Gary Gach Transcript

March 8, 2008

Announcer: Welcome, and thanks for tuning in to Sound Authors with host, Dr. Kent. Get set for candid conversations about everything from cuisine to culture, and from nature to nurture. Now here’s your host, Dr. Kent.

Kent Gustavson: Welcome to Sound Authors. Today is March 7th. We are just about hitting Spring here in New York, one day is hot, one day is cold. I think the world’s about ready to turn it over.Today on the show we’ve got four great guests. At the very end of the show we’ll have Lucy Koplanski on, she’s an incredibly folk singer from New York City. The other three guests are all authors. The first author will be Gary Gach, the second will be Leigh Le Creux, with her children’s book “Astro Socks”, and the third guest will be Lisa Genova with her novel “Still Atlas” about Alzheimer’s.But my first guest, his name is Gary Gach. He has written a guide, “The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Buddhism”, and is also well known for his book “What Book? Buddha Poems from Beat to Hip-Hop”. Welcome to the show.

Gary Gach: Thank you for having me, Dr. Kent.

Kent: Tell me a little bit about your- which one of those two books is newest? I know this is the second edition of “The Complete Idiot’s Guide”.

Gary: Yes, that’s the newer book. Actually, ‘What Book? Buddha Poems from Beat to Hip-Hop” is something I edited. I didn’t write. It went through three or four editions, and now you can actually, if you go tobooks.google.com, you can find most of it for free.

Kent: Wonderful. We’ll go check that out. Now, understanding Buddhism. Lets get to the meat of this. Most Americans don’t know too much about Buddhism. We know that its quite a movement happening though in this country; of people wanting to know more and getting into certain aspects of it. Is there a mainstream and then kind of people that just dabble in it?

Gary: Well, that’s a good question. A recent poll found that one in eight people have some kind of influence, in some way, shape or form. They may not practice, but they may know the word “karma” and believe in that. You know, that our actions effect what we do. Or just the idea of emotional intelligence. Its become very pervasive in many ways into mainstream culture. It’ll never be a mainstream practice itself, but you don’t have to necessarily practice Buddhism to enjoy any of the teachings.

Kent: Now does it stand at odds with the Judeo-Christian religions?

Gary: It isn’t really at odds with any religion. It actually isn’t a religion itself. You don’t have to give anything up to enjoy it. It adds wings to your practice and roots to your traditions if you already have them. Some people don’t have any and they just become Buddhists, so they go the Buddhism. But I’m Jewish, for example, so you can call me an American Jewish Buddhist, if you’d like.

Kent: Why is Buddhism not a religion, what is it all about?

Gary: Well religion, there’s no creator deity in Buddhism. Its not about a creator deity, or a first cause of the universe, or any intercessor to the divine. Its not about that one way or the other. You can be an atheist or you can believe in God, it doesn’t matter one way or the other. The primary teaching of Buddhism is about the nature of suffering and the nature of liberation from human suffering.

Kent: How did you get into writing about Buddhism? How did you write “An Idiot’s Guide”?

Gary: Well, I’m a writer. I’ve done nine books so far. I thought that it would be a good way to present the teachings to people who might not ordinarily have an opportunity to pick it up through this branded series. You know, like the “Dummies”, or those books that are yellow and black. The “Complete Idiot’s” is a similar series, they were both started when computer technology started to become pervasive and it made dummies of us all.Because the manuals were written by very bright people who couldn’t write, and so we’d have to buy a book. Then they got into “How-To” books, so there’s a “Complete Idiot’s Guide” and a “Dummies” book for just about anything, but there hadn’t been one for Buddhism. Being a Buddhist and seeing that it was a topic that could use some new reportage, I went for it. It took about two years to get a deal, and just to dot the I, if I may?

Kent: Yes?

Gary: One thing that I was able to do with this book that I haven’t seen any other book do is I was able to talk about all the different schools of practice. To go back to an earlier question that you asked, there’s Zen and there’s Insight, there’s Tibetan Buddhism. There’s also a school called Pure Land Buddhism, its the first school practiced in America and is still one of the largest, but many people don’t know about it.There’s different schools depending on the countries of origin from Asia. Usually, the author, he will talk from their point of view. The Dalai Lama doesn’t talk about Zen, a Zen Buddhist doesn’t talk about Tibetan Buddhism. But the “Complete Idiot’s” guides are very comprehensive, so I was able to cover a lot of territory.

Kent: Is Buddhism able to fit well into an American lifestyle, especially now there’s all this economic downturn? Is it something that people have to spend a whole bunch of time to practice?

