Blogger and HTML

It's so ungracious to complain about a service one uses for free. But every time I turn around, the automatically generated HTML for paragraphs and other formatting seems to deteriorate. Not just the last post, either -- older posts seem almost unreadable.

Framing is almost as important as content. But no time now to go back and reformat. Hope you can find some value in the words and pictures as they are.

Update: With a change of template, and one changed pref, the formatting seems to have gone back to normal.

We spend trillions to preserve the American Way of Life® for Wall St. CEOs, but we still don't have decent, open-source HTML editors!

Hotei's Belly

The archaic branch of the Internet called "usenet" is still active. Unregulated in many parts, its culture has in quite a few newsgroups acquired a harsh, two-gun etiquette which many anarchistic individuals find amenable. Other groups are noted as being creatively outré. My favorite usenet hangout is alt.buddha.short.fat.guy, a congenial gathering of unusual Buddhists and Buddhsymps that combines both those qualities with a light-hearted benevolence and deeply twisted humor. One of the culturally defining shticks throughout the colorful lifetime of the group has been its response to the still occasionally occurring post protesting its name. Typically, the earnest writer objects that the Buddha (meaning Siddhartha Gautama, the probably historical person who became known as Shakyamuni Buddha) was neither short nor fat. Pouncing on such a post with the gusto of feral cats on a joint of meat dropped from a sloppy butcher's truck, an regular of a.b.s.f.g will loudly announce, "Your Buddha may not be short and fat, but ours certainly is!" The reference is to the Ghost of the Western Plain, the Sage of Sonora . . . El Dupree! — otherwise known as "Him-Whom-One-Must-Not-Stand-Downwind-Of."

It will do a student of philosophy well to search out on the Tubes the enlightening wisdom of the #14 Vinyl Headsack. Yet such an explanation of absfg's name, true as it may be, is but the half of it. As the Ancient Mulroy said in an absfg FAQ, quoted from 1994:

Look, every other day some cherry asks:

"Why is this newsgroup called alt.buddha.short.fat.guy?
The Buddha wasn't short or fat!"

So how come we don't put in the FAQ the following disclaimer:

You're right! He wasn't short or fat. In fact we've NEVER
seen a shakya who was short OR fat! Unless they were
_gravely_ ill.

The point is, that most of the unwashed have the impression
that the rotund, jowly fellow who sits in the lotus-position
in most Chinese restaurants is the Buddha. The group's
name makes as much sport of that impression as it does
anything else.

In fact, if you have an idea of the Buddha, WE'RE MAKING
FUN OF YOU!!! NAA NAA NAAAA NAAAA NAAAAA!!!

Mulroy was speaking of that amply enfleshed Asian figure named Budai, or Pu-tai, in Chinese, more commonly known by his Japanese name of Hotei. Some say he's really Taoist, and not properly Buddhist at all. Some disparage Hotei as merely a folk deity. It doesn't really matter — the gods know what they are. Folk tales come from the deepest parts of a human and bear wisdoms well worth listening to. Whatever his origins, Hotei teaches the same Dharma. Since his image still appears, all over the world, it may be it has something to tell us. Of course, the real teaching is always bigger than words can hold, and words shouldn't be taken too seriously, but if you loosen up their robes a bit, something wonderful may fall out.

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Hotei's most obvious traits are: he is fat, and he is happy. Not just fat, but grossly obese. Not just kind of happy, but laughing to the point of delirium. He deliberately parts his robe to expose his belly where others would cover their flesh for shame. He is happy as he is, unlike those of us with a frustrated desire for imagined improvement. He is happy being exactly as he is. Not despite his corpulence, nor because of it. Since he is not ashamed of himself as he is, he is an emblem of thusness. He opens his robe and exposes what he is, having nothing to hide. Thus he is a symbol of emptiness. In surrendering to complete exposure, he has accepted total vulnerability, and thus become invincible.

