Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

Bad Buddhist: Speed Bumps and Detours on the Path to Enlightenment
Bad Buddhist: Speed Bumps and Detours on the Path to Enlightenment
Bad Buddhist: Speed Bumps and Detours on the Path to Enlightenment
Ebook178 pages5 hours

Bad Buddhist: Speed Bumps and Detours on the Path to Enlightenment

Rating: 0 out of 5 stars

()

Read preview

About this ebook

For as long as I can remember, I’ve been focused on accumulation. I’ve been accumulating money, objects, jobs, respect, friends, invitations and ticks on the list in my mind called “Things I Should Have Done by This Stage of My Life”.... I feel like I’ve done everything I was supposed to do, but while I have lots of stuff, I have no time, energy or peace ... This isn’t the way it was supposed to be.

Meshel Laurie is all too aware that she’s probably a very bad Buddhist, but every day she puts her energy into improving. She works in television and radio, creates podcasts, writes columns and books, and parents twins – so she also knows a thing or two about the mad juggle of modern life.

In this collection of new and previously published writing, Meshel explores everything from the meaning of friendship to the travails of online dating, from mammograms to mid-life crises. With candid humour, she reveals her horror of family holidays after becoming stranded in Bali and reflects on what it was like to meet his one and only Holiness, the Dalai Lama. This is Meshel at her funniest and most relatable.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateSep 3, 2018
ISBN9781743820636
Bad Buddhist: Speed Bumps and Detours on the Path to Enlightenment
Author

Meshel Laurie

Meshel Laurie is a comedian and radio and television personality. She is a regular panellist on The Project, and has also appeared on Spicks and Specks, Good News Week and Rove. She is the author of The Fence-Painting Fortnight of Destiny, Buddhism for Break-ups and Buddhism for the Unbelievably Busy, and produces and hosts two of Australia's most downloaded podcasts, Australian True Crime and The Nitty Gritty Committee.

Read more from Meshel Laurie

Related to Bad Buddhist

Related ebooks

Humor & Satire For You

View More

Related articles

Related categories

Reviews for Bad Buddhist

Rating: 0 out of 5 stars
0 ratings

0 ratings0 reviews

What did you think?

Tap to rate

Review must be at least 10 words

    Book preview

    Bad Buddhist - Meshel Laurie

    Acknowledgements

    LUNCHING WITH

    the Dalai

    I was the last to be seated. Running late as usual, I had no idea who my lunch companions would be. I’d only been told that most of them were benefactors whose generosity had enabled the Dalai Lama to visit Melbourne.

    As I was ushered to the table, I noticed the handsome, friendly face of Ian ‘Thorpedo’ Thorpe, and, like any normal person, I fangirled out for just a tiny bit. He really is very charismatic in person.

    I was so caught up that many seconds ticked by without my noticing that His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama was also seated at our table.

    I’m not suggesting for a moment that His Holiness is second to anyone in the charisma stakes; his aura sings louder than a twelve-year-old at a 5 Seconds of Summer concert. I suppose I just wasn’t expecting to see him there. He usually eats with his small entourage, separate to the hoi polloi.

    In fact, I’d had a sticky beak at his private greenroom the night before, so I know that the plan was for him to eat there, but HH hasn’t a problem in the world with changing the plan.

    So there he was, bold as brass, just two seats around from me. And he was frowning. Oh dear, had he realised? Had I offended him?

    ‘Where soup?’ he queried, waving his hand towards my vacant table placement. As I was late, the server hadn’t put a bowl of soup down for me, and everyone else was ready to dig in. Thus began a process I call the Tibetan mealtime shuffle.

    Tibetans are a beautiful, gentle and yet robust people, but their greatest attribute by far is their generosity. More accurately, they are obsessed with altruism, the practice of concern for others above the self, and here’s an example of how it manifests: even though I insisted that I was fine and my soup would be along in good time, the six Tibetans at the table insisted I eat their soup immediately.

    The one closest to me actually pushed his bowl under my nose and placed a spoon in my fingers, at which point someone else pushed their bowl in front of him. That generous soul had someone else’s bowl pushed in front of them, and so on and so forth, until every bowl had been in front of every person and, mercifully, an extra bowl had been added by a server. The Tibetans nodded in satisfied unison, and we all commenced eating our soup.

