The Light That Stays

3. My Own Long Walk Inward

For as far back as I can remember, I had a feeling about this whole world of practice that I can only call recognition — as if I were coming back to something rather than finding it for the first time. I don’t know what to make of that, and you don’t have to make anything of it either. But the pull was real, and it was there from when I was young.

I started reading about Buddhism in my mid-teens, and I just kept reading. Nobody was assigning anything. Mostly I read standing in the Buddhism aisle at the Barnes & Noble on Route 18, working my way through whatever was on the shelf. By my mid-twenties I’d been through most of it. The books I liked best were the memoirs of Westerners who had left their regular lives and gone east — to India, Nepal, the Himalayas — looking for a teacher, or a cave, or some piece of themselves they couldn’t find here. The whole I was an ordinary American, then I walked into a monastery and didn’t really come back genre.

In the first few of those books I came across the idea of reincarnation — not in a fluffy way, but in the older, harder sense, that life keeps coming back around in every kind of body, and that the line between me and the chicken on the plate is not as clean as I’d been led to believe. Reading that, something just settled in me. I became a vegetarian that day. Not because anyone told me to and not because I had to argue myself into it. It just suddenly felt obvious. I’ve been one ever since.

I went on like that for years — reading, sitting sometimes in my room, nobody teaching me anything in particular. Mostly I was just longing and searching.

The Little Temple

When I was twenty-two, I found a small Buddhist temple not far from where I was going to graduate school. A monk had just moved to the area and started it, in the old Chinese tradition. The first time I walked in, the room smelled the way a temple smells — that mix of incense and old wood and quiet that I won’t try to describe further, because if you’ve been in one you already know, and if you haven’t, no words I write will get you there. The monk met me at the door. We clicked instantly — the way you sometimes meet a person and feel, with no good reason, that you already know them.

In his tradition, students call a teacher like this Shifu — the word means something close to master or teacher, the way Japanese students say sensei. So that’s how I’ll refer to him here: Shifu. He didn’t tell me right away who he was — he wasn’t the kind of person who told you, and it took me years to slowly piece it together. He was a respected scholar and the lineage holder of two ancient Zen monasteries, one of them in southeastern China and founded around the year 300 AD; seventeen hundred years of teachers had passed the practice down, hand to hand, to him. He had also spent years working at the side of one of the most important Chinese Buddhist figures of the twentieth century, helping to hold the tradition together through some of its hardest decades. He carried something very old and very alive, and he carried it without making any noise about it. By the time I met him, he was mostly interested in painting the house, watering the trees, and listening to whoever walked through the door.

What I want you to feel about him, more than the lineage, is this: there wasn’t a particle of self-importance in him. He treated everyone exactly the same — Buddhist or not, regular or stranger off the street — with sincerity, respect, and his complete attention. He’d remember your name. He’d offer you tea. He’d ask how you were, and then he would actually listen to the answer. That — more than anything that happened on a cushion — was the meditation.

After I’d been a regular for a while, Shifu gave me a dharma name — a kind of spiritual name students of his tradition sometimes receive: 中禅. The character 禅 means Zen (the meditation tradition itself), and 中 means middle or center — the same “middle” you find in the Buddhist idea of the Middle Way, the path that doesn’t lean too far in either direction.

And here’s the funny thing. Shifu barely “taught” me meditation in any formal way. Mostly he gave me jobs. Water the trees today. Help paint the front of the house this Saturday. I sat in on counseling sessions when people from the town came to him with their troubles, and I watched how he listened to them. I enjoyed all of it. I wasn’t restless about it or waiting for the real teaching to start; the work itself was peaceful. Only later did I understand that that was the teaching. The watering and the painting and the listening were the meditation, wearing work clothes.

The Path Opens

Somewhere in those years — whether Shifu nudged me toward it on purpose or whether it found me on its own, I’m honestly not sure — I came across the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism, the older of the great Tibetan schools, founded by Padmasambhava (sometimes called Guru Rinpoche). I felt a pull toward it like nothing I’d felt before — toward its central teachings, and toward the way they point directly at the nature of mind. I went to a teaching retreat in North Carolina with a Nyingma teacher and a group of his longtime students. I sat. I listened. I came home and went on with my life.

One more honest thing about a long path. Teachers and students sometimes drift apart — for ordinary reasons, mostly. Communities form and break. Friendships in the dharma diverge. None of that has touched the practice itself, for me. The teaching and the teacher are not the same thing, the same way a song and a singer are not the same thing. You can lose a singer and still keep the song.

Now

These days, decades on, the practice is just part of how I live — a daily routine like a morning walk or going to the gym. Nothing more than that, and on purpose. I sit when I have time. I don’t think of it as a spiritual pursuit, and I’d gently steer you away from thinking of it that way too.

I’ll tell you why, because I learned this one the hard way myself. For a long stretch I treated meditation as a spiritual pursuit — as a somewhere I was going, an attainment, a level. Looking back from where I am now, that orientation didn’t serve me. The only setup where meditation honestly becomes the central thing in a life is monastic — ordination as a monk or nun in a real tradition. That is a real path, and the people who walk it offer something the rest of the world quietly needs. It just isn’t my path; I have never had a calling to monastic life.

For everyone else — almost everyone — meditation works best when you keep it small. A daily thing, like a walk or going to the gym, that makes life a little clearer and a little kinder, and then you go live the rest of your life.

If there is one thing in this whole chapter I most want you to take away, it is this: don’t make meditation a special thing. Make it a small, daily thing. Just sit, the way you would just walk, or just lift weights. Live the rest of your life with both hands. The practice will quietly change you in the background; it doesn’t need you to chase it. It just needs you to show up most days — and then go do everything else.

(After this many years, my own body has settled into a cross-legged seat that’s comfortable for me. Please don’t read anything into that. It’s just what one body happened to settle into over time. Plenty of people who’ve practiced just as long sit in chairs. Yours is yours. Find what lets you sit easy and forget about it.)

The little temple is still my home base. I still go back when I can. I still show up there for Buddhist holidays. Some things you build early in your life become the thread that pulls you home for the rest of it. That little temple is mine.

I’m not telling you any of this so you’ll do exactly what I did. Your path will be your own, and it should be. I’m telling you because I want you to know that this stuff is real in an ordinary life — not only in books, and not only in monasteries. It started with a curious teenager and a cushion in her bedroom. It can start with you, exactly where you are.

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