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This is a sidestream to the symbolism of the Cross. Jesus is a man nailed to an instrument of torture and death. He can't move his arms or legs, he can't do a thing about it. He can't escape, and soldiers guard against any possible help. Nothing to do but yield to the inevitable, give up his self, and die. And so he gives his self and his pain and his life to God the Father, and stops his suffering. On the other hand, Hotei exposes his belly and throws away any shame for his body. He embraces in naked honesty this very moment, and he is happy. Although both of these visual stories involve the spiritual value of vulnerability, Hotei's path is joyful. The Crucifix, before the story includes resurrection and redemption, is horrible and tragic. But both mythic nuggets embody a teaching worth contemplating, and the teaching is similar. Lots has already been said about Jesus on the Cross; I haven't seen so much about Hotei.

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It's no accident that Hotei's Belly is as round as a globe. His good nature is universal. With his arms upraised, he is supporting the universe. Sometimes he points straight up. Is it at the moon? Not a moon you can see by eyes! Hotei often clutches a rosary, even with his face full of mirth. Even in joy, he does not abandon his practice. He doesn't need to practice to realize sukha, but nonetheless he finds sukha in his practice. No anxiety, no dread of pain, no shame, no fear of bad memories, just a joy of living, a joy of pointing
upwards.

And I'm the laughing man
with the load of goodies for all

---"Big High Song for Somebody,"Philip Whalen

At first it was said Hotei lived so simply that he could carry everything he owned in a gunny sack. The story got bigger and so did the sack. It became a magic bag that contains anything one might wish for, but it only gives out that which is truly helpful. Hotei's joy is the perfection of giving -- giving gives him joy, and joy lets him give freely. He has plenty to give because his life is ample. But his life is ample because his bag is Empty, containing No Thing.


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The culture that produced the first images of Budai was modest with respect to nudity. Hotei's belly has to suggest all that symbolism of nakedness alone:

My body is naked now and it was born naked. 
No matter how I dress up or undress, I'm naked. 
The hours of the early morning find me naked 
and I find the hours and the morning just as naked as they find me... 
The best and juiciest of humanly truths are our naked truths. 
Our fittest honesty is our naked honesty... 
This is what I call being truthfully democratic.

---Woody Guthrie

Among the many ideas and attitudes we studied and challenged with our own behavior in the Sixties, was the shame of nakedness. When together with friends, we often shed our clothes just like water brothers in Stranger. The psychological result was refreshing -- sexual innuendo and flirting were gone, and so was a layer of armor. Although we still had romances, we had fewer and simpler games between us. We learned that, obviously, shame of one's own nudity and automatic prurient arousal at another's nakedness were learned social conditionings, and not innate in humans at all. In all that time when we were usually naked rather than clothed, we never had orgies . . . well, except that one time . . . . Much later, in 2004, I traveled to California. While attending a Zen service in Santa Rosa with my teacher's teacher, I ran into a friend who had been part of Hank's Sangha in Newton. He was then working at Harbin Hot Springs, and he gave me a free day pass. A former girl friend of mine had lived in a loose community at Harbin in the Seventies, just before the current proprietors evicted them all to create a spa-like spiritual center. As I was on my way from the parking lot to the pools of seismically heated mineral water, I wondered if the anxious, tight-ass social tendencies of recent years had suspended the culture of casual nudity that had always been a tradition there. I saw a sign on the way that reminded people to clothe modestly in sight of the county road, and I smiled. Forty years after our first encounters with naked innocence, and my body was dumpy with age. Practically everyone else there was young, trim, tan, and beautiful. Nothing to do for it but to become Hotei, and laugh at the thought that what others thought of my physical appearance was ever a concern! Thus I played in the buoyant, healing waters, a Silenus amongst the fauns and dryads of young California.


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What do these icons of a laughing fat man say about the Buddhist Way?

Hotei teaches us how to practice: surrender without reservation and stand beyond body! Let go of anxiety and sit in the sky. Go to sleep like a baby with powerful and loving parents. Beg smiling from strangers and give away all you get to other strangers, with a happy snort for their good fortune. Read the flowers and count the stars! Walk home past the last horizon without taking a step!

One can hardly put on arrogance and deception wearing rags, which even the finest robes are already becoming. And when we think on it, deep and steady, again we see the universe, time, this life, all existence, is a really funny joke! It requires more than a giggle, much more than a chortle -- it takes a laugh from somewhere deeper than the gut, that comes rumbling and rolling to trumpet out from the entire body!

