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buddhism
September 2009 
Adbusters asks, "What Would Buddha Buy?"
gary
(Show of hands.) How many people have seen Adbusters?
This is that magazine where all the ads look like ads until you stop and look closer and you discover they’re anti-ads ... like those billboards “liberated” by the Billboard Liberation Front. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one paid ad in an entire issue … which couldn't be said (for what it's worth) for many a nonprofit magazine.
Anyways, is it apt that such a radical magazine is interested in Buddhism? A friend of mine told me recently that he thinks the FBI has been infiltrating his meditation group. Why? Because the message there is that of being content with what one is rather than what one has. (!) How does he know there are FBI agents, though? Because they’re the ones, he says, that keep their eyes open during meditation … looking all around. So how can we recognize them, I asked. They look like art students, he said.
¿These days, who doesn’t look like art students?
Anyways, Adbusters tells me that they’re excerpting an edited selection from my forthcoming third edition of Complete Idiot’s Guide to Buddhism (June 2009, 'tho maybe by then you can trade salmon for it ... or flowers). It will be on the front page, they say, of their website. (The pay, by the way, is exactly: $0.00.)
You may see it before I do, as I’m going to go out to have Pho with a friend I haven’t seen for four months (having been figuratively chained to the desk revising the book for June). At Pho Vang Tau, on Green, just West of Stockton (used to be a Korean place, with great food, cutlery, ambiance; before that it was an Italian cafe where old Italian anarchists had a Fernet at a small round table while young kids shot pool to the latest Italian pop music on the jukebox).
Please tell me what you think.
Access: Public
