Very Bad Buddhist

An Afterword

Happily Dogsitting Our Dear Friend Felix

AN AFTERWORD

And then, almost as if I’d never been away, I stood in the middle of my living room at home, all my things around me. The furniture I’d bought in second hand shops and then refurbished while I was in graduate school. My books. The perennials in my garden coming up. The tulips blooming. I’d planned my trip so that I would not miss this, the first year in the garden with the fence I’d worked so hard to build. All of a sudden I was at home. Everything had more or less worked out the way I’d planned. But, also, I was even more alone than before. I chose not to call friends and tell them what had happened.

Indeed, what had happened? I couldn’t tell. Maybe what had happened was that I’d gotten used to being alone. That came in handy now and would in the future as my marriage finally broke up and as I moved out and away from my garden exactly twelve months later. Yellow tulips under the blooming cherry tree as, for the last time, I closed and latched the gate on my picket fence.

But, newly back from India, surrounded by my things, my cats, my garden, I did not go out and look for a job and I did not care. I saw my wife off to work each morning before meditating and getting to work at my desk and computer. I cleaned the house, after a fashion, and cooked a little. I taught a section of composition during summer quarter, a half time job the way I do it, and two sections fall quarter, a full time job at half pay. I continued to avoid my friends for the most part.

I hesitate here. There seems to be more to say but I can’t think of what it might be. I’d begun this journey wanting to be completely reformed and yet the reality is that I had not taken the sorts of steps that would have profoundly changed me. I’d been safe largely among friends, fellow dharma bums, collecting bits of stories, cracking wise. Now I wonder how badly I wanted to be so greatly changed in the first place.

Did I go home as my best self? No. But maybe I’d taken some first step in that direction. Total transformation? Of course not. That must have meant that, at some level, I thought it was more or less fine to be the kind of person I am, and indeed, I have not heard from the fat man on my shoulder for a long time. I do not remember the moment his voice fell silent.

A pilgrimage is a divider. Now that part of my life is over; now this part begins. It’s a way of marking. “I took that trip in 1992,” we say, “and then I came back and started my new life. Nothing has been the same since, thank God!” So, imagining that a pilgrimage is like that, we go about looking for that single instant where the break with the old life happened. It was that event, gesture, comment, look, sneeze, conversation, scene, smell, noise, or single realization that turned the ship of my life away from its previous destination and saved me.

But it didn’t happen that way. The trajectory of my life had been set long before. There came no instant of turning. The image was wrong. I would always be coming from that time and place by the river where I grew up.

My meditation practice? I am indeed a bad Buddhist. I continue to struggle all these years later. But, yes, Buddhism is psychologically integrative when you stick with it. No question there. And there is also something else, something about Michael’s bell that I am not yet able to understand, much less articulate.

India? That was a long time ago and we both—India and I—have changed, me for the better, I think. Uncle Lal and his friends have ascended there. Trump and Trumpism here. They say we become more so as we age, but which more so is the question. Is it our sweet side or the other? The nasty BJP men are in charge in India. Small men like Uncle Lal, driven by their fears and resentments. The United States finds itself in a long historical struggle to make peace with which of the  more sos it will be. We have our own set of small men driven by fear and resentment.

In the meantime, we engage in the world, informed by our meditations. This is the end of Very Bad Buddhist, which I suppose is itself a meditation on my own hapless personal journey. I am sure many readers find much to argue with here, especially if they are themselves students of Buddhism. That’s okay with me. Remember, I am a very bad Buddhist.