Buddha Was Not One to Sit Around

Buddha’s birthday, which comes around this time (April 8 for Japanese Buddhists, the full moon in May for most others), is not a holiday I have ever noticed much. That is, until last May’s full moon, when a friend sang into my answering machine, “Happy birthday, dear Buddha, happy birthday tooooo youuuu. . . .”

And I couldn’t get it out of my head. It perched there, repeating like a deranged parrot: Happy birthday, dear Buddha. Well, I didn’t mind thinking about Buddha. I’m quite delighted someone so wondrous once existed. I just don’t like songs getting stuck in my psyche. McCartney’s “Hope of Deliverance” had recently driven me mad for three straight days and nights.

Yet, there the jingle stayed. I heard it while writing, while doing laundry, while exercising, while watching “The Price Is Right.” I cursed it. I tried substituting other tunes, even “Hope of Deliverance.” Nothing worked.

After a while, I just surrendered. Maybe it was there for a reason. Maybe I should listen to the message, as some Buddhists say. Maybe this scratched-record excuse for “Buddha-consciousness” was prodding me to do something--perhaps to seek enlightenment in this world of inherent suffering, just as Buddha did 2,500 years ago.

So the next day, I did. I certainly had nothing better to do. My first stop was the great Masonic monolith known as the Scottish Rite Auditorium, which was hosting a rite neither Scottish nor Masonic: “Millennium Madness--An Evolution Update, Cosmic Conspiracy Game and Gala Ball.”

I’d seen it advertised in the paper. Sure sounded potentially enlightening. I strolled into the great hall, beneath grave words etched in gold on marble walls: Though I march under the light of sun and of star, and have not hope, I am become as stagnant water or a desert sand. I wondered if there were any Buddhist Freemasons.

Inside, I was given written instructions for the “Cosmic Conspiracy Game.” My job, a slip of paper told me, was to take the role of a “CIA computer hacker” but to insist upon inquiry that I was actually a chicken farmer.

I had a peculiar password to be spoken to other attendees--variously cast as space aliens, time travelers, psychics, Third World dictators, satanists, Christians, anarchists, drug smugglers--in hopes of receiving a desired coded response. I don’t know how to win the Cosmic Conspiracy Game. I didn’t play. Poker and Scrabble once or twice a year are about all the competitive spirit I muster.

*

Instead, I headed directly for the “Evolutionary Update” lectures featuring the inventor of the Cosmic game, a kind of philosopher named Robert Anton Wilson. Well, he looked a little like Buddha, I thought--that is, if Buddha were dressed for a Sunday afternoon of boccie ball.

Wilson told a crowd of about 300 that Prince Charles and Ross Perot each have large ears, and that one wishes to be king and the other doesn’t. He suggested that conservative radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh has a crush on First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, terming it potentially “the most touching love story since King Kong.” He spoke of a religion he invented centering on worship of the Greek goddess of discord, Eris. Everyone is a pope in this religion, he noted, and all popes instantly excommunicate one another.

The idea of worshiping discord seemed apt for the late 20th Century, kind of a theological cousin of the credo of the film “Dr. Strangelove: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” I enjoyed Wilson, but I wasn’t sure if I was enlightened by him. I left.

The birthday song came back the next morning, while I was singing in the shower. This called for a more serious, even drastic approach. I picked up a couple of friends and drove to one of Buddha’s very homes, the stupendous Hsi Lai Temple in Hacienda Heights, the largest Buddhist temple complex in the entire Western hemisphere. A place where Kuan-Yin, the goddess of great compassion, is said to have appeared above the San Gabriel Mountains in the form of a cloud while the temple was being built. I glanced toward the San Gabriels to see if she might have returned. Maybe she had, but I couldn’t see anything through the smog.

A Buddha’s birthday festival was under way in the courtyard among the grand temple buildings, with their stunning, pumpkin-colored, curved Chinese rooftops sheltering icons the size of Cadillacs. There were fried radish cakes, herbal soups and an exhibit of pastoral Chinese watercolors sponsored by March Fong Eu.

We proceeded to the main worshiping hall but stopped abruptly at a sign forbidding entry to anyone in shorts. My friends wore very trendy khaki knee-length pants, fresh from the Gap. After a moment’s hesitation, I told them that I didn’t think Buddha would mind. He always seemed to be wearing little more than a big sheet, anyhow. We entered without being struck by lightning.

Three gigantic, serene icons representing the three manifestations of Buddha sat high on the far wall: Bhaisajyaguru, or the “medicine Buddha,” to whom believers pray for healing; Amitabha, the Buddha of eternal light, said to be dwelling in the land of bliss, and Sakyamuni, symbolizing the mortal Buddha who once strolled this Earth trying to figure things out.

They stared unflinchingly ahead, seemingly inhabited by secrets everyone wants to know. It was intimidatingly peaceful. Worshipers prayed. Recorded monks droned. A little girl in a frilly dress ecstatically bowed her head. Enlightenment seemed to hang in the air. Unfortunately, I couldn’t seem to hang on to any of it. I went back outside.

*

I was starting to feel frustrated in my quest--and that the endless jingle was just a symptom of an overworked mind--when I suddenly spied a glass case marked “Dharma Words.” Inside, I found hundreds of tiny paper scrolls containing dharmas, cosmic laws and principles of existence, for a buck apiece.

A dollar for a cosmic law struck me as quite a bargain. I eagerly paid, reached in and grabbed one. It read: Wearing out one’s sitting mat, not applying effort, will the empty mind be realized? After great effort is applied, life will be like the flying colors of the peach blossoms in March.

Wow, it was a message straight from Buddha. That is, if you buy into the assumption that fate and random events and God are the same thing. What did it mean?

As near as I can tell, Buddha seemed to be telling me to get off my duff. I’d been sitting around too much for his liking, apparently. Well, my sitting mat--my couch-- was rather worse for wear. And I really liked the idea of life being like peach blossoms; that would be change. And then, as I mulled all this over, I suddenly remembered the words on the Scottish Rite wall about “I am become as stagnant water. . . .”

Arguably the same message! Hmm. . . .

The next day, the birthday song was gone.

Greatly relieved, I drove up to a lovely state park given to California by the family of another legendary seeker of wisdom named Will Rogers. You know, the writer-actor-cowboy-humorist who found Zen in a lariat.

I walked past Rogers’ rustic, meticulously preserved home-museum--I suppose you could say it is a kind of temple to his memory now--and up into the Santa Monica Mountains. Took a vigorous two-mile hike through the chaparral to a place called Inspiration Point.

Not because I was seeking inspiration, but because Buddha had enlightened me to get off my duff.