This one’s easy. In the following, understand that I’m talking about Buddhism mainly as seen in the US.

There are two basic kinds of Buddhism: Mahayana and Theravada. Mahayana means “Greater Vehicle” and is meant for everybody, including monastic and regular people. Theravada used to be called Hinayana by the Mahayanists, only the Theravadists didn’t like that, because it means “Smaller Vehicle.” I don’t think they meant it as an insult; they only meant that Theravada Buddhism was a practice meant for monks, for people willing to shut themselves away in a monastery and not engage fully in human life, e.g.,  marriage, family, working, etc. And oh yeah, women couldn’t join.

People who like Theravada Buddhism seem to like it for its traditionalism, and claim that it is superior to other forms of Buddhism because it uses Buddha’s “original” teachings. Since the Buddha made it clear that this is an experiential thing, passed mind-to-mind from teacher to student, this doesn’t make sense to me. The argument (and it seems to me that they’re the only ones who care) about whose sutras are more original turns me off. And, while it’s nice that they’ve changed it in the West to include lay people and women, it seems to me that that should invalidate their claim to traditionalism. I get hung up on all this when I think of Theravada.

Vipassana or insight meditation sounded interesting to me, but when I did a little – a very little – reading about it, it just sounded like zazen with a whole lot more language attached to it.

So much for Theravada. In the Mahayana tradition, there are of course many flavors to choose from, but the ones most familiar to us are Tibetan and Zen. I love the Dalai Lama, but every time I look into Tibetan Buddhism, I come smack up against a whole lot of – stuff. Jeweled trees, mandalas, gods, demons, prayer wheels. They’re big into symbolism and images. It’s gorgeous, but I find it all very distracting. I also can’t get behind reincarnation, which is central to Tibetan Buddhism and many other forms. I don’t know everything; reincarnation may be real, but if it is, it’s not something I can afford to focus on in this lifetime.

Overall, among Buddhists, my impression is that all the schools are cool with each other. There are no bitter disagreements, and as far as I know the Dalai Lama doesn’t think Thich Nhat Hahn is going to hell just because they represent different traditions. If I were from Tibet, I would be a Tibetan Buddhist. But I’m an American, so I can choose.

Zen just feels right to me. It always has. It’s simple. The emphasis is on just this. Zen says, basically, sit down and shut up, and see for yourself. No arguments over doctrine. No visualizations. Just this.

Plus, it has lots of stories, and I like stories.

Most cats are Buddhists.

(Part 1 here.)

I went abroad for junior year, so no more meditating with the professor and his group. I tried to do it on my own, with miserable results. I’ve dealt with major depression all of my life (my mother’s death, mostly). Sitting down alone and focusing on my breath while suffering from untreated depression was A Big Mistake. ‘Nuff said.

After I finished up at university, I moved to San Francisco. The famous San Francisco Zen Center was founded by Shunryu Suzuki in 1962, and was one of the first Zen temples  located outside of Japan. Suzuki-roshi gave the talks that became the classic Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. But there was something wrong there. My impression of that place and the people who went there was subtly tainted somehow, and I never went inside, though I often passed the lovely brick building on Page street. (Recently I read the book Shoes Outside the Door: Desire, Devotion, and Excess at San Francisco Zen Center by Michael Downing, which explains or at least describes what had happened there just a few years earlier; I’m amazed that I picked up on it.)

But I kept thinking about Zen, and the things I had read.

I deliberately chose not to read a whole lot about it, though. I understood that it wasn’t something I could get from a book, but that reading a lot of books about it might give me that impression. I would become an expert, a know-it-all, and never learn anything. The notion of beginner’s mind was about all I had understood from Suzuki-roshi’s book, apart from the concept of mindfulness, of being present in the moment. That’s another idea that I instinctively understood was true and important. I often practiced just being present in the moment, doing whatever I was doing, not thinking about the future or the past or daydreaming or whatever. There were other Zen places I could have tried in San Francisco, but I was still fighting the idea of labeling myself or joining any kind of organization, particularly a (semi-) religious one. And I was also doing other things.

Eventually the depression got so bad, I turned to my old books from that now-long-ago philosophy class, looking for something, anything, that would help. Zen masters are proverbially serene, and I wanted some of that. Buddhism’s insistence that there is no self confused and angered me: if there’s no “me,” then why am “I” hurting so much? Yet, when I finally tried just letting the depression be, something happened. It didn’t banish the depression overnight, but I believe I would never have come out of that episode if I hadn’t had this insight.

It took a few more years, and a move to another coast, for me to go to a zendo and begin a practice. As I still couldn’t do zazen by myself, I had to find a group to join, as uncomfortable as that made me. Resisting the pull of something I felt was true because it had an “ism” attached to the end of it was absurd, though, and eventually I realized that. And anyway, this is one “ism” that understands that what’s important is not some doctrine you believe in, but what you do. It still troubled me to join up, but I thought, it’s the price I have to pay for what I believe I can learn here.

And maybe being uncomfortable with a group is something I can work on.

I tried a couple of places before I settled on the one where I go now. It has a stronger Japanese flavor than most American places have. In fact, the Abbot himself is Japanese, so, while definitely modified for American culture, it is still very traditional. This intimidated me at first, and I liked the challenge of it. Having more cultural differences keeps me from getting used to it. After two and a half years, it still feels strange to me. It helps me keep my beginner’s mind.

