I said I wasn’t going to do it, and I honestly thought I could resist. But in the end, like most of the rest of the world, I caved. I watched the Olympic Opening Ceremony. Not once, but three times.

I have had a fascination with Asian history and culture for the better part of my adult life. I’ve formally studied Japanese and Mandarin (though not in the quantities or with the success I would prefer). I have practiced Vajrayana Buddhism for more than five years, which in the early days included a lot of reading about the intersection of classical Buddhist, Confucian and Taoist thought, teachings, history and culture in ancient China.

I have sought to understand the actions of today’s Chinese government against the backdrop of the same government of 30 years and 50 years ago, trying to recognize the complexities of something that is so far outside of my normal experience that I cannot help but to react to it through a lens of what is, on many levels, based on ignorance.

With all of that in mind, I can honestly say that the Opening Ceremony was the most visually and emotionally stunning production I have ever seen. Like many of the talking-head analysts who have picked apart China and these Games for the last few months, and like many of my own friends who aren’t nearly as vested in the issue, I have but one conclusion to reach: China’s bainian guochi, the 100-year humiliation of a people, society and culture that that has spent the better part of four millennia as a world powerhouse, is officially over.

Like the awe-inspiring pyrotechnic Footprints of History that marched through the skies between Tian’anmen Square to the National Stadium and directly into the minds of 4 billion television viewers across the globe, I have to believe that the Chinese Century has now made its way from concept to reality.

Perhaps underscoring my naïveté, I was surprised to see the gap between the ancient-history portion of the program, which concluded at some point toward the end of the Qing dynasty, and the start of the modern-history section, which the commentator placed at 1978, when China began implementing economic reforms after Mao Zedong’s death. Frankly, I found it strangely optimistic that this sterilized production of modern Communist history seemed to group the turbulence created under Mao, including the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, as part of the guochi, almost attempting to purge it from the world’s collective memory via the Opening Ceremony.

(I couldn’t help but to think back to the Opening Ceremony of the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, which sought to reconcile both the city’s and the entire geographic region’s egregious treatment of African-Americans before and after the Civil War through acknowledgment of past sins and celebration of black America’s individual and collective accomplishments.)

The Chinese government and its people put a face of overwhelming optimism on China’s role on the world stage in the next century via what will likely go down as one of the most expensive displays of propaganda in history (in fairness, every Opening Ceremony I’ve ever seen – including the one in Atlanta – is propaganda on a grand, prime-time scale). It is now incumbent on the rest of the world to hold the People’s Republic accountable for the responsibility that comes with the new, post-bainian guochi role.

As that happens, I’ll continue to try and find my own balance when it comes to the tenuous relationship between the Chinese government, her people, their collective culture and experience, and my own effort to practice the Middle Way.

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BEIJING - Foreign activists unfurled pro-Tibet banners at a key Olympics venue Wednesday and spoke out against China’s rights record in Tiananmen Square, in the first attempts to use the spotlight of the games to raise other issues.

One athlete, U.S. swim star Amanda Beard, also made a public political gesture, on behalf of animal rights.

All of the groups tangled with Chinese authorities, who are determined to make sure the communist government’s plan for the Beijing Games to be an international showcase for the country goes off without a hitch.

With the Summer Olympics now upon us, I’ve turned the question of Tibet over in my mind a hundred times, trying to reconcile the grievous actions taken there by the Chinese Communists with the fact that the world is now lauding the Chinese government with an honor that it frankly, in my opinion, does not deserve.

I, for the first time in my adult life, have actually stopped watching the news, tired of seeing a government that has caused so much harm, death and destruction — and that has apparently gone back on just about every promise it made in order to secure the 2008 Games — showcase itself as an internationally sanctioned, Olympic-worthy powerhouse of the 21st century.

I did catch some images of the Forbidden City on the news this morning; Matt Lauer was giving U.S. viewers a first-ever glimpse at a former emperor’s “retirement chamber.” Seeing the wide shots of the Forbidden City, with all its beauty and ancient allure, made a connection in my mind between ancient China and a not-so-ancient Tibet, which was largely isolated from the world until the 1959 invasion by the Communists. Two ancient-but-ultimately-interconnected societies, where religious philosophers explored the inner workings of the mind.

Again, my mind is drawn to the Tibet of old, with its great Buddhist masters who forged a path for the rest of us to explore and contemplate upon. A society — albeit a flawed one — that produced a man best described as a simple monk who has gone on to captivate an entire planet with a message of peace, tolerance and love.

