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.
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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.
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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