Today was Emancipation Day, a DC holiday.  It is the anniversary of the day Lincoln freed the slaves within the District, nine months before he freed all slaves within the U.S. via the famous Emancipation Proclamation.  It's interesting that we celebrate an event that is widely seen as motivated by political expediency.  Emancipation of the slaves within DC was not based on the moral conviction that slavery is wrong, but rather in the hopes that freed DC slaves would fight for the Union side.

All this talk of perpetually peaceful Tibetan monks standing nobly in the face of the evil Chinese reminds me of a related pet peeve I have with respect to how many (not all) Westerners approach things Asian.

An image seared into my psyche from the earliest years of my consciousness is that of a burning Vietnamese monk. The incident happened before my existence but was repeatedly shown during the long, drawn out war. The flames so violent, yet the monk so stoic. So Buddhist.

One of the tensions with which I continually struggle is trying to reconcile two ideas, both of which I believe to be true, and yet seem contradictory.

Buddhists will say "All is Buddha, Buddha is all." Does that mean that rape and murder and torture are Buddha??! And many theists will say, "EVERYTHING that exists exists only because of God. Otoh, we want to say that God is GOOD." Again, does this mean that rape and murder and torture are good? If not, why does a good God allow bad things?

According to the calendar that I snatched from my parents during Christmas because it is full of beautiful pictures of San Francisco that make be very homesick, it's the Buddha's birthday today.

Of course, that depends on whether you are Mahayana or Theravada Buddhist. If the former, then it's the Buddha's birthday today. If the latter, then you celebrated the Buddha's birthday, enlightenment, and death on the last full moon (May 2nd).

"You must be the change you wish to see in the world."
- Mahatma Gandhi

Like many realizations that I have, it takes me a long time to get to them and then once I do, it seems so obvious that I'm embarrassed that I hadn't realized it before. That's how I feel about a recent epiphany with respect to karma.