Nirvana Day

Parinirvana Day, or Nirvana Day is a Mahayana Buddhist holiday celebrated in East Asia. By some it is celebrated on 8th of February, but by most on 15th of February. Some Western Buddhist groups also celebrate Parinirvana Day.

It marks the day when the Buddha is said to have achieved Parinirvana, or complete Nirvana, upon the death of his physical body. Buddhists celebrate the death of the Buddha because they believe that since he was Enlightened, he was free from the pain of physical existence.

Observances include the reading of parts of the Nirvana Sutra which describes the Buddha’s last days of life. The day is also marked by meditation and visits to Buddhist temples and monasteries which sometimes open their doors to laypeople, who bring gifts of money and household goods to support the monks and nuns.

In Buddhism, parinirvana is the final nirvana, which occurs upon the death of the body of someone who has attained complete awakening (bodhi).

For any person, this might be an appropriate day is a time to think about one’s own future death and on the deaths of loved ones.

The Paranirvana of the Buddha. Gandhara 2-3rd century. ZenYouMitsu Temple, Setagaya, Tokyo. In Buddhist art, a reclining Buddha usually represents Parinirvana.

The Zen of Groundhog Day

I watch this film at least once a year. I’m sure there are people who think of this film – seen or unseen – as “just another Bill Murray/Harold Ramis comedy.” I really believe it is far more profound than you would think at a glance. I don’t know that the filmmakers’ intended all of that, but it’s there.

A. O. Scott in The NY Times did a re-review of this existential comedy this past week (watch his video review) and that was enough to send me to the shelf this weekend to watch Groundhog Day again.

I am not crazy in my belief that’s there’s more here than meets the viewing eye. Do a search on “Groundhog Day” and add something like philosophy, Buddhism, Zen, etc. and you’ll get plenty of hits of others who feel the same way.

Harold Ramis (director and co-writer) has said that he gets mail from Jesuit priests, rabbis and Buddhists, and they all find meaning in the film , and use it in sermons, talks and classes. In Buddhism classes, it is often used to illustrate the cycle of continual rebirth.

If you haven’t seen the film, here’s some background: Bill Murray plays a self-centered, cranky TV meteorologist named Phil who gets sent to to Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania to cover the annual Groundhog Day festivities. He is joined by his producer Rita (Andie MacDowell), and a cameraman Larry (Chris Elliott). He does a going-through-the-motions report. When they try to drive back to Pittsburgh, they are stopped by a blizzard (which he had predicted would miss the area) that shuts down the highways and they are forced to stay in town an extra day.

Phil wakes up at 6 AM and discovers that it is February 2 all over again. The day runs the same as it did before, but no one else seems to be aware of the time loop. And it happens again the next time he wakes up – and the next time and so on (38 times by my count).

He realizes that he can use this to his advantage and begins to learn more about the townsfolk. He ’s hardly noble. He seduces women, steals money, drives drunk and tries to put the moves on Rita (that last one fails).

But this power he has eventually bores and depresses him. He tries to break the cycle and files mean TV reports, abuses residents, kidnaps Punxsutawney Phil the groundhog. Finally, he attempts suicide, but still ends up waking up to the clock radio playing Sonny & Cher’s “I Got You Babe.” (Give a listen.)

Each time I re-watch the film, I think about another aspect of it. I keep thinking that some day I am going to teach this film in a course.

One scene has Phil dead in the morgue. Rita and Larry are there to identify his body. Is any of these retakes on the day affecting the others?  They don’t seem to remember the alternates takes, but…

A few years ago, I watched it and it led me to explore other movies and writings that play with time loops. There are a lot of them.

One day Phil is in the bowling alley. He asks two guys drinking with him, “What would you do if you were stuck in one place, and every day was exactly the same and nothing that you did mattered?” One guy replies, “That about sums it up for me.”

Are some of us leading a kind of Groundhog Day existence for real?

Other writers online have gotten far more serious in their explorations of the film than me.

