I received a complaint disguised as a question from a senior Hoffman Teacher—why was I writing now about Hoffman’s unethical behavior? A.M., who choses to be anonymous, responded to my Facebook post about Hoffman’s sexual abuse by trying to shame me. He deleted his remarks after many people objected to what he said. I didn’t get a screenshot so I can’t quote him directly. However, this was the essence: “It’s been 50 years since Hoffman raped you, and he’s been dead 20 years. It’s too bad you still are playing the victim.” And in a second response he said: “I’m sorry that you can’t let go of it.”
It demands a response. Here is what I said:
“So the complaint continues. Is this a plea to “let it go” as if I am a bad person for calling attention to harm caused by Bob Hoffman, who presented himself as a healer, a spiritual counselor, and a trustworthy public figure? Let me be entirely clear. He got me drunk and raped me 5 months after finishing his Process of Psychic Therapy. It was not consensual. It was illegal, unethical, and under normal circumstances there would be consequences. His ineptitude destroyed my relationship with my father for 30 years. The damage was real. I should keep my mouth shut? Be a man and deal with it? This is just another form of bullying and if it’s the mind set that comes from doing the Process, we have a problem. My response is clear: a victim never has to apologize. Period.”
I have been writing about Hoffman for almost 20 years. It has been part of my therapy to deal with Hoffman’s sexual abuse. Here’s a list of all my published posts about Hoffman with their timestamps. I think that after revision and rewriting (I do repeat myself), there might be enough for an eBook.
Hoffman Process, Bob Hoffman Bibliography
31/07/04, The Ontological Odd Couple, and the Origins of the Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy. A lengthy examination of the people who contributed to the creation of The Hoffman Process. Revised September 16, 2006
09/04/07, Jonestown and our Deliverance from Cults. Remembering one FHPT client who did not die in the murder/suicide at the Peoples’ Temple.
02/08/07, Science vs. Spooks, skepticism, scientific research and the Nostradamus effect. Is a peer-reviewed study of spirituality even possible? Revised August 11, 2011.
05/06/08, New Age Miracle or Fraud. An introduction to my thoughts and experience with Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy, now known as the Hoffman Process.
21/11/19, #GayMeToo—Bob Hoffman. The traumatic sexual episode in my relationship with Hoffman.
23/12/19, "Bob Hoffman was a criminal. Simple." A respected Zen teacher reacted to #GayMeToo.
19/08/20, Forgive and Forget? Impossible. An inquiry into Victimization.
07/09/20, A Very Personal Question: Can I Forgive Bob Hoffman? In short, if I can forgive myself.
21/11/20, This Victim Refuses Silence It was difficult to write about Hoffman’s sexual abuse, and it might be difficult to read—but I had to be honest with myself.
22/01/21, Why Do Cults Need to Rewrite History? The institutional narrative about the creation of the Hoffman Process is awash in lies, distortions and fabrications.
13/02/21, The Sad Demise of Bob Hoffman. My experience with Hoffman at the end of his life.
18/02/21, Called to Jury Duty. The real story of waking up to my sexual abuse.
13/04/21, Sex in the Bushes: the real story. Hoffman ends it with his boyfriend. Yes the name says it all!
22/04/21, Bob Hoffman, the First Encounter. Why do intelligent people believe nonsense? My personal experience of the first Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy group with Claudio Naranjo’s SAT in Berkeley.
12/05/21, The End of Patriarchy and the Beginnings of a Cult. The inter-relationship of Hoffman, Claudio Naranjo and the SAT group process.
16/05/21, The Hoffman Process was birthed by TV sitcom “Bewitched,” Some wicked, nasty fun about the psychic origins of the Hoffman Process.
09/06/21, Bamboozled. “Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.” Carl Sagan.
17/06/21, Why can I find nothing online about Bob Hoffman? An examination of the praise for Bob Hoffman and the Hoffman Process.
21/06/21, Tolman Hall, the first Hoffman Process, Hoffman and Naranjo end their collaboration. The predator begins to groom me for sex.
19/10/21. The Truth about Bob Hoffman
Monday, June 21, 2021
Tolman Hall, the first Hoffman Process.
Hoffman the sexual predator grooms me.
