Buddha and the beastie - rapper-turned-Buddhist Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys

When Richard Gere snatched a moment of airtime during the Oscars to call attention to the plight of Chinese-occupied Tibet, it was no big surprise. Gere's very public conversion to Buddhism was consonant with his ultrasincere Hollywood persona. Not so for newly Buddhist Beastie Boy Adam Yauch. Yauch (known as MCA within the hip-hop world) and his two Beastie cohorts have sold millions of records and made a name for themselves as merciless cultural snipers. Yauch's public identity was always a sneering, snotnosed king of sarcasm, someone who made fun of everything--including the role of rapper. So it came as an eye-opener when the twenty-seven-year-old Jewish New York native emerged from a hiatus snowboarding and trekking in the Himalayas about a year ago with an utterly unsarcastic interest in Tibetan tantric Buddhism.

"Our society is outwardly modern," says the newly reflective rapper. "We have a lot of machines and we think of ourselves as really advanced. But in fact we're not very modern compared to the Tibetans, who have a more inwardly evolved society in terms of their psychology and philosophy. And without adopting some of that understanding and learning from the Tibetans and from Buddhism, we're basically going to destroy the planet for everyone. So it's not so much the idea of freeing Tibet for the sake of the Tibetans, or of us doing this kind of thing for somebody else, so much as us doing it for our own sake, and for the sake of all sentient beings."

The first hint of Yauch's realization came last fall in the debut issue of Grand Royal, the Beastie Boys' viciously witty magazine. While it featured the expected pranks (a phone interview with Def Jam top cheese Russell Simmons conducted without him knowing he was being interviewed, the Beasties sporting Joey Buttafuoco fashions), there was also an honest letter from Yauch about why he's not into gun glorification or antiwomen lyrics. This from the same guy who several years ago rapped about keeping his finger on the trigger while a monumental inflatable penis rose onstage behind him and scantily clad girls danced in cages?

Even allotting for male maturation, Yauch's transformation from a ranting, snide piper into a soft-spoken paragon of political correctness is arguably one of the more noteworthy spiritual developments in pop music since Cat Stevens began donating most of his earnings to a Muslim school. And it appears that Yauch has not only obtained tacit acceptance of his newfound faith from his two partners in rhyme (i.e., they don't make fun of him), but has convinced them to put some of their collective money where his mouth is. The latest Beastie Boys album, III Communication (Grand Royal/Capitol), contains two songs, "Shambala" and "Bodhisattva Vow," whose publishing proceeds are being donated to Milarepa, a Tibetan relief organization the Beasties established. In addition, the Beastie Boys performed two benefits for Tibet early this summer.

While the other two Beastie Boys, Michael Diamond and Adam Horovitz, have married into the epicenter of L.A.'s twentysomething coolsville (Diamond to director Tamra Davis and Horovitz to actress Ione Skye), Yauch has remained solo, if not monklike, though he has begun to hobnob with some of contemporary Buddhism's heavyweights. "Bodhisattva Vow," which features a sample of Tibetan monk chanting, was written in an instant last year after Yauch had an audience with His Holiness himself, the fourteenth Dalai Lama. The title refers to the decision not to attain enlightenment for oneself until all other sentient beings are saved from cyclical suffering, and the lyrics were recently reprinted in Tricycle, an American Buddhist magazine. Yauch has also developed a friendship with Columbia University professor Robert Thurman, one of the nation's leading Buddhist scholars and authors.

Meanwhile, the Beastie Boys have risen to even greater heights of hipness. Their last three albums have been critical triumphs, reconfiguring rap, punk, and funk with an ironclad irony. In retrospect, the secret of their success--a seemingly insane devotion to being themselves at all costs--just seems so perfectly, well, Buddhist.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group