I found a commentary by Buddhist chaplain Mikel Ryuho Monnett that ties together two recent themes on this blog -- Jataka Tales and the death of Osama bin Laden. I found a slightly different version of the same Jataka Tale by Stephen Jenkins at The Guardian.

This particular Jataka Tale is one I've heard before, but I've been unable to find exactly where in comes from. If anyone knows, do speak up. But here it is --

Once the Buddha was a ship's captain, and he learned that one of the passengers planned to kill the other passengers.  He thought that if he warned the other passengers, they would get angry and kill the homicidal passenger in a fit of rage, and this would create all manner of unfortunate karma for them. So he killed the would-be murderer himself, but he did so without anger.

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Vesak is May 17 this year, and I understand big celebrations for Buddha's Birthday already are underway in South Korea and Taiwan. As observed in Theravada Buddhism, Vesak is more than just Buddha's birthday; it's also the observance of the Buddha's enlightenment and Parinirvana.

As kind of a pre-Vesak treat, I have new features on the Jataka Tales and three of the best-known tales -- The Selfless Hare, The Golden Deer (also called the Ruru Deer), and The Golden Mallard, which in some re-tellings is a goose or a swan. I found a great many variations on these stories, but in my re-telling I tried to stay close to what I think is the original version. I've come to suspect no two storytellers have ever told these stories in exactly the same way, however.

In our last episode of Genpo Merzel: The Scandal, 66 Zen teachers had signed an open letter to the wayward ex-Soto Zen priest Dennis Genpo Merzel for going back on his promise to stop being a Zen teacher. Now the Salt Lake Tribune has a story about Merzel and his, um, situation that I found provocative. "Provocative" is the least snarky word I can think of for what I'm feeling, anyway.

(Merzel was abbot of the Kanzeon Zen Center in Salt Lake City until he resigned earlier this year, after Merzel's sexual relations with students became public knowledge. However, Kanzeon is selling its assets and is relocating to a new property outside of Salt Lake City, and the new abbot and teacher will be ... Genpo Merzel. For more background, see Another Zen Master Scandal and Scandal and Allegation Updates.)

As I said, Merzel had stepped down as abbot of KZC. He also resigned from the Soto Zen priesthood (or, at least, that's what I originally understood) and from the White Plum Asangha, an organization of Zen teachers from the lineage of the late Maezumi Roshi of the Los Angeles Zen Center. And he agreed to stop being a Zen teacher, at least until he had been rehabilitated somehow. However ... this is from the Salt Lake City Tribune --

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Dosho Port has a post up called "Dharma as Moral Principle" that has a great quote from the book The Six Perfections: Buddhism and the Cultivation of Character by Dale Wright.

This vividly illuminates the Buddha's teaching on karma --

Every choice we face provides us with an opportunity either to embrace or to break the hold that the past has had on us. No matter how often we have chosen a certain way in the past, so long as we are human, we retain the freedom (to varying degrees) to disown earlier patterns and to break out onto a new path. But all of our previous decisions are weighing heavily in the direction of the character we have formed for ourselves through previous actions, thus making decisive change difficult.

Wright says also that karma is "... one of the most ingenious cultural achievements to emerge from ancient India. It has enormous promise for future world culture - a way to understand the relationship between moral acts and the kinds of life that they help shape."

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