The public narrative about the creation of the Hoffman Process is that Claudio Naranjo’s strong, professional psychotherapeutic experience guided Bob Hoffman. I will make a case that there is little substance to this claim; that it is a myth and a marketing ploy. Naranjo says in his Introduction to “No One is to Blame” that he played the role of John the Baptist. Did he forget that that relationship did not turn out well? But both were Jews so perhaps the subtlety escaped them. (For a serious examination of Claudio’s, and others’, contributions, see “The Ontological Odd Couple”).
By Thanksgiving, the conflict between Hoffman and Naranjo in the direction of the SAT Process was becoming apparent. Claudio’s directions insisted that our exploration be self-directed. The time honored and well tested practice of psychotherapy require that discovery come from the patient him or herself, not the dictates or evaluation of the therapist. Hoffman had no patience and thought it was nonsense.
Hoffman and Claudio might have talked about the purpose or therapeutic purpose of each exercise, but I cannot remember one evening that Claudio stayed after Hoffman began his presentation. Claudio maintained control over the direction of the work that we SAT members did through Rosalyn—3 hour group meetings once week with several small cohort meetings in between. For Hoffman that was far too long, more than a month doing what he did in two hour-long sessions with the people who came for psychic readings in the basement of his tailor shop in Oakland.
After our second or third week of the “Bitch Session” against Mother, not even halfway through the Process, Hoffman announced that he and Claudio had agreed that “The Defense of Mother'' would be an OK place to end their collaboration, as if it were an amicable divorce. Actually he’d had enough, and discovered the Wiffle Bat as a way to get to the core of emotional anger. He said that he and Claudio had agreed to finish their work together and that be doing his own version of group therapy.
Hoffman took me aside and strongly suggested that I join the group of people he’d “selected” to do the first 13 week Process in Tolman Hall. He would later tell me that he saw me sitting there in Claudio’s SAT, he knew I was “terribly unhappy.” What I didn’t realize was that I hadn’t been “selected,” rather that he’d singled me out to be a sex partner. It was not romantic. With Hoffman it was transactional. I was being groomed for Hoffman’s self-gratification.
Hoffman made it seem like a huge honor that he’d been invited to use the prestigious Tolman Hall, the UC Berkeley’s Department of Psychology’s classroom and office building, as the venue for his presentation. In reality all it meant was that someone, Hoffman, even his secretary, or perhaps even a psychologist who supported Hoffman, called the campus rental Office, made a reservation, and paid a deposit on a room for an evening class. It was not a fancy lecture hall, actually just a drab narrow classroom with no windows and awkward plastic chairs, but Hoffman could always label his first group “Tolman Hall.”
50 or so people gathered on a January night for Hoffman’s first Process.
Class, or session was Monday night at 7 PM. The 13 week Process quickly became a forced march. Each session had specific exercises with a clear objective, and we had to keep up. He warned us that stragglers wouldn’t make it, that we would resist but we could just take it as an opportunity to learn about our defenses. We had till Wednesday at 5 to deliver the week’s assignment to Hoffman’s Office on 14th Street in downtown Oakland in an office building close to his former tailor shop. We listened to his taped feedback the following Monday before the session began.
Hoffman presented the week's objective in a rambling style. It actually felt more like he was caught up in a mental tangent, just let it rip, stream of consciousness. He claimed that he was channeling Dr. Fisher. The spirits on the other-side are apparently as disjointed and unorganized as they were in human life when they inhabited bodies, or more so—Hoffman was channeling a German professor of psychotherapy not known for flights of fancy. (It was recorded and I found out later that Mariam Brandstatter received the recordings in Tel Aviv and helped put some order and rationale into the presentation).
Usually Hoffman picked out one person for the demonstration of the purpose of each exercise. Often he’d just ask “who doesn’t understand, or who objects?” And the first person whose hand went up would be asked to come forward. There were compelling moments even if in retrospect they were needlessly brutal. I remember the demonstration of Negative Love in the first or second session. We had each brought a list of our mother’s negative traits to either the first or second session. One woman, she was a professional psychologist I think, a well dressed large woman—I have no idea why her image remains with me—volunteered to “work” with Hoffman.
Hoffman took the list she’d prepared of her mother’s negative traits and admonitions and started at the top. “Your mother complained about your father in an uncompromising fashion. Ok, How often do you complain about your husband?” “Never.” “Really? Be honest. Never? The thought never enters your mind? You’re always positive and loving? Don’t play your games. You never have to stop yourself from complaining just like your mother did?” And eventually the woman admitted that she had to fight with herself not to behave in exactly the same way that her mother treated her father. Onto the next trait on the list. Same interrogation. Same result: imitation to get love, or rebellion to the trait and experience conflict. Every thought, every action, every impulse was a conditioned response. There were no redeeming qualities, and no other possibilities. One thing was clear: we were nothing but the sum total of what we’d learned from our parents. Negative love was negative.