    Conversation was lively and animated. It traversed a great deal of ground, including a quick stop at male baldness, which His Holiness noted appeared to have become fashionable. ‘That’s what bald people say,’ whispered Thorpie, a little too loudly, and I thought HH would fall from his chair laughing.

    All through the meal every eye in the room was on the Dalai, and I wondered if it ever irritated him. My mind wandered to stories about Michael Jackson going out disguised as everything from a forklift driver to Diana Ross, just so that he could have some downtime from being Michael Jackson.

    I imagined His Holiness in denim and a polo fleece, with a flat cap on his lovely bald head, sneaking into an early evening screening of Mad Max: Fury Road. What a brilliant flick that is, and why shouldn’t he get to see it too? He’s done enough for humanity, surely. Can the old boy have a day off?

    I was snapped out of my daydream by his rising from the table, which meant that everyone else in the room leapt to their feet too. He’d talked onstage for three hours that morning before entertaining us over lunch. Now he was heading back into the auditorium to lay down another three hours of power, before speaking at a multi-faith church service later in the afternoon.

    ‘I’m very glad I have retired from politics,’ he announced to the table. ‘Now I can just do my real job: teaching.’

    With a flourish of the robes he was off at a cracking pace, nodding and smiling to every bowing pilgrim along his path. ‘Doctor say, You must remember eighty, not eighteen!’ he said with a laugh to someone who enquired about his health.

    There are no sneaky days off for His Holiness – his altruism simply won’t allow it – but fortunately he’s one of those eighty-year-olds who really seems to dig it. He’ll spend most of the next six months touring the United Kingdom and the United States. There’s no rest for the wicked, I guess, but I really hope he catches Mad Max on a plane.

    WOULD THE

    Feminists

    PLEASE STAND UP?

    Do you believe all people are equal? Do you believe women are people? If you answered ‘yes’ to both of these questions, congratulations! You are a feminist.

    As contemporary quizzes go, it’s probably a bit anti-climactic. It’s definitely not as Facebookable as the ones that tell you what Game of Thrones character you’d be (I’d be Khal Drogo – excellent), or what exotic city you really belong in (Los Angeles? No way) or what your pet says about you (nothing – he can’t talk). Yet I like it because it cuts to the heart of what I believe to be a very simple matter. I’m sad to say, however, that my fellow online femmos couldn’t disagree with me more, or more aggressively.

    At one end of the spectrum are the young women who refuse to identify as feminists at all. It’s not surprising, I suppose, given that some of their favourite gals – who are among the most successful humans, if fame and fortune are our measures – eschew the word with reassuring determination.

    ‘I am not a feminist, but I do believe in the strength of women,’ says Katy Perry. What? Those whipped-cream cannons exploding from your bosoms weren’t ironic? Oh, man! I thought they were whimsical warheads in the battle against the homogenisation of young female artists.

    Don’t panic, though, we still have Lady Gaga’s meat dress – that’ll teach the sexist media.

    ‘I’m not a feminist,’ says Lady Gaga. ‘I hail men, I love men, I celebrate American male culture: beer, bars and muscle cars.’ Well, I’ve officially put my paws down. You don’t have to dislike men to be a feminist, you twit! For the love of god, somebody get me Beyoncé.

    ‘I guess I am a modern-day feminist. I do believe in equality.’ I should have known Queen Beyoncé would have the you-know-whats to stand tall for our team. ‘That word [feminism] can be very extreme,’ she adds. Ugh. You won’t even repeat the word, B? Where my (feminist) bitches at? Every time one of these successful, educated, entitled Western women has denounced feminism, I have tweeted my disgust and – unequivocal about my feelings – have often used the word ‘pathetic’.

    My argument has rolled along these lines: it’s pathetic to denounce the title our foremothers fought for and the freedoms they won for us to enjoy today. It’s pathetic to disassociate yourselves from the real, ongoing international struggle. It’s pathetic to ignore the fundamental definition of the word, and to capitulate instead to those who falsely endow it with negative qualities such as ‘man-hating’.

    Every time I’ve tweeted about this, I’ve been bombarded with argumentative replies from young women telling me they’re not feminists either, so I must think they’re pathetic too. Yes, I suppose I must, and it’s that attitude that places me unhappily at the other end of the spectrum – the struggle for Feminist Supremacy.

