My Flirtation with Buddhism

No one leads an abstract life, solely founded on philosophic, religious, or spiritual principles. Each one of us is born into a particular culture and a distinctive family that give us a certain direction in life, furnish us with personal problems to solve or demons to overcome, and stuff ideas into our heads that are opposed to reality; in this way, we become viatores through this world. I, like all moderns, did not begin my journey through life in Varanasi with the Buddha, or in ancient Athens with Socrates, or in Galilee with Jesus. My journey began in Union Lake, Michigan, with a well-traveled path laid out before me by democracy, capitalism, and science.

I ended up in Los Alamos, as if led by the hand of a trusted adult, only to discover that the goals of Modernity are ultimately disastrous for humankind. I, of course, did not follow a single path, for Modernity gives everyone multiple, contradictory paths. Science told me that only matter exists, that I was the “farcical outcome of a chain of accidents,”[1] chance and necessity fathered me[2], the preservation of my genes was the ultimate rationale for my existence,[3] and that with no free will I was a slave of matter[4]; that human life was meaningless. Yet, my experience of doing theoretical physics convinced me that the universe is beautiful; the greatest, unexpected joy in my life came from grasping the underlying, beautiful mathematical structure of the cosmos. Capitalism set me on the path to consume more and more, so I would be happier and happier, and not to pay attention to the losers in the economic game or to question the source of my wealth, the Laboratory for the Destruction of Humanity. American democracy, in concert with science and capitalism, told me I was an isolated, autonomous individual, a disastrous belief I clung to for too many years.

As a result, I found myself in Los Alamos, no more than a child, playing out the life given to me by the “adults.” But all of us, despite the pronouncements of materialism, possess almost unlimited freedom for introspection and change, although we need guides.

The Buddha: My First Guide to the Interior Life

My first guide to the deepest aspects of the interior life was the Buddha. At that time, I was an arrogant theoretical physicist and earnestly believed I had chosen my own path in life and did not realize how much I adhered to American individualism. With a “distaste for accepting any man’s word as proof of anything,”[5] I thought that if I followed another person’s judgment, I would give myself over to that individual and thereby would enslave myself and would violate what was most precious to me, my personal freedom. As a result, I sought to rely solely on my own judgment. 

So, why did I turn then to the Buddha? Because I was stuck. Not thoroughly enculturated, I found absurd such American goals as becoming a success, amassing wealth, and acquiring a house with a white picket fence, a dutiful brunette wife, and a golden retriever named “Rex.” My secure intellectual ground was science, which repeatedly informed me that human life was pointless, and thus could offer me no solid direction. A friend of mine, an experimental physicist, told me over lunch that “there are two levels of truth, one scientific, the other personal.” When I asked him what his personal “truths” were, he proceeded to list American middle-class values. I, then, pressed him to examine his personal “truths.” He refused, and I told him if every aspect of human living is merely personal opinion, then I would fire a bullet into my brain.

The Buddha’s teachings did not seem to oppose the shaky ground I stood on — individualism, the desire for freedom from social entanglements, and the goal of personal fulfillment. I applauded my new Master when I heard him tell the Kalamas in the Kalama Sutra, “Don’t go by reports, by legends, by traditions, by scripture, by logical conjecture, by inference, by analogies, by agreement through pondering views, by probability, or by the thought, ‘This contemplative is our teacher.’ When you know for yourselves that ‘These qualities are skillful; these qualities are blameless; these qualities are praised by the wise; these qualities, when adopted and carried out, lead to welfare and to happiness’ — then you should enter and remain in them.”[6] I understood “when you know for yourselves” to mean that only from my own personal experience and judgment could I be sure of the correct path to follow in life.

Through reading, I learned of the three treasures of Buddhism: 1) the Buddha, the Enlightened One to emulate; 2) the dharma, the teachings of the Buddha and the Masters who stemmed from the Enlightened One; and 3) the sangha, the community of practitioners. However, I knew that in Modernity, ancient scriptures are not truly believed, community life is greatly weakened, and tradition is merely the reciting of certain verbal formulas.