Then it occurs to me that my feelings toward the Chinese government are largely based on my own attachment to something that I’ve never experienced in person, but for which I have poured out so much compassion. I have protested in front of the Chinese embassy here in Washington with native Tibetans and Uyghurs — the people who actually lost their nations and fled for their lives. Yet my attachment to the notion of a free Tibet, where Vajrayana Buddhism can one again flourish, creates negative emotions.

I know that Vajrayana doesn’t need a free Tibet — or anything in Tibet — to be the Diamond Vehicle. The Triple Gems of Buddha, Dharma and Sangha will outlast both His Holiness and the Communists. Our samsaric suffering will continue, even if His Holiness is able to return to Lhasa in this lifetime and, as he has called for, Tibet is declared an International Zone of Peace.

I can not criticize people for taking an anti-China stance on the Olympics. What’s done is done, and my ability to actively seek refuge in Three Jewels does not require me to support or oppose the Beijing Olympics.

What we must realize, however — and these are difficult words for me to type — is that because of our interconnectedness, an attempt to make a political statement about China during the Games could very well lead to even greater suffering. If someone in Beijing tries to do something to embarrass the Communist government, what of the crackdowns that will certainly take place in the monasteries across the old Tibet, and in the back-alley shops in Lhasa?

I read enough from credible sources on the Internet to know of the horrors that are going on right now in prisons around China, and especially in the Tibetan areas. And I know it will get worse when His Holiness dies — the Communists will certainly do everything in their power to take over Tibetan Buddhism by naming his successor, just as they have already done with the Panchen Lama. The youth of Tibet, both inside and outside of the People’s Republic of China, will rise up, leading to even greater suffering, despite calls from their elders to practice pacifism.

Be it now or later, it is inevitable that we will fulfill our destiny as humans by creating more suffering in the name of stopping suffering. There is hope, but that hope exists solely inside the hearts, minds and souls of more than 6 billion individuals, all sharing this shrinking little planet.

For me, I will accept that I can do nothing to change the events that will unfold over the next three weeks. I am sure, in fact, that these Olympic games will bring joy to some people, and perhaps that joy will be enough to spur the innate seeds of compassion that we all harbor deep in our hearts.

I will keep vigil, however, being mindful of those who do not, will not or simply can not share in that Chinese Olympic joy. I will keep Tibet and Tibetans in my motivations and dedications. I will continue to pray for His Holiness’ long life. I will continue to seek refuge, and I will wish nothing but loving-kindness for the Chinese, including their leaders.

To do anything otherwise would defeat the entire purpose of my practice.

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There is a reason why topics like religion and politics are taboo for most informal gatherings where people have just met each other: you simply don’t know one another’s history. A subject that could be a passing fancy for one person could elicit deep, strong and even uncomfortable feelings from another.

In those situations, I wonder if the person who is the offendee ever stops to recognize the offender’s intent. The very nature of human emotion makes it nearly impossible for the offendee to even pause, once the emotional chords have been struck.

I think about this today after unintentionally offending someone I met last night. He is a professional musician; I seriously considered a career as a musician in high school and college, but decided against it for a number of reasons, chief among them my mother’s constant nagging that musicians just don’t make any money. So I approached the conversation with said musician with a lot of respect for his accomplishment.

“You actually get paid to play the oboe full-time,” I asked, a tone of amazement in my voice as I realized this guy seems to have a pretty comfortable life in expensive Washington, D.C., putting in his 40-plus on the backside of a musical instrument. What a sweet life, I thought, to get paid for doing nothing more than feeding one’s own artistic passion.

The question plucked something that was lurking pretty deep in the guy’s head; he snapped back about how he was tired of people not giving him respect (whether it was because of him playing the oboe or working full-time as a military musician, I’ll never know). But as I thought about it later, it occurred to me that I had hit one of his hot-button issues, and that he didn’t have time to think about the context of my question. He simply reacted.

I don’t fault the guy, especially since I’ve spent the better part of five years trying to get one step ahead of my own head, only to fall into the same trap of emotionally charged, spontaneous reactions when someone hits one of my own buttons. If anything, what I have learned is to recognize when this happens in other people, and when put in the same situation, I hope to be able to see the response coming in myself in order to blunt it or eliminate it entirely.

It all goes back to mindfulness. If I am as mindful of what I say as I am of how people react to my words, then I’m in pretty good shape. Of course, wanting to be that mindful and actually doing it are two different things.

