{"product_id":"buddha-or-bust-isbn-9781400082186","title":"Buddha or Bust","description":"Why does an idea that’s 2,500 years old seem more relevant today than ever before? How can the Buddha’s teachings help us solve many of the world’s problems? Journalist Perry Garfinkel circumnavigated the globe to discover the heart of Buddhism and the reasons for its growing popularity—and ended up discovering himself in the process.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe assignment from \u003ci\u003eNational Geographic\u003c\/i\u003e couldn’t have come at a better time for Garfinkel. Burned out, laid up with back problems, disillusioned by relationships and religion itself, he was still hoping for that big journalistic break—and the answers to life’s biggest riddles as well. So he set out on a geographic, historical and personal expedition that would lead him around the world in search of those answers, and then some.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFirst, to better understand the man who was born Prince Siddhartha Gautama, he followed the time-honored pilgrimage “in the footsteps of the Buddha” in India. From there, he tracked the historical course of Buddhism: to Sri Lanka, Thailand, China, Tibet, Japan and on to San Francisco and Europe. He found that the Buddha’s teachings have spawned a worldwide movement of  “engaged Buddhism,” the application of Buddhist principles to resolve social, environmental, health, political and other contemporary problems. From East to West and back to the East again, this movement has caused a Buddhism Boom. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAlong the way he met a diverse array of Buddhist practitioners—Thai artists, Indian nuns, Sri Lankan school children, Zen archers in Japan, kung fu monks in China and the world’s first Buddhist comic (only in America). Among dozens of Buddhist scholars and leaders, Garfinkel interviewed His Holiness the Dalai Lama, an experience that left him speechless—almost. As just reward for his efforts, toward the end of his journey Garfinkel fell in love in the south of France at the retreat center of a leader of the engaged movement, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh—a romance that taught him as much about Buddhism as all the masters combined. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn this original, entertaining book, Garfinkel separates Buddhist fact from fiction, sharing his humorous insights and keen perceptions about everything from spiritual tourism to Asian traffic jams to the endless road to enlightenment.“A compelling read . . . part travelogue, part primer, part spiritual quest. Garfinkel brings a reporter’s sharp eyes to an elusive topic.” —Tony Horwitz, author of \u003ci\u003eBlue Latitudes\u003c\/i\u003e and \u003ci\u003eConfederates in the Attic\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Narrating his observations of contemporary Buddhist practice and meetings with Buddhists in situations that include traditional Buddhist strongholds and places in the West, where the Dharma has only recently arrived, Perry Garfinkel presents Buddhism as a practical approach to human problems. The Buddha’s teaching remains refreshing and relevant today, because, more than two and a half thousand years ago, he invited people to listen, reflect and critically examine what he had to say in the context of their own lives.” —His Holiness the Dalai Lama\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Garfinkel dramatically demonstrates that the socially engaged Buddhism movement is growing globally and touching millions of minds and hearts—including his own.” —Thich Nhat Hanh\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Garfinkel’s global search for the essence of Buddhism today is in turn entertaining, informative and enlightening. As a raconteur of the Dharma, Garfinkel is as lively a guide as anyone could hope for on such a pilgrimage—Woody Allen in the footsteps of the Buddha.” —Daniel Goleman, author of \u003ci\u003eEmotional Intelligence\u003c\/i\u003ePerry Garfinkel has been a contributor to the \u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e since 1986, specializing in travel and cultural trends. A veteran journalist who has covered the overlap of East and West for more than thirty years for many major publications, he has been falling on and off the meditation cushion for just as long. He lives on Martha’s Vineyard. Visit him at BuddhaOrBust.comChapter 1  one\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Buddha Rising\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    A 2,500-Year-Old Idea That’s More Relevant Than Ever\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    You can’t ever get everything you want. It is impossible and you will   never fully succeed. Luckily, there is another option; you can learn to   control your mind, to stop outside of this endless cycle of desire and   aversion. You can learn not to want what you want, to recognize desires   but not be controlled by them.   —The Buddha\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The fundamental teachings of Gautama, as it is now being made plain to   us by study of original sources, is clear and simple and in the closest   harmony with modern ideas. It is beyond all disputes the achievement of   one of the most penetrating intelligences the world has ever known.  —H. G. Wells, in Outline of History\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The man who taught me the most about Buddhism wasn’t a monk with a   shaved head in saffron robes. He didn’t speak in Sanskrit code, and he   didn’t live in a Himalayan monastery. In fact, he wasn’t even a   Buddhist.