For Americans, Buddhism is primarily meditation. Since the word “Zen” means “meditation,” simply sitting still, with no special robes or shaved heads, just being fully present in the here and now, with no dogma to believe, with nothing special to do or to be, I decided to explore Zen Buddhism. I loved the emphasis on nothing special.

In Santa Fe, every other educated Anglo is some sort of Buddhist. Except what I had read in books, I had no idea how to practice zazen, the Zen term for sitting meditation. For guidance, I attended lessons on zazen at the Mountain Cloud Zen Center and lectures on spiritual transformation at the Upaya Zen Center.

My Zen Practice

Without fail, every morning, I would wake up at 5:30, practice sitting meditation for thirty minutes; once a week, I went to the Mountain Cloud Zen Center to join the sangha for one hour of zazen; bimonthly, I listened to dharma talks at the Upaya Zen Center.

I soon discovered that in America a Zen teacher (a roshi) must adhere to equality and appear to be an ordinary, nice guy, but wise, in contrast to Japan, where a Zen teacher may strike a novice on the shoulders with a wooden stick if he is falling asleep while meditating, or plunge his head in a barrel filled with rainwater, or twist his nose.

I was admonished at both Zen centers not to talk with the sangha members about their practice, which being a Romanian gypsy, I, of course, violated. A businessman told me that merely sitting helped his business. When a tough situation arose at work, he would sit and then call a meeting, where somehow the problem resolved itself. A neuroscientist told me that zazen produced clarity of thought and inner peace. He and other colleagues had used the latest brain-imaging technology to show that long-term meditation changed the brain structures associated with attentiveness and compassion. A woman in her mid-fifties and a fallen-away Catholic confessed that Buddhism for her had replaced God, sin, and repentance with connectedness, peace, and harmony. She now was open-hearted with her husband, children, colleagues, and even strangers like me.

I met several people who had journeyed from Vipassanā (insight meditation) to Tibetan Buddhism to Zen. They claimed that meditation gave them freedom unencumbered by dogma, so they could choose the best from the various schools of Buddhism. One woman told me that she now saw that Zen stayed faithful to the original teaching of the Buddha, for it emphasized zazen, not rituals or theoretical concepts as most schools of Buddhism do.

One dharma speaker, an esteemed roshi from California, said, “Unlike the Buddhism of the Pāli canon and the Theravāda tradition, contemporary Buddhism, particularly in America, understands the Path as psychological development. Meditation helps us cope with personal problems, especially our monkey minds and our afflicted emotions. In contrast to Asian Buddhism that aims to leave the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth, our pre-occupation is mainly therapeutic.

“The basic supposition of secular Buddhism is that my core problem is how my mind works. The solution is to change through meditation how my mind works. Then, I can play my various roles — employee, spouse, father, or mother — better. So, I can fit into the world better.”[7] (An eternal outsider, I moaned on hearing this. Who wants to fit better into a crazy world?)

Oddly, only in two or three dharma talks did I hear that Zen practice can resolve existential questions inherent in human life. Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going? For these roshis, Zen offered a way to answer the great questions of life and death by seeing reality, by grasping one’s true nature in a moment of sudden revelation.

I heard from several other roshis that in reality there is no inside or outside, no self and no other, no life and no death, so I earnestly practiced sitting meditation, not primarily for enhanced concentration and inner peace, but for deep insights into human existence that result from experiencing “I” as an illusion.

After two years of meditation, which I realized was a millisecond in Zen, I felt as Master Yakusan (745–827) did before his enlightenment. I was a tiny mosquito trying to bite an iron ox; I repeatedly failed to draw blood, so I was dying. I concluded that I was not destined for enlightenment in this life and began to suspect that for me the Buddha may not be a model to emulate.

My Doubts about Buddhism

My initial qualms about the path of Buddhism came back with a vengeance.

As a Western scientist, I did not see any empirical evidence for reincarnation, now called rebirth by American Buddhists. In the scriptures were tales of Masters recounting past lives, but I chalked those legends up as unlikely stories told out of necessity, for the historical origin of Buddhism was Siddhartha Gautama’s quest for liberation from saṃsāra, the endless cycle of birth, death, and rebirth; dukkha at the deepest level means the suffering caused by saṃsāra. Once a person dismisses rebirth, the overcoming of suffering loses it urgency, and the Four Noble Truths become, especially in the modern West, tools for achieving inner peace or even success in business.

