The Dharma of George Carlin

The other day this video popped up on my Facebook page:



Those of you who aren't seeing that link, click here or type http://youtu.be/R37zkizucPU into your browsers. The clip came courtesy of Waylon Lewis who posted it as part of this article in his online journal Elephant.

Lewis drew the connection between what Louis C.K. says in this clip and the idea of having a teacher in Buddhism. I thought it was a brilliant and very apt connection. What Louis C.K. says he learned from George Carlin reminds me a lot of what I learned from my teachers Tim McCarthy and Gudo Nishijima. Louis C.K. did not set out to remake himself in the image of George Carlin. He didn't copy Carlin's offstage behavior. He didn't tell jokes that Carlin made up. He didn't set himself up as the new George Carlin.

And yet he learned the deeper truth embedded in Carlin's work and he learned how to make that truth his own. He learned how to express George Carlin's approach to comedy in his own way. If Carlin had had a lineage to pass on, he would have been right in passing it on to Louis C.K.

As Shunryu Suzuki said in 1962:

"If you want to meditate you must have (the) instruction of (the) right teacher, especially when you want to meditate at home. It will take at least six months before you get your own right posture. Everyone has their own right posture but without instructions you cannot find it. For it to be your true posture, there must be (the) spirit which is called (the) Essence of Mind. Without spirit it cannot be your own. So we say, 'When you become yourself then Zen becomes Zen.'"