I'm a Mexican-American Buddhist

Crystal Quintero, Pfc. Sandoval; Amber Larson, Seven (eds.), Wisdom Quarterly; LA Times

Mexican-Americans and other Latinos wandering around the City of Angels (latimes.com)

Latino celebs like Chicana Selena Gomez on the streets of L.A. (PeopleEnEspanol.com)

Los Angeles' favorite soccer/futbol team, like its favorite cuisine, comes from Mexico (AP)

 

It's all about directly experiencing the Truth

Q: If you were a "Mexican Buddhist," wouldn't you live in L.A.?

A: I guess that's true. I don't live in Latin America. I must be a Mexican-American Buddhist because I live in Los Angeles.

Buddhist temples here are very welcoming to people who speak Spanish or Spanglish. They try to be very accommodating to explain the Dharma or offer meditation instruction.

La Virgen de Guadalupe as Latin Guan Yin

Beyond Chino Hills, far to the east near the massive Hindu mandir which is larger than the Malibu forest mandir, there is a large Thai Buddhist temple that tried to get a permit from the city to build a golden stupa. The city said it was too big. So they cut it down to size and set it in the parking lot. That temple has a little guest house dedicated to Native Americans, who were once the locals before colonization and incorporation. When one asks the monks why it's there, they explain that it's out of reverence for the people who originally settled that land.

Ancient Mexico in Mesoamerica was partially usurped to form the United States. Mesoamerica included North and Central America, including California, where the people remember the Mayan, Aztec, Toltec, and Olmec empires (wiki)

 

Reality check: El Pueblo de L.A.

Going West (Hsi Lai) temple-complex in Hacienda Heights on the border with Orange County is very welcoming, too. They are a Taiwanese Mahayana missionary movement, so one expects it. One does not expect to be so warmly treated in about 100 much smaller temples that dot Latin neighborhoods all over L.A. County.

Q: And what Dharma message do you like best?

Jessica Alba, mom, Beverly Hills

A: The message of independent thinking. The Dharma is not about faith or priestly authority. It is about free inquiry and a sangha, a community, that includes the people who practice the Path. The Kalama Sutra tells us so, as do so many teachings of the Buddha.

Like the original Protestant movement opposing corrupt Catholic institutions, Buddhism says we don't need an intermediary between us and the Truth, us and reality, us and enlightenment (seeing things as they really are), seeing the end-of-suffering (nirvana).

Ricky Ricardo (Desi Arnaz) loves Lucy

We don't need idols, Gods, or heroes. They're all well and good. What we need is practice and insight. And that's up to us. No one gets anywhere without help, but no one can help us so much that they are doing it for us. No one can do it for us. I think Mexican-Americans can really relate to this. Maybe all Americans in our diversity can, like disaffected Presbyterians and languishing Lutherans [Editor: Like my dad, you mean?] What did people want but a direct experience of sacred knowledge, liberating enlightenment, of the divine, of the entheogenic (godhood-within) experience.

Speaking of diversity, before there was America there was Mexico. And Mexico was the place for diversity. It still is! The Los Angeles Times recently (hardcopy June 13, online June 12, 2014) had a front page story titled "Mestizo Nation: Mexican DNA reveals a staggering range of diversity"! Mestizo means "mixed" (miscegenation, which was illegal in the U.S. until the 1950s, but has been and is now one of the most popular things Anglos and Latinos do, like Sofia Vergara and "Al Bundy" on Modern Family as the new Lucy and her Hispanic hubby).

Afghan, Chinese Buddhist missionaries to Cali

"Mexico," it seems, gets its name from one Indian tribe, the Mexica or Mēxihcatls, who were Aztecs. Mexicans again became the majority group in sunny California in 2013, but now we're Mexican-Americans, and many of us are interested in Buddhism. After all, what few know is that Buddhism arrived in Mexico and California LONG before Europeans, Columbus, or Christianity.

 

Mestizo Nation 
Geoffrey Mohan (Science: latimes.com)
Mexico boasts a staggering genetic diversity, study shows

Writers, artists, and historians have long pondered what it means to be Mexican. Now science has offered its answer, and it could change how medicine uses racial and ethnic categories to assess disease risk, testing, and treatment.

• California no longer has a white majority (Think Progress) 
• Hospital to train barbers in black areas to test for hypertension
• Teaching Through Trauma: How poverty affects kids' brains

US plunges, Obama's "War on Whistleblowers"

Ashley Wells, Pfc. Sandoval, Wisdom Quarterly; Amy Goodman (DemocracyNow.org)

National debt makes strange bedfellows.

There is not much freedom in the "Free World" nowadays. A new survey of press freedom around the world finds the United States has plunged 13 spots, now ranking just 46th among 180 countries. The annual survey by Reporters Without Borders also says Syria is the most dangerous country for journalists, showing a correlation between conflict zones and a low level of press freedom. Other countries that fell lower than in the previous year’s survey include the civil-war-torn Central African Republic, down 43 spots to 109, and Guatemala, where four journalists were killed last year alone. This comes as the United Nations General Assembly recently adopted its first resolution on the safety of journalists. The group has now called on the United Nations to monitor how member states meet their obligations to protect reporters. Delphine Halgand of Reporters Without Borders is  interviewed.


