Читать книгу A Straight Road with 99 Curves - Gregory Shepherd - Страница 8

To the heart of youth the world is a highwayside. Passing for ever, he fares . . .

—Robert Louis Stevenson, Songs of Travel

“Who’s that guy, Paul?”

“That’s Buddha.”

“Who’s Buddha?”

“He’s a happy man. That’s why he’s laughing.”

My first encounter with Buddhism in any form was this moment in the 1950s when my brother and I stood in front of a Chinese restaurant in our hometown of North Arlington, New Jersey, gazing in fascination at a porcelain figure in its window of Hotei, the “Happy Buddha.” I looked at Paul after he said this, and his eyes were unblinking in concentration, as if he were trying to memorize the figure’s features so that he could draw them later on at home. He was seven and I was five. I was sure he knew everything.

Later on, during our Catholic high school years, Paul began bringing home books on various Eastern philosophies, and I found myself gravitating to the ones on Hinduism and Buddhism, perhaps because they were unfettered by the notions of eternal damnation that were driven home relentlessly at our church and school. Adolescence is universally marked by the search for identity, and my own search was motivated by a seemingly innate desire for transcendence of some sort. In my freshman year of high school I began doing hatha yoga exercises I learned from one of Paul’s books, and I read and reread the Bhagavad Gita, from which I learned the rudiments of karma yoga. In this practice, one relinquishes any desire for reward for one’s labors, and I found that when I ran on the track team in this frame of mind, the energy that might have been frittered away in the hope of gaining glory (or winning the heart of the forever-out-of-reach Nancy Jones) was channeled instead into the act of running, an act now purified of the fever of achievement. At times, while running without regard for goal or reward, I would momentarily experience a state of being wherein my sense of self became identified with the act of running. “I” was “running.” It was a strange, fleeting sensation that I didn’t seek to cultivate. It was as though I were disappearing.

Also thanks to Paul’s books, I became fascinated with the idea of enlightenment, through which Shakyamuni Buddha and others after him were said to have transcended the realm of dukkha, or the essential unsatisfactoriness of life. Perhaps the closest expression of dukkha in Western philosophy comes from Immanuel Kant, who wrote, “Give a man everything he desires, and yet at this very moment he will feel that this everything is not everything.” The Zen form of Buddhism, unlike other forms that spoke of enlightenment almost as an abstract concept, offered the possibility of realizing one’s true nature through the practice of zazen, or Zen-sitting. Part and parcel with that realization, I read further, came liberation from dukkha and true peace of mind. Thus I began to meditate late at night by sitting quietly and trying to center my concentration on my breathing.

To the same degree that I was put off by Catholicism’s rigid dogma and truckling to authority, I was attracted to Buddhism’s emphasis on self-reliance and finding one’s own way to freedom and happiness, even in the midst of samsara, the ever-changing world of illusion. No faith needed, just look and see for yourself. Now that was free will, unlike the Catholic version that was more like something out of a Dirty Harry movie: go ahead and sin to your heart’s content—if you’re feeling lucky, punk.

The independence of spirit of Buddhism is epitomized in the Sri Lankan Buddhist monk Soma Thera’s translation of the Kalama Sutta, a scriptural text I read over and over again:

Do not go upon what has been acquired by repeated hearing, nor upon tradition, nor upon rumor, nor upon what is in a scripture, nor upon surmise, nor upon an axiom, nor upon specious reasoning, nor upon a bias towards a notion that has been pondered over, nor upon another’s seeming ability. When you yourselves know: “These things are good; these things are not blamable; these things are praised by the wise; undertaken and observed, these things lead to benefit and happiness,” enter on and abide in them.

I also read that in the Zen form of Buddhism, one eventually comes to throw even Zen away, as it too can be a hindrance to enlightenment. All of this was a far cry from the warning “Outside the [Catholic] church there is no salvation” that we heard over and over again at church and school. I kept a journal in those days and made an entry on the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths:

First Noble Truth: Nothing lasts forever. Nothing is capable of satisfying the spirit for long. Do not be attached to what you are experiencing, otherwise you will experience suffering.

