Nomad Codes

Indranet when we accept that we will not transcend the sometimes agonizing tension between the world’s various structures of belief and practice. Nor will we simply overcome more contemporary conflicts between faith and skepticism, the stones and the stories, the mundane absurdity of everyday life and the incandescence of the absolute. Instead, these tensions and conflicts become dynamic, calling us to face the Other with an openness that does not seek to assimilate them to our point of view. By replacing the need for a common ground with an acceptance and even celebration of our common groundlessness, network spirituality might creatively integrate these tensions while also learning when to let the gaps and ruptures alone. These are the spaces in which we simply breathe.
    2002

THE PAISLEY GATE

    Tantric Psychedelia

    I first visited Green Gulch Farms on a sunny Sunday in the fall of 1995. A group of students were sitting beneath the alien rows of eucalyptus trees, talking casually with Tenshin Reb Anderson, then abbot of the San Francisco Zen Center. Jerry Garcia had recently died, and at one point in the conversation, a blond, fortysomething woman asked Anderson, in all seriousness, whether Garcia was a bodhisattva.
    Myself, I would have failed this particular Marin County koan. But not Anderson, who answered the question promptly and without condescension. He first described the Buddhist idea of protectors: beings who can be said to encircle and guard the dharma without being entirely within the fold. Presumably, Anderson was taking inspiration from the dharmapalas of Tibetan Buddhism, especially the lokapalas : ferocious local spirits who swore allegiance to the Buddha-way only after being magically subjugated by the tantric missionary and wizard Padmasambhava. Some of these shamanic entities are even said to not fully accept the Buddha’s teaching; though integrated within Tibetan Buddhism, they retain an intense liminality, or “in-betweenness.” And as the recent Tibetan culture wars over the protector spirit Dorje Shugden makes clear, one monk’s manifestation of Manjushri can be another monk’s blood-thirsty demon.
    In any case, Anderson’s response was brilliant. Without castigating whatever visionary and communal ecstasy Deadheads managed to extract from their loopy scene, Anderson established an open border between Garcia and the dharma, at once separating the two while acknowledging their connection—a connection that, in the Bay Area anyway, is as local as a lokapala. But though American Zen and the Grateful Dead have both served as major attractions in northern California’s spiritual carnival, the abbot also needed to draw the line. On the far side of this line lay drugs, because drugs, Anderson made clear, were definitely not the Buddha way.
    Anderson did not name the drugs, which was just as well, as the day was growing short and the Dead’s curriculum vitae is long. Garcia’s appetite for heroin and freebase was at times prodigious, and few would make an argument for the enlightening nature of these substances. But in the larger context of the Grateful Dead experience, “drugs” means psychedelics—the LSD, peyote, mushrooms, and other compounds that transformed the Dead’s cowboy jazz into occasions for Dionysian romps in the electric bardo. In Anderson’s analogy, then, psychedelics correspond to the unassimilable shamanic elements of Tibetan folk magic, to those pre-Buddhist beliefs and practices, Bon-po or not, that remain outside the circle of dharma they nonetheless helped shape.
    Leaving the Grateful Dead aside, I’d like to suggest that the overlap between American psychedelic culture and American Buddhism is roughly analogous to the liminal zone inhabited by the less sublime dharmapalas. The analogy works both historically and, if you will, institutionally. On top of providing an imaginative slant on the significant historical links between American Buddhism and psychedelics in the 1960s and ’70s, the tantric tension between local demons and dharma protectors also helps us understand how some contemporary American Buddhists grapple with the controversial, even heretical specter of psychedelic spirituality. When Tibetan Buddhists engaged the fierce and sorcerous entities of the pre-Buddhist mindscape, they faced the same sort of problem that greets American Buddhists attempting to account for the convulsively magic molecules in their midst: how to simultaneously honor