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He was Carl Taylor, a lifelong San Franciscan who looked to be in his   late 40s. At the moment he just looked cold, sitting upright in a bed   rolled into the gardens off the hospice ward at Laguna Honda Hospital   near San Francisco’s Twin Peaks. It was a high blue-sky summer   afternoon, but in this city that often means a bone-penetrating chill.   Carl was dying of cancer.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I was spending a week with the Zen Hospice Project, a group of Buddhist   volunteers who assist the staff of the 24-bed hospice unit at this, one   of the largest public long-term-care facilities in the United States.   The project, now emulated around the world, uses two of Buddhism’s   central teachings—awareness of the present moment and compassion for   others—as tools to help bring a degree of dignity and humanity to those   in the last stages of their lives. They’re not easy lessons to learn.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I sat beside Carl, helping adjust the well-worn flight jacket he used   as a blanket. He wore his terminal diagnosis with resigned bravado. I   tried to make small talk, but it was going terribly. What words of   solace can you offer someone who doesn’t have long to live and knows   it?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “So what kind of work do, er, did you do?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Long silence. Slow drag on his cigarette. An eternity passed as we   watched a white tuft of cloud break the blue monotony and move across   the sky.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “I don’t really talk about my past.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Okay. Squirming to keep the conversation moving forward, I mentally   scrolled through my list of questions. But if I couldn’t ask about the   past and there was no sense in asking about the future, that left only   the present. And in the present, I was learning, there are no   questions; there is just being. This made me feel awkward at first:   Stripped of his questions, the journalist has no identity.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    But Carl seemed content to have me just sit there, my company alone   helping to ease some of his suffering. Once I accepted that I had   nothing to do, nowhere to go and, perhaps most important, no one to be,   I relaxed. Carl glanced sideways at me and smiled. We both understood I   had just learned a small lesson. Together we watched another cloud go   by.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    That week I learned other lessons from the Buddhism 101   syllabus—lessons about the impermanence of life, about our attachment   to the way we want things to be and the disappointment that comes when   those things don’t come to pass, about physical and mental suffering,   about the value of what Buddhists call sangha, which best translates to   community. But most of all I saw how the lessons one man learned in   India 2,500 years ago have been updated and adapted to the modern   world.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Around the globe today there is a new Buddhism. Its philosophies and   practices are being applied to augment mental- and physical-health   therapies and to advance political and environmental reforms. Athletes   use it to sharpen their game. Through it, corporate executives learn to   handle stress better. Police arm themselves with it to defuse volatile   situations. Chronic pain sufferers apply it as a coping salve. Because   its teachings have such contemporary relevance, Buddhism is now   experiencing a renaissance—even in countries like India, where it had   nearly vanished, and China, where it had been suppressed.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Buddhism is no longer just for monks or Westerners with disposable time   and income to dabble in things Eastern. Christians and Jews practice   it. African Americans meditate alongside Japanese Americans. In the   United States alone, the number of self-declared Buddhists jumped from   400,000 in 1990 to more than\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    3 million by 2001, James Coleman, a sociologist at California   Polytechnic State University, writes in The New Buddhism. And according   to a 2004 study published in the Journal for the Scientific Study of   Religion, one in eight Americans—more than 37 million—believe that   Buddhist teachings have had an important influence on their   spirituality.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The Zen Hospice Project is one example of “socially engaged Buddhism,”   a term coined by the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, who was exiled from   Vietnam in the 1960s for his nonviolent antiwar activities. Still   “engaged” at the age of 79, he traveled in his native country for three   months in 2005—the\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    30th anniversary of the Communist Party takeover of Vietnam—spreading   Buddhist teachings where he had once been a pariah.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    In southern France, at his Plum Village retreat center, he regularly   hosts, among other groups, Palestinians and Israelis in workshops on   conflict resolution and peace negotiation. Such sessions often begin   with animosity, Rev. Hanh told me, and just as often they end with   embraces.