An unusual Buddhist center spreads a West Coast author's teachings to Middle Tennessee

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Nashville, Tennessee (USA) -- It's all fun and games until the bell rings, as Against the Stream Nashville founder and meditation teacher David Smith would say. Prior to propping himself on the cushion promptly at 7 p.m., at a spiritual center housed in an eerily beautiful old restaurant-equipment facility on Charlotte Pike, Smith is just one among several cronies participating in a raucous scene of chatter and bear hugs that would burst any newcomer's bubbles of Buddhist preconceptions.

Maybe punk Buddhism sounds like a contradiction in terms. Yet despite Smith's shaved head, tattoo sleeves and affinity for the F-bomb, he has found a path to enlightenment that places its own rough-hewn spin on the Enlightened One's 2,500-year-old doctrines. It's affiliated with the Santa Monica and Los Angeles centers founded by spiritual teacher and Dharma Punx author Noah Levine, who visits Nashville 7 p.m. Friday as a fundraiser for Smith's local outpost.

Teaching mindfulness meditation four times weekly at his Sylvan Park center, Smith encourages his students — some of whom, like him, have histories of addiction — to explore their inner horizons instead of checking out through a cocktail, Klonopin, or cruising the Internet.

"You go sit in a room full of people and do some breathing and you feel better," Smith says. " 'This feels almost familiar' is what a lot of people say."

While the Nashville area has a number of established Buddhist organizations (like the Nashville Zen Center, founded in 1982), Smith's unorthodox lectures — coupled with events like Levine's first Nashville appearance this weekend — suggest that the city's spiritual life is taking on new complexity. An offshoot of Levine's California-based Mind Body Awareness Project, his center is in essence a church for people typically turned off by churches, or by the very idea of following.

"Dave looks like he could teach you as much about how to survive a mosh pit as he could about how to cultivate compassion and mindfulness," says Jeff Browning, an alcohol and drug counselor who works as an instructor with Mind Body Awareness Project. "That's what people respond to when they meet him. When we take meditations into the jails, those guys don't want to be preached at for the thousandth time, they want to hear about somebody who understands suffering and has a way out of that suffering."

First introduced to Buddhism by the family of Emotional Intelligence author Daniel Goleman, Smith divided his teenage years in western Massachusetts between retreats at the Insight Meditation Society and a street-punk lifestyle of drugs and debauchery.

"I didn't know what they were doing up there, I just knew the place seemed pretty cool and that the people were friendly," Smith says. "And then I got in this really bad car accident where my girlfriend was killed, and to cope with my PTSD I started doing mindfulness meditation."

Yet Smith acknowledges that at the same time he was still doing drugs. "It was just a big mess," he says. Seeking out recovery at the age of 28, Smith renounced his full-time music career and his hardcore excesses to start his own construction business and delve back into the study of Buddhism. While attending a three-month meditation retreat, he first heard about Levine's 2003 memoir Dharma Punx and found the book paralleled his own sex-drugs-and-rock-'n'-roll past.

Relating to Levine's rebellion against his spiritual roots — his father is famed poet and author Stephen Levine, one of the pioneers to popularize Theravada Buddhism in the West — Smith struck up an email correspondence with him. The more they communicated, the more the two saw they shared a desire to redirect their arrested-adolescent angst into a journey "against the stream" — a struggle to cultivate compassion for their faults.

Opting to follow in Levine's footsteps, Smith signed up for the teacher's San Francisco-based Meditation Instructor program. He met with Levine five times over the course of a year for guidance in how to facilitate his own group.

Inspired to share the serenity derived from his practice and dedication to the Four Noble Truths — the creed that essentially suffering is inevitable, and it is actually our resistance to unpleasant emotions that causes us pain — Smith sought out a prospective center where he could conduct his own teachings on "more of a street rather than college level." Approached by Smith in early 2011, the founder of 12South's One Dharma Nashville, Lisa Ernst, agreed to let him teach his Sunday-night guided-meditation class at their facility.