The woman was devastated. There was zero therapeutic, compassionate presence when Hoffman dealt with a person and their “games.” It was a frontal, take-no-prisoners assault, and he relished the fight. He ended the attack with a scripted, fake, all knowing, condescending smile coupled with the assurance that if we honestly stepped into his Process, and submitted to him, we’d come to realize deeply that everyone was guilty and no one to blame, and finally be free from the chains of Negative Love.
Contrast Claudio’s careful, respectful, even compassionate invitation to look into one’s self with Hoffman’s brutality and the reason why they separated couldn’t be more clear.
I also have to admit that I had never seen my own personality as some reflection of my mother’s in such stark relief before. It was enough to allow me to follow along.
Hoffman the Predator Groomed Me!
In the sixth or seventh week I had a very uncomfortable experience. The beginning of Hoffman’s sexual abuse started in a setting that was allegedly therapy!
Late one Wednesday afternoon I hand delivered my emotional “autobiography with father” to Hoffman on 15th Street. It was past 5, and the receptionist had left. Hoffman was sitting at his desk in a cramped office, with his feet on the desk. I stood in the open door.
He told me to hand him my work, and he began to read it right on the spot. He would read a paragraph, comment on the emotional tone, and then try to make some connection between the specific circumstances I’d described and what he called the negative emotional patterns and character traits that I’d adopted from my father in an attempt to bargain for his love.
Hoffman read through to an incident I wrote about my father resetting the stone wall at the back of our lot. As Dad was lifting stones into a wheelbarrow, he uncovered the nest of a woodchuck who’d built her nest in a cranny between the rocks. As she was ferociously defending her cubs, my father killed her and her cubs with his shovel. As I remembered it, he began to beat her viciously. Her screams were chilling.
Hoffman began by complimenting the emotional tone of my writing. But then he began to raise his voice. He said that obviously my Dad was a homosexual, and then, “You’re also gay too, aren’t you?” I countered with a question about how he could deduce that my dad was gay based on his bludgeoning a woodchuck? He just repeated “You’re gay.” His voice became louder and louder. Now he was almost screaming—obviously my father was a sadist. What? Then he repeated his question: “You’re gay? Don’t play games with me. I know these things.” I admitted that of course I had gay feelings, but I was unsure if I was gay. By now he was shouting loudly: “Don’t play games with me.” I had heard that Hoffman often often attacked clients—he claimed that he was breaking us down in order to build us up—but I could barely believe it.
I was in nearly complete denial about my homosexuality, but my Dad was not gay. I actually think that the idea of same sex relationship never once crossed his mind in his entire life. I am also certain that Hoffman’s deductions from what I related in my writing were entirely projections and his own pathology. Other things that he said or implied were entirely off base and not even worthy of the weirdest pop psychology. But because there was one note of truth in analysis, the whole thing became plausible, and I lost any possibility of a real relationship with my father for the next 30 years. In exchange I got the debilitating transference to Hoffman. I also remember that the 13 week process cost $300. The real cost was devastating.
This part of my therapy with Hoffman happened in March. He began stalking me in September. He raped me in late October or early November.
When I described this incident to my therapist, his response was: when you stayed, he knew he had you. And he did.
Thursday, June 17, 2021
Why can I find nothing online about Bob Hoffman?
An examination of the praise for Bob Hoffman and the Hoffman Process, formerly known as The Quadrinity Process or Fisher-Hoffman Psychic Therapy.
I was recently interviewed for a book about personal transformation, specifically with regard to my experience with the Hoffman Process and the Landmark Forum. The writer asked me, “Why can’t I find anything online about Bob Hoffman except pro forma praise or what look like infomercials?” So I Googled him.
I found the ghost-written and dated No One Is to Blame: Getting a Loving Divorce Form(sic) Mom and Dad, the Discoveries of the Quadrinity Process which is so worthless that I can find no recommendation by the Hoffman Institute. I love the professionalism of the typo. We all make mistakes, but really, it's been 50 years, and you can't get the title of Hoffman's only book spelled correctly?