This is from thesacredpage.com

Once Phil realizes that in his Nietzschean quagmire there are no consequences to his actions, he also experiences modern philosophy’s liberation from any sense of eternal justice. “I am not going to play by their rules any longer,” he gleefully announces. His reaction epitomizes Glaucon’s argument in Plato’s Republic. Remove the fear of punishment, Glaucon argued, and the righteous will behave no differently than the wicked.

and from groundhogdaythemovie.com comes some discussions about the film like this:

I asked what the Reb thought was the turning point in the film. After watching it for the ninth or tenth time specifically to find where the third act begins, I concluded that it begins 4/5 of the way into the 103 minute film, at about the 80 minute mark. Phil is throwing cards into the hat, and Rita points out that the eternally repeating day doesn’t have to be a curse.

Reb Anderson disagreed. He thought the turning point came later, when Phil found he was unable to save the old man’s life. Only here, he said, did Phil realize “It’s not me, it is the universe, I am just the vessel.”

Why did the writers use February 2, Groundhog Day, as the setting? I think because it’s such a nothing “holiday.” It has no religious connections, no cards, no gifts and very little tradition. And yet, it’s not just an ordinary day. The first time I saw the film (wow, almost 17 years ago), I thought that he would relive the day for 6 more weeks of winter. Later, I thought about the day and decided there was something about the end of winter, spring and rebirth going on in the story.

In this piece from 2003, the author suggests that we consider the film as a tale of self-improvement which

…emphasizes the need to look inside oneself and realize that the only satisfaction in life comes from turning outward and concerning oneself with others rather than concentrating solely on one’s own wants and desires. The phrase also has become a shorthand illustration for the concept of spiritual transcendence. As such, the film has become a favorite of Buddhists because they see its themes of selflessness and rebirth as a reflection of their own spiritual messages. It has also, in the Catholic tradition, been seen as a representation of Purgatory. It has even been dubbed by some religious leaders as the “most spiritual film of our time.”

Want to have a viewing group (which I would prefer to a reading group these days) and show the film?  Check out the discussion questions on this philosophy site. http://www.philfilms.utm.edu/1/groundhog.htm

The original idea for the story was supposed to have come from the book The Gay Science (The Joyful Wisdom) by Friedrich Nietzsche. In that book, Nietzsche gives a description of a man who is living the same day over and over again.

The writer of the original script, Danny Rubin, said that one of the inspirational moments in the creation of the story came after reading Interview With the Vampire which got him thinking about what it would be like to live forever. Rubin and Ramis have both said that they avoided exploring the really dark side of Phil’s time looping in which he could done some horrible things without consequence, like murder.

And, as a capper to this love letter to the film, I have to add that the film is also funny and sweet. Funny is no surprise. Murray and Ramis teamed up for the film Stripes which is a great, silly comedy that I also love, and that has no philosophy or religious themes at all.

The sweetness is all Hollywood. Phil does learn lessons. He befriends many of the townsfolk that he had mocked. He uses his knowledge to try to save lives and help people. And he finally knows how to treat Rita. His final TV report is a beauty that puts everyone in tears. The  next morning he wakes and finds the circle broken.

When the clock clicks over to 6 AM for you in the morning, what kind of day are you planning to make it?

Saturday Night At The Movies

I read that the cable channel FX paid 24 million for the broadcast rights to Avatar and a few other films like Star Trek,but basically there are no more theatrical movies on the old media “big 4″ networks. It wasn’t always that way.

When I was a kid, theatrical films premiering on broadcast TV was a big deal. I can recall literally making popcorn and gathering on the couch to watch a TV premiere.

In the 1950s, most movies on television were usually low-cost B films or older films that the major studios no longer could push in theaters. It was a time when movie theater audiences were being wowed by widescreens, Technicolor, 3D and more gimmicky effects, so old black-and-white films weren’t as appealing to theater owners.

About the only films that held on for theatrical re-release were some Walt Disney’s films and biggies like The Wizard of Oz (which I saw in a theater 25 years after its first theatrical release – and that was a big deal).

Then came NBC’s ” Saturday Night at the Movies” which was the first network movie anthology series to run two or more hours and often “premiered” films.

In 1961, NBC bought the rights to 31 post-1950 movie titles from 20th Century Fox and in September they showed the 1953 Marilyn Monroe/Lauren Bacall/Betty Grable film How to Marry a Millionaire for “Saturday Night at the Movies.”

