curate

“I’d like to start with one of my favorite pieces of historical … information.  Once the English had colonized India and established their businesses, they yearned for recreation and decided to build a golf course in Calcutta.  But golf in Calcutta would prove to have a unique obstacle.  Monkeys from a nearby habitat would drop out of the trees, scurry across the course, and seize the golf balls.  The monkeys would play with the balls, tossing them here and there.  At first the golfers tried to control the monkeys.  Their strategy was to build high fences around the fairways and greens. This approach, which would seem initially to hold much promise, was abandoned when the golfers discovered that a fence is no challenge to an ambitious monkey.  Next, the golfers tried luring the monkeys away from the course but the monkeys found nothing as amusing as watching humans go wild whenever their little white balls would be disturbed.  In desperation, the British began trapping and relocating the monkeys, but for every monkey they carted off, another would appear.  Finally, the golfers gave into reality and established a rather novel ground rule for that particular course.  Golfers in Calcutta were obliged to play the ball wherever the monkey dropped it.  (Laughter) So I think they were on to something when it comes to the spiritual path: playing the ball wherever the monkey drops it.  So, it’s not hard to relate to: every one of us wants life to go a certain way.  …When the monkeys throw a ball in a way that is really not according to the way we want it, how do we respond with a wise heart?”

I keep thinking about white supremacy and dharma talks — or the way that people teach the dharma.  I keep thinking about Tara Brach’s use of a story about the British Raj trying to play golf and getting along with monkeys — she used this story as way to introduce the usual themes about dealing with “reality” by accepting the ultimate fallacy of control.  Of power.

First I was shocked.  Monkeys?  Little white balls?  A cheerful tale about colonizers?

Then I was numbed, thinking it was just a strange idiosyncrasy of white american buddhists being careless.

I briefly considered that even colonizers have moments of insight.  This is really what my own scholarship is about.  But I don’t take it out of context and obscure the colonized in the story or, worse, make monkeys stand in for them.

Then I felt hurt and enraged.

I felt all these things at once, really.

And now I can’t stop thinking about it.  How white supremacy can be supported by dharma teachings.  How it can sit alongside the way the dharma is taught.

I’ve been getting a lot from Brach’s teachings.  I especially like her interpretation of the Triple Gem.  So: no, no one’s forcing me to download her talks and listen to them.  But there are other lessons to be learned from them.

I’ve already been thinking about how the way the dharma is taught matches very well with (white) affluent first-world guilt.  Don’t be attached to all your possessions.  Laugh gently at the consumer culture you’re so used to being at the center of.

And that it’s also about presumed on a privileged position: that the overbusy workaholic Type A personality has already (naturally?) gotten successful and found it empty or had some tragedy and only thereafter found buddhism.  Or a variation of that is a person born to parents who were those go-getter types and want to find more to life.  (OK, I sort of fall into both categories.)

As if then that the question of buddhist practice is really – what is BEYOND western success and individuality?

And not centered on a question, say, about what is BEYOND this life of suffering?  About all different kinds of suffering and all different kinds of connections we have to one another through compassion and complicity.  About how to be more fully human in an inhumane world.  How some of us might live as underprivileged people among very overprivileged and short-sighted people, whether they are dharma practitioners or not.  Just simply: how do we get power to resist and survive and heal, not only how to give up power and control and self to be more enlightened.

I suspect the practitioners of mainstream US vipassana have a hierarchy of dharma paths that makes their stories about the imperial nostalgia somehow more pure than a story about, say, trying to live on food stamps.  They’re just going about their business, which sometimes seems like being very concerned about their own perfectibility.  I just find them incredibly literal minded.  And therefore sad.

Audio link

One positive response to Brach’s story

Wow, this story gets around. Postcolonial mythology for the other side.