The Rest is Silence…
There are no evil people, by DNA, only babes badly bred, by society. And yet the slurs continue, from the highest levels of government, that we are endangered by those of lesser stuff and stature, made of mud and sh*t, all the color of dirt, and not the shiniest of shiny pure white incandescent lightness, we Europeans finely bred on white bread and potatoes, not to be confused with the lesser belly-gobs of noodles and rice and corn and millet from the sh*t-stained countries of Africa and Third-World elsewhere, notwithstanding the fact that we all trace our lineages to there, Africa, both male and female, to opposite sides of that continent, Adam and Eve, by DNA, too bad they never met, as they might’ve even liked each other, you never know, stranger things happen, that Mom and Dad actually get along, and it’ll come in handy, too, any friendship and good feeling to be found along the way, as we hobble handicapped and hampered to our next social challenge, how to deal with the ramifications of our own successes, such that we are now overwhelmed by the very things which sustain us and which were once so hard to find: ground provisions and year-round sustenance, healthy offspring and shelters from the cold, now too numerous to mention. And the words multiply exponential, only adding to the suffering, adding to the pain: opinions comments narratives predictions screams shouts expletives yada yada, still not enough when what we really need now is silence, blessed silence. That’s what Shakespeare said. That’s what the Buddha said…
Okay, so I admit it: I’m going through a crisis of confidence with my newfound love of Buddhism, and all that entails. The devil is in the details, of course, as even the ever-tricky Buddha himself well knew, just like Jesus after him, that you pick and choose what to tell the initiates and laypeople at any one time, subject to their capacity to comprehend, assimilate, or even fathom, concepts which may just be a bit difficult to swallow at first, or maybe forever…
Beyond all the fibs and fantasies, behind all the lies we tell ourselves, is the l-DNA we create for ourselves in language, a trail to our past and an arrow to our future, and pretty much the only thing we had before y-DNA and mt-DNA, revealed now to be something like a parallel universe to those more precise measurements, yet far more analogous to the largely hypothetical cultural tracks and traces, like c-DNA, full of long lonely nights and broken promises, frightened misgivings and belated thanksgivings…
The year 1953 should have been a big one for Buddhism. Something to do with Tibet, you’re probably thinking? No, something to do with the discovery of DNA, I’m thinking, because that meant that we Buddhists would no longer have to twist ourselves into human pretzels and insert our heads halfway up our… meditation postures…
Some people say Buddhism is not really a religion, though I know some monks who would beg to differ. Here’s what my dictionary says about religion:
Terborn Zult, and 
I’m paraphrasing, of course, but this is the question that has plagued—no, let’s say intrigued’—the sangha (Buddhist community) for two and a half millennia, more or less, if not in so many words, then in so many actions, cutting to the chase, and allowing for interpolations and extrapolations, i.e. whether to think big, farming ideas and allowing for fierce and free debate, or to think small, on the achievement of individual ‘liberation’ and the purging of ‘defilements’ from the composite makeshift personalities that we call ‘I’…
…of religion, science, and life, too, the mostly unrequited wish that “it’s all written,” whether in script or bar-code, to the point of retro-fitting the logic that may or may not have actually led up to some fait accompli, though that accomplished fact was never predicted even at the point of inception. This is the need for happy endings, and the one overriding narrative that drives all others, the one theory of everything…
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