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At one point during a recent conversation with friends, someone made the insightful remark: Sean, that may all work well and good for you and the other 350 million Buddhists on the planet, but not everyone shares those beliefs, so what’s the solution that works for everyone?

Just before my friend said this, I had explained how one of Gandhi’s main messages, that we must be the change we wish to see in the world, made so much sense to me because, as I have written here before, I truly believe that one act of kindness can and will (someday) have a ripple effect that spreads across the globe and changes humanity as we know it. Hence, the remark from my friend above.

As I think about his statement more closely, however, I find myself wondering how different Earth would be if every man, woman and child practiced any one of the three branches of Buddhism. But then again, my mind concludes, what if everyone were Christian, or Muslim, or Jain, or whatever else. If we ALL had the same shared system of values and morals and beliefs, then my guess is there would be no war, exploitation of resources and each other, etc.

So what is the solution for all mankind? Where is the intersection between a planet full of belief systems? My guess is that it’s as simple as having respect for your fellow man and for the Earth.

I have co-workers who have very, very strong Christian faith, and while we’re quite friendly within the confines of the office, I have no idea what they think, in their heart of hearts, of me as a non-Christian gay man. But regardless, I respect them for their choices, especially since I see how much strength these men and women are able to draw from their faith in God and Jesus. And I honestly feel these same people respect me for who I am.

When the going gets tough, they turn the prayer — and who’s to say that Christian prayer isn’t just another form of the Buddhist practice of generating compassion and loving-kindness for all beings via setting our motivation and dedication before and after our own practice?

Respect as the antidote — as the solution that works for everyone, as my friend asked — seems so far-fetched, but it’s all I can offer.

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In his editorial for the May 2008 edition of Shambhala Sun magazine, Editor-in-Chief Melvin McLeod writes about the discoveries one can encounter on the Buddhist path:

…If we look closely, or someone points it out to us, we find that enlightened mind has coexisted all along with our usual neurosis. We catch a glimpse of enlightenment in the moments of simplicity, peace, and awareness that shine through when there’s a gap in our usual mental activity.

As Shawn and I picked up a couple of items along 14th Street in our neighborhood this afternoon, we were at the Garden District, a locally owned plant store, when a spontaneous downpour erupted from the skies above. After 10 minutes, the rain passed and the sun returned, and when I stepped outside, I noticed a stream of water pouring down from the mesh tent above that provides shade for the store’s outdoor area.

I paused and held out my right hand, letting the clean, cool water splash into my palm, reflecting the sun’s rays all about. For about four or five seconds, I experienced the purest and most simple form of mindfulness, at once giving thanks to the universe for this gift of refreshing, nourishing water while recognizing that the stream running down my arm was part of something infinitely larger than anything my mind could possibly comprehend. It was McLeod’s glimpse of enlightenment, literally in the palm of my hand.

As quickly as the glimpse entered my mind, it left, bringing home the notion that enlightenment — nirvana — occurs in the here and now, if and when I have the peace of mind to not only experience it, but to let it physically reside within my being. It is, as McLeod says toward the end of his piece, the core belief of my own personal journey along the path: My mind is the Buddha’s mind; my body is the Buddha’s body. I only have to discover what is already mine.

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I can remember a sermon nearly 30 years ago at Oakdale Baptist Church in my home town of Rock Hill, S.C. In it, the minister, Rev. Raymond Thompson, talked about how the crucifixion of Christ affected the disciples. On that day, which is now observed as Good Friday, some of Jesus’ closest friends hid in fear. No doubt others were racked with confusion, angst, sadness and guilt.

The pain and grief caused by their teacher’s death was a life-defining moment, the pastor said all those years ago. For me as a boy, it seemed the entire planet wept with Christ’s disciples: the sky went dark, the ground shook, and Heaven sank to Earth. For those men, and indeed all of Jesus’ followers at the time, it must have seemed as if their world was coming to an end.

Some 2,000 years later, I imagine the loss of Tibet and the exile of His Holiness the Dalai Lama in 1959 must have been just as intense for the millions of people who spent a millennium living in relative peace and isolation. While it’s true that Tibet was not a model civilization in the modern context, it was probably as pure as a theocracy could be: every aspect of life revolved around faith; a deep belief in karma and Dharma drove every decision, from the rural farmer to the Potala establishment. Respect for every form of life was at the core of the society (even the lowly earthworm was shown the same respect one would for his or her mother).

