The Accidental Buddhist. Mindfulness, Enlightenment, and Sitting Still

156 Pages·1997·0.94 MB·English

by  Dinty W. Moore

ALSO BY DINTY W. MOORE
The Emperor’s Virtual Clothes
THE ACCIDENTAL BUDDHIST
Mindfulness, Enlightenment, and Sitting Still
DINTY W. MOORE
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
TO MARIA RAPHAELLA ROMASCO MOORE
TEACHER, DAUGHTER, AND FRIEND
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
MY DEEP THANKS to the many Buddhist practitioners who offered assistance
during the course of this project, including Linsi Deyo and Patrick Clark,
Dharman Craig Presson, Mary Pattison, Bill Butler and Jean Giddings, Barbara
and Len Seibert, Steve Heywood, Lynn Newman Mennenga, Tom and Sue
Wolsko, and Jack Hatfield. And gassho to my patient teachers: John Daido
Loori, Geshe Lobsang Tenzin Negi, Father Robert J. Kennedy, Bhante Henepola
Gunaratana, and Dai-En Bennage. I am grateful as well to Helen Tworkov for
her kindness, and to Allen Ginsberg for permission to use an excerpt of his poem
“The Ballad of the Skeletons.”
During the time I worked on this book, I received significant support from the
Institute for Arts and Humanistic Studies at Pennsylvania State University, from
Kjell Meling, and from the Penn State Altoona Campus Advisory Board.
A special thanks to Robert Rubin for all he has taught me. May his own
journey go well.
And finally, for her patience, guidance, and love, a deep bow of gratitude to
Renita Romasco.
There is something in other people’s religions that is
incomprehensible.
—Huston Smith
I’m astounded by people who want to “know” the universe when it’s hard
enough to find your way around Chinatown.
—Woody Allen
CONTENTS
Prelude
PART 1: ZEN MIND, MUDDLED MIND
1 Buddha 101: Stumbling Up Monkey Mind Mountain
2 One Bright Idea: My American Buddhism Project
3 Just Sitting: I Obsess a Lot, and Then I Get Distracted
4 Zen Gardening: Me and My Green-Thumbed Monkey
5 Why Do Tibetans Have Such Trouble with Their Vacuum Cleaners? They
Lack Attachments
PART 2: PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT
6 Catholic Boy Zen: Was Jesus a Bodhisattva?
7 You Can Change Your Mind: And Your Karma, Too
8 The Work Koan: Life Without a Cushion
9 The Plain-spoken Theravadan: A High View from a Low Seat
10 Buddha Bug, Buddha Being: You Are What You Eat
PART 3: REAL BUDDHISTS DON’T TAKE NOTES
11 Destroy Your Neighbor, Destroy Yourself: The Dalai Lama and the Action
Hero
12 Trying to Hit the Ball: Fruitless Searching on the Fruited Plain
13 Eat Your Rice, Wash Your Bowl, and Just Sit: Studying with the Seven-
Year-Old Master
14 What Kind of Buddhist Am I? A Lousy One, Thank You
Basic Buddhist Terms
Suggested Further Reading
Copyright Page
PRELUDE
WHEN I WAS young, I thought for a while that I might actually become a
priest. I was raised in a town full of Catholics and endured twelve years of
Catholic school, so the idea was certainly bouncing around. The priesthood, after
all, is the ultimate calling, every Irish-American mother’s dream for her son. I
had a few nuns in my family, a priest related by marriage, and I was painfully
awkward around girls, so why not?
It turned out, of course, that I didn’t have a true calling, or any calling, but
there were moments when I thought I might. Most prominent among them was a
weekend in early high school. I was barely fifteen, searching for something
about myself more interesting than being the school’s best speller, and so agreed
not only to participate in a Catholic Youth retreat weekend, but to lure ten or so
of my classmates to come along.
I was attending an all-male Catholic prep school in my hometown, and the
main selling point for the retreat was that we would be joined by an equal
number of saintly young girls from Mercyhurst and Villa Maria. Three days and
two nights in a monastery, along the scenic shores of Lake Erie, with only a few
doddering monks as chaperones. Anything could happen.
But none of it did. They watched us like hawks, and there were so many
locked doors and thick walls between the girls’ dorm and the boys’ dorm that it
would have required heavy machinery to break through. It was late November,
