I’ve been putting this off for a while, but since yesterday’s conversation here with Buddhist Geeks Vince Horn pretty much started a blazing meteor shower of comments, it’s time to come out and say it – my dharma is better than YOUR dharma – nothing personal against Vince – my dharma is better than EVERYBODY’s dharma. For real.

As the venerable Ethan Nichtern once quoted the Buddha here at Beliefnet.com “As the wise test gold by burning, cutting and rubbing it…, so are you
to accept my words only after examining them and not merely out of
regard for me.” I.e. if the Kool Aid doesn’t seem right to you, don’t drink it.  My Kool Aid is cold, crisp, refreshing – and delicious.

So without futher ado, here’s five reasons why my dharma is wayyyy better than your dharma.

1. My dharma is comfortable admitting it’s superior. I mean, if you get
all Buddhist-y and non-judgmental, then you probably won’t say your
dharma is better. And if you can’t claim your dharma is the best, then
why follow it? Do you really want to follow some teachings that Might
Maybe turn out to be second rate, or even third?  Screw that. I want to
be on a winning team, and the first step towards being a winner is
thinking like a winner. I think my dharma is better than yours,
therefore I am.

2. My dharma doesn’t reek of incense and mandala
beads. I mean seriously, were they having a sale on Canal Street when
you got dressed this morning?  Do you really think buying Nag Champa
and some bracelets made by “Fairly Traded” third-world children makes
you all holy and crap?  You smell like a hippy and look like your
trying way too hard to accessorize your spirituality – or maybe your
are trying to spiritualize your accessories. Either way, when they
start selling your “religious garments” next to the cash register at 
Suburban Intfitters, it might be time to admit that my dharma is way
more fashionable than yours because cute guys always look good in a
black tee-shirt and semi-skinny jeans. I’m interested in how my mind works and I’m interested in meditation, but I don’t want to pretend I live in ancient Asia. So this is the dharma for me, and it kicks your dharma’s skinny butt.
 
3. Chicks dig my dharma. So do dudes.
Seriously. When people hear I study Buddhism, but in a way that’s
relevant to 21st century life, that gets them all moist in all the
right places.  They think I’m all enlightened, and who am I to tell
them otherwise? Fact is, after meditating for the last two years, I’m
pretty sure I AM enlightened.  And frankly, before you tell me I’m not,
consider this – the only person who could say I’m not enlightened is
one who has him or her self experienced enlightement – and if you’ve
experienced enlightement, you sure as hell aren’t going to go around
telling other people they haven’t. So shut your face-hole you
unenlightened wanna-be and melt before the powers of my
near-instantaneous transcendence of spiritual mastery.  Or at least
let’s go make out. Seriously, when’s the last time YOUR dharma got you
lip-locked with a seeker?

4. My dharma is way easier to get down
with that than all that traditional crap.  Yeah, my teacher may want us
to study semi-classic texts about the origins and history of Buddhism.
And yeah, he uses Pali and Sanskrit words sometimes. But I think we all
know that’s just to make it look genuine. End of the day, if you say
your Buddhist, then as far as I’m concerned you’re Buddhist, and that’s
all there is to it.  As long as you meditate to chill out once in a
while, your all right with me.  That’s how my dharma rolls baby.

5. My dharma is well-connected.  You don’t Twitter about your latest posts to Beliefnet? Your Sangha doesn’t have it’s own page on Facebook?
Sure, I can wait a week while you get out of your rocking chair to go
crank the record player and put your milk bottles by the front door. 
If you can’t deliver the dharma (or even the Dharma) instantly, why
bother? And even those other connected Buddhists have a lot to learn.
Yeah Waylon and Elephant Journal
are cool, but me and my dharma are cooler – and if you don’t know why,
don’t sweat it – it’s an East Coast West Coast thing.  Sure, Waylon may
post 389 articles a day, but that doesn’t make his dharma better than
mine. That just makes mine more concentrated.

And so what if my dharma gets discussed on a blog that has pop-up ads from some dude named Dr. Oz? Sure, pop-up ads are totally 1999, but what do you expect from a blog owned by Fox and Rupert Murdoch? The dudes Australian and old enough to play George Burns. He’s happy with any kind of pop-up he can get his hands on. 

Look, I admit,
I have no idea what dharma even means, and one of the main reasons I wrote this post is because work is hard to come by in Mumbai right now and I’m getting paid a penny a word from Mechanical Turk.  But if your dharma rocks it
like mine does, you know that words are just concepts, and so you also
know that knowing what they mean is like knowing the meaning of snow.

Let me confess something. Once in a while when I’m meditating, this totally crazy thing
happens –  I get this really weird random feeling like all of a sudden
I stop thinking and it feels like I poked my head above water and got
this perfect gasp of fresh air even though I didn’t know I was drowning
in a thousand feet of brackish water and for just like a half-second I
kind of forget I exist and I sort of am myself and see myself all at
the same time, but thanks to my kick-ass dharma that weird
feeling goes away really quick and I get back to the perfect flow of my
deeply enlightened totally spiritual and 100% correct thoughts about
how to improve myself and everyone around me.  And THAT is the number one reason my dharma is better than your dharma.