This is a first draft of the final essay I have in my personal essay collection titled "Monks and Mormons."
What Buddhism is and what it is not:
The Dalai Lama
Who wouldn’t want to meet the Dalai Lama? I know I did, long before I had heard of Tibet or knew that he was associated with one of the many sects of Buddhism. Buddhism was so vogue and sexy to me. I dreamed of coming to India to learn how to meditate and find peace within myself since no amount of self-help books and cute motivational posters were helping much with the whole life contentment thing I was supposed to be working on. I guess I wasn’t the only one who sought out Buddhism either, because Western backpackers flooded in from all the corners of the world to find God something else in Mcleod Ganj, home of His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama.
My first week in India I had the opportunity to see His Holiness. My group of fellow students and I lined up under the bright, festive prayer flags in the blistering heat among the mix of natives and tourists for hours just to watch him drive past—an important event which I mistakenly called “that Dalai Lama thing” for which I was reprimanded by a local shopkeeper. I stood in the crowd with eager anticipation, but as initial life in India goes, I had a wave of “Delhi belly” come over me and had to sprint up temple road to find the nearest public squatter (my first public squatter if I might add, and I would tell you all about it but I think I would rather spare you the details). By the time I made it back the Dalai Lama had long come and gone. The crowed was dispersing back to the regular routine of life, and I pushed against the current to hear what I missed. Some of my group members related the experience to me: Bonnie caught a glimpse of his elbow, Kristen didn’t realize what car he was in until after he past, and lame as the drive by was, I felt disappointed the way you do when you first learn that Santa isn’t real.
Sure, I would have plenty more opportunities to see the Dalai Lama, and maybe even meet him. When I got home that evening I related the story of my misfortune to my Tibetan host family and they assured me I would have another chance. They pointed at the blue walls of their cozy home at the pictures framed in white khata scarves, documenting all of the times they have met their spiritual leader throughout the years. I noticed that they passed over the one with a woman in a wheelchair I did not recognize, so I asked.
“Who is that?”
My host sisters shot each other a look, then Tenzin, the oldest with the best English, stepped up to the plate and told me it was their mother—dead for just over a month now.
And what was I supposed to say to that? I felt awful. No one had mentioned anything about a recent family death. I’m sure my enthusiasm as the new student in the home was not appropriate, and I think this defined the rest of my experience. On later occasions my host sisters mentioned their mother from time to time, but the subject never came up around Paula, my host father.
My family was still very eager to teach me about their religion. The devout Tenzin would take me to circumambulate the temple each evening as the sun and heat of the day was settling to discuss different symbols and rituals that of her religion. She answered many of my pressing questions—why there were cookie donations at the foot of the Buddha statue, why the ninety year old woman with no teeth could do more prostrations than me, and why different Buddhist principles like interdependency and kindness were so important. I admired her dedication, though often felt more uncomfortable participating in Buddhist devotion than I would have anticipated—and even more so than I would like to admit. Tenzin shared her religious books with me and related well-known stories about His Holiness, how he ate tsampa for breakfast and woke up at 3 AM every morning, how he escaped to India over the Himalayas, his notable quotes on religious tolerance and the meaning of life, his recent trip to New York, etc.. Tenzin became particularly interested once she found out about my frequent nightmares. “Meditation,” she said, “was the answer.” One night she took me up to the roof of the home to a breathtaking view of the Himalayan valley. We sat lotus style on the grainy concrete that stuck to my skin and she gave me my first lesson in meditation.
“Close your eyes and focus even on your breathing,” she said. “If you do this every night, you will be having better sleep and keep bad thoughts out.”
I did, and I tried, but then I would remember my reading assignment I was behind on, how I needed to email the office, apply for a skymiles account—and my gosh traffic was loud. And I wondered if they sold hand sanitizer at the market, and how long I had been successfully meditating…
And so on and so forth.
But I still kept trying. Each night I would climb up to the terrace above the verandah and peer out at the little shops and hotels with different colored lights like Christmas, then squeeze my eyes shut and breathe. And breathe.
Every so often though I would go up and have to turn right back because I was interrupting Paula, standing with arms folded, staring out into the blackness—beyond the pretty lights and civilization—as he rolled the beads of his worn rosary between his thumb and pointer finger. I would have apologized for the intrusion, but he never took notice of me.
Ever.
Most of my time in Dharamsala was spent volunteering at English conversation labs with geshes, or monks with the equivalent of a PhD. A handful of times a week I would talk with these eight bald, maroon-clad monks and talk about anything from superstitions about carrying water buckets to the benefits of polyandry. Though language barriers became, well, apparent, their favorite and best subject for conversing was religion.
This is when I first started to dismantle my infatuation with Buddhism.
We couldn’t get far before first establishing that I was a Christian. They had, what, eighteen years in philosophy training? So there were plenty of points to debate with me already. “What is the self?” they would always ask. “Is it the head? The arm? The stomach?” Since the self is not defined by any of those things, it is therefore an illusion.
The self does not exist. Souls do not exist. Identity does not exist. I do not exist.
This is the first realization to embrace before you can move on to avoiding suffering—an inevitability of life, as the Buddha taught. In retrospect, perhaps that is why I was so bothered that my yoga teacher could never remember my name. I would take my regular place at the back right corner of the studio, just like I did during ten years of my much dreaded dance lessons as a child, and the great yoga master would simply call me “back side.” Maybe this is why I was left so disturbed in Varansi, watching the countless bodies being cremated over crackling firewood on the edge of the sacred, mud-colored Ganges River, and why I almost threw up when a cloth fell off the face of one half-charred man. Perhaps this was why I was so disturbed with getting human ash in my hair, a smell that I swear lingered for weeks, and why I felt so damn depressed most days in India.