The other beginning point of Buddhism is karma, the cosmic law of moral cause and effect. The sentiment that a man is frequently sick in this present life because in a past life he habitually got drunk and beat up other men is not morally objectionable, and perhaps consoles many people with the principle that eventually a person gets what he or she deserves; however, the Law of Karma is absurd in Modernity. Who can believe that the victims of Hiroshima, the Gulag, and the Holocaust perished because of moral wrongs in past lives? The Law of Karma blames the victims, not oppressive rulers and unjust political and economic institutions that cause suffering.

My doubts about Buddhism further intensified when I learned that Siddhartha Gautama, the future Enlightened One, named his son Rāhula, which means “fetter” or “impediment” in Pāli. In The Dhammapada, the Buddha teaches that love for a son “drags a man down, and it is hard to undo.”[8] In the Great Going Forth, Siddhartha Gautama abandoned his son, his fetter, in the hope of achieving enlightenment.

Rāhula was raised by his mother and grandfather, King Suddhodana. When he was seven years old, Rāhula requested his father, missing him dearly.[9] The Buddha returned to his home city of Kapilavatthu to preach the Four Noble Truths. On the seventh day of his return, Rāhula’s mother, Yasodharā, took Rāhula to see his father, the Buddha. She told the boy that since his father had renounced the palace life and as he was the next royal prince in line, he should ask his father for his inheritance.

Prince Rāhula went to the Buddha, stood before him, and said, “Pleasant indeed is your shadow, sage.”

And when the Blessed One had finished his meal and left the palace, Prince Rāhula ran after him shouting, “Give me my inheritance, sage; give me my inheritance.” At that, the Blessed One spoke to the Venerable Sāriputta: “Well then, Sāriputta, take him into the Order.” Rāhula subsequently became an Arahant by following the Buddha’s teachings.

The Buddha holds, and he probably is right, that the love of another always leads to suffering. In the Visākhā Sutta, the Enlightened One tells a grandmother grieving for her recently dead grandson, “Those who have a hundred dear ones have a hundred sufferings. Those who have ninety dear ones have ninety sufferings. Those who have eighty… seventy… sixty… fifty… forty… thirty… twenty… ten… nine… eight… seven… six… five… four… three… two… Those who have one dear one have one suffering. Those who have no dear ones have no sufferings. They are free from sorrow, free from stain, free from lamentation, I tell you.”^[10]

If we follow the Buddha, as the writer Peter Matthiessen did, we will seek to alleviate our suffering regardless of others. Unhinged by the death of his second wife, Matthiessen leaves for a two-month trek in Nepal in search of the Lama of Shey, who resides at the ancient monastery on Crystal Mountain. He hopes the Lama will show him a way of overcoming the suffering caused by death.

Matthiessen leaves behind in Sagaponack, New York, his eight-year-old son, Alex, with friends whose family have taken over his house while he is gone. Alex, in a short letter to his father, writes, “How are you. I am fine. I was very sad, I was even crying, because I didn’t write to you. But I feel a lot better since I’m writing to you now. The cat and the dog are great, but I’m going to be sad when they die. School is doing pretty well. I hope you can make it back for Thanksgiving.”^[11]

Like his father, Alex is brooding about death. The young boy is worried his two pets may die, and then he will be left alone without a mother and with a father absent in Nepal. Matthiessen’s pursuit to alleviate his suffering causes his son to suffer acutely by himself.

The Snow Leopard is a marvelous book with wonderful insights into early childhood. Every time I taught Matthiessen’s great work to undergraduates, at least one student raised the following critique for discussion: “I don’t understand why Matthiessen did not attend to his son’s suffering instead of his. If he had focused on his son, he would have discovered that his suffering was of no consequence and never felt the need to travel to Nepal.”  

