Forget the Buddhism
By Lisa Bright
January 2002
I’m leafing through the latest issue of a Buddhist magazine, a handsome quarterly that apparently commands a broad readership. Including me. I’ve been a subscriber for years. And by now, I’m quite familiar with the public faces of American Buddhism as they appear and reappear in these pages. Maybe a little too familiar: I’m not sure how much more I want to know about all our various Orders and Disorders, and all the media-savvy personalities behind them.
It’s not that I’ve ceased to admire the energy of these people, or their commitment to teaching and writing—far from it. Publishers’ catalogs are practically bulging with their titles; I like to look through the new releases once in a while and I usually find quite a few that could be helpful or at least interesting. But even though I’m a consumer of this literature myself, there’s something about my magazine that troubles me—something beyond the common weaknesses of these publications.
I’m not much bothered by the excessive earnestness, or the preachy appeals to wisdom and compassion. In a world where neither of these qualities is much in evidence, a little preaching on their merits might not be such a bad thing. So what is it that underlies this sneaking sense of uneasiness? I turn to my husband, Chris, who is also a long-time Zen practitioner. His response is simple but pointed. “It’s all about Buddhism,” he says. “But Buddhism isn’t about Buddhism.”
That’s it. That’s what is bothering me. It’s so easy to fall into the habit of thinking that studying Buddhism is the same thing as practicing it. So we read and talk. We try—usually not too successfully—to compare the different Buddhist traditions. Maybe we learn a couple of different meditation methods. And of course, there’s nothing wrong with any of this. If it’s done thoughtfully, it can actually be very helpful: after all, it’s just as important to exercise the intellect and the imagination as it is to exercise the body. The problem arises when we begin to assume that the words or meditation procedures or whatever somehow “contain” the thing itself. It sounds ridiculous when it’s stated explicitly—and yet it’s one of the most seductive distractions there is.
I know a woman who has been trying for years to find the perfect sangha. From her discussions with monks, her reading, and so forth, she has built up a kind of ideal. I have a rough idea of what this must be: a beautiful temple, frequented by people who are somehow, well, more “authentic” than maybe you or me. The trouble, of course, is that there is no such place—and even if there were, it wouldn’t do her any good. This is the trap: we start with a vision, apparently very positive, and by degrees the vision takes us prisoner. For some people, like this woman, the prison is the anguish of failing to connect with the ideal. For others, the prison is religious pretension of one kind or another—unhealthy conceits about the depth of one’s practice. Either way, the prisoner ends up isolated from the magnificence of life, both within and without. What should seem beautiful, or terrifying, or wonderful beyond comprehension instead just looks flat and dull—a reflection of the sterility within. And the saddest thing is that the prisoners aren’t even likely to notice what has happened to them!
Even the very best temples can be prisons of this sort—depending of course on the attitudes of the people within them. One of the monks I most respect had practiced for over 30 years at Songgwang Sa, a famous Zen monastery in Korea. He was orphaned at an early age, and raised in the temple. As he matured, he developed great strength in his practice, and eventually he became a celebrated teacher, in constant demand for lectures. The years slipped by and he reached middle age not knowing any life other than that of the monastery. During this whole period, he says, he never once doubted the importance of his position.
Then one day in May 1980, he arrived in the city of Kwang Ju to spend a couple of days organizing temple supplies. (Like most large Korean temples, Songgwang Sa is in the countryside.) At the time, South Korea was governed by a military dictatorship and the monk, like most Koreans, deeply disapproved of this but tried not to think about it too much. For monks especially, this was a natural attitude; after all, they were supposed to be cultivating detachment. But even if he had been following politics closely, he would never have guessed that he was about to witness a defining moment in the life of modern Korea. He had walked right into the Kwang Ju uprising.
Bands of students, advocating the overthrow of the government, had taken over several university buildings, government offices, and broadcasting studios. They were trying to promote similar uprisings in other cities. They had refused government demands to surrender. Some of them were armed, although poorly. The government’s patience was rapidly exhausted, and the army was ordered to surround the city. And then Korea declared war on itself: the army invaded Kwang Ju. Hundreds of people were herded together and bayoneted or shot. Bodies of the dead and dying were heaped in gymnasiums, in the streets, in the buildings the students had occupied.
The uprising was suppressed, but the legitimacy of the regime had been seriously undermined. Ten years later, Korea finally became a democracy. And at least in retrospect, the uprising seems to have marked the beginning of that long, difficult transition. But that’s not how it looked at the time. And the monk was right in the middle of it. What good was his training at such a moment as this? What could he say to the people bleeding to death in the streets? For the first time in his life, he later recalled, he felt ashamed to be a monk. He felt as if he were going mad—as if his life no longer made any sense.
Even after he returned to the monastery, his memories of the massacre gave him no rest. His quest for enlightenment seemed contrived and unforgivably selfish. He could no longer meditate. And so he abandoned the monastery. He spent the next two years in India, just walking, following the route the Buddha himself is thought to have taken through the subcontinent. He was mugged several times—nearly killed once or twice. But he kept going, and he kept asking himself: what would the Buddha have done in Kwang Ju?
Eventually, he realized that he was asking the wrong question. What the Buddha would or wouldn’t have done was really beside the point. The monk came to see that he would himself have to take full responsibility for his own practice, if it was ever going to amount to anything. No Buddha, no monastery could develop it for him. So he returned to Korea but not to the monastery. Instead, he settled in a poor, backwater village, where he raised vegetables in abandoned farm plots and shared the harvest with his neighbors.
The villagers were not a particularly attractive lot, especially the men. They were resentful and suspicious of outsiders, frequently drunk, and in the habit of settling their differences with fist fights. But they gradually warmed up to their peculiar new neighbor and he coaxed them into establishing a communal organic farm. Through his temple contacts, the monk found plenty of customers for their produce; the farm expanded and prospered. Eventually, the monk met and married an accomplished cellist, who left her musical career to grow soybeans and radish and make miso. Together they had three children.
Of course, these events did not go unnoticed by the monastic community, and the monk was denounced as a renegade—as having abandoned the path and become just a layman with religious pretensions. The monk says that as far as he is concerned, he is still a monk—and that’s all that he has ever been. But as he sees it, he needed to get out of the monastery in order to keep his practice alive. Long before those awful days in Kwang Ju, he sensed that he had begun to exhaust his personal possibilities within the formal monastic regime. Witnessing the massacre just seemed to catalyze a change in him that had been in process, albeit much more slowly, for quite some time. His current life, he argues, is not a repudiation of his formal practice but a kind of realization of it. In a sense, he says, he is now applying what he learned at the temple.
It’s not hard to understand why the monasteries would cry foul. After all, if every monk behaved this way, the monasteries would be deserted! But of course, that won’t happen. The monastic life can be highly conducive to practice and most monks aren’t going to leave it without good reason. Personally, I don’t see how external circumstances, taken by themselves, could ever make a person “more” or “less” Buddhist. I think the telling point is more subtle: whether you’re in a famous temple or a run-down village, you’ll know you’re really getting somewhere when your practice is no longer about Buddhism.