Looking for Bodhi in all the wrong places

One of things I was hoping to gain in Thailand was a better understanding of Buddhism. My knowledge of Buddhism is quite limited, and I remembered having a very lively discussion about it with someone my last time here. I hoped to expand that understanding.

Now that I've been here for awhile, I find that like many adventures in life, I am finding some of what I'm looking for, but in the most unlikely of ways. As it turns out (perhaps I'm the last person to learn this), Buddhism as practiced in Thailand (and apparently in Burma as well) remains laced with animism. Prior to the Buddha's teachings coming to Southeast Asia, the people in this area were animists, that is, they worshipped the spirits of animals. Buddhism never actually supplanted the old religion, but simply moved in with it.

To this day, you can see spirit houses all over Mae Hong Son. These are little houses which the Thais put on their property, away from the main house. They consider them as places where the spirits of animals which were displaced during the building of the house can reside. Outside the spirit house, you can see offerings to the spirits like food or flowers. This morning, I observed a bottle of orange soda sitting in front of one (imagine: animal spirits into junk food).

The only people who don't have spirit houses on their property are Christians. Unlike Buddhism, which is more of a philosophy and spiritual practice, Christianity is a religion, and one that doesn't team up very well with competing religions. When someone coverts to Christianity, she or he must give up all other belief systems.

Needless to say, animism is not very compatible with Judaism, either. Judaism is a religion as well, and while it is not as strictly belief-based as Christianity (what we do is at least as significant as what we believe), it could never exist side-by-side with animism, with its three-dimensional representations of multiple spiritual beings. Coupled with the difficulty of communicating with the monks around here, the vast majority of whom don't speak English, my quest was at a stalemate.

That is, until the week between Christmas and New Years. That's the week during which nearly all of my favorite news commentators—and their usual cadre of replacements—got the week off. My basket of iTunes podcasts was empty. My evenings were about to be ruined. Desperately, I searched the iTunes store, looking for some interesting content.

And there it was, in the person of one Tara Brach. She teaches Buddhist philosophy and practice in the Washington, D.C. area. She is a founder and senior teacher at the Insight Meditation Community of Washington. I downloaded her entire series of teachings and meditations into iTunes and have been learning from them every night (except Shabbat) since. While I have no idea whether she was born Jewish, nothing I've heard her say is in any way incompatible with my belief system. In fact, the last teacher I had who made this much sense to me was Rabbi David Zeller, of blessed memory.

In case you've been wanting to learn more about Buddhism, I think I can save you a trip to Thailand.