I took the Buddha’s path early in 2001. I remember the time because it was the week that the Taliban dynamited the great Buddhas of Bamiyan. I remember thinking, “How does my new faith, the lovely, peaceful religion of Lord Buddha ask me to react to such a terrible desecration?”
In early 2001, I was having trouble adapting to a new job I had taken six months earlier. I was looking for something to bring me peace and to help me to feel less insecure. I wasn’t sure I was up for the tasks required of me.
I had meditated on and off since high school in the late sixties and found it calmed me. So, I went to the local Barnes and Noble and bought a book called, It’s easier than You Think: the Buddhist Way to Happiness by Sylvia Boorstein. That wonderful little book brought me the dharma.
The dharma taught me that we all suffer and that the source of our suffering is trying to escape the here and now! Learning to slow down and honor the here and now and thereby honor ourselves and all beings, is the way to handle suffering. The Buddha taught that pain, sickness, loss of loved ones and other difficulties are part and parcel of life. But the suffering part is optional. It’s your choice to cling to some other reality instead of trying to deal with the one in front of you.
The teachings seemed to fit like a glove! I felt as though I had been a follower of the Buddha for many years.
I had never understood the Christian emphasis on sin and the alienation it brings from God and from other people. Sure, I had sinned and did feel alienated from those I had hurt but there was something even deeper, and more insidious than that at the bottom of my spiritual malaise.
That something was the sense at times that I didn’t belong here or anywhere. I was unfit for human society. This feeling would sometimes go completely away but then come roaring back. I was a mistake. I had no business here.
As I grew older, however, that terrible sense of unfitness began to loosen its grip. In my mid thirties it started to give way to a sense that yes, I had a place here. I was a regular old human like anyone else. I could see that sometimes I was smarter or cleverer than others. Sometimes I was clumsier or more inept. But I still had a sense of place. I still belonged here.
At that point, I returned to the Christian Church to the denomination in which I was brought up, the Episcopal Church. I had what Christians would call a conversion experience. I felt that God wanted to let us know in the most graphic way he could think of that He loved us and that we were all a family, dependant on one another. This is why he sent Jesus Christ to die on the cross. In this conversion experience and in my return to Christianity I didn’t emphasize the concept of sin as I did the concept of a cure for our alienation from God and from others.
After several years, however, the Christian Church’s emphasis on the specificity of the historic Jesus and the idea that he was the only way to salvation really started to bother me again. It had bothered me as a high schooler too, causing me to join the Self Realization Fellowship, a Vedantist group that practiced meditation and spoke of Christ in univeral terms as the Christ consciousness.
It was a good fifteen years later in which I had no spiritual practice, that Buddhism really spoke to me. I feel that my home is right here and now and that I have never strayed from it!
I take refuge in the Buddha, the dharma and the sangha!
