How laughter can keep you on your spiritual path
Carmel Wroth | August 2009 issue
Known as the “hugging saint,” Amma might just as well be called the laughing saint.Photograph: Money Sharma/EPA/CorbisA few years ago, I traveled throughout India looking for spiritual inspiration. Naturally, I wasn’t the first person to have done this. At all the temples, ashrams and holy mountains, I found crowds of Westerners looking for something as well, and presumably it wasn’t the bedbugs, diesel fumes and diarrhea. It was easy to identify the seekers in a crowd. While regular tourists wore shorts or khakis or brightly colored Indian shirts, spiritual tourists wore a lot of white. They walked across temple courtyards, a slow-motion blur of white drapes and scarves, their faces a vision of sobriety and introspection.
Inside the shrines, they sat perfectly still, unfazed by the heat, various itches and their gurgling tummies. They sat in full lotus or Zen kneeling positions. Their eyes were sublimely closed. Rarely did they smile, and when they did, it was more of a knowing smile.
Their manner perplexed me, especially when I walked out of a shrine into the chaos of color, sound and personality that is India. Everywhere I turned, Indians were smiling, shoving food in my hands, cracking jokes, playing with kids—theirs or a stranger’s. And when I met a real-life Indian guru, she seemed to be laughing most of the time. Amma is known as "the hugging saint" because she gives affectionate embraces to the thousands of devotees who line up to see her everywhere she goes.
A petite, plump woman with a perfectly round face, warm dark eyes and a beaming smile, Amma could also have been called the laughing saint. One of my clearest memories is of her squinting her eyes closed, leaning her head back and breaking into peals of laughter.
If the very gurus the seekers come to see are laughing, why are the seekers themselves so serious? I decided I wanted to learn something about laughter’s ability to unlock the spirit. After all, as James Baraz, a Buddhist meditation teacher at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Northern California, told me, "It’s called enlightenment for a reason. Lighten up!" I went in search of some lighthearted tips on the spirit.
Why don’t Buddhists vacuum in the corners? Because they have no attachments.
Baraz didn’t always have such a merry outlook. He’s been a serious—dead serious—student of Zen since 1974. For a number of years, he says, he interpreted Buddhist teachings on the illusory nature of sense perception as an instruction to regard everything with a kind of gloomy existential detachment. "The Buddha started taking on a very stern look to me," he recalls. "I somehow mixed up [the Buddhist concept of] the end of suffering with the end of living."
The spell was broken in 1990 when he met H.W.L. Poonja, better known as "Poonjaji," an Indian teacher of advaita vedanta, or non-dual, philosophy. Poonjaji was a jovial man who loved to laugh, even while explaining that enlightenment means awaking to the realization that your true nature is indistinguishable from the indefinable source of the universe, or what Baraz calls emptiness. Baraz remembers asking, "Poonjaji, why is your emptiness so much more fun than mine?" To this the irrepresible guru replied, "My emptiness rejects nothing. It includes stillness and activity and sorrow and joy, laughter and tears." And then he burst out laughing.
From that time on, Baraz understood Buddhist teachings differently. He reread the scriptures and discovered that joy was one of the seven factors of enlightenment. Now in his Awakening to Joy workshops, he teaches students to smile and laugh, to cultivate wholesome, happy emotions, to celebrate. Even the physical effects of laughter have a spiritual component, he says: "Sometimes, just changing your face and your body language can create more space in your mind. Laughter is a real aid to bring about that spaciousness."
A rabbi, a Lutheran pastor and a Zen monk walk into a bar. "Hey, what is this, some kind of joke?" the bartender asks.
Bernie Glassman likes to inject a little humor into his Zen teaching, too. People at Buddhist retreats tend to ask "really heavy, serious questions, like, What is life? Who am I?" Glassman says. His answer: He slips on an imaginary banana peel or knocks down a shelf of books, skills he learned from professional clown Moshe Cohen.
"My clown actions will arise out of bearing witness to the situation, and that’s what Zen training is all about," he says. "The basic principle of Zen is ‘not knowing.’ It’s to not be fixed to any idea or concept, to not be attached to them." If you start thinking ‘my way is the way’—that’s when Glassman gets out his clown nose.
One of the founders of American Zen, Glassman, 70, received the title "sensei" (which means teacher) in 1967 from revered Japanese master Hakuyu Taizan Maezumi and Glassman earned the title "roshi" (or master) in 1995. But Glassman is fond of another title he gave himself: Bernie, the Boobysattva. A Bodhisattva is an enlightened soul who voluntarily enters the world to spread compassion and grace; the Boobysattva—as Glassman lives the role—is one who voluntarily spreads laughter and mirth.
With inspiration from 1960s icon Wavy Gravy and help from Michel Dobbs, who runs a Zen center on Long Island, New York, Glassman formed the Order of Disorder (OD or "odd" for short), a loose alliance of Zen practitioners who know enough clowning skills to get any group of overly serious monks laughing.
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