Volker Kohrn of the Australian branch of the Hoffman Institute posted a piece called 50 YEARS LATER, BOB HOFFMAN’S DREAM LIVES ON which is so awash with factual inaccuracies (check out my blog post Why do cults need to rewrite history?) that I wonder if Mr. Kohrn actually met Hoffman. He certainly didn’t do much research about Dr. Claudio Naranjo’s contribution to the development of the Process.
You can buy You Can Change Your Life: With the Hoffman Process by Tim Laurence. Tim is the owner of the UK Hoffman Process and not an entirely objective observer. He “... came to the United States and ‘studied’ with Bob Hoffman, the gifted ‘intuitive' who founded the ‘world famous’ Hoffman Process.” I have a few admittedly snarky comments about Tim’s bio blurb.
I knew Hoffman, and I know a good number of Process teachers, including Tim. No one “studied” with Hoffman. If you “worked” with him it usually meant that you were angling for an international license to sell the Process or a teaching credential. But it also meant that you put up with being verbally attacked, yelled at, humiliated and belittled, yet always justified by Hoffman’s claim that he was doing it all for your own good, that he was “breaking down to build up.” I know this from personal experience as well as countless conversations and complaints by Hoffman’s early followers. If you were a psychologist or really any professional, you were singled out for Hoffman’s particularly abusive brand of attention. This “study” was more akin to a secret, brutal fraternity initiation than anything remotely resembling an education or a course of psychotherapy.
But in truth, there was nothing subtle to learn. Although Hoffman had an opinion about any subject from OJ Simpson to Henry Kissinger, I'd be hard pressed to distinguish much difference. I mention these two cases because I distinctly remember conversations with Hoffman about both. Kissinger “ran all over the globe” trying to please a father who never approved of him, but he did some good. OJ killed his wife because he never got unconditional love from his parents. Kissinger, as well as Madeleine Albright, were both Jews who succeeded, a Hoffman obsession, and he couldn’t tear himself away from Simpson’s TV trial, an obsession that he felt guilty about but could not control.
I recently wrote in a post “Bamboozled” that the use of “intuitive'' is a ploy to cover Hoffman’s roots in the Spiritualist Church—not the elite, hip Science of Mind organization, but the one with spirit visitations and ouija boards. A “gifted, compassionate Intuitive'' is an innocuous and deceptive moniker to present an unqualified and untrained person who claims special knowledge that mysteriously surpasses the hard earned therapeutic work of professional psychology. Nothing could be farther from reality.
An apparently sanctioned description by Dylan Jones appeared in the 24 September 2017 edition of GQ Britain: "Founded in 1967 by Bob Hoffman, a former tailor from Oakland, California, with no formal training in psychology, psychiatry or psychotherapy, the Process is designed to help the unmoored identify negative behaviours, moods and ways of thinking that developed unconsciously and were conditioned in childhood." At least Hoffman’s CV is accurate. I like the lyricism of "the unmoored." Really, let the precision of this precise psychological descriptor "unmoored" sink in before you plunk your money down.
Why am I so harsh on an enterprise that has allegedly helped many people achieve some measure of inner peace and resolve unfinished business in their relationships with their parents? In my case Hoffman’s sexual abuse was severely damaging, and it took a very long time and a lot of money to resolve. The Hoffman Process is not psychotherapy but poses as an alternative. It’s a free world and anyone can subject themselves to anything they choose, but I feel that honesty obliges me to present another, less popular view so that people can make an informed choice.
Here is a link to my other writing about the Process.
© Kenneth Ireland, 2021
Saturday, June 12, 2021
James Ishmael Ford’s Monkey Mind, "Mind-monkey," 心猿
Let me begin my tribute and thanks to James Ford for his blog “Monkey Mind” with a guess that he’s never experienced living with monkeys. Among Western Buddhists, he would not be alone. I’ve been around long enough to understand the shorthand we use to describe this experience of the mind’s vagaries, and I know the honored etymology of Monkey Mind, originally from the Chinese, "Mind-monkey" 心猿. We’ve all had some experience in meditation of the tenuous connections between jumping thoughts, feelings popping up, sometimes with inexplicable twitching's, swinging from branch to branch, hanging on by our fingernails. This was a metaphor, a vivid linguistic picture, until I moved to India. Here it's been filled out with a more complete experience.
Monkey Mind and Money Matters in an Indian “spiritual” context.
