Why Did You Become A
Buddhist?
May 2,
2016 Daniel Scharpenburg
Patheos
I tell two different stories about how I discovered Buddhism. One
of them is that I started meditating to relieve anxiety and came to
Buddhism just from learning more about meditation. The other is
that I learned about Buddhism when I took a class in college and
something about it inspired me to become a Buddhist.
I’ll
tell them both here. If I’m honest, I have to tell you that I don’t
remember which one is true.
As a
kid I had some spiritual experiences. I experienced what Dogen
calls, “the dropping away of body and
mind.” Not in any special
situation. It just happened to me a few times.
I
hadn’t heard of anything like the path to awakening, so in my mind
I thought of it in different ways. But, I think deep down it was
always the path to awakening, the mystic’s path, that I was
thinking of. I just made up metaphors to fill in the
gaps.
I
sometimes imagined I would step through a doorway and enter another
world—a pure land of wonder. But, the truth was I didn’t need to
look for a pure land of wonder, because I’m already in
one.
And so
are you. The pure land is right here.
Anyway,
by the time I started college I felt alone in the universe. I had
lost both my parents to cancer. My brother—my only sibling—and I
were never really close. He is eight years older than me, so I
didn’t really grow up with him.
I fell
into a deep dark hole, as can be imagined. My parents left me an
inheritance. It wasn’t a substantial inheritance. We weren’t
wealthy, but it was enough for me to go to college. I had no idea
what I wanted to do with my life, so I went to college. That’s what
I thought I was supposed to do. I can remember as a very young
child wanting to be a writer, but at some point between childhood
and young adulthood I just let that dream go. I decided it was
unrealistic, which it was. It still is.
A lot
of people try a lot of different things in college. A lot of people
have a lot of fun and remember it as the best time in their life. I
was essentially grieving the whole time. College was certainly not
the best time of my life. I suffered from anxiety and depression.
It was a very very bad time.
I can
remember one time that I was sad and I contemplated suicide. I was
just so sad and I felt so very alone. I stood on a bridge
overlooking a busy highway, I-35, and I thought about jumping. I
stood at the edge and really considered it. What a gruesome way to
go! The fall wasn’t very far. The fall wouldn’t kill me. It would
be the cars zooming by at eighty miles an hour. I’d land in front
of one that wasn’t able to stop and it would run me over. Then
there would be tires screeching, cars would collide in their
efforts to avoid hitting this young man laying in the street. What
a mess! Now I know there’s a chance that I wouldn’t even die from
that if I had jumped. Needless to say, I didn’t do it. But I stood
on that bridge overlooking that highway for a long time.
I saw a
therapist. I didn’t open up to him much, but I told him I was
anxious and depressed. He prescribed me an SSRI medication. I know
medication works really well for some people. It didn’t work for
me, or it worked too well. It made me a crazy person. I would do
things like give strangers great big hugs and I would always say
what I was thinking instead of having any sort of filter. And a
couple of times I groped women that I didn’t know very well. It’s
fortunate that I realized these pills were a problem and stopped
taking them before anything bad happened to me. Things could have
gone south very easily.
I quit
taking them.
I was
grasping at straws, trying to figure out how to get through life. I
went back to that therapist and told him that I couldn’t take the
pills anymore. He asked if I had heard of meditation, that it was a
technique to manage anxiety. I had never heard of it, but I became
interested. I wanted to learn more. I never saw that therapist
again. I wish I could thank him, but I don’t remember his
name.
I went
to the library to look for books on meditation. If I was in the
modern world I might have looked it up on the internet. But it was
1999. If there even was an internet back then, I wasn’t on it. The
first book I read was “Meditation in Action” by Chogyam Trungpa.
Soon after that I read “The Miracle of Mindfulness” by Thich Nhat
Hanh.
I tried
it. I started meditating every day and after a while it worked. I
could focus. I could manage my anxiety and stop ruminating all the
time. Anxiety became something I could manage. It was really really
good for me.
In
these books I learned a little bit about Buddhism. There wasn’t all
that much information in these books, but they laid a foundation
for me.
And I
read “The Dharma Bums” by Jack Kerouac. I had read “On the Road” in
high school and I had enjoyed it a great deal. It was his followup
to “On the Road”. It was on a list of books about meditation, but
it probably didn’t belong there. It’s a fictionalized account of
his life as a Buddhist in America in the middle of the twentieth
century. There’s a few things Kerouac didn’t exactly get right in
writing about Buddhism. This is because at the time they really
didn’t have the amount of scholarship that we have now. But, in
spite of this it’s a work of genius. It’s my favorite book, by far.
I think it’s more responsible than anything else, with the possible
exception of my parents deaths, for the path that I’m on now. It’s
not a very good introduction to Buddhism, but it presents a level
of enthusiasm for the path that few books can match.
One
more really significant thing happened during my college years. I
took a World Religions class. We had a unit on Buddhism. It was
actually one of the main units in the class. That’s where I was
pulled in. I got to learn about it in a classroom setting instead
of simply reading about it. I learned about the different
traditions and lineages.
The
Four Noble Truths really spoke to me.
I had
learned a lot about suffering and impermanence at
an earlier age than most. And the Buddha taught the truth of
suffering and the way out of suffering.
It was
what I really needed.
Something about the
Zen tradition really spoke to me too. I started for looking for
more information. I started reading everything could find about
Buddhism, along with continuing my daily meditation
practice.
By the
end of college I was calling myself a Buddhist.