FOR THE FIRST TIME in San Jose history, the Dalai Lama will make two successive appearances in buildings on San Carlos Street. Next Tuesday, he will appear at the McEnery Convention Center, teaching on Geshe Langri Thangpa’s Eight Verses of Training the Mind (lojong tsik gyema), organized by the Gyuto Vajrayana Center.
The next day he will show up at the SJSU Event Center to give an Amitabha Permission Initiation (opakmei jegang). The sold-out first appearance is presented as an interfaith event. That is, anyone connected to any denomination or nondenomination is encouraged to attend.
Now, I would not call myself a Buddhist, but Buddhist perspectives have always inspired me, especially the concept of Paticca-samuppada, or dependent origination—how nothing exists independently, how all beings and phenomena exist or occur because of their relationships with other beings and phenomena.
For me, this concept emerges in varying degrees, so the Dalai Lama’s presence in my hometown drives me to ponder several interconnected milieus, a few of which I will unleash here. To paraphrase the interdisciplinary researcher and physicist Piet Hut, maybe I can view life as a laboratory, as an opportunity to examine myself and others, in the hope that it leads to something better.
Here we go: In 1998, I showed up at Todd Perreira’s bachelor party, which took place in a secret upstairs room at a wonderful and now-defunct coffeehouse, Café Zucco. A San Jose native, Perreira married Somsamai Ritprasert, owner of the San Jose restaurant House of Siam, where I had spent hundreds of student loan dollars while at SJSU.
Their wedding took place at St. Joseph’s Cathedral and was one of the happiest events I’ve ever attended. By any definition, it was an interfaith experience. They had a Western ceremony in the church, followed by a traditional Thai Buddhist ceremony at the St. Claire Hotel—true local flavor.
Just last week, I met with Perreira at San Jose’s best Buddhist reincarnation of a gas station, Roy’s Coffee in Japantown. Now a Buddhist scholar, he teaches in the comparative religious studies program at SJSU as he completes his Ph.D. research through Harvard.
Over coffee, we yakked about his current research on the genealogy of Chang and Eng Bunker, the famous Siamese twins and how their history might be intertwined with the first legit Buddhists ever to step on American soil. Perreira is connected to scholars in Bangkok currently at work on the goods as you read this.
We also discussed potential reincarnations of Frontier Village, a long-gone San Jose amusement park we both loved as kids. I mentioned that my life can be characterized by one gigantic loss after the next, Frontier Village being just one. We then laughed uproariously at the sadness of it all, just as those old Zen masters probably did.
And then there’s the Dalai Lama, particularly known for his ever-growing interest in the resonances between Buddhist perspectives and quantum mechanics. He is not the only one. His former student, the scholar, scientist and ordained monk Alan Wallace, is striving to mainstream the conversation between Buddhism and Western science, in order to explore how the two should compare notes.
During the Dalai Lama’s first teaching tour in the West in the late ’70s, Wallace was his interpreter. These days, His Holiness attends or hosts academic conferences on consciousness studies and shows up at experiments in physicists’ laboratories. No one is claiming that science “justifies” Buddhism or vice-versa; rather, they suggest that integrating methods of inquiry from both will give birth to profound new insights. Being half-Eastern and half-Western and naturally interested in anything “in-between,” I am inspired by the approach.
Wallace’s wife, Vesna—herself an accomplished Buddhist scholar and translator—is on Perreira’s dissertation committee. How’s that for connections? After last week’s conversation with Perreira, I felt like I had finally come full circle. Now I feel dependently original and glad to be a San Jose native. The Dalai Lama’s presence will indeed be significant in various degrees of unseparation. After getting my camera approved by the bomb squad, I will attend his teaching as an observer/participant and see what happens.
Dalai Lama
Oct. 13, 9:30am; $20/$35
SJSU Event Center
October 12th, 2:00pm-3:30pm
San Jose McEnery Convention Center