In 2011 on our first trip to India, Ashish and I visited Shimla where east of the city on Jakhu Hill a 108 foot statue of the Monkey God had been unveiled just the year before. But for hundreds of years before that at Shri Hanuman Mandir, monkeys had been venerated and pampered, producing some pretty outrageous ingrained behavior. One jumped me and stole my glasses, my spec’s, and refused to return them without forfeiting a ransom. The animal wanted candy which, along with small versions of its supernatural idol, is readily available from the concessioners set up in the Temple precincts testifying to the long, universal symbiosis between religious observance and extortion. These annoying, religiously-conditioned primates have been crawling over the shrines of northern India for generations. On the 12 km trek up Vaishno Devi in Katra, near Jammu, they steal your overpriced Pepsi’s in a kind of comedy routine, and of course do not pay any delivery cost to the way station at almost 12,000 ft above sea level. And we’re not talking about satisfying basic needs—for monkeys Pepsi is an acquired taste.
OK, perhaps filling out the picture of monkey mind and money is no antidote for the pain of paying the cost of spiritual pursuits, but the experience of real monkeys is closer to the bone. For me at least, seeing the image of god as a creature with such distasteful behavior was a shock. My cynic wants to highlight the cunning of extracting a price without getting anything in return. And theologically we are worlds apart from Norman Vincent Peale’s sermons at the Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan where he taught Donald Trump and his father: think the right positive thoughts, and cash will pour into the coffers. Here nasty monkeys’ stealing and conniving is seen as just that and not a holy virtue worthy of the celestial realm. It’s as real as the writing in Monkey Mind. In this regard James is not easily distracted.
Monkeys as Kings and Gods in Buddhism
The Hindu pantheon is not unique in elevating the monkey to a revered status. In some Buddhist lore, monkeys are both kings and scoundrels at the same time, in the same body, in the same world, in all worlds. I can still almost hear Zenshin Phil Whalen’s guffaws as Lou Hartman read aloud Arthur Waley's abridged translation of the Journey to the West (Chinese: 西遊記; pinyin: Xī Yóu Jì), Adventures of the Monkey God, two old monks delighting in the ingenuity of Wú Chéng'ēn’s story telling. Also known as Ruzhong (c. 1500–1582 or 1505–1580), he weaves a long tale about the risky transplanting of the Buddhist Teachings they both loved from India to China. It’s based on a true story of another famous monk, Xuan Zang, of the Chinese Tang Dynasty (602-664) who journeyed to India, the birthplace of Buddhism, to retrieve the “true” Buddhist holy books, and when he returned, translated the Sutras into Chinese.
Ruzhong weaves in all kinds of folklore and fantastic tales into a complicated and convoluted plot with a large unlikely cast of fantastic animals, humans, and celestial beings. Over 100 chapters, the Monkey King, Sun Wukong, gains power, rebels against heaven, wins battles, is condemned to death by the Eastern deities, but the Buddha intervenes and traps him under a mountain for 500 years, preparing him to guard Xuan Zang and the Dharma. I’ll skip the Buddhist pig and dragons given the space limitations of a blog post.
It’s late Spring now in the foothills of the Himalayas, and the brown rhesus monkeys have just come down from the mountains—or maybe they’ve come up from the plains. I have no idea why these nasty monkeys seem to appear now in the village, but they’re here. To be fair to the species, their behavior is totally different from their grey langur cousins who live in the higher elevations, but they do not conform to the fanciful literary portrait except perhaps in this way: just as the Monkey King survives the celestial plot to execute him, they won’t disappear. They can’t be silenced, squelched, or eradicated. And this might have been the very quality that the Buddha singled out as important for guarding the Sacred Teachings as they made their way across continents, oceans, languages and cultures.
Everyone hates the brown monkeys. Besides being scavengers, they have ugly orange asses; they scream and fight; they steal my tomatoes just when they’re ripe; they shit all over my balcony, and are not easily scared off. They even throw their shit if confronted. These days, almost as if to highlight our suffering during the epidemic, they crowd the road that runs along the river where cremation gnats receive the bodies of people who’ve died from Covid. Food offerings provide an easy meal.
There are no wild monkeys in San Francisco, and I am a thoroughgoing Westerner. The way that local people deal with “the monkey problem” is for me as new and intriguing as living with monkeys. They simply make lots of space, and live their lives around them.
