[Buddha-l] new sarvaastivaada

[Richard Hayes]

On Oct 24, 2009, at 10:56 PM, Erik Hoogcarspel wrote:

>> Verstehen is for Prussians. Real men prefer begrijpen. But I guess I
>> shouldn't be gripin' so much, eh?
>>
> Well Verstehen has the verb 'stehen' which means to stand. Perfectly
> suited to sarvāstivādin philosophy. On the other hand begrijpen  
> contains
> 'grijpen', which is 'to take hold of' and that would suit a Buddhistic
> appraoch. Take your pick.
> I just spent a few days in the country of Verstehen, so give me a few
> days to regain my manhood.

You'll have to double the amount of hagelslag you sprinkle on your  
havermout every morning. That will bring your manhood back to a  
Verstehen that you can begrijpen. But already I digress.

Erik, you'll be glad to know that I have been working on the script to  
an American-style police show set in the Netherlands. It's called  
"Leiden is my beat" (or maybe "The mean streets of Leiden"---the title  
should reflect somehow what Leiden means in German, and what lijden  
means in Dutch). The title will come to me eventually, but let me tell  
you the story line.

The main character is a very tall blond policewoman with a pony tail  
who rides around the cobble-stone streets of Leiden on a bicycle. She  
is so tall that her knees keep bumping the handlebars. (I thought that  
was a nice touch of realism.) In the first episode she sees seeing  
someone stealing a bicycle. Knowing that she has no chance of catching  
the thief (because of her knees hitting the handlebars, you see), she  
has to come up with some other method of stopping the crime wave.  
Fortunately, she knows the owner (now the former owner) of the stolen  
bike, so she races to the owner's house to give him a ticket for  
failing to have a proper lock on his bicycle. But on the way to  
delivering the ticket she stops to help an American tourist find her  
way back to her youth hostel after a long afternoon in a coffeeshop.  
Naturally, the policewoman and the American tourist girl fall in love.  
This complicates things a bit and causes them both a great deal of  
misery. But as luck would have it, when the policewoman remembers to  
deliver the ticket to the bike owner and is just about to press  
charges against him for his criminal negligence resulting in tempting  
a bicycle thief, the owner of the bike turns out to be a Buddhist, a  
disciple of a tulku named Steven Seagal. The disciple gives the  
policewoman a DVD of Steven explaining the first noble truth while  
doing some nicely choreographed kung-fu moves. When the policewoman  
and her American lover see the DVD and hear the dharma proclaimed,  
their hair spontaneously falls out and their clothes turn orange, and  
they realize they have miraculously become Buddhist nuns. So they  
decide to feed themselves to a starving orphaned swan swimming  
forlornly in the canal near a windmill.

I'm pretty sure this TV series will be a big hit. I'd like to ask you  
to consider playing the part of Steven Seagal. Think about it, Erik.  
It might help you get some of your manhood back. We might need to  
change your name, though. It's much too difficult for an AMerican  
audience. We'll have to change it to Eric.

jou vriend,
Richard