Everything and Nothing That You Were

Yesterday, as part of its year in review, the New York Times ran a memoriam for Beastie Boy Adam Yauch that didn't sit well with me. Specifically, it maintained that MCA was never down with the Licensed To Ill-era frivolity:

"“Fight for Your Right” created expectations; the Beasties met those expectations by touring with cage dancers and a giant inflatable penis and hosing one another down with Budweiser onstage. But they weren’t those guys, not really....Even in “Licensed to Ill”-era interviews, you can see the Beasties already growing weary of playing the roles they’d assigned themselves."

This, frankly, is a load of shit. Yauch himself, in a quote the author includes, noted that he was more than willing to play along with the shenanigans: “I went and got drunk and made some stupid music.”

I have a problem with any attempt to scrub a person's record after they die. To do it after a Buddhist dies seems especially disrespectful and clueless.

Look, MCA was an asshole. He was a guy who gleefully made a lot of money putting women in cages on a stage.

And then he changed.

When we pretend, "oh, he was always this saintly person, they didn't REALLY mean all the bad shit they did," all we do is miss the fundamental lesson: Adam Yauch was an asshole. In my life, I have certainly been an asshole. If you haven’t been an asshole, you’ve been something else that you’re not proud of.

You know who else was things he wasn’t proud of? The Buddha. I prefer not to get into the Buddha’s previous lives stuff, but even if you accept that he was the end result of a lot of lives dedicated towards awakening, at the beginning of that chain of lives, the Buddha was not special. He was not a saint. He was as far from perfect as the rest of us. At some point in his chain of lives, the Buddha was an average guy.

And then he changed.

He got better. He found calm, and he knew that if he, vile sinner though he might be, could find enlightenment, anyone can.

When we make people we admire into saints, we rob them of their humanity, and we lose the most critical message of their lives, which is that anyone can be a hero. Anyone can wake up. It doesn’t take someone special. It doesn’t take a saint. It takes you, and you can do it right now. No matter what you or I have done, an end of our suffering is available to us. It is our birthright, it is our destiny, and we can have it right now, in this moment.

Happy New Years.