I’ll contrast it to the way a San Franciscan, for example, might deal with homelessness and poverty. Here there are people who live outdoors, and there are beggars everywhere, but there are no governmental attempts to house, feed or educate the homeless. The liability of drug addiction, here as in San Francisco, seems to be part and parcel of the homeless condition, but it is handled very differently. If an addict is lucky enough to have some family, he or she might get involuntarily locked up in the 30 day detox, the “de-addiction center,” but with no medical follow-up, they are basically left on their own to fight their demons.
Here is another story of living close to the wild, unpredictable, and very dangerous side of nature. Late this Spring near a local water tank, seven people were mauled by a black bear who came down from the high forest. Two died. The tank is located perhaps 500 meters below the Dalai Lama’s residence but still in the dense forest before the large Central Tibetan Authority complex, Gangchen Kyishong, commonly known as the “Library” because it holds perhaps the largest repository of Tibetan Buddhist texts in the world, after the Chinese occupation and wholesale destruction of Tibet’s monasteries. That’s also very close to me so I hear reports, stories of those injured and killed as well as most of the rumors.
My dear friend Bablu left my flat before sundown to return to his village which is adjacent to the Library, and we joke—carry big dunda to frighten off an angry bhaaloo. He knows one of the women who was injured. She tried to fight off the bear without any stick. She escaped alive, but was badly injured. People commended her for a brave fight, but they didn't arm a vigilante posse to stalk the bear and her cubs. That might be a course of action I’d expect if it happened in an American town.
Monkey Mind and Money Matters in an Indian “spiritual” context.
In 2011 on our first trip to India, Ashish and I visited Shimla where east of the city on Jakhu Hill a 108 foot statue of the Monkey God had been unveiled just the year before. But for hundreds of years before that at Shri Hanuman Mandir, monkeys had been venerated and pampered, producing some pretty outrageous ingrained behavior. One jumped me and stole my glasses, my spec’s, and refused to return them without forfeiting a ransom. The animal wanted candy which, along with small versions of its supernatural idol, is readily available from the concessioners set up in the Temple precincts testifying to the long, universal symbiosis between religious observance and extortion. These annoying, religiously-conditioned primates have been crawling over the shrines of northern India for generations. On the 12 km trek up Vaishno Devi in Katra, near Jammu, they steal your overpriced Pepsi’s in a kind of comedy routine, and of course do not pay any delivery cost to the way station at almost 12,000 ft above sea level. And we’re not talking about satisfying basic needs—for monkeys Pepsi is an acquired taste.OK, perhaps filling out the picture of monkey mind and money is no antidote for the pain of paying the cost of spiritual pursuits, but the experience of real monkeys is closer to the bone. For me at least, seeing the image of god as a creature with such distasteful behavior was a shock. My cynic wants to highlight the cunning of extracting a price without getting anything in return. And theologically we are worlds apart from Norman Vincent Peale’s sermons at the Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan where he taught Donald Trump and his father: think the right positive thoughts, and cash will pour into the coffers. Here nasty monkeys’ stealing and conniving is seen as just that and not a holy virtue worthy of the celestial realm. It’s as real as the writing in Monkey Mind. In this regard James is not easily distracted.
Monkeys as Kings and Gods in Buddhism
The Hindu pantheon is not unique in elevating the monkey to a revered status. In some Buddhist lore, monkeys are both kings and scoundrels at the same time, in the same body, in the same world, in all worlds. I can still almost hear Zenshin Phil Whalen’s guffaws as Lou Hartman read aloud Arthur Waley's abridged translation of the Journey to the West (Chinese: 西遊記; pinyin: Xī Yóu Jì), Adventures of the Monkey God, two old monks delighting in the ingenuity of Wú Chéng'ēn’s story telling. Also known as Ruzhong (c. 1500–1582 or 1505–1580), he weaves a long tale about the risky transplanting of the Buddhist Teachings they both loved from India to China. It’s based on a true story of another famous monk, Xuan Zang, of the Chinese Tang Dynasty (602-664) who journeyed to India, the birthplace of Buddhism, to retrieve the “true” Buddhist holy books, and when he returned, translated the Sutras into Chinese. Ruzhong weaves in all kinds of folklore and fantastic tales into a complicated and convoluted plot with a large unlikely cast of fantastic animals, humans, and celestial beings. Over 100 chapters, the Monkey King, Sun Wukong, gains power, rebels against heaven, wins battles, is condemned to death by the Eastern deities, but the Buddha intervenes and traps him under a mountain for 500 years, preparing him to guard Xuan Zang and the Dharma. I’ll skip the Buddhist pig and dragons given the space limitations of a blog post.