For many of us, the Buddha offers a way out of suffering to perfect peace, to unconditional happiness. The Buddha begins with the undeniable principle that nothing in this world is permanent. Civilizations rise and fall; species of plants and animals come and go; continents drift and produce mountain ranges; wind and water erode rock and level mountains.

Everything we love is impermanent, but we desire our loves to be permanent. So, our joy and happiness in loving a craft, a person, or a community will inevitably become sadness and despair. Humanity is caught in the cycle desire a good; attain or possess that good; lose that good; suffer; start over again with a different good but with the same inevitable outcome.

To begin to break free of this cycle, the Buddha tells us to have no dear ones and to develop compassion for all, and to never stop striving for enlightenment, for within each person is the unborn, the realization of which leads to nonclinging, the end of suffering, to the liberation from saṃsāra to nirvāṇa.

The Core Problem of Human Living, Not Suffering But Faulty Love

Years after my flirtation with Buddhism, I realized that the central problem of human existence is not suffering, but love, and that Jesus countered the Buddha’s argument that love always leads to suffering when he introduced agápē, a love previous unknown in the ancient world. Agápē means God’s selfless love for human persons, a love that cannot be earned and excludes no one.^[12] Such love gives and expects nothing in return. Since no English translation accurately renders how agápē is used in the New Testament, probably the best recourse is for the reader to stop, ignore the proper Greek, which only a minority of us know, and try substituting agápē and agápēd for “love” and “loved.” For example,

John 13:34: A new commandment I give to you, that you love [agápē] one another; even as I have loved [agápēd] you, that you also love [agápē] one another.

Or,

Matthew 5:43-46: You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love [agápē] your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, [agápē] your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust.

 Despite the butchering of the Greek, this substitution shows that Jesus is calling upon us to practice a new love, to love the way God does, to love our neighbors and even ourselves selflessly and unconditionally, without desiring a reward, without wanting something in return.  Jesus frees us from loves that always end in suffering. But such love is difficult for most of us because we measure love by what we receive, not by what we give. How many times have we heard a person complain, “She is not meeting my needs.”?

Agápē requires the destruction of the ego. Jesus told his followers, “He who loves his life loses it, and he who hates his life in this world will keep it for eternal life.”^[13] St. Paul confesses, “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me . . .”^[14]

St. Paul’s confession is a mystery to us ordinary mortals; we struggle to understand his straightforward but mysterious description of his new life. Perhaps, the best place to begin is with “it is no longer I who lives,” that is with the death of Saul; recall before St. Paul’s conversion to Christianity, he was Saul, a persecutor of the early disciples of Jesus. On the road to Damascus to persecute Christians, a light flashed about Saul; he fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” Saul was blind for three days; when he recovered his sight, a new person was born, Paul, who became instrumental in explaining Jesus’ message to the world.

We will call the birth of a new person through mystical experience, intellectual insight, or intense suffering Christian enlightenment. For skeptical non-Christians, Homer in the first great book of Western civilization gives a precursor of Christian enlightenment.

At the opening of the Iliad, Achilles is angered because Agamemnon, the leader of the Greek expedition to Troy, has taken for himself Briseis, a beautiful and clever woman captured by Achilles. Since Achilles thinks he is the greatest warrior amongst the Greeks, he feels dishonored by Agamemnon, retires to his ship, and refuses to join in the battle against the Trojans. Blinded by his anger, Achilles allows his best friend, Patroclus, to use his armor and to do battle against the Trojans. Patroclus, masquerading as Achilles, is killed by Hector, the greatest Trojan warrior. Achilles goes berserk — enters battle, kills every Trojan in sight, including Hector, and in his rage attacks a river, the height of madness.

From Achilles’ immense suffering, a new person emerges. He sees that he has been exactly like other men — foolish, caught up in winning prizes, striving for eternal glory. The new Achilles is compassionate and even smiles at the foibles of his fellow warriors. Eva Brann, classics scholar and recipient of the National Humanities Medal, is surprised that “with the unaccountable suddenness of a divinity, Achilles is another being: the courtly, peace-keeping, tactful, and generous host at Patroclus’ funeral games.”^[15]

Homer shows us in the Iliad that suffering can destroy a person’s ego, correct his misunderstanding of himself, and join him in a more profound way to others. Suffering can move a person from a narrow self-love to an expansive love of others.

