Diary 1963 - Murshid Sam's Living Stream

Diaries 1963-2It is very curious that while Paul Fung is the Vice-President of the International BuddhistCongress, all the other Buddhist groups have united to some extent here and have joint meeting ofall kinds. Leslie Lowe of Los Angeles died in my absence—I have known him for a long time, but nottoo well. Ira Price has taken his place and here I am more fortunate than you, for the mehta whichexisted between Phra Sumangalo and myself continues not in his goings, so to speak, and I have thesame feeling both without reason and without ego to Price, Wagner and Goode here.There is a compromise Wesak Festival to be celebrated here in San Francisco on May 5, and itis hoped even Vice-President Fung may attend. All the other Buddhist groups—Chinese, Japaneseand Caucasian, are uniting, and I think this is remarkable and the dream of Dwight Goddard, so tospeak, has come true. I have volunteered to help and was put on the program.This is amusing to me because again I have been given the brush-off by the Americans and theprofessors. But now my relations with all the Chinese Buddhist groups is excellent and they recognizeme as the representative of Phra Sumangalo, as the agent for “The Western Buddhist,” and inmy own right.Next week the program will be in the hands of the Neo Dhamma Society which is trying torevive a sangha-less Tipitaka Buddhism, with a combination of morality (badly needed), contemporarycultures, and, alas dialectics. Americans simply cannot face anatta, anicca and dukha and theywant to be Buddhists and I want to face anatta, anicca and dukha regardless of any appellation.In the course of the service Iru held up the first fascicule of the “Encyclopedia of Buddhism.”Well, I have waited forty years, and “Je l‘ai” or “Eureka” or whatever you want.One looks over the Advisory Board and the Board of Honorary Editors with some (not toomuch) satisfaction. Humphreys is there and Daisetz Suzuki is not. Edimann is not there and thereare more articles by one H.G.A. Van Zeyst than anybody else. He appears to be a linguist and a dialectician,so business is back at the old stand.In the section on the “Absolute” Brother Van Zeyst has abstracted Buddha right out from Indiaand made him a good nineteenth century German. However he has fairly successfully handled thewhole thing from an an-atta point of view. This is followed by a longer and finer historical article byone Yoshiro Tamura who tells us all but Buddhism and then plunks right back to Hegel. No moreSamadhi, no more Meditation and of course, no Prajna!