If you have ever been bothered by the weight of your own nothingness and insignificance in the universe, or if you are looking for a warm-fuzzy validation of your unique existence, then Buddhism is not the religion for you.
The next steps to alleviating sorrow in Buddhism are similar—that any attachment to the world, whether that be possessions or people, bring sorrow and must be avoided. All strong emotion should be eliminated, including happiness. General love and kindness are necessary, but you have to be careful not to form those attachments. I thought of my close friends and family, then Paula, and wondered how you can love something or someone and not feel some kind of attachment.
Some months later I was walking up and down the steep road and noticed a new flier posted to the wall of a restaurant near my home. By then it was rainy season, and the paper was water damaged, but the words were still clear despite the rainbow smear of what used to be the photograph taking up most of the flier. It was a workshop for traditional Tibetan mandala painting, thrown together by some Western guy looking for some extra cash to get him to the next exotic destination, advertised as a way to “reach into our souls” to get in contact with “our inner selves.” I looked at the phone number and seriously thought about calling to let him know that Buddhists do not believe in “souls” or “selves,” and that he was not doing anyone a favor by feeding the misrepresentation—one that Dalai Lama himself warns about.
But I didn’t.
I did end up seeing His Holiness three, four, maybe five times. The first was the most memorable though. I stood with my host family at the base of the Dalai Lama’s yellow temple and we watched him and the new prime minister walk up the stairs. What struck me is how he looked just like his picture, but somehow not. He wore maroon robes and long matching socks with black loafer shoes, had deep creases in the back of his bald head, and modeled thick brimmed glasses. He was hunched over, and though he did not struggle up the stairs, he looked much older than I had imagined. I guess I didn’t realize that he was 76, or that he was human, or that he is going to die like the rest of us.
That moment felt like it passed in slow motion. He had a presence about him that demanded respect, but who was this man? Was he a living Gandhi, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize? A rebel and an enemy to China? As Anne Lamott puts it, “the most sane person” in the world?[1] Was he the man whose “greatest error in his political life” (not going to Beijing in 1989 for a chance to patch China relations) resulted in the last chance lost for Tibet?[2] The great spiritual leader and model for thousands of homeless Tibetans?
Or, in his own words from his autobiography, maybe he was “just a human being?”[3]
My last month in India I had the opportunity to attend a public teaching by His Holiness—an affair almost unheard of anymore for the tourist population to attend since the Dalai Lama is trying to retire and speaks mostly to the Tibetan population these days. My group and I registered a week in advance and stood in line for hours to squish ourselves into some corner of the overloaded temple to press our ears to our scratchy FM radios to hear the broadcast of the monotone, translated message of the Dalai Lama. Our nearby neighbors were soon annoyed when, like most Westerns, we got squirmy when our feet fell asleep from sitting cross legged for too long, our backs started to ache without any kind of support, and our interest waned with each passing hour of philosophical teachings—something about the importance of correct understanding Buddhist philosophy. I stayed because I knew I should, and that it was a unique opportunity, etc., but I was bored to tears.
After the teaching we pushed our way through the crowd to a nearby restaurant for a refreshing soda and some lunch to hold us over for the next session, which we were only half considering attending at that point, though no one had to say it.
I remember sitting there with my glass Sprite bottle in hand, a pink stripped straw and everything, when I overheard a group of (no doubt), American tourists emerging from the temple. One guy, the leader it seemed, turned to his twenty-something year old friends and said, “Well, that was cool, but now that we have seen him I don’t think we need to stay and listen anymore.”
“Yeah,” said the girl to his right. “Seeing him was the most important thing. Now we can say we have seen the Dalai Lama.”
The group unanimously agreed and disappeared into the masses in the street, probably looking for their own restaurant retreat, while I sipped at my Sprite and tried really hard to deny that I was anything like those kinds of Americans.
As it is, I never got rid of my nightmares, never learned to meditate, never requested an audience to meet the Dalai Lama, and never learned what happened to my dead host mom and why despite His Holiness’ statement, “Buddhism does not require mourning[4],” my Buddhist Paula was left devastated by his wife’s death. My last week in McLeod I went to a final English conversation lab with the geshes and saw that a new volunteer had shown up. She was paired up with one of the better speakers in the class and, of course, they got talking about religion. I couldn’t help but smile as I heard her personal religious philosophy:
“Well, I’m a Christian and a Buddhist.”
If there is anything I can say I learned in the three months I lived in Dharamsala, it was that you cannot (romantic as it sounds), be a Buddhist Christian, or a Christian Buddhist. His Holiness thinks every major religion that teaches “love and compassion can produce good human beings,”[5] and though he is interested by the “phenomenon” of “the rapid growth of interest in Buddhism amongst western nations,”[6] he warns people about misunderstanding of Buddhism and the danger of proselytizing since it draws “people away from their traditional culture and values.”[7] The Dalai Lama also says that he believes we can learn from each other and better understand our own spiritual practices[8], which is what Buddhism gave me—a rich and unique chance to confirm my own beliefs and unravel my infatuation with Buddhism without diminishing my great respect for the religion and the amazing people who devote their lives to it.
But at the end of the day, I am not Buddhist.
NOTES:
I want to add more from Tibet, Tibet when my notes back from another professor and What Makes You Not a Buddhist, once the library gets a copy in.
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