"Now that leading mayoral candidates Bill de Blasio and Joe Lhota have both vowed to add two Muslim holidays to the public school calendar..."

"... advocates for other religious and ethnic groups are clamoring for their days to be recognized too."

“I think the city has to recognize (Chinese New Year),” said [Assembly Speaker Sheldon] Silver, a Democrat whose district includes Chinatown in lower Manhattan. “We don’t want to take away from the learning days, but we have to adjust the calendar appropriately to include all of the major populations that we have.”

All the major populations... what about the minor populations?

[City Councilman Daniel Dromm] introduced a resolution in July to close school on the holy day of Diwali, a festival of lights celebrated by Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs and Jains.

A spokesman for Lhota said he’d consider adding other holidays. De Blasio has said he supports adding the Chinese New Year, but his campaign wouldn’t comment on Diwali.

Where will it all end?

Imagine putting education first.

Inspired by Buddhist monks, a Brooklyn restaurant enforces total silence for a 90-minute organic, locavore dinner.

"Nicholas Nauman, Eat’s 28-year-old managing chef and events planner, said he was inspired to hosts the meals by silent breakfasts he enjoyed at a monastery in the Indian Buddhist pilgrimage city of Bodh Gaya."

Punishment for talking was having one’s plate... removed and placed on a bench outside, where loudmouths could finish their meals....


Maria Usbeck, a 28-year-old freelance art director from Williamsburg, tried to make her companion laugh by turning her napkin into a paper airplane and sailing it from one knee to the other.

Three women celebrating a 30th birthday developed such elaborate pantomimes that they were able to have a fully silent conversation....

Some diners tried to pantomime what they were having, like this woman miming the gills of a fish.

Well, hell! You go in search of meditative, religionish quietude and you find yourself in the presence of mimes. The named violators of the spirit of the thing were all females, interestingly. Possible theories: 1. Women are just soooo verbal. 2. Only women were willing to give their names to the reporter. 3. It was mostly only women who were attracted to this event in the first place. 4. Men are better at following rules. 5. The reporter, a man, sought out women to talk to. 6. Happenstance.

Ms. Usbeck, who felt she might break into speech before dessert arrived, used the opportunity to give herself a pep talk in the bathroom mirror — “only a mental pep talk,” she promised — in which she stared herself down and told herself “You can do this.”

Pep talk in the mirror. Mental pep talk in the mirror. What was the function of the mirror?

“At first it felt like being 50 and married,” said Bianca Alvarez, a 33-year-old creative director from Williamsburg. “But then it became good, the good kind of quiet.”

Because being 50 and married can't be good. Thanks, creative director lady. Thanks for the spilling from your you-must-think-it's-creative mind.

He "will do more than any other man in history to change the course of humanity. … He is the Chosen One. He'll have the power to impact nations. Not people. Nations."

Can you identify the "he"? It's not Barack Obama. The statement was made by the man's father, quoted in an article printed in Slate in July 2000. I ran across that article, which is written by Bob Wright (whom I talk to from time to time on Bloggingheads), because I'd just done that post about the problem of shame, and I knew shame was one of Wright's big topics. (He's pro-shaming.)

But this article isn't about shame. In fact, it cites as a goal to "live in the present and free yourself of aspiration and anxiety" — at least if you want to play the sport played by that "Chosen One," Tiger Woods.

You can't be angry over a previous error or worried about repeating it, nor can you be dreaming of future glory. Gandhi used to say he tried to strive on "without fear of failure and without hope of success."...

At the moment of impact, various golf philosophers have held, your mind should be empty—you should be focused on the task at hand in a kind of nonverbalizable way. Many golfers are good at this sort of unconscious concentration, but the utter consistency with which Tiger Woods seems to achieve it almost does qualify him as supernatural...

Wright makes much of Woods's Buddhist background.

One hallmark of spiritual maturity is unity of internal purpose—the subordination of the mind's unruly impulses to an overarching goal....

"Athletes aren't as gentlemanly as they used to be," [Woods] has said. "I don't like that change. I like the idea of being a role model. It's an honor. People took the time to help me as a kid, and they impacted my life. I want to do the same for kids." Woods likes the Asian side of his heritage because "Asians are much more disciplined than we are. Look how well-behaved their children are. It's how my mother raised me. You can question, but talk back? Never."

Or is that about shame?

"The world has grown accustomed to a gentle image of Buddhism defined by the self-effacing words of the Dalai Lama..."

"... the global popularity of Buddhist-inspired meditation and postcard-perfect scenes from Southeast Asia and beyond of crimson-robed, barefoot monks receiving alms from villagers at dawn."

