The Dharma of Celebrity Death

Dean Sluyter is a very smart and playful Buddhist writer (The Zen Commandments) who uses the rash of celebrity deaths (Michael Jackson, Walter Cronkite, Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett) as an occasion to ponder the mysteries of death, the afterlife, and their legacies. He saves his best commentary for reflections on David Carradine whose depiction of an exiled, half-Chinese Shaolin priest wandering through the Old West was "a bridge between East and West, the exotic and the familiar." His TV series, Kung Fu, touched many lives in positive ways and that is as good a legacy as one can leave behind. Sluyter ends his meditation with "Enjoy life, enjoy death, let be."