Second Noble Truth: Craving sensory stimulation, craving existence, and craving non-existence give rise to the continuity of being, and with it its attendant suffering. Attaining a state of non-craving should be part of your daily effort.

Third Noble Truth: One can end eternal suffering by ending the craving that leads to the continuation of suffering.

Fourth Noble Truth: Ending the craving that leads to the continuation of suffering is brought about through living by the ideals of the Noble Eightfold Path.

Before long, I came across another Buddhist concept, that of “no-self,” which caused me no small amount of consternation. Sure, I wanted happiness and peace, but not extinction, and here was the Buddha’s message of liberation being linked, it seemed to me at least, to not existing. I was further frightened by this idea as a result of a visit to the dentist in which I was hooked up to a breathing mask that delivered nitrous oxide through my nose as a painkiller. Almost immediately I felt my very existence was about to be extinguished, and that I was disappearing down a vast, airless tunnel. I heard my voice scream, “Take it off!” as if from a million miles away. Afterward, I wondered if the no-self experience of Buddhism also produced this sense of imminent extinction. If so, I would tread carefully along this Noble Eightfold Path I was reading about.

A year later, despite having twice been thrown out of his class for disruptive behavior, I somehow managed to persuade my sophomore-year high school Latin teacher to allow me to give a short presentation on the Eightfold Path in commemoration of Shakyamuni Buddha’s birthday. To start things off, I asked everyone in the class to sit with their eyes closed and just observe their thoughts as they arose one after another, much as they might watch the ocean waves rolling onto the beach at Asbury Park. The teacher and most of my classmates were more than a little skeptical at first, but by the end of my pres­entation everyone joined in on a rousing chorus of “Happy birthday, dear Buddha, happy birthday to you!”—although one of my more irreverent friends changed the ending to “Happy birthday, fuck you!”

Years into my future I would also be saying “fuck you” to the Buddha, but not nearly as light-heartedly.

•••

A respite from all the relentlessly negative indoctrination of Catholic education came in my junior year high school history class, taught by Brother Blaise (not his real name),* who introduced us to Christian mavericks such as Meister Eckhart, St. John of the Cross, and St. Teresa of Avila, mystics who emphasized peace and oneness, with nary a word about guilt and hellfire. Brother Blaise also told us about the connection between the early Christian mystics and ancient Buddhist sages. My ears pricked up. They come together, he said, in the sense of the phrase “the peace that passeth understanding”: in both traditions there comes a point where one experiences a deep peace that cannot be explained in logical terms, since the oneness of the experience goes beyond the dualism of logic. Not a lot of this made much sense to me, but I felt that the underlying experience was the important thing. A deep part of me hungered for this “peace that passeth understanding.”

At Branch Brook Park, Newark, New Jersey, with my brother Paul (left), around 1957.

One of the only things that ever made me sit up and pay attention at church was during Lent when the priest would read aloud from the Bible about Pontius Pilate asking Christ, “What is truth?” Christ remains silent. None of the priests or nuns or brothers ever attempted to explain what Christ’s non-answer meant, which made me even more curious about it. Was his not answering a way of getting back at Pilate for his part in the impending crucifixion? Or was his silence itself his answer to the question “What is truth?”

Silence of the mind—when all thoughts and concepts die down—that was what the Christian mystics seemed to be talking about. Was Christ referring to the same thing with his non-answer? I had always been drawn to these types of mystical considerations, and even occasionally, back when I was an altar boy, had daydreamed about becoming a Trappist monk. As I would light the candles for morning Mass, I sometimes sensed an inkling of soul-peace, the pungent tang of beeswax and sweet incense heightening the mystical dimension, the “state of grace.”