For Heaven's sake, relax! We can't see much further than the range of our fears. Though the universe is a scary place, an earthquake or a firing squad isn't likely in our future for the next hour or so, for most of us. So take some ease and reflect on what this is. We might also consider what is is, also what's what.

What is this!? We might have thought it was all so familiar, but when we really begin to look at it, it gets pretty damned strange. The succession of moments might seem like a river of kaleidoscopically related little dancing bits of whirling nothing. Or wide-open spaces defined by what we call matter, but said matter, on closer examination, is pretty much just more empty space bound by other spaces. Or a dream dreamt by a dream that dreams it's a dreamer that dreams it awakens from one dream into another. Whatever the truth of the matter, it's likely to be weirder than anyone's dreams. We anoint some of these dreams as beliefs and then pretend they're facts, yet we still act as if we know what's going on.

A nameless dread has been increasingly gnawing at the human psyche for the past five hundred years or so, as changes through discovery and technology have forced changes in worldview faster than human evolution has enabled us to integrate them. We can deal with the resultant fear in at least three ways.

We can refuse to face it by denying the nature of the changes and avoiding thinking about our fear. Anxiety has always been part of life, but, until recently, we've succeeded in sleeping at night because of various comforters and crutches. But now, given any thoughtfulness, none of them seem convincing enough anymore, not religious doctrine nor other philosophical engines, like science or psychology. Even a little examination of our life and mind will show us that we comforted ourselves with merely the idea of control -- we hung onto our little pretense of knowledge and it felt something like being empowered. We could vigorously deny anything that threatened this illusion of control, even though, every night, we surrendered to our bodies' demand that we enter the chaos of dreams. We could fill every moment with distractions and entertainments so we would not have to think about the reality that we cannot guarantee ourselves against random misfortune, nor can we hold off sickness, old age, and death forever. But sooner or later, reality will stick itself in our faces, and we will have to acknowledge our basic helplessness in the shadow of our enormous ignorance.

Another way, of which these days we have many examples, particularly in politics, is to let anger rule over our judgment. Anger is closely related to fear, like electricity is to magnetism, where you can transform the one into the other just by shifting energy. Turning fear into rage certainly can get rid of it -- get pissed off enough, and we don't care what happens to ourselves so long as we can hurt someone else. Obviously, this is less than optimal with regard to our own personal welfare, let alone everybody else's, and it doesn't really deal with our precarious situation, except by likely making it worse.

It's fortunate we have an alternative: we can also deal with our fear of the unknown by laughing at how seriously we take our own stupidity. When you really look at something, it changes. Look honestly and deeply at your desires – how many begin to seem frivolous? Just by watching yourself be angry, anger begins to look pointless and even silly. As for the nameless dread, the lack of cultural security that may be our worst social problem these days, well, why worry about something we never really had, anyway?

Why not savor the joke?

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In our culture, from childhood, we're taught to Suck It In! Handsome men and beautiful women have lean flat bellies, and we should try to be like them or no one will like us.

But Hotei says, Who cares? It's OK to let it all hang out!

And this is how you meditate in Zen. You don't grab your attention and squeeze it into a tunnel of overheated searchlight awareness -- you let it cool and settle into clear pools of benevolent interest.

The purpose of the traditional meditation posture is to provide maximum stability with minimum effort. Thus, the knees and tailbone make a triangular base, and the spine is balanced like a stack of coins, not leaning to either side, front, or back. This obviously is the most efficient use of muscle, since leaning in any direction requires a compensatory effort. However, to balance the column of spinal disks this way, the pelvis has to be rotated forward somewhat. It's quite incompatible with the military posture of sucking in one's gut. Hotei's hanging belly is a literal visual depiction of how to hold your abdomen in zazen. Kind of a relief not to have to make the effort, actually, and better for breathing.


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To close, the statues of the laughing fat man are to remind us that Life & Death & Walking the Way are way too important to take seriously. No matter how much we may insist on keeping our misery through fooling ourselves, we can't bring Hotei down. And Hotei lives right along with us. There he is, laughing with us, from inside, right now!