"Against the Stream is a very friendly place to begin a meditation practice for people of all backgrounds, as well as those who are interested in developing a practice and studying Buddhism more in depth," Ernst says. "I respect Dave's sincerity and commitment to his own practice, as the best teachers are those who never stop studying and have the most to give."

Despite Against the Stream's popularity on the West Coast, where the L.A. and Santa Monica centers attract nearly 1,800 visitors per week, Smith's arduous first year of no-show nights and skeptical attendees told him Nashville wouldn't be a pushover. But from his work with the Mind Body Awareness Project, for whom he currently teaches meditation to incarcerated youth, Smith says he's grown accustomed to tough audiences. Eventually he attracted a loyal crew intrigued by his standup-worthy witticism and no-bullshit Buddhist wisdom. Among his adherents is Belmont University student Luke Mayton, one of Smith's first pupils and an occasional substitute for his Wednesday night class.

"I had been interested in Buddhism since I was a kid and had been meditating on and off over the years in a very unorganized and unguided way without a teacher or community to support my practice," Mayton says. "When I attended Against the Stream for the first time, I knew it was something I would come back to many times. The group is approachable, laid-back and has a come-as-you-are feel that's always made me totally comfortable with being myself."

Confident that meditation's psychologically proven benefits will appeal to an overworked and saturated society, Smith believes Buddhism's fluid "question everything" philosophy will universally appeal to both New Age and ex-children-of-the-church crowds. Currently attracting between 150 and 200 people per week, Smith plans for a series of sliding-scale workshops (for instance, the upcoming Saturday Morning Series will deliver a diagram and historical detail-driven study of Buddhism) to finance the center, which like the entire ATS umbrella is nonprofit-certified and relies 100 percent upon attendee donations. Eagerly anticipating Levine's sanction of approval for the country's third official center, which coincidentally aligns with the group's fifth anniversary, Smith admits how surreal it seems to be at the forefront of the Southern division of Levine's burgeoning Buddhist movement.

"I remember being on retreats and watching the Dharma teacher and thinking, 'I wanna do that,' " Smith says. "It was always something I wanted to do at some point, but when I was like 60. When I was old and shit and couldn't play rock 'n' roll music anymore, maybe then I would teach. Never did I think it would happen this quick."

Noah Levine speaks 7 p.m. Feb. 1 at Against the Stream Meditation Center, 3816 Charlotte Ave., and conducts a Kind Awareness Day-long 10 a.m. Feb. 2. Sliding-scale donations range from $20 to $200. For more information, see againstthestreamnashville.com.

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Buddhist monks’ art project spreads message of peace

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Seven Buddhist monks was at the Spencer Museum of Art this week painstakingly constructing a sand painting called dul-tson-kyil-khor, meaning "mandala of colored powder." On Friday, the monks will tossed the sand painting into Potter's Lake in a symbolic gesture.

Lawrence, KS (USA) -- Yes, Tenzin Dekyong confirms, creating sand paintings is as difficult as it looks.

Photo by Richard Gwin

Monks’ necks and backs hurt from hunching over their work, faces just inches from the sand. And, yes, sometimes they make mistakes, which must be mended just as carefully - if not more so - as the purposeful details are created.

On Tuesday, Dekyong and six other Buddhist monks from the Drepung Gomang Monastery in India took a four-day process of creating a 5-by-5-foot mandala out of millions of grains of colored sand, painstakingly funneled into intricate designs on a platform in the Spencer Museum of Art Central Court, 1301 Miss.

On Friday, they swept up their entire project and poured the sand into Potter Lake.

The temporary display, Dekyong said, is a reminder that all we have — no matter how beautiful or carefully created — is impermanent.

Friday’s events included chanting and prayers and a procession from the museum to the lake. The monks believe placing the sand in a nearby body of water enables the water to carry the mandala’s healing energies throughout the world, according to an announcement from Kansas University.

Mark King and Rhonda Houser of Lawrence brought their 7-year-old son, Liam Kinghouser, to see the mandala in progress.

“We thought he might enjoy seeing them concentrating and creating something beautiful,” Houser said.