and the idea of sneaking down to the lakeshore for some heavy petting was
discouraged well enough by thirty-mile-per-hour subzero Canadian winds.
Instead, we were left to think and pray. The first night, we sat against the
walls of a darkened first-floor hallway, listening to the Moody Blues on a record
player. This was the age of guitar masses, and the monks were trying hard to be
relevant, I suppose. We were supposed to be thinking about Jesus, how he had
died for our sins and could save us again from our adolescent weakness, but I
was thinking about Mary Margaret Flatley.
Mary Margaret was the Catholic Youth recruiter for Mercyhurst Girl’s High
School. She was beautiful. I imagined that if she saw how devout I was, she
would want to lose her virginity to me.
I prayed fervently all weekend, and when it came time to tell the assembled
group about what was in our minds, I tried hard to sound deep and soulful.
“There is so much good inside of people,” I whispered. “If only we just loved
one another.”
Any number of young Catholic girls decided over those three days that I was
a great guy, very sincere, and sweet. Not one of them, of course, had any interest
in dating me. I was stuck talking to Brother Damien.
Brother Damien was the youngest of the monks, probably in his thirties, and
he somehow knew that my parents were divorced, that my father had a drinking
problem going back twenty years, and that I was bright, eager, and fit in
nowhere. Maybe everybody is massively insecure at age fifteen, but I wore my
insecurity on my sleeve. He took me aside late Saturday afternoon.
“I’ve been noticing you,” he said, out of earshot of the others. “They call you
Dinty, but your name should be Peter, like the Apostle, because you are a rock.
Do you know that?”
I think I nodded.
“You are very strong. I can sense it. There is a rock inside of you.”
I nodded again. I had noticed the rock. I thought it was everything wrong
about me, all my faults and deficiencies balled up and ready to explode, but
Brother Damien made it sound like something good.
“That rock is your faith,” he went on. “That rock is the faith that keeps you
strong. You are going to do great things.”
The monk took my breath away. He looked right at me, not averting his gaze,
not nervously shuffling off. He just looked at me and waited. No priest or monk
had ever paid such attention to me before. I don’t think any adult had ever paid
such attention to me. Brother Damien was a man of God, so in a sense, it was
God paying attention to me.
We were just off the chapel, and I could hear the other monks reciting their
Latin prayers. It was the most religious moment of my life.
IT TURNS OUT, though, that the rock was something else entirely. Mary Margaret
Flatley took up with a lifeguard, my divorced mother married a fellow I never
really trusted or liked, my high school religion teacher flunked me for asking
hard questions, and my father fell off the wagon. I would walk home from
school some days and see his old car bouncing off the curbs and boulevards as
he threaded his way from the Danish Club to Mentley’s Tavern. That hard thing
inside of me turned out to be anger.
My life was a mess, a mess not even of my own making. And the situation
didn’t get any better, either, after God, through Brother Damien, took a direct
interest in me. It just got worse.
I began to suspect that when the old priests and nuns who had been guiding
me through my childhood and early adolescence said “we must take the truth of
Jesus on faith,” what they were really saying was “we have absolutely no proof
of any of this, so you are pretty much on your own.” Being a good kid and
saying my prayers wasn’t going to fix anything.
I never went back to Brother Damien’s monastery, and it wasn’t long before I
stopped going to church at all. Stopped praying. Stopped looking for spiritual
answers. God, I thought, had let me down.
NONE OF WHICH fully explains why twenty-five years later I found myself at the
doorway of a different monastery. This one, as it happens, was also in New York
State, but far on the opposite end. And the monks, well, this time the monks
were Buddhists.
My journey, it turned out, was not quite finished.