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “It all starts with a spin on an old adage: ‘Don’t just do something,   sit there,’ ” he said in a wisp of a voice. A rail-thin man with large   ears and deep-set eyes, Rev. Hanh was sitting on the porch of his   cottage overlooking verdant Bordeaux vineyards. It seemed incongruous   to be talking in the heart of a region that attracts worshippers of   Bacchus, not the Buddha. “With all this socially engaged work, first   you must learn what the Buddha learned, to still the mind. Then you   don’t take action; action takes you.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    R\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Indeed, action had taken me on an expedition of epic proportions, an   ambitious and at times arduous journey in search of mankind’s most   endangered—and elusive—prey. I circumnavigated the globe in pursuit of   nothing less than truth, meaning and happiness. I tracked a man almost   half a billion people today firmly believe found all three—and then   some. Then I navigated this man’s legacy, charting the migration and   mutation over two millennia of the rather simple tactics he developed   for capturing this quarry.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He has gone by many names—Tathagata, Sakyamuni, Siddhartha Gautama—but   is most recognized by the form of address that honors his wisdom: the   Buddha, “the awakened one.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Though his philosophy gave rise to a religion long practiced throughout   Asia and, over the last century, in pockets of the West as well, my   quest was not of a religious nature. Nor, I now believe after studying   his life, was the Buddha’s. He—like me, like you, like anyone who   thinks, feels, emotes—simply wanted answers to questions that are of   such a universal nature that they transcend the isms and cut to the   soul of what it means to be human. Questions that plague, taunt,   challenge, befuddle, frustrate, inspire and drive people on from   approximately the moment they are weaned.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Who am I?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Why am I here?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “What is this whole thing called life?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    And the biggie: “How can I make it to the weekend with a little less   suffering and a little more happiness?”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Truth. Meaning. Happiness.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I was questioning all three—and quickly coming to what seemed in my   mind to be the very plausible conclusion that none of the three   existed—when the Buddha appeared to me in the form of the juiciest   assignment of my life. And none too soon.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    National Geographic magazine accepted my proposal to write a major   feature vaguely entitled “In the Footsteps of the Buddha.” Keeping my   ego in check, I learned that I got the assignment because one of the   magazine’s ace photographers, Steve McCurry (he shot the famous profile   of the angry green-eyed Afghani girl), already had a running start with   images of Buddhist monks and statues largely from throughout Asia. They   advanced me a hefty expense budget, issued me a round-the-world   unlimited-stops business-class plane ticket and shot me up with all   variety of vaccinations while I shot myself up with typical   journalist’s fantasies of cover stories and Larry King appearances.   “See you in ten weeks,” they said. I parlayed that 10 into 10 more,   plus a little more travel money and, eventually, the book you hold in   your hand. But what I really got back was much bigger—nothing near   enlightenment but a cosmic bailout for sure.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    I organized the expedition with the chronology of Buddhism in mind.    From the Buddha’s birthplace at the border of India and Nepal, I would   follow his path in India. Then I would track the teachings’ passage,   first to Sri Lanka, and then through both Southeast Asia and the   Himalaya Mountains to China and Japan, eventually on to Europe and the   Americas. In effect, I would circumambulate the globe, in the same   manner that Buddhists circle sacred sites or temples three times. My   angle was to report on the worldwide engaged Buddhism movement, about   which I thought I knew something but which turns out to be much more   widespread than I imagined. In Engaged Buddhism in the West,   Christopher S. Queen, a Harvard lecturer on religions, defines socially   engaged Buddhism quite simply: It is “the application of the dharma, or   Buddhist teachings, to the resolution of social problems.” Spearheaded   by an international interconnected web of nonprofits and NGOs—from the   Buddhist Peace Fellowship (BPF), in Berkeley, California, to the   International Network of Engaged Buddhists (INEB), based in Bangkok;   from the Center for Contemplative Mind in Society, in Northampton,   Massachusetts, to the Greyston Foundation in Yonkers, New York; from   Zen Peacemakers in Montague, Massachusetts, to Thich Nhat Hahn’s   Community of Mindful Living, with branches throughout the   world—Buddhist practitioners were coming out the monasteries, literally   and figuratively. Establishing AIDS\/HIV treatment centers in Cambodia,   participating in peaceful protests against executions at San Quentin   State Prison north of San Francisco, launching prison reform   initiatives in India, counseling young teens at pregnancy centers in   Thailand, and more, monks and lay people were actively trying to lessen   suffering in the world.