PREFACE TO “BUDDHA OR BUST”
“Words have the power to both destroy and heal. When words are both true and kind, they can change our world.”
-- The Buddha
“The Way is beyond language, for in it there is no yesterday, no tomorrow, no today.”
-- Hsin Hsin Ming From “Verses On The Faith Mind” By Seng T'san,Third Zen Patriarch
“Not all those who wander are lost.”
-- J. R. R. Tolkien From “The Lord of the Rings, Book I: The Fellowship of the Ring”
The man who taught me the most about Buddhism wasn’t a monk with a shaved head in saffron robes. He didn’t speak in Sanskrit code, and he didn’t live in a Himalayan monastery. In fact, he wasn’t even a Buddhist.
He was Carl Taylor, a lifelong San Franciscan who looked to be in his late 40s. At the moment he looked cold, sitting upright in a bed rolled into the gardens off the hospice ward at Laguna Honda Hospital near San Francisco’s Twin Peaks. It was a high blue-sky summer afternoon, but here that often means a bone-penetrating chill. Carl was dying of cancer.
I was spending a week with the Zen Hospice Project, a group of Buddhist volunteers who assist the staff of the 24-bed hospice unit at this, one of the largest public long-term care facilities in the United States. The project, now emulated around the world, uses two of Buddhism’s central teachings -- awareness of the present moment and compassion for others -- as tools to help bring a degree of dignity and humanity to those in the last stages of their lives. They’re not easy lessons to learn.
I sat beside Carl, helping adjust the well-worn jacket he used as a blanket. He wore his terminal diagnosis less comfortably, with resigned bravado. I tried to make small talk, but it was going terribly. What words of solace can you offer someone who doesn’t have long to live and knows it?
“So what kind of work do, er, did you do?”
Long silence. Slow drag on his cigarette. An eternity passed as we watched a white tuft of cloud break the blue monotony and move across the sky.
“I don’t really talk about my past.”
Okay. Squirming to keep the conversation moving forward, I mentally scrolled through my list of questions. But if I couldn’t ask about the past and there was no sense in asking about the future, that left only the present. And in the present, I was learning, there are no questions; there is just being. This made me feel quite awkward at first: Stripped of his questions, the journalist has no identity.
But Carl seemed content to have me just sit there, my company alone helping to ease some of his suffering. Once I accepted that I had nothing to do, nowhere to go, and perhaps most importantly no one to be, I relaxed. Carl glanced sideways at me and smiled. We both understood I had just learned a small lesson. Together we watched another cloud go by.
That week there were other lessons right out of the syllabus of Buddhism 101 -- lessons about the impermanence of life, about our attachment to the way we want things to be and the disappointment that comes when those things don’t come to pass, about physical and mental suffering, about the value of what Buddhists call sangha, which best translates to community. But most of all I saw how the lessons one man learned in India 2,500 years ago have been updated and adapted to the modern world.
Around the globe today there is a new Buddhism. Its philosophies are being applied to augment mental and physical health therapies and to advance political and environmental reforms. Athletes use it to sharpen their game. It helps corporate executives handle stress better. Police arm themselves with it to defuse volatile situations. Chronic pain sufferers apply it as a coping salve. This contemporary relevance is triggering a renaissance of Buddhism -- even in countries like India, where it had nearly vanished, and China, where it has been suppressed.
Buddhism is no longer just for monks or Westerners with disposable time and income to dabble in things Eastern. Christians and Jews practice it. African Americans meditate alongside Japanese Americans. In the U.S. alone, the number of self-declared Buddhists has jumped from 400,000 in 1990 to more than three million. And according to a 2004 study, one in eight Americans – more than 40 million – believes that Buddhist teachings have had an important influence on their spirituality.
The Zen Hospice Project is one example of “socially engaged Buddhism,” a term coined by the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, who was exiled from Vietnam in the 1960s for his non-violent antiwar activities. Still engaged at the age of 79, he traveled in his native country for three months in 2005 -- the 30th anniversary of the Communist Party takeover of Vietnam -- spreading Buddhist teachings where he had once been a pariah.
In southern France, at his Plum Village retreat center, he regularly hosts, among other groups, Palestinians and Israelis in workshops on conflict resolution and peace negotiation. Such sessions often begin with animosity, Rev. Hanh told me, and just as often they end with embraces.
“It all starts with a spin on an old adage: ‘Don’t just do something, sit there,’” he said in a wisp of a voice. A rail-thin man with large ears and deep-set eyes, Rev. Hanh was sitting on the porch of his cottage overlooking verdant Bordeaux vineyards. It seemed incongruous to be talking in the heart of a region that attracts pilgrims who worship Baccus, not Buddha. “With all this socially engaged work, first you must learn what the Buddha learned, to still the mind. Then you don’t take action; action takes you.”