According to my desk calendar, today is Bodhidharma's birthday.  I don't know how anyone decided it was Bodhidharma's birthday, but I guess one day is as good as the next.

Bodhidharma is, of course, the fabled first patriarch of Zen. He came to China from India early in the 6th century. According to legend he insulted the Emperor, sat in meditation without ceasing for 9 years, ripped off his eyelids (which sprouted into the first tea plants) so that he wouldn't fall asleep, and meditated so much that his arms and legs atrophied and fell off, but was able to invent kung fu anyway. After his death and burial he was spotted walking back to India wearing one sandal; his grave was found to be empty except for one sandal.

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I just discovered the Kala Kula Sutta, which is very brief. According to this Pali sutra, there are four reasons why a wealthy family cannot hold onto its wealth --

1. They don't look for things that are lost.
2. They don't repair things that are old.
3. They are immoderate in consuming food and drink.
4. An un-virtuous person is placed in charge.

Since I'm nominally the only one in charge of my household (Miss Lucy, the household cat, is really in charge, but she doesn't handle money), I can't really speak to #4. As for #3 -- I'm working on it. As a culture, probably few of us are good at #2, getting things repaired. Small things especially are far more likely to be replaced than repaired. However, I frequently look for things that are lost, mostly because I tend to lose things.

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I understand much of the eastern U.S. is buried until a ton of snow. It missed me (nyah nyah nyah), but some of you readers must be snowed in right now. Stay safe and stay home, if you can.

So who's in the mood for winter haiku? Review the rules at "Spring Haiku Challenge"  and "Zen and the Art of Haiku," then give it a shot. I'm drawing a blank, possibly because there's little snow where I am, but here's Bassho --

Winter solitude--
in a world of one color
the sound of wind.

Maybe we can update that --

After the snowstorm --
in a world of one color,
spinning tires.

Buddhism recently came to the attention of American political partisans via the Great Brit Hume Flap. And since then some right-wing writers have felt compelled to sully the reputation of Buddhism. One of these, Marvin Olansky, strongly implies that Buddhism is responsible for the infamous Nanjing massacre of 1937.

After some graphic descriptions of atrocities in Nanjing, for which he implies that Buddhism is to blame, Olansky goes on to cite Brian Daizen Victoria's Zen at War and Zen War Stories, which forthrightly documents Zen institutional support for Japanese militarism in the 1930s. Does Olansky actually have a case? I don't think so, but let's look more closely.

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