And from the first time that I heard the Abbot speak, I knew I was in the right place. He’s not perfect, either, but I can tell he gets it. I definitely have a lot to learn, and this guy seems to know something, so okay.

It’s been hard. Sitting meditation at home still doesn’t work for me, so I have to go and do it with these people. Sitting with a group makes it possible for me to sit for long periods of time. And sitting for long periods of time makes it possible for… well, that’s another topic. Let me just tell you, it’s worth it.

It takes time and it takes discipline. I knew I would be more disciplined if I took a vow, so I went ahead and committed myself to it. I took the precepts and officially became a Buddhist about a year and a half ago. It does help me be disciplined. And I have learned a lot.

And being part of a group still chafes. But now I know, it’s the places with the most sensation that need the most work.

Daibutsu, Great Buddha in Kamakura, Japan

Calling myself a Buddhist makes me uncomfortable. In a way, that’s why I became one.

Let’s see if I can be a little less obtuse.

My search for ultimate meaning started early. My mother was diagnosed with leukemia, and died just before my fifth birthday. The adults around me did their best to explain and to console me, but not much of what they said about death – and where exactly my mother had gone – made any sense to me. God? Heaven? Angels? You die, and somehow you end up in this really nice place where everyone you ever loved eventually shows up too, and then you spend eternity there. But, you have to earn it.

Even at five, that sounded fishy to me.

I tried. I really tried, until I was sixteen, to believe and trust in what I had been taught, about Jesus and God and Christianity. Some of it sounds okay, like the being-nice-to-each-other parts, though I didn’t see a whole lot of that going on. There was Mother Teresa, and 45 minutes on Sundays and holidays, and not much else to Christianity as far as I could see. And although the idea of living forever had its appeal, on a visceral level it also horrified me. While the cosmology of Christianity was hard to accept, and contradicted what I was learning in science, I wanted to believe in that moral system and that view of the universe, and as long as I did, I was sincere.

I don’t want to slam Christianity, I really don’t. But the most important legacy I have from those years is a supreme dissatisfaction with what is generally accepted as normal. “Reality.” I embraced the idea that it’s vital to know what’s really going on here. Most people don’t have that. My friends tend to be people who do.

So, what happened at sixteen? Disillusionment, what else? I began to wake up to the greater reality of the world and this life, and like any thinking, feeling person, I was appalled. I read Bertrand Russell and saw religion in a new light. The scales dropped from my eyes, I became an atheist, and I began to read the existentialists.

What I found there made more sense than anything I had heard so far. The world, and life itself, they say, are essentially meaningless; the only meaning there is, has to be created by each person in his or her own life. Existentialism is the only form of Western philosophy I ever heard of that begins with the idea that life is suffering.

But there was something wrong with it, too. Something too bleak, or complicated, and definitely egocentric. It didn’t quite satisfy me.

Then, my senior year of high school, I read Siddharthaby Herman Hesse. Here at last I recognized something true, something that rested quietly inside my mind. There was a lot that I didn’t understand, but the core of it resonated with me like nothing else ever had.

“… all the voices, all the goals, all the yearnings, all the sorrows, all the pleasures, all the good and evil, all of them together was the world. All of them together was the stream of events, the music of life…”
- Herman Hesse, Siddhartha

But I was too cynical to join up then. I had just shed Christianity, I didn’t want to become a part of some other religion. I mistrusted yet another “ism,” as so many of us do, and rightly so. I became a punk rocker, appreciating the irony of aligning myself with a group of nonconformists. That kind of irony is an essential element in Zen, by the way, so this was good training. The connection between Zen Buddhism and punk has been well described in Brad Warner’s book, Hardcore Zen: Punk Rock, Monster Movies, & the Truth about Reality.

Nevertheless, in college I took a Chinese philosophy class, knowing that the emphasis was on Taoism and Cha’an Buddhism (“Zen” is the Japanese way of saying “Cha’an”). I discovered that, although the tradition of the teacher-student relationship is fundamental to Zen, so is the punk rock value of questioning authority.  Be a lamp unto yourselves, were Buddha’s last words. That made sense to me.

And, famously, the founder of the Rinzai sect of Zen Buddhism said, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.” How punk rock is that!

I learned to meditate with a small group from that class, even chanted a little, self-consciously. The professor took some of us on a field trip to another town, where there was a Zen temple. That was a very conflicting experience for me, and for some of the others, too. It was a beautiful building, clean and airy, with nice-smelling incense, filled with good people who seemed sincere. But a bunch of white people walking around in Eastern-looking robes? Their heads shaved? Talking in riddles? And why were we bowing to this statue of Buddha, when I had thought we were supposed to kill him?

What did any of this have to do with that still, deep truth I had sensed in “Siddhartha”?

All of that made a strong impression. I had doubts, but I was still interested. My worldview was developing, and I got some good ideas from Buddhism, what little I understood. I wasn’t really sure I needed a spiritual system at all, though even in college I realized that it was just possible that I wouldn’t be able to come up with all the answers myself.

(Part 2 here.)