King said he’d watched monks creating a sand mandala once before, in Virginia, and that he’d wanted to visit since he heard the Spencer would be playing host to a similar event.

“It was such a good experience,” King said. “It’s just amazing — so peaceful.”

Through the course of building the mandala, a Sanskrit word for circle, the monks hope to spread their message of peace, love, compassion, unity and healing, Dekyong said. He said that specifically includes their hope for peace in Tibet, where Communist Chinese rulers do not allow Buddhists such as the monks to freely practice their religion.

The Drepung Gomang Monastery is in southern India, but most of its 2,000 monks are Tibetan. Their monastery originally was in Tibet, but the Dalai Lama and followers fled when the Chinese invaded and later rebuilt in India.

The design under way at the Spencer is called the Interfaith World Peace mandala. It has symbols signifying the world’s 12 major religions, the four elements and the four seasons.

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Buddhist order spreads temple cuisine

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Seoul, South Korea -- Korea’s Buddhist temple cuisine is becoming more popular among healthy eaters within and outside Korea.

<< A spread of temple food is shown in this 2009 file photo taken at a temple food restaurant in Seoul. More health-conscious Koreans are enjoying the benefits of the cuisine. / Korea Times file

Reflecting the trend, the main theme of the largest Korean Buddhist order’s visit to New York last month was food. It organized a two-week promotional campaign to highlight and raise awareness about temple cuisine, one of the highlights of the templestay program which marks its 10th anniversary this year.

The Cultural Corps of Korean Buddhism, an affiliate of the Jogye Order, has tried to modernize the recipes and make them more accessible to the public here and abroad.

“Temple food practices reflect some important values, such as the beauty of doing things slowly and sharing with others,” Ven. Beopjin said in an interview with The Korea Times last week. “New Yorkers were excited to learn about the templestay program and temple cuisine.”

Temple food, referring to what monks and visitors eat at temples, is basically vegetarian and prepared with natural ingredients without artificial seasoning. At temples, eating is a part of the meditative discipline.

Ven. Beopjin, director of Cultural Corps of Korean Buddhism, was in New York to oversee the activities.

Small groups of 20 to 50, spanning from chefs, food specialists, and media to travel industry consultants, were invited to the Astor Center in Manhattan to taste various Korean temple food dishes for luncheon and dinner events over three days.

Travel consultants received a detailed introduction to the templestay program, available at over 100 temples all over Korea. Food specialists had a chance to taste Korean soy sauce and fermented soy bean paste made using traditional methods in the temples.

“In the future, we will publish recipe books and develop promotional material on temple food, while expanding opportunities for the general public to come to temples and make the cuisine themselves,” Ven. Beopjin said.

Although Korean temple cuisine is vegetarian, in which meat, poultry and fish are forbidden, its practice is closer to vegan, as eggs are also not eaten and dairy is used sparingly. Five pungent vegetables - chives, leeks, garlic, onion and scallion - are prohibited for the reasons of causing hindrance in spiritual practice and to avoid an attachment to strongly flavored spices.

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the templestay program, which made more people familiar with Korean Buddhism including non-believers and foreigners.

The programs usually include monastic formal meals made up of healthy, vegetarian dishes; tea ceremonies; morning and evening chanting; and “Seon” or Zen meditation. The communal Buddhist meal or “balwoo gongyang” is a unique way of eating in Korean temples, where food is consumed in total silence and not a single grain of rice is wasted.

Since it was first adopted 10 years ago, it has become one of the most popular tourist activities Korea.

“The popularity of the program among Koreans and foreigners stem from different reasons,” Ven. Beopjin said. “A recent survey showed that Koreans were most interested in templestays for relaxation. For foreigners, they were most interested because they wanted to learn more about Korea’s traditional culture and Buddhist culture.”

The Jogye Order has tried to make templestay programs more attractive to non-Korean participants. It has designated 15 temples that specialize in templestay specifically for foreigners, where they have professional interpreters.

There are three in Seoul, including Geumseon Temple, Myogak Temple and Bongeun Temple. A full list is available at www.templestay.com

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