Gary: Well, that’s two good questions. You can practice just by being aware of being in the present moment. It doesn’t require going anywhere beyond where you already are. If the universe is always in a state of perfection, it doesn’t mean that we’re necessarily enjoying that. The difference is having that awareness and the practice is sort of a like a way of reporting and recording that. Seeing it for ourself. Answering whether we can do this as Americans, this is the interesting kind of question.We’re finding that it is so. It’s been something that every world culture has embraced in its own way and made it it’s own. When it came to China, China was a very developed country. In other countries it provided the kind of, what they called “nation building”, when the countries were formative. For our country, it seems to do pretty well. We’ve got a teacher whose this kind of “can do” guy, who says “Go out and see for yourself, I did it, you can do what I did.” That’s what the Buddha said, and that’s, I think, a very American attitude.

Kent: So Buddha was an entrepreneur of sorts?

Gary: [laughs] An entrepreneur of sorts. Yes. He was an entrepreneur of the greatest good, not the greatest goods.

Kent: The greatest good and not the greatest goods. A good while back, I read “Siddharta”, by Herman Hess.

Gary: Oh, yeah. Buddhism as written by a Swiss Protestant.

Kent: [laughs] Talk about that for a second.

Gary: Many people bring their own point of view to it. The “Old Path White Clouds” is a very large version, but its the one I like the best by Thich Nhat Hahn, because it goes to all the sources. Its very close to the sources, and I like his tone of voice. I like the way he writes. Hess is a beautiful writer, I’ve read many of his books. Its a wonderful story, as to how much of it is Buddhism and how much of it is translation remains to be seen. I think there’s a certain amount of interpretation that he’s doing that you can go around and get to the source from other versions of the life of the Buddha. But its certainly a very important book and worth reading.

Kent: So one of the common views of Buddhism is that the Dalai Lama sits at the center?

Gary: Oh, yeah. A lot of people think that he’s like the Pope, or something. There is no central Buddhist anything. There’s no central Buddhist teacher or Buddhist church or anything like that, but his holiness the Dalai Lama has sort of become the de facto world ambassador of Buddhism, as it were. He goes around the country so much, he’s such a dynamic speaker, he has a cause that he pleads for and so forth.

Kent: Part of the fascinating thing about the Dalai Lama is that he’s been in exile for most of his life. Can you talk about Tibet and Tibet’s relationship to Buddhism?

Gary: The Tibetan people are very active, vigorous, and were very militant people. During our war in Afghanistan for example, they were some of the front line soldiers, the Avant Garde soldiers. But they largely became a pacifist nation when the country heard the teachings of the Buddha, decided this was for them. They became a Buddhist country. They actually developed their writing system in order to spread the teachings of the Buddha, they didn’t have a formal writing system until then. Buddhism adapted to the philosophies and practices of a country which then was called Bun; the Bun religion.So you have the particular Bun aspects to Buddhism. Its also like Hinduism. In Tibet, its the only country that gets the teachings from India, straight-up from India, rather than being filtered through East Asia the way China and Japan and Korea, or even Southeast Asia was. There’s a lot of Hindu aspects to it. And of course there’s this political struggle, because on the one hand China says that Tibet is part of their country, and the Tibetans say “We never really have been.” Now China’s asserting itself by choosing the latest Panchen Lama.Up until now the Tibetan religion has always done it themselves. So China is doing what happened in the French Revolution, where the French Revolution said that state and religion are one. I don’t think it’s a very controversial topic.

Kent: Now I’m curious about how you got into Buddhism in the first place. You said you’re Jewish, you were born in Los Angeles, how did you get into this?

Gary: I would say in the summer I’m a nudist, in the winter I’m a Buddhist. Buddhism is sort of a made-up word for the West. In Asia, where people have been practicing this since the time of the Buddha, people just say “You study the teachings of the Buddha in your daily life? Do you follow the path of the Buddha?” I first read about it when I was 13 or so, but I already had…. I hate to say it, but it was a mystical vision.We’re on talk radio, so OK, I can tell you. I had a mystic vision when I was around six. I kept it at the bottom of my coin pocket like it was gold. I didn’t forget it, it stayed in my very bones. At first I thought it was like a vision of God because I didn’t know what to call it, but when I read “The Way of Zen” by Alan Watts when I was 13, I said “Well this is very exactly identical to what I experienced.” More than what Judaism or God-based teaching would describe.So that’s the point at which I kind of formally saw that here’s this body of teachings that very much had to do with the way I seemed to vibrate in relation to the universe most happily, and have ever since found myself a follower of the way. Many people come to it through a divorce, or death, or many of the sorrows in life. For me, it wasn’t a matter of disappointment at all. It was just something that I feel most akin to.

Kent: What’s your newest project? Whats going on next?

Gary: Haiku. Gesundheit. [laughs] Haiku.

Kent: Haiku?

Gary: Haiku. People want to keep up to date with me, I have a very simple website. Its word.to. You can find out a lot about what I’m doing there. Lately I’ve been translating or co-translating a Korean author whose the foremost living literary spokesperson of Korea, whose also a Buddhist. His work was banned, not only in his home country but even in translation until the 1980s. I’m helping him catch up with world recognition. I’ve helped produce two of his books and a third is coming out this year.