Buddha's UFO & the Bardo Thodol

[Doug Millison]

http://slate.msn.com/?id=2068541&entry=2068575
[...] We'd heard about Dhammakaya, a slightly bizarre Buddhist sect, from a
pair of likable Harvard undergrads. These two were in Thailand on summer
research grants to study Buddhist culture. (Apparently, much Buddhist
culture exists underwater, for when I met them they'd just returned from a
week of snorkeling off Ko Samui.) They told us the Dhammakaya group
worships in a giant spaceship building-tens of thousands of Thais dressed
all in white, chanting and meditating together beneath a 40-foot-high
portrait of their cultish monk leader. Badass, right? [...]



"We are assured by the Bardo Thodol, or Tibetan Book of the Dead, that the
soul newly in transition often doesn't like to admit -- indeed will deny
quite vehemently -- that it's really dead, having sliped so effortlessly
into the new dispensation that it finds no difference between the weirdness
of life and the weirdness of death, an enhancng fctor in Takeshi's opinion
being television, which with its history of picking away at the topic with
doctor shows, war shows, cop shows, murder shows, had trivialized the Big D
itself. If mediated lives, he figured, why not mediated deaths?"
--Vineland (218)