By JAMES ATLAS
Published: June
16, 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/17/opinion/sunday/buddhists-delight.html?_r=1&smid=fb-share
WHY was I in a
tent in northern Vermont? Much less a tent in the woods at a Buddhist
meditation center, reading Sakyong Mipham’s “Turning the Mind Into an Ally” by
the light from my smartphone?
If you really want to hear about it (to borrow
a phrase from Holden Caulfield), I was on retreat. Perhaps I should say, I was
in retreat, from a frenetic Manhattan life, hoping to find the balance and
harmony that have formed the basis of the Buddhist tradition ever since
Siddhartha Gautama discovered enlightenment around 2,500 years ago while
sitting under a Bodhi tree in Northern India.
The fundamental
insight of the Buddha (the Awakened One) is this: life consists of suffering,
and suffering is caused by attachment to the self, which is in turn attached to
the things of this world. Only by liberating ourselves from the tyranny of
perpetual wanting can we be truly free.
Not that I am
ready to renounce this world, or its things. “I am still expecting something
exciting,” Edmund Wilson confided in his journal when he was in his mid-60s:
“drinks, animated conversation, gaiety: an uninhibited exchange of ideas.” So
do I. But I need a respite from those things, too.
I wasn’t eager
to end like the Buddhist couple who went on a retreat in Arizona and turned up,
one dead, one nearly dead from dehydration, in a remote cave. But I am far from
alone in my choice of spiritual nourishment. The Vermont retreat was so
oversubscribed that people slept on futons in the Shrine Room. (I was lucky to
get a tent.) Dr. Paul D. Numrich, a professor of world religions and
interreligious relations, conjectured that there may be as many Buddhists as
Muslims in the United States by now.
Professor
Numrich’s claim is startling, but statistics (some, anyway) support it:
Buddhism is the fourth largest religion in the United States. More Americans
convert to Buddhism than to Mormonism. (Think about it, Mitt.)
Many converts
are what Thomas A. Tweed, in “The American Encounter With Buddhism,” refers to
as “nightstand Buddhists” — mostly Catholics, Jews (yeah, I know, “Juddhists”)
and refugees from other religions who keep a stack of Pema Chödrön books beside
their beds.
So who are these
— dare I coin the term? — Newddhists? Burned-out BlackBerry addicts attracted
to its emphasis on quieting the “monkey mind”? Casual acolytes rattled by the
fiscal and identity crises of a nation that even Jeb Bush suggests is “in
decline”? Placard-carrying doomsayers out of a New Yorker cartoon? Uncertain
times make us susceptible to collective catastrophic thinking — the conditions
in which religious movements flourish.
Or perhaps
Buddhism speaks to our current mind-body obsession. Dr. Andrew Weil, in his new
book, “Spontaneous Happiness,” establishes a relationship between Buddhist
practice and “the developing integrative model of mental health.” This
connection is well documented: at the Laboratory for Affective Neuroscience at
the University of Wisconsin, researchers found that Buddhist meditation
practice can change the structure of our brains — which, we now know from
numerous clinical studies, can change our physiology. The Mindful Awareness
Research Center at U.C.L.A. is collecting data in the new field of
“mindfulness-based cognitive therapy” that shows a positive correlation between
the therapy and what a center co-director, Dr. Daniel Siegel, calls mindsight.
He writes of developing an ability to focus on our internal world that “we can
use to re-sculpt our neural pathways, stimulating the growth of areas that are
crucial to mental health.”
I felt this happening
during my four-day retreat. Each day, we sat for hours as bees hummed beyond
the screened windows of the meditation room, a converted barn. It was hard to
concentrate at first, as anyone who has tried meditating knows: it requires
toleration for the repetitive, inane — often boring — thoughts that float
through the self-observing consciousness. (Buddhists use the word “mindfulness”
to describe this process; it sometimes felt more like mindlessness.) But after
a while, when the brass bowl was struck and we settled into silence, I found
myself enveloped, if only for a few moments, in the calm emptiness of
no-thought. At such moments the seven-hour drive from New York seemed worth it.
During the
lectures, there was talk of “feelings,” “loving kindness” and “the inherent
goodness of who we are” — tempered by good-natured skepticism. (“Feel free to
resume struggling with things,” a teacher concluded after a long “sitting.”)
But it wasn’t all about looking inward. There was also talk of issues I thought
we had left behind. “What’s affecting the world is the unhealthy state of mind
— culture, environment and society,” a teacher reminded us: “violence, horror,
bias, ecological catastrophe, the entire range of human pain.” In Tibet, he
noted, monasteries aren’t sealed off from the life around them but function as
community centers. The resistance to Chinese oppression has come largely from
monks, who demonstrate and even immolate themselves in protest.
Engaged Buddhism
— a concept new to me — has a tradition in the West. Allen Ginsberg and Jack
Kerouac, among its early American proponents, didn’t just cultivate their
gardens. Kerouac’s Buddha-worshiping “Dharma Bums” were precursors of the
sexual revolution (their tantric “yabyum” rituals sound like fun); Ginsberg, a
co-founder with Anne Waldman of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics
at Naropa University in Boulder, Colo., the first accredited Buddhist-inspired
college in the United States, faced down the police at the 1968 Democratic
National Convention in Chicago by using meditation as an instrument of passive
resistance.
Reading
“Buddhism in the Modern World,” a collection of essays edited by David L.
McMahan, I was struck by the pragmatic tone of the contributors, their
preoccupation with what Mr. McMahan identified as “globalization, gender
issues, and the ways in which Buddhism has confronted modernity, science,
popular culture and national politics.” Their goal is to make Buddhism active.
As I drove out
of the parking lot on the last day, ready — sort of — to return to what passes
for civilization, I wondered whether I would be able to hold on to any of what
I had learned — or if I even knew what I had learned, or had learned anything
at all. Perhaps it was simply the lesson of acceptance — and the possibility of
modest self-transformation. A teacher had said: “Don’t fix yourself up first,
then go forth: the two are inseparable.” To enact, or “transmit,” change in the
world, we need to begin with ourselves and “learn how to have a skillful, successful,
well-organized, productive life.” That was a lot to ask from a four-day
retreat, but at least it was a start.
My phone pinged.
I could check it later.
