There are a number of popular conceits about Buddhism in Brendan O'Neill's article "The Truth About Tibetan Buddhism" at Reason. For example, the article reflects the common notion that westerners who "take up" Buddhism are privileged dilettantes who don't practice seriously. Buddhism to westerners, O'Neill says, "is something you can ingest while sipping on a skinny-milk, no-cream, hazelnut latte." Western Buddhists are "hippyish, celebrity, and middle-class followers."

To prove this point, O'Neill sites an old episode of the television series Friends in which Jennifer Anniston's character read a collection of the Dalai Lama's teachings. And he tells us about a student at Boston University who was asked why she wore a Tibetan necklace:

"It keeps me healthy and happy," she said, reducing Tibetan Buddhism, as so many Dalai Lama-loving undergrads do, to the religious equivalent of knocking back a vitamin pill.

And that's it. Those are his examples of western Buddhists, from which he drew his conclusions.

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I've written recently about misbehaving dharma teachers (see "When Teachers Aren't Perfect"). At his blog Monkey Mind, Zen teacher James Ford brings up the issue of sexual misconduct among teachers and considers what might be done about it.

Apparently there have been new revelations of sexual misconduct about a particular Rinzai teacher who has been "haunted by relentless allegations of sexual misconduct with students over many years," says James Ford. I don't want to replay that tape now (sorry). What's more interesting to me were the Rev. Ford's observations on western Zen going forward.

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On his blog, Andrew Sullivan shares a reader letter about language and religion, in this case Christian. The reader writes,

Very early on it struck me that the crisis of faith in my own experience was a crisis of language that obfuscated spiritual reality. It seemed that the mystical traditions of both Catholicism, certain forms of Buddhism and Islam had struggled mightily to push the limits of what we could speak of in terms of God and our experience of God. I think the post-modern hermeneutical tradition had much to say on this with respect to language in general.

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Barbara Crossette writes for The Nation that a visit to the U.S. by His Holiness the 17th Karmapa had to be canceled because the government of India wouldn't permit him to go. The trip, long planned and scheduled for the near future, had been unpublicized. I understand that His Holiness was going to visit the Karma Triyana Dharmachakra Center in Woodstock, New York, and some other Kagyu centers.

As Crossette says, the government of India has restricted His Holiness's movements since he arrived in Dharamsala in January 2000, after escaping from Tibet. But India permitted His Holiness to leave India in 2008 for a highly visible tour of the United States. This year he had to cancel a publicized trip to Europe as well as the quieter one to U.S.  To say that His Holiness is under "virtual house arrest" may be an overstatement, but only a slight one.

I have inquiries out to see if there could be any possible reason for India's actions other than the influence of China. As Crossette says, it appears China wants to squelch the Karmapa's growing visibility and popularity. They don't want anyone not under their control to become the public face of Tibetan Buddhism after His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama is gone.