Russia's Pres. Putin has spent more than $50 billion on the Winter Games in Sochi, making this the most expensive Olympics in history. In the lead-up, Russia has faced worldwide criticism and calls for boycotts, especially after it passed a law in June banning the spread of so-called "gay propaganda" to children. Roundtable: Dave Zirin, sports columnist for The Nation magazine and author of Game Over: How Politics Has Turned the Sports World Upside Down; Samantha Retrosi, a luge athlete who competed in the 2006 Winter Olympics; historian and former U.S. Olympic soccer player, Jules Boykoff, author of Celebration Capitalism and the Olympic Games; and Helen Lenskyj, author of several books on the Olympics, including Gender Politics and the Olympic Industry and the forthcoming book, Sexual Diversity and the Sochi 2014 Olympics: No More Rainbows.

• "Wounds of Waziristan" with missing anti-drone activist
• Drone on Your iPhone: Apple app tracks US drone strikes
• House GOP drops standoff over debt ceiling
• Holder calls for restoration of felons’ voting rights
• Washington State freezes death penalty
• Websites stage Global Action Against NSA Surveillance
• Appeals Court rejects halt to Guantánamo force-feeding, allows challenges to prison conditions
• New spill in West Virginia with leak from coal slurry
• Environmentalists: N.C. trying to avoid scrutiny of Duke Energy deal following toxic leak 
• 1 missing after natural gas explosion at Pennsylvania well 
• U.N. envoy calls on Russia, U.S. to help Syrian peace 
  
• The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (E. Kolbert) 
• How humans are causing largest die-off since Dinosaur Age

"The Summit" of the most dangerous mountain

Ashley Wells, Pfc. Sandoval, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; Pat Falvey and Pemba Gyalje Sherpa (thesummitk2book.com, Beyond Endurance Publishing), ImageNowFilms.ie

The film The Summit, produced and directed by Nick Ryan. In US theaters Oct. 4, 2013. (DVD and downloads available early 2014).
 

Not all Westerners respect Buddhist Sherpas

It was the deadliest day on the world's most dangerous mountain, K2. This is an early trailer for the feature book and documentary film "The Summit."

On August 1st, 2008, 18 climbers from around the world reached the summit of K2, the world's second highest (some argue the highest) and most dangerous mountain. It is a peak which claims the lives of one in every four climbers who attempt it. Over the course of 28 hours, however, K2 had exacted a deadlier toll: 11 lives were lost in a series of catastrophic accidents.
 

Beware: mountains do not exist to be climbed

Standing at 8,611 meters and attracting a climbing elite along the Pakistan-China border, K2 is known as the "Mountaineer's Mountain" (much like Denali in Alaska) because of its extreme technical challenges, its dangerously unpredictable weather, and an infamous and hazardous overhanging wall of glacial ice known as the Serac.

Snowbound at Base Camp for weeks on end and increasingly despairing of their prospects for success, an unexpected weather window finally gives the climbers the opportunity they were waiting for. In their collective desire to reach the summit, seven expeditions agreed to coordinate efforts and share equipment. Triumph, however, quickly turns to tragedy when a seemingly flawless plan unravels with lethal consequences.

Over the course of three days, a Nepalese Sherpa called Pemba Gyalje, along with five other Sherpas, was at the center of a series of attempts to rescue climbers who had become trapped in the Death Zone (above 8,000 meters), unable to escape its clutches and debilitated by oxygen-deprivation, chronic fatigue, delirium, and a terrifying hopelessness.

The tragedy becomes a controversy as survivors walk away from the catastrophe on the mountain into an international media storm. Countless stories emerge, some contradictory and many simply untrue.

More recent trailer of "The Summit" to be released in US on Oct. 4, 2013

Mahakala, Yeti, a fierce spirit, Tibet (MTP)

Based on Pemba Gyalje's eyewitness account and drawing on a series of interviews with the survivors, which were conducted for an award-winning documentary. "The Summit: How Triumph Turned to Tragedy on K2's Deadliest Days" is the most comprehensive interpretation of one of modern-day mountaineering's most controversial disasters.
 

Also at the heart of The Summit lies a mystery about one extraordinary man, Ger McDonnell. By all accounts, he was faced with a heartbreaking dilemma -- at the very limit of his mortal resources, he encountered a disastrous scene and a moral dilemma: Three climbers were tangled up in ropes and running out of time.

In the Death Zone, the body is literally dying every passing second. Facing one's mortality, morality is skewed 180 degrees from the rest of life off the mountain. When a climber falls or wanders off the trail, the unwritten code of the mountain is to leave them for dead. Had Ger McDonnell stuck to the code, he might still be alive.
 
"The Summit" is about the very nature of modern adventure, one that remains contentious and fiercely debated. The book "The Summit" deals with the logistics, excitement, fears, successes, rescues, and fatalities of ill fated days on the world's most dangerous mountain.