[Buddha-l] Re: Pennsylvania and crying Buddhas

[Richard P. Hayes]

On Thu, 2005-10-06 at 11:59 -0700, Mitchell Ginsberg wrote:

> To add the Buddhist touch: Are there any jokes in any
> of the Mahayana or Vajrayana or Chinese or ... texts
> of Buddhism?

What does something have to have to qualify as a joke? There is no doubt
that the Pali canon is full of satire, parody and spoofery meant to
entertain as well as to edify. Surely the narrative episodes in the
Vimalakirti are meant to be wildly funny. Even the Lotus Sutra has
narrative that was surely intended to provoke laughter in its audience. 

> Do any roshis or rinpoches ever tell jokes

Like you, I have sat through hundreds of dharma talks, and I would say
that one of the most prevalent features of the majority of them is a
liberal use of humor, wit and irony. But jokes as such are relatively
rare, perhaps because the joke is one of the most crude and witless
forms of humor, and most people giving dharma talks are operating at a
higher level of sophistication than most jokers.

>  Are they ever caught chuckling at a sitcom? 

Years ago I met an academic couple whose son had become a Buddhist monk.
They were not at all sure what to make of it, because they were both
secular humanists who tended to see religion as a descent into blind
faith and sanctimony. They spent many a dark hour worrying about their
son, the monk. One day, after a few years in the monastery, he went home
for a visit. On the first night of his stay at home he joined his
parents in watching some sitcom on TV. He laughed until tears were
rolling down his cheeks, just as he had done when he was younger. The
mother then began to cry with joy and relief and exclaimed "Thank God,
you're still our son!" 

Maybe by the time their son made the rank of rinpoche, he finally lost
the ability to see anything funny in a sitcom, but I'd like he could
appreciate a more refined form of humor.

There is a Buddhist abhidhamma treatise that has an elaborate discussion
of laughter. What it says is that Buddhas and other arahants can smile
without parting their lips, but they would never do anything as unseemly
as showing their teeth while smiling, let alone something as utterly
unrefined as slapping a knee, rocking back and forth, wheezing,
whooping, snorting, cackling, giggling or ejecting coffee or other hot
liquids through the nostrils onto a keyboard. 

Smiling slightly without parting my lips is about the full extent of my
response to such fellows as Seinfeld and Robin Williams. This could lure
me into thinking I had made the grade as an arahant, if it were not for
the fact that Lili Tomlin can make me pee my pants and laugh so hard
that I need CPR and require the services of a fleet of ambulances.

-- 
Dh. Dayamati
Albuquerque, New Mexico