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    And I would get to cover it all.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    For even a dabbler such as I would have described myself, getting the   green light on the assignment was like winning the trifecta of   Buddhism. I would gain multiple levels of “merit,” highly desirable   chips redeemable in this lifetime or the next. My work would be what   Buddhists call “right livelihood,” meaning not only was my job not   harming other sentient beings but also my writing subject might benefit   mankind and the environment. I would get to interview some of   Buddhism’s leading thinkers and practitioners, meaning every day would   be like auditing a course entitled “Ultimate Dharma Talks.” I would get   to stand in places where the Buddha stood, sit in caves where he sat,   walk across rice fields where he traveled—just to visit these sites,   the Buddha told his followers, was to gain merit and insight. Plus, I   was getting paid to do it, I would see my byline in one of the world’s   most recognized magazines, and hopefully I’d be elevated to the A list   of Interesting Dinner Guests on the small island where I live. Could   love and enlightenment be far behind?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    R\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    On a personal level, the timing was excellent. Things were falling into   place. Finally. It felt as though someone had suddenly sprinkled magic   dust on me, and its effect was to reverse the slippery slide my life   had taken. What I didn’t know at the time was that things would get   even better. For a while. Then they would, well, change. And change   again.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    To understand the full epic-ness of this expedition, we have to go back   to . . .\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    July 2003, the shag-carpeted floor of my mother’s New Jersey living   room, my back in a spasm, my mother hovering over me. Zero latitude,   zero longitude of my life. It is one year since my father’s death and   it is just catching up how much I miss the man I spent so much time   pushing away. I had come home for the unveiling, the Jewish tradition   of visiting the gravesite one year after interment. I am, for all   intents, homeless, temporarily living in corporate housing in the   Valley, L.A.’s waiting room for has-beens, wannabes, and   never-will-bes. The woman I am dating had nicknamed me Mr. Turtle; I   could fit all my worldly possessions on the West Coast in my Subaru   Forester, and often did. That same girlfriend, whose very L.A.   lifestyle I would never to be able to afford, which she herself can’t   afford, has put me out after discovering some improprieties I am too   embarrassed to repeat even to myself.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    My so-called career is being flushed down the toilet bowl. Two   ghostwriting projects I had relocated to California for have fizzled.   The New York Times, to which I had been contributing since 1986, lately   has rejected every story idea I’ve proposed. It’s been months since my   last significant writing work. I have put my life on credit cards while   waiting for this Grail of a Geographic assignment to come through. But   I am losing hope. The thought that the attempt has been an exercise in   self-delusion leaves me free-falling into oblivion, not to mention   literary obscurity. One of my mother’s lines keeps coming back like an   errant mantra: “Perry, you don’t have a pot to piss in.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    And now this. I am writhing on the floor, eating shag carpeting.   Minutes before I had bent over in an awkward maneuver—riding a bicycle,   I had stopped to lean over and pick up a turtle that was waddling   across the street—and experienced what felt like a drum roll ripple   down the left side of my lower back. My back completely gave out; the   left side crumbled like a graham cracker and I could not stand. Somehow   I got myself back to my mother’s a few blocks away and now I am   collapsed on the floor. The irony does not escape me that trying to   save my namesake, a turtle, has caused my current predicament.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    No position is comfortable. I know the feeling well. This is the third   “back event” in two years that has left me so debilitated I had to lie   in bed for 10 days, dosed to the legal limit on Advil, left to crawl to   the bathroom because I could not stand. And did I mention the pain and   suffering!? I immediately recognize the severity of the situation and   in my mind am already canceling the flight I had booked back to L.A.   for the next day, intending to give my West Coast life one more shot. I   am imagining days laid up in a suspended hell realm called New Jersey,   albeit a shag-carpeted hell realm.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    My mother is sitting there nagging me with her shouldas. “You shoulda   packed last night. You shoulda been more careful. Why do always put   everything off to the last minute?” It’s a fast track to her critique   of my entire life, predictably ending with the “pot to piss in” punch   line.National Bestseller","brand":"Harmony","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303403737317,"sku":"NP9781400082186","price":23.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781400082186.jpg?v=1767723142","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/buddha-or-bust-isbn-9781400082186","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}