The situation today in Tibet and its environs challenges Tibetans and Tibetan Buddhists to closely examine their beliefs, for Buddha’s first teaching spelled out a universal truth that attachment to the status quo – be it a nation, a leader, a temple or anything else temporal – is the sole reason we suffer. Still, it must be incredibly difficult to reconcile the loss of one’s country and the resulting ethnic and cultural genocide with something as ironically simple as the Second Noble Truth (the origin of suffering is attachment to transient things and the ignorance thereof).

It’s almost absurd in my mind to even try to think of the Tibetan issue from the perspective of the Second Noble Truth. I feel anger at what the Chinese have done, and disgust at how most of the world, including my own country, has stood by while atrocities like Rwanda, Darfur, the Congo, East Turkestan/ XÄ«njiāng, Inner Mongolia and Tibet have unfold before our eyes. But, and it’s an important but, I know enough to honestly recognize afflictive emotions like anger and disgust do nothing to improve the world around me, and if anything, only serve as spiritual roadblocks.

So where does that leave me? If anything, the lesson of Good Friday and Easter, especially from the disciples’ perspective, is that nothing is ever as it seems (how’s that for understatement, especially for those who have studied the Two Truths in Buddhism?). The spirit and practices of the Tibetan people, including Vajrayana Buddhism, will live on for as long as they are supposed to.

And for my part, well, I guess I know exactly what I need to do.

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There is a part of me that is thankful for the Tibetans in Lhasa, Kathmandu, Dharamsala, the remote areas of Tibet and the other parts of the world who are so willing to take a stand for basic human rights that they would risk their very lives for it.

For Tibetan Buddhists, there is nothing more precious than this human life that each of us has, for it is through this life that we can work to dedicate our every action to ending suffering for each and every sentient being.  As a Tibetan Buddhist, I recognize and share in this moral imperative to serve and save even the most minute self-aware form of life.

Imagine, then, the immense amount of compassion and loving-kindness that a person must have for the rest of her or her people and culture to make the ultimate sacrifice and put this life on the line to face down Communist China in an effort to preserve those few remaining shards of the most peaceful civilization to ever inhabit this planet.

To be thankful for the protesters in India and Tibet can not be a good thing.  And yet, I am a mere mortal, possibly eons away from Nirvana,  and to deny what I feel in the here and now would be just as bad as acknowledging those same human emotions.  All I can do at this point is raise my voice in prayer with tens of millions of others, remaining constantly hopeful that something will change, somewhere, in order to stop the Tibetan genocide.

Om mani padme hung.  I dedicate any merit that I have ever obtained to the end of suffering for all beings, especially those who have carried the weight of a lost Tibet on their shoulders for 50 years.

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From yesterday’s International Herald Tribune:

‘Magic is over’ for U.S., says French foreign minister

By Alison Smale

PARIS: Bernard Kouchner, the foreign minister of France and a longtime humanitarian, diplomatic and political activist on the international scene, says that whoever succeeds President George W. Bush may restore something of the United States’ battered image and standing overseas, but that “the magic is over.”

…

Asked whether the United States could repair the damage it has suffered to its reputation during the Bush presidency and especially since the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, Kouchner replied, “It will never be as it was before.”

“I think the magic is over,” he continued, in what amounted to a sober assessment from one of the strongest supporters in France of the United States.

U.S. military supremacy endures, Kouchner noted, and the new president “will decide what to do - there are many means to re-establish the image.” But even that, he predicted, “will take time.”

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In what sometimes seems like an incredibly dark and evil world, the only thing we can do as individuals and as societies is to put forth our own light in the form of hope, optimism and the idea that we are one race of people, brothers and sisters, who are connected at levels deeper than anything we can possible imagine.

Without hope, we would have never reached the moon. We would never have beaten small pox. We would have never defeated the horrors of Adolf Hitler.

With hope, we can eradicate AIDS and hunger. With hope, we can bring people together to create positive change in the world. With hope, we can heal the deep scars of war and hate that are etched across our planet. We can protect our Mother Earth and nurture ourselves.

It is only through hope that we can reach our full potential.

This is why one man’s message has sparked a political movement unlike anything I’ve ever seen in my lifetime. This is why people of all political stripes are reexamining how they think about terms like “right” and “left,” words that have become ingrained in our national psyche and now dictate how we govern ourselves.

We can be pulled through life by fear, or we can take control of our own destinies by embracing hope.

Ésta es nuestra América. This is our America. We have to embrace the Power of Hope.

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