Maybe, every culture has caught a glimpse of agápē. Joan Halifax Roshi, the founder of the Upaya Zen Center in Santa Fe, New Mexico, tells the members of her sangha that “agápē is that non-referential love, which we refer to in our deepest Buddhist practice.” She adds, “Subtle agápē . . . is the love for everything.”[16]

Buddhists and Christians alike need love. To develop properly, a child needs the unconditional love of a mother or a constant caregiver. Psychologist René Spitz discovered through the study of hospitalized children that a child’s very first bond with another person is the basis for the later development of human love and friendship. A child under two years of age, if deprived of a single person’s continuous care for three months or more, develops emotional trauma that may result in death, even though the child is provided with perfectly adequate food, shelter, hygiene, and medication by a succession of compassionate nurses.^[17]

As lovable as we were as babies, we were utterly ignorant with an intense desire to know. In short, we were a cute bundle of erōs, the natural desire for full existence. We were born radically incomplete, and without erōs we would have remained so.

Our human nature sets us on the path of love; without love, we would literally be nothing.  We have no choice but to love and suffer. Some of us will become self-pitying sufferers, blaming others for our misery and constantly asking, “Why me?” For others, suffering leads to the death of the ego and to the birth of a new person dedicated to the wellbeing of others, to Christ living within them, whether they are Christian or not.

Endnotes

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[1] Steven Weinberg, The First Three Minutes: A Modern View of the Origin of the Universe (New York: Basic Books, 1977), p. 154.

[2] See Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity: An Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology, trans. Austryn Wainhouse, (New York: Knopf, 1971).

[3] See Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New York: Oxford Univers­ity Press, 1976), p. 21.

[4] See Joshua Greene and Jonathan Cohen, For the law, neuroscience changes nothing and everything, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society London B (2004) 359: 1781.

[5] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. George Lawrence (New York: Harper & Row, 1966 [1835, 1840]), p. 430.

[6] Kalama Sutta: To the Kalamas, trans. Thanissaro Bhikkhu.  

[7] Stephen Batchelor, After Buddhism: Rethinking the Dharma for a Secular Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), p. 258.

[8] The Dhammapada, trans. Juan Mascaró (London: Penguin Books, 1973), 24:346, p. 84.

[9] In the Buddhist literature translated in English, slightly different versions of the Blessed One’s relationship to his son, Rāhula, exist. Our text follows Bhikkhu Ñāṇamoli, trans. and ed., The Life of Buddha: According to the Pali Canon (Onakaska, WA: BPS Pariyatti Editions, 2001), pp. 77-78; Sherab Chodzin Kohn, A Life of the Buddha (Boston, MA: Shambhala, 2009), p. 67; Paul Carus, The Gospel of Buddha According to Old Records, “Rāhula, the Son” (Chicago,IL: Open Court, 1894).

[10] Visākhā Sutta: Visākhā, trans. Thanissaro Bhikkhu, 2012. Italics added.

[11] Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard (New York: Penguin, 1978), p. 37.

[12] In The Bhagavad Gita, the Sanskrit word that corresponds most closely to agápē is tyāga, the selfless action that has no desire for personal reward. See The Bhagavad Gita, trans. Eknath Easwaran with chapter introductions by Diana Morrison (Tomales, CA: Nilgiri Press, 1985), pp. 202-204 and 18.11.

[13] John 12:25. RSV

[14] Galatians 2:20. RSV

[15] Eva Brann, Homeric Moments: Clues to Delight in Reading the Odyssey and the Iliad (Philadelphia, PA: Paul Dry Books, 2002), p. 68.

[16] Joan Halifax Roshi, Aimless Love (Real Love, Real Compassion Part 4).

[17] René Spitz, The First Year of Life: A Psychoanalytic Study of Normal and Deviant Development of Object Relations (New York: International Universities Press, 1965). See also Robertson, J., and J. Bowlby. “Responses of Young Children to Separation from Their Mothers.”Paris: Courr. Cent. Int. Enf, 1952.