The Naked Monk

Archive for the ‘Stories’ Category

Last weekend I was interviewed by Drew Marshall, host of ‘Canada’s most listened to spiritual talk show.’ Drew believes in Jesus Christ, but he also describes himself as an “autodidactic iconoclast” who rages against the “bizarre North American Christian sub-culture.”

I liked him. Rather more surprisingly, he liked me.

I really don’t believe in believers. Considering all the scorn I’ve heaped upon Christians (and Buddhists too, for that matter), I don’t expect to be liked. Anyway, Drew had actually read my book – which not all interviewers bother to do. He also asked thoughtful questions. Best of all, he tried to provoke me, describing my encounter with Tibetan Buddhism as a sort of, “counter-culture, esoteric, pseudo-elitist, leave-it-all-behind, throw-out-the-baby-with-the-bathwater and let’s buy into something else” trip. I had to agree; who could resist such a brash string of adjectival phrases?

After the interview, I revisited some of his questions in the privacy of my own head and realised I could have answered all of them in a dozen different ways. That doesn’t mean I was unhappy with the answers I gave, but that his questions reached deep. I appreciated that, and felt that I was in the company of someone of like mind. That’s a rare treat. There’s a link to the interview on this page.

Like my own interest in Buddhism, Drew is deeply concerned that his Christianity be authentic, and not just a show. He employs none of the pat phrases we hear from most public Christians (God-willing, God-bless, etc.), who use words as supernatural incantations. He’s also sensitive to the close relationship between beliefs and hypocrisy, and not afraid to expose his own failings. As the interview drew to an end, he considered my own journey and, after a cautious disclaimer, asked me, “Why not Jesus?”

I might have answered with the counter question, “Well, why not Buddha?” Instead, I described the Buddha’s legacy as substantial and measurable enough to have sustained me through times that Jesus’ words, well … didn’t. Buddha taught, and was recorded in great detail, over a period of forty-five years, whereas a fragmented selection of the words of Jesus were passed down after his death, with considerable disparity, by four evangelists in well under a hundred thousand words. I was never able to figure him out, or understand in any meaningful sense how he might know me.

Radio interviews are time-sensitive. I’d have liked to have answered in more detail; to point out that, first, the accounts of those who knew Jesus are far from transparent; and, second, as memorable and inspirational as Jesus’ parables and teachings are, they’re mostly about the sort of people we should become. The Buddha’s teachings opened doors for me because they’re mostly about how we might become that way. They describe, dispassionately, without guilt or recrimination, why we keep getting ourselves into trouble, and what practices lead to peace and compassion.

To put it in their own words: Jesus was The Way. Buddha taught The Way. Grasping the legacy of either of these great teachers has little to do with what we say — whether about our beliefs or our rationalizations — and is all about what we do in accepting the challenge of living with integrity from day to day. In the case of Jesus, it requires enormous interpretation; with Buddha, great reflection.

There’s no such thing as a religion that can’t be abused:
http://www.christianpost.com/article/20100504/buddhist-extremists-drive-christians-from-village-in-bangladesh/

We just had five great days in Philadelphia and New York, promoting The Novice. Up here in Canada, we tend to be critical of the good old U.S.A. — which is to say U.S. politics — while actually feeling pretty good about the people. Some of them still seem to think we all live in igloos. That’s okay guys; we make fun of you too. Really though, we are cousins  — two countries born from the loins of the same strangely repressed-adventurous Anglo-Saxon stock, then strengthened with language, culture, cuisine, religion skin-color and attitudes from a worldwide gene pool.

Glenn Wallis and the Won Institute of Graduate Studies gave us a warm welcome and a full house for my talk on Friday morning. Glenn was generous in his praise, which is to say that he and I see eye-to-eye on most things Buddhist. Like me, he has little time for supernatural nonsense about the Buddha and the Buddhist saints, and can only imagine the man Siddhattha as just that — a man, and hard-core empiricist to boot. To think othewise is to put his accomplishment beyond the reach of ordinary mortals, which is about as disrespectful of the Buddha’s life as you can get. Glenn and his wife Friederike fed us a wonderful dinner at their home while we tried to figure out why so many ’Buddhists’ end up as uncritical believers in search of spiritual security, far from the groundless, iconoclastic role model of the Buddha himself.

New York was strangely peaceful. It took us a while to figure out just how: as usual, the traffic was crazy, the sidewalks crowded with weaving, slouching, cell-phoning, jay-walking, happy, sad, crazy, tall, short, slim — unexpectedly not so wide — people of every color, size and shape; the sky hummed with airplanes, helicopters and radio waves. Then we realized what had changed — no honking. The formerly endless barking of cars, trucks and mostly taxis had finally been silenced by a new by-law equipped with a $350 fine. What a difference! The noisiest place of all turned out to be our hotel room in the Millennium Hilton — I mention it so you know to avoid it at all costs — which faced right into ground zero and it’s relentless 24/7 construction schedule. Still, as sleepless as our nights were, it was impossible to ignore the momentous significance of this mass murder site. I gazed again and again into the haunted, empty space.

The most unusual part of our trip was my talk at Tibet House — rather than a full house, it was intimate and select. One by one, the visitors filed in and introduced themselves as I put out chairs — a fine-artist, a copy writer, a young man in search of himself, a lady curious about Buddhist debate and — just as I was beginning, a straggler. An older man walked in carrying a seventies-era briefcase wound with duct-tape and a bulging plastic bag; he looked as self-possessed as he did out of place. He unfolded a chair right between Caroline and me, blocking our view of each other. Making himself comfortable, he folded his hands and stared at me.