They billed it as being “In Living Technicolor” and other films in the package had been made in Cinemascope, so the films had to be severely “panned-and-scanned” for TV viewing. So, these films were not really a “night at the movies.”

One interesting addition to these nights came because commercial breaks were shorter back then. If a film ran less than the two hour slot, NBC filled the remaining time with theatrical trailers – coming attractions – of upcoming films.

Films became a way to fill big blocks of the TV schedule in the later 1960s.

The next phase was when NBC (at first with Universal) decided to create “made-for-TV” films.

Interestingly, the first was produced for the 1963–64 season, but never made it to TV. It was a remake of an Ernest Hemingway story. That was The Killers with Lee Marvin, Angie Dickinson and Ronald Reagan in his last film prior to politics. NBC decided it was too violent for television, so the first made-for-TV film went instead to theaters in 1964.

By 1968, there was a prime time network movie for every night of the week – “The ABC Sunday Night Movie”, “The NBC Monday Movie”, “NBC Tuesday Night at the Movies” etc.

Even though the common belief had been for years that TV would kill movies,  movie studios did very well with the competitive bidding for their popular movies’ broadcast rights.  All of this peaked in the mid-1970s when 11+ movies would be found in the weekly schedule of the Big 3 networks and many more on independent channels.

The NBC “Saturday Night at the Movies” run ended in 1978.  Viewing habits had changed because of competition from cable television pay movie channels with their uncut and no-commercials showings and home video, and video rentals, pay-per-view and video on demand.

There have been a few odd showings of the NBC Saturday Night Movie in the past ten years, and CBS had a three-hour commercial network telecast of Million Dollar Baby in 2007 and ABC showed Dreamgirls last year.  But, a “Night at the Movies” via television seems to be a part of TV history. Even cable “movie channels”  like HBO rely on their own version of made-for-TV/cable films and series for their big audiences.

When I was getting a graduate degree in media back in late 1970s, we had to read The Cool Fire: How to Make It in Television by Bob Shanks, former vice-president of ABC Television. (The book is now out of print it seems.) Marshall McLuhan called TV the “Cool Fire” but families no longer gather around the cool fire of television the way they did 30 or 40 years ago – the way we once gathered around the family or tribal campfire. Something was gained, but something was lost.

The Happiest Man in the World

“If there is any religion that could correspond to the needs of modern science, it would be Buddhism.”  – Albert Einstein

Matthieu Ricard is a Buddhist monk, an author, translator, and photographer who has lived, studied, and worked in the Himalayan region for over forty years.

A British newspaper called him “The Happiest Man in the World” after the publication of a scientific study of Ricard’s brain done as part of a larger study trying to find that happiness part of the brain.

He grew up an intellectual in an intellectual family and environment. His father was philosopher Jean-François Revel and his mother, Yahne Le Toumelin, was an artist.

He received his doctorate in cell genetics at the Institut Pasteur in 1972 and then decided to concentrate on Buddhist studies and practice.

One of Matthieu Ricard’s books is Happiness: A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill.  It’s interesting to think of happiness as a skill rather than as a goal.

You can’t find happiness in any book, though reading has often set me long paths that led to happiness. For Ricard, happiness is not really self-interested, which is probably the more common goal of modern people. Rather it is more closely related to being compassionate and seeking the well-being of others. When you are truly happy, you can change things in the world because of your compassion for others.

He believes that happiness can exist in every moment of life, despite the inevitability of suffering.

Suffering is inevitable, so how can individuals learn to minimize suffering in life?   His suggestions are not original and not surprising to anyone who has studied Buddhism at all. Two paths are by practicing moderation in all things, and in the practice of meditation.

The Four Noble Truths of Buddhism

The Nature of Suffering (Dukkha): “This is the noble truth of suffering: birth is suffering, aging is suffering, illness is suffering, death is suffering; sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief and despair are suffering; union with what is displeasing is suffering; separation from what is pleasing is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering; in brief, the five aggregates subject to clinging are suffering.”

