Bibliophilia, or, a teenager meets Buddha. Part 1.

One should easily glean even from the few posts that I have up here thus far that I am a bit of a bibliophile. It's true. I love books. Always have. I can remember going with my parents on Sunday evenings to the bookstore as a child. I was always told to get whatever I want (this policy had its limits of course), that money was not an issue. My mother would take my sister and me to the library during the day while my father was at work, and we would spend hours wandering up and down the aisles past shelf after shelf of books. We would often leave with dozen of books in our arms, and always with smiles on our faces. I was reared in a household in which books were almost sacred in their importance. Every room had books: the living room, where the coffee table was stacked with "coffee table books" and magazines; each bedroom, with its airport paperbacks and biographies, short story collections and encyclopedias; my father's study, where old chemistry textbooks mingled with books on hiking, home brewing, horse racing, and Kurt Vonnegut novels; and finally (and perhaps most importantly), the shelf by my mother's bed, which was filled to bursting with books on religion and spirituality.

I always bristled at my mother's insistence that I look into these books she had. Her favorite spiritual writer is Sylvia Browne, the putative psychic and author of dozens and dozens of books on her career as a psychic medium, life on "the other side," and also on Gnosticism and mystical spirituality. I'm not sure whether my mother knows this or not, but these books did have an impact on me. I can remember one in particular by Sylvia entitled, simply, meditations. I remember regularly swiping this book from my mother's bookshelf and sitting on the floor of my bedroom for hours at a time trying out the various mediations in that little book. They were visualizations mostly, but they did give me an early instruction in following the breath and calming the mind.

Coinciding as this exploration into meditation did with my newfound interest in the Beats, I discovered a book somewhat more off the beaten path than On the Road and Howl; I discovered The Dharma Bums. Dharma Bums is the story of Ray Smith (Kerouac) and his friend Japhy Ryder (the poet Gary Snyder) as they flirt with and practice Buddhism in California. I read it voraciously, carrying it with me from class to class at school, sneaking snippets of reading time during class, precariously propping the book against my backpack to shield it from the view of my teachers. It was a marvelous find not only for the young bibliophile in me, but for the yearning spirit in me. I fell into a cliche of which I was not aware at the time and began to idolize Jack Kerouac. His journey (spiritual and literal) enticed me. I wanted to go on a journey myself. Eventually, I discovered that Kerouac, in his days of studying Buddhism, read from and intensely studied A Buddhist Bible, a collection of sacred Buddhist texts edited by Dwight Goddard. So, on one of our weekly Sunday trips to the bookstore, I picked up this Buddhist Bible with money earned at my part-time job. And there it sat on my bookshelf for years.

I couldn't get into it in the way that I had gotten into Kerouac's own writing on Buddhism. Where were the fast cars and the hashish and the bop jazz and the women? I didn't get it. How could a book recommended by one of my favorite writers be so, so....boring?

Nevertheless, I pressed on. One day, after getting home from school, I found the phone book sitting open on the island in the kitchen. There, circled in black ink, was The Indianapolis Zen Center. As always, my mother had taken an interest in my interest and had done a little homework for me. It wasn't long before we journeyed from our little suburb of Fishers, Indiana into the big city to see first-hand what Buddhist meditation had to offer to a teenager and his forty-something mother.

So it was that one cold weeknight my mother and I drove to Indianapolis for the weekly Open Zazen session at the Indianapolis Zen Center. I don’t recall now what exactly I expected, but I imagine my head was filled with some pretty egregious stereotypes—a bunch of diminutive Asians sitting around in robes, the smell of sandalwood incense drifting through the air, the lingering reverberations of a gong filling my ears as I sat in a large open room in perfect, unadulterated bliss. In fact, the Indianapolis Zen Center was a wholly unremarkable building in a not-so-good part of town with potholes in the parking lot and very little identifying signage. Inside, rather than a gaggle of serious-looking Japanese, I saw a few middle-aged white people who looked to have just left their local Sierra Club meeting. The inside was drafty, but looked well-apportioned. Everyone was remarkably calm and friendly, welcoming me and my mother into their little Buddha club for the evening.

After a few awkward moments (over tea, no less) in which my mother and I had to somehow justify our presence to people who had clearly been practicing for some time, we all entered the sitting room for meditation. We received a few remarks on how to sit properly for those of us who were new (read: me and my mother), and then we took the first step on the path to enlightenment. Unfortunately, no one told me that first step involved pins and needles in my leg and a pain in my spine unlike any i'd felt before. My mother and I left that night wholly uncomfortable and not exactly jazzed about returning. For weeks, months, and years afterwards, newsletters from the Zen Center arrived in the mail and usually went unopened. Somehow, I think both my mother and I didn't even want to open them; whether it was from shame, disappointment, or lack of interest, I don't know.

All I know is that that after that night at the Indianapolis Zen Center, it would be years before I ever turned my eye toward Buddhism or meditation again.* But when I finally did, it was not Zen or Kerouac I turned to, but rather, a little book by an over-the-hill American nun.

*Let it be said in hindsight that these misgivings and irritations had nothing whatsoever to do with the community or leadership at the Indianapolis Zen Center. The people we met there were nothing but hospitable, helpful, and happy to see us join them. It just wasn't, shall we say, our cup of tea. At the time.

Awakening the Heart

Noah Levine, the notorious "Dharma punk" examines loving-kindness meditation in an article on Huffington Post:

In reaction to the pain in my life I began to close my heart and to harden myself against all forms of love. So it was with great hesitance that I experimented with Buddhist practices of kindness and compassion. In the beginning I don't think forgiveness was even in my vocabulary. The only reason I opened my self to these meditation practices, often called heart practices, at all was because I had tremendous faith in the practices of mindfulness (paying attention to the present moment), the Buddha and my teachers, who assured me that it was safe to love again.

The fact that Levine comes from a hardcore punk background lends a certain credence to his writing that is missing from some of the more fluffy, lovey-dovey writers one commonly encounters when poking around in bookstores and blogs for quality writing on Buddhism and meditation. His is an experiential Buddhism, and the fact that he has so fully embraced Buddhist teaching given his background makes his writing all the more powerful.

I look forward to checking out some of his books as soon as the funds and the space in my to-read list allows.

Meditation and Aging

From the Guardian newspaper comes this article on the effects of a meditation practice on aging.

Money quote:

After several years of number-crunching, data from the so-called Shamatha project is finally starting to be published. So far the research has shown some not hugely surprising psychological and cognitive changes – improvements in perception and wellbeing, for example. But one result in particular has potentially stunning implications: that by protecting caps called telomeres on the ends of our chromosomes, meditation might help to delay the process of ageing.