But over the past year, images of rampaging Burmese Buddhists carrying swords and the vituperative sermons of monks like Ashin Wirathu have underlined the rise of extreme Buddhism in Myanmar — and revealed a darker side of the country’s greater freedoms after decades of military rule. Buddhist lynch mobs have killed more than 200 Muslims and forced more than 150,000 people, mostly Muslims, from their homes.

Why was "the world" such a nitwit?

"Buddhist Mobs Burn Mosque and Muslim School in Myanmar."

"... a sign that radical strains of Buddhism may be spreading to a wider area of the country."

"The unusual order makes Myanmar perhaps the only country in the world to impose such a restriction on a religious group..."

"The local authorities in the western state of Rakhine in Myanmar have imposed a two-child limit for Muslim Rohingya families, a policy that does not apply to Buddhists in the area and comes amid accusations of ethnic cleansing during earlier sectarian violence."

It was unclear how the local government would enforce the rule, and the announcement could be as much about playing to the country’s Buddhist majority as about actual policy....

A spokesman for Rakhine State, Win Myaing, said the new program was meant to stem rapid population growth in the Muslim community, which a government-appointed commission identified as one of the causes of the sectarian violence.

Although Muslims are the majority in the two townships in which the new policy applies, they account for only about 4 percent of Myanmar’s roughly 60 million people....

"For a while these reveries provided an outlet for his imagination; they were a satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality, a promise that the rock of the world was founded securely on a fairy’s wing."

Why, that's a sentence from "The Great Gatsby." Couldn't you tell?

The unreality of reality... the world... founded securely on a fairy’s wing....

So... I Googled "unreality of reality," and the second thing that came up was a Wikipedia article titled "Reality in Buddhism."

Some consider that the concept of the unreality of "reality" is confusing. They posit that, in Buddhism, the perceived reality is considered illusory not in the sense that reality is a fantasy or unreal, but that our perceptions and preconditions mislead us to believe that we are separate from the elements that we are made of. Reality, in Buddhist thought, would be described as the manifestation of karma^{[citation needed]}.

Isn't it always like that? Citation needed!

Tourist with a Buddha tattoo barred from Sri Lanka.

Some Brit was deemed too disrespectful, not just because of the tattoo, but because when he was asked about it, he spoke "very disrespectfully."

Irrelevant factoid: As I typed the word "Buddha" just now, the word "Buddha" came up in the song I was listening to. There's Judy Garland taking Buddha by the hand.... Feel free to get a tattoo of that.

ADDED: More detail here.

"As soon as he saw it the chief officer went crazy. You could see it on his face, he looked really angry and said I would have to go back to London," [Antony] Ratcliffe told the BBC....

"I like the artwork in tattoos obviously and, due to my belief in Buddhist philosophy which I have followed for many years, I thought a quality tattoo of the Buddha was rather apt.... The whole experience has been a shock - it has been upsetting and a waste of my time. I'm not taking it further, but when I saw they had accused me of speaking disrespectfully about Buddhism, I had to put my side of the story"....

Why Buddhism? Why truth? Why children?

I challenge Bob Wright about the way Westerners indulge in Buddhism and a few other things:

"The people around you grew up in an atheist society."

"They believed that religion was poison.... I think my emotions really took over, and I became frustrated, and I just got up and left."

"I managed to get my head up and scream 'croc' and then this giant dragged me under again."

"I got my head above water again and this time I was swearing and saying get this thing off me. I was just screaming for help. I couldn't feel any pain but I could see his teeth sinking into my leg. I thought I was going to die. I could only see about four centimetres of the top of my leg and the rest was in the croc's gob."

Well, clearly she survived, since we have that quote, but how did she survive? (The saltwater crocodile was 3 meters long.) Her friend on the shore — Al Sartori — went in:

"I jumped into the water and on to its back and stuck my thumbs into its eyes until I felt it start to slacken off.... I picked up the croc and chucked it back into the water and it came back at me. It was pretty heavy."

Great heroism by Satori! A euonym? "Satori is considered a 'first step' or embarkation toward nirvana."

The student's mind must be prepared by rigorous study, with the use of koans, and the practice of meditation to concentrate the mind, under the guidance of a teacher.... Chinese Zen master Wumen Hui-k'ai (無門慧開)... struggled for six years with koan "Zhaozhou’s dog"...

The koan is: "Does a dog have Buddha nature or not?" Does a crocodile?

Wumen, having understood the koan wrote this poem:

A thunderclap under the clear blue sky
All beings on earth open their eyes;
Everything under heaven bows together;
Mount Sumeru leaps up and dances.

I know a poem about a crocodile:

How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail,
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale!
How cheerfully he seems to grin,
How neatly spreads his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in
With gently smiling jaws!