Suffering’s Origin (Samudaya): “This is the noble truth of the origin of suffering: it is this craving which leads to renewed existence, accompanied by delight and lust, seeking delight here and there, that is, craving for sensual pleasures, craving for existence, craving for extermination.”

Suffering’s Cessation (Nirodha): “This is the noble truth of the cessation of suffering: it is the remainderless fading away and cessation of that same craving, the giving up and relinquishing of it, freedom from it, nonreliance on it.”

The Way (Magga) Leading to the Cessation of Suffering: “This is the noble truth of the way leading to the cessation of suffering: it is the Noble Eightfold Path; that is, right view, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, right concentration.”

What first led me to Ricard was his scientific connection. He was used in that study because he is an “Olympic meditators” who has meditated tens of thousands of hours and whose brain is of interest to neuroscientists.

This dialogue with science is also something that interests the current Dalai Lama. And Matthieu Ricard did begin his life as a molecular biologist, so “contemplative science” might make more sense in describing his practice. His book about this is The Quantum and the Lotus: A Journey to the Frontiers Where Science and Buddhism Meet.

Can science ever explain something like happiness as more than neurons and brain chemistry? I doubt it. I almost fear that they will, because it would suggest that a pill could also make it happen. But I want them to keep looking. Their pursuit of happiness is good too.

In The Quantum and the Lotus is a conversation with astrophysicist Trinh Xuan Thuan that looks at how Buddhism and modern science address those big questions of life.

Is the secret to happiness as simple as being mindful to the pursuit of happiness without concern for the attainment of some ultimate and everlasting state of happiness?

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Since 2001, Ricard has coordinated Karuna-Shechen which has initiated more than 30 humanitarian projects, providing vital services to underprivileged communities in Nepal, Tibet, and India.

Excellent radio program on Ricard via Speaking of Faith

Books by Matthieu Ricard

Happiness – Thoreau

The Pursuit of Happiness

“If only we’d stop trying to be happy, we’d have a pretty good time”
Edith Wharton

Is the pursuit of happiness one of the reasons we are unhappy? Do we try too hard and expect too much? Do we have a “right” to be happy?

Jefferson & Franklin

The Virginia Declaration of Rights (June 12, 1776), written by George Mason, says:

That all men are by nature equally free and independent, and have certain inherent rights, of which, when they enter into a state of society, they cannot, by any compact, deprive or divest their posterity; namely, the enjoyment of life and liberty, with the means of acquiring and possessing property, and pursuing and obtaining happiness and safety.

But Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson agreed to downplaying protection of “property” as a goal of government in favor of “happiness.” So, in the United States Declaration of Independence   (I had to look this up – I couldn’t remember if the phrase was in that, the Constitution or the Bill of Rights), adopted July 4, 1776, it says:

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

In Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, Garry Wills writes:

When Jefferson spoke of pursuing happiness, he had nothing vague or private in mind. He meant a public happiness which is measurable; which is, indeed, the test and justification of any government. But to understand why he considered the pursuit of that happiness an unalienable right, we must look to another aspect of Enlightenment thought – to the science of morality.

John Locke

Wills and others go back to the writings of English philosopher John Locke who wrote that “no one ought to harm another in his life, health, liberty, or possessions.” Not to get too philosophical here, but Locke (who is talking more about government than your personal life) connects happiness with desire.

He has the phrase “the uneasiness of desire.” What can overcome the uneasiness of one desire is the greater uneasiness of another. Therefore the removal of uneasiness is the first and necessary step to happiness.

In Buddhism, the First Noble Truth is that life is suffering. Life includes pain, getting old, disease, loneliness frustration, fear, embarrassment, disappointment and ultimately death. That’s hard to refute.

That view can be seen as pessimistic – or realistic. I go with the latter. Pessimism is expecting things to be bad and Buddhists don’t believe that to be any more true than believing things can be good. Buddhism attempts to explain how suffering can be avoided and how we can be truly happy.  (How to do that? More in my next post.)

Unhappiness is a fact of life. We don’t pursue it; it pursues us. And happiness couldn’t exist without it.

Moments of sadness, anger and dissatisfaction are signals to pay attention to what is happening in our life and redirecting.