    My Twitter feed is a feminist battleground at times. This one reckons that one’s choking on meaningless outrage and petty gestures. That one reckons this one’s a professional pest with too much time on her hands and a well-thumbed thesaurus. Several are beyond criticism, as their well-trained acolytes will harass detractors into silence. Who needs a patriarchal paradigm with sisters like these?

    The accusation of hypocrisy is the AK-47 in the online feminist’s arsenal. It’s ubiquitous and never fails. ‘She says she’s a feminist and yet she does/says/thinks/appears to think/tweets/Facebooks/reads/watches/is friends with/stands next to someone who …? ATTACK!’

    Around and around it goes, perpetuating stereotypes and sucking the oxygen from a conversation and a medium with limitless possibilities for embracing and empowering women. Is it any wonder that young women, who are generally enthusiastic users of social media, find it all a bit feral?

    I’m sure I’m not the only woman who followed and friended the leading lights of Australian feminism online, only to discover that on any given day I’m just as likely to witness a snarly slap-down as a celebration of sisterhood. I entered the fray in the early days, defending friends and mentors and their credentials against criticism, until I was overcome by the futility of it all. I was also sick of vicious tweets from people who’d likely never heard of me, but had been rallied to fight against me by someone I’d challenged.

    I heard an analogy recently that changed my attitude to online infighting forever. When a monkey at the zoo throws poo at you, you don’t throw poo back. It’ll just pique the interest of other monkeys, who’ll join in, because that’s what they do. When it’s all over, it won’t matter who was right and who was wrong, because everyone will be covered in poo.

    I’ve realised with much embarrassment that for a while there I was happy to sling a bit of the old you-know-what; I was a bitchy internet feminist. It was kind of rotten of me to pick fights with young women because I’d decided they weren’t feminist enough, and I’d like to take this opportunity to apologise, although I don’t suppose it’s keeping Katy, Gaga or Beyoncé awake at night.

    What irritates me most is that I spent so much time trying to ingratiate myself with exclusive female friendship cliques under the guise of declaring my membership to the feminist movement. Now that’s really pathetic.

    WORLD’S WORST

    Vegetarian

    As a child of the swinging seventies, born in cattle country, my thrice-daily intake of meat was a source of great pride to my parents. It would make me strong and smart, they believed, and it did, but lately I have this gnawing feeling that it’s not for me. Several ‘light-bulb’ moments have illuminated a much more attractive path, although I’ve yet to make it more than a few steps along the way. You see, I am the world’s worst vegetarian, but with your help, I think I’m ready to go all the way.

    ‘Poor lambs,’ I’ve said aloud at some stage, during every meal in which I’ve eaten one over the last two decades or so. ‘They’re so delicious, the poor little things, why must they taste so good?’

    I’ve lamented similarly for pigs, of course, as I’ve crunched on their crackling, or chewed on their velvety, fatty bacon, feeling it melt over my tongue and descend in salty sovereignty down my greedy throat. I feel bad about eating cows too, and fish and birds, and clumsy insects who’ve drowned in my wine unnoticed, but I don’t know how to stop. For the love of mung beans, I just don’t know how to stop!

    Well, actually, I don’t know how to stay stopped. I have lived meat-free for periods of up to six months before. Unfortunately I ended up living on bread and cheese because I was busy, tired (increasingly depressed) and didn’t know what else to do. Obviously I ended up gaining weight and feeling like crap, with fingernails like flaky pastry and the skin of an acne-prone axolotl, so I reverted to meat, but I didn’t give up the guilt – or the dream of one day turning vegetarian.

    I’ve never been guiltier than I am now, because I feed my kids meat on the one hand, and on the other hand I rave on and on about the terrible sin of hurting animals. My twins are only four, but every time they wave out the window to their pet chickens, while eating chicken, I just want the world to open up and swallow me. I mean, they’re not so dumb, my kids, and they’re bound to see the perversity of my position one day. How long do you think I’ve got here? How will I explain it to them when I can’t explain it to myself?

    I remember the night my father explained it to me, although this was certainly not his intention. He announced proudly that we were eating ‘Bugs’ for dinner. He said it over and over, winking at Mum and waiting to see if we’d join the dots and finally get the joke. It’s a very annoying habit he persists with today and often leads to a dinner that’s almost silent, but for the repetition of his clue, and the sound of rolling eyes. We all know

    Enjoying the preview?
    Page 1 of 1