Eastern religions and had been a somewhat unconventional figure in their south of England commuter-belt town. Mary had been used to thinking about spiritual matters as a teenager:
I had been looking forward to going to university to discuss ‘the meaning of life’ with people, but as it turned out university wasn’t about that at all. It was about getting plastered. All the people I seemed to bump into were just into drink and sex and their careers! I missed the serious side of things dreadfully. After I left I worked for a couple of years and then planned an overland trip to China. Six months before I was due to go my father died. And during the week after he died I experienced, in the middle of all the feelings, a great presence of mind. I was thinking and writing about him, and remembering all the times I had felt critical of him. And I thought, ‘When death is possible, what is the most important thing?’ And I knew the answer was Love. This was a sort of turning point, and I gained some insights that I later realized were important in Buddhism, though I didn’t know it at the time. When I came back from my trip, which I eventually made, I went to a thing called a Western Zen Retreat – very nervously, I might say. I didn’t know what to expect. I was set this question to meditate on which was ‘Who am I?’, and I found an answer to it, a real one, that put me in touch with a level of being that I had not experienced before: infinite love, infinite peace, a different sense of who I am entirely. And that experience of course made me very interested in Buddhism. At this point I wasn’t quite sure what I was after, but I was jolly well after something!
Then I met a Japanese Zen Master called Hogen-san who came to England for a few weeks every year, giving talks and workshops, and he attracted me very much. I used to follow him around the country. He was very down-to-earth, not ‘holy’ at all. I remember one interview I had with him where we had Guinness for breakfast! I learnt to see that Buddhism was in everyday life, not in some special rituals or only on Sundays. Hogen-san’s quality was there in the pub as well as in the meditation room.
The last extract I want to give here is from my talk with Theresa, a 41-year-old American woman who was also living in the community and teaching meditation. She had grown up in an orthodox Jewish family, enjoying some of the rituals, but without thinking about what it meant at all. ‘It didn’t mean anything to me. I wasn’t specially resistant, but ... well, everybody has to have a religion, don’t they, and you might as well be Jewish,’ is how she remembers it. She impressed me as much as anyone I have ever met, with her unpretentious, light, warm manner which I came to see as the outward show