“Good evening,” I ventured. He stared at me with expressionless intensity.

“You’ve come to hear about The Novice, then?” That’s about as good as I get at small talk.

“Is that your book,” he asked abruptly, pointing.

I held it up. “The Novice? Yes.”

He reached for it. I handed it over. He examined it minutely.

I wondered if he wasn’t all there and said, “I’m going to talk about it. You’ll be able to buy it if you want.”

He didn’t look up.

“I’ll begin now, then, I said more loudly.”

He continued to ignore me, opening the first page.

By now, everyone was staring at him from all sides. He was oblivious, seemingly unperturbed. Suddenly, he raised his head, gave the faintest of smiles and blurted out, “I’m deaf. I can’t hear.”

“You’re deaf?” I asked. “Completely?”

But he’d already turned back to the book.

“You can’t hear anything?” I said, this time very loudly. He didn’t look up.

He read for about twenty minutes while I spoke, then closed the the book and placed it face down on the floor. Concerned for its resale value, I reached towards it.

“I’m going to buy it,” he assured me. “I’m going to buy it.” He opened his briefcase, which was neatly packed to the brim, pulled out a check book and filled out a stub, then a check. He handed it over.

I opened the book and wrote in it, ‘To Richard O’Neill’ — the name on the check — ‘who came to hear me speak.’ I signed it.

He accepted the book without a smile, without a word of thanks and yet in some way I can’t explain, graciously. I thought his eye twinkled, but can’t swear to it. He leaned back and watched me for the remaining hour and forty minutes with rapt attention. At first I mouthed my words precisely, but had no sense that he was lip reading, or had any idea what I was saying. When at the end he got up to leave, he came to me and asked, “Where can I write to you?”

I pointed to my web site address on the dust cover.

He nodded, satisfied, and then announced. “I’m writing a book.”

“A memoir? I asked. Disappointingly, he didn’t even respond to that; he just turned on his heel and made a bee line for the door.

We were all wide-eyed as he left without a backward glance. Nobody was untouched by this man. Even by New York standards, he was unique. He made our evening unforgettable.

It was the end of a tiring, annoying day, and the overwhelming emotion was “bugger it!” Caroline would never employ such coarse language, of course, but she still expressed herself in a surprising way: “You can have all the purpose and meaning of life in the world,” she said, “or, you can just have a great glass of wine. It’s all the same in the end; I mean, we’re all going down — aren’t we?”

We looked at each other in shock for a moment before all the complicated emotions of the day exploded into laughter. The fact is, we both spend one day after another preoccupied with finding purpose and giving meaning to life — but there’s a point at which you just stop taking yourself seriously and let go. Sometimes short-term catharsis trumps profound universal truth.

The idea of Truth has driven ethical philosophers and spiritual seekers for thousands of years, and it’s not a bad thing, but it’s still just an idea. The reality of life is that no matter what we believe, we don’t know much, and probably never will. You might call ‘I don’t know’ the truth that underlies everything. It doesn’t mean we give up, or lose heart. It’s just that when it stands before you in all its irrefutable glory, words and ideas cease, not to mention pretentions of knowledge and righteousness. All that’s left is consciousness itself; it’s as if we’re tricked into pure mindfulness by the blatent bankrupcy of theorizing. It’s a good thing. There’s no harm in a glass of good wine, and there may be hidden splendors. In those moments of visceral mindfulness, it’s not what you do that matters; it’s how you do it.

Yesterday I spoke to a surprisingly shy lot of McGill students and afterwards had lunch with some of them and their Professor, Lara Braitstein. The class was on Tantric Buddhism, and they’d all been instructed to read my memoir (see right), which was on their reading list alongside bios of Marpa and Milarepa — two highly eccentric Tibetan mahasiddhas. There was a time when being elevated to the Buddhist big-leagues like that might have tempted my poor ego, but yesterday it just provoked a hearty laugh.

My, how things have changed! Dissent, doubt, questioning and criticism of teachers came so easily to them all that I had to remark on it at lunch afterwards: “You know, all this talk would have been seditious back in my day.” I recalled how nervous I’d been as a waning monk to speak my mind and transgress the unwritten rule that all things Tibetan were sacrosanct.

Tibetans are more accessible today; more of them speak English and more is known of their quirks. Also, far more is known of the grisly annals of Tibetan history, which have been excavated like never before in search of a rational explanation for the Dorje Shugden debacle. Nothing’s quite as healthy as the clear light of day. Still, I can’t help thinking that the colorful complexities of Tibetan Buddhism, quite apart from its potential for good and, dare I say it—evil, obscure the profound simplicity of what the Buddha taught. Whether you study the Mahayana (advanced) and Tantrayana (esoteric) teachings that have sprung up in the wake of the historical Buddha, there’s no substitute for, and no excuse for not, getting to the root of what he was all about.

Even studying the Pali Canon, championed by the Southern (Early) Schools of Buddhism, demands a critical eye, for it’s not always clear what the Buddha said and what others said for him (presumably but not necessarily in good faith). Just as the Hebrew and Christian Bibles must now suffer the forensic scrutiny of linguists and historians, Buddhist texts and dogmas too are coming under the spotlight. For those who feel threatened by all this, remember that the Buddha wasn’t teaching a belief system so much as a means of enquiry, and even though he used philosophy he wasn’t providing answers. His contribution to civilization was to pull the rug from under our feet and encourage us to let go, for nothing’s been more painful, destructive and futile for the human race than hanging on to our illusions of certainty, truth and righteousness.