It’s late Spring now in the foothills of the Himalayas, and the brown rhesus monkeys have just come down from the mountains—or maybe they’ve come up from the plains. I have no idea why these nasty monkeys seem to appear now in the village, but they’re here. To be fair to the species, their behavior is totally different from their grey langur cousins who live in the higher elevations, but they do not conform to the fanciful literary portrait except perhaps in this way: just as the Monkey King survives the celestial plot to execute him, they won’t disappear. They can’t be silenced, squelched, or eradicated. And this might have been the very quality that the Buddha singled out as important for guarding the Sacred Teachings as they made their way across continents, oceans, languages and cultures.
Everyone hates the brown monkeys. Besides being scavengers, they have ugly orange asses; they scream and fight; they steal my tomatoes just when they’re ripe; they shit all over my balcony, and are not easily scared off. They even throw their shit if confronted. These days, almost as if to highlight our suffering during the epidemic, they crowd the road that runs along the river where cremation gnats receive the bodies of people who’ve died from Covid. Food offerings provide an easy meal.
There are no wild monkeys in San Francisco, and I am a thoroughgoing Westerner. The way that local people deal with “the monkey problem” is for me as new and intriguing as living with monkeys. They simply make lots of space, and live their lives around them.
I’ll contrast it to the way a San Franciscan, for example, might deal with homelessness and poverty. Here there are people who live outdoors, and there are beggars everywhere, but there are no governmental attempts to house, feed or educate the homeless. The liability of drug addiction, here as in San Francisco, seems to be part and parcel of the homeless condition, but it is handled very differently. If an addict is lucky enough to have some family, he or she might get involuntarily locked up in the 30 day detox, the “de-addiction center,” but with no medical follow-up, they are basically left on their own to fight their demons.
Here is another story of living close to the wild, unpredictable, and very dangerous side of nature. Late this Spring near a local water tank, seven people were mauled by a black bear who came down from the high forest. Two died. The tank is located perhaps 500 meters below the Dalai Lama’s residence but still in the dense forest before the large Central Tibetan Authority complex, Gangchen Kyishong, commonly known as the “Library” because it holds perhaps the largest repository of Tibetan Buddhist texts in the world, after the Chinese occupation and wholesale destruction of Tibet’s monasteries. That’s also very close to me so I hear reports, stories of those injured and killed as well as most of the rumors.
My dear friend Bablu left my flat before sundown to return to his village which is adjacent to the Library, and we joke—carry big dunda to frighten off an angry bhaaloo. He knows one of the women who was injured. She tried to fight off the bear without any stick. She escaped alive, but was badly injured. People commended her for a brave fight, but they didn't arm a vigilante posse to stalk the bear and her cubs. That might be a course of action I’d expect if it happened in an American town.
But the presence of the bear and her cubs have made people hyper-vigilant. The furious barking of dogs and loud monkey squalling (I can’t think of a word that describes the sound) served as a warning that the bear was in Bablu’s village next to the Library. And this is as close as I can get to the monkey behavior guarding the Dharma—brown monkeys making a ruckus near a repository of precious texts, warning my friends to keep their dogs inside and watch over their children.
The real lives of people and monkeys is something that has thus far eluded the attention of religious scholars examining the exegesis of Monkey Lore. If anyone can do it, it is James Ford, but alas he might have to sojourn in India for a spell to deepen his understanding. As for me, I will just not plant tomatoes in my garden, and be grateful that monkey screams helped protect the precious children of my dear friends. If he visits, James will not be imprisoned under a rock for 500 lifetimes until he solves some tricky dharma questions, or at least I hope not. (I’ve already mixed monkeys in with bears so I’ll leave the Zen foxes for another time).
The real lives of people and monkeys is something that has thus far eluded the attention of religious scholars examining the exegesis of Monkey Lore. If anyone can do it, it is James Ford, but alas he might have to sojourn in India for a spell to deepen his understanding. As for me, I will just not plant tomatoes in my garden, and be grateful that monkey screams helped protect the precious children of my dear friends. If he visits, James will not be imprisoned under a rock for 500 lifetimes until he solves some tricky dharma questions, or at least I hope not. (I’ve already mixed monkeys in with bears so I’ll leave the Zen foxes for another time).
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)