By high school, Catholicism for the most part represented fear and repression with nary a trace of mysticism and “the peace that passeth understanding,” and one day I simply rejected it all outright. I stopped going to Sunday Mass or Confession with no more fear of mortal sin. It seemed to me that the Church’s emphasis on sin back then was to spirituality what insecticide was to crops: the former is meant to help the latter grow but just ends up poisoning it. A seed-kernel deep within my soul increasingly yearned for the positive and life-changingly transcendent—in a word, for liberation as embodied in the Buddhist enlightenment experience.

Part and parcel of this quest for enlightenment over the next several decades of my life would be a tug-of-war between true spiritual substance on the one hand, and the superficial image of that substance on the other. There is no ego like the “spiritual” ego. It’s almost as if one needs to go through the pitfall of pride and move beyond it before the mysteries of the spirit reveal themselves. That certainly was the case for me.

•••

On a full scholarship at the University of Pennsylvania, I attended only one course in my freshman year with any enthusiasm, and that was one on Eastern religions. The professor left most of the teaching duties on Buddhism to an assistant from Japan named Mori-sensei (not his real name). Mori-sensei declared in class one day that the only way out of the suffering and unending dukkha-ness of life is to see that there is no intrinsically real or permanent self. He also talked about “arhats” (loners who works on their own personal enlightenment) and “bodhisattvas” (unselfish meditators who put off their final enlightenment in order to save others). I decided then and there that I was an arhat, a legacy of my days as a lonely long-distance runner. But this business about not having a self continued to gnaw at me.

“If there’s no self,” I asked Mori-sensei one day after class, “then how did the Buddha know to say, ‘I alone am the holy one’ after his enlightenment? Who was the I who said that?” Mori-sensei regarded me intently in a way that made me think he was either enlightened or very good at faking it. “That’s something you have to find out for yourself.” He smiled at the irony and wordplay of his answer and continued. “It’s not something that can be explained. It’s beyond understanding in the normal way.”

“The ‘peace that passeth understanding’?” I wondered silently.

I dropped out of Penn in my sophomore year, since the coursework did nothing to assuage the urgency I felt about somehow “solving” life now. I roomed with my brother Paul in New Brunswick, New Jersey, and we began attending lectures on Buddhism at the First Zen Institute in midtown Manhattan. Paul was working fifty-hour weeks as a “paint specialist” at a dark, satanic mill of a chemical company, a job that often left him with crushing headaches and nausea from the toxic fumes. On weekends, he and I would gatecrash frat parties and dances. At one such party he had a bad—a really bad—trip after he helped himself to some “electric kool-aid,” not realizing the amount of LSD therein, or that it was also laced with methamphetamine. I stayed with him throughout a long, panic-filled night, and the experience scarred him for months. I had my own bad trips with LSD during this time, and thus Paul and I were counting the days until our upcoming trip to Hawaii to visit our sister, who had lived there for several years.

Unlike me, a college dropout, Paul had graduated from college with a degree in music, a passion he and I had shared since early childhood. Otherwise, our temperaments could not have been more different. Always of a dreamy, introspective nature, Paul could retreat into himself for hours at a time, reading his philosophy books or drawing fantastical cartoons. I also read voluminously, but my personality was more restless and given to physical activity, like long-distance running. The seeds of personality conflict had been sown early, and when we were pre-teens Paul and I often had knock-down, drag-out fights, the ferocity of which still makes me cringe. In high school, Paul gravitated to the smart-set, while I hung out with the jocks, each of us regarding the other with a measure of contempt. But now that we were older, we grew closer through our common interest in Zen, although Paul was ever more diligent and hard-working, while I was impulsive in a ’60s “go-with-the-flow” way. Despite our personality differences, we now hoped to pursue our interest in Zen more actively in Hawaii, given the strong Buddhist influences on its culture. On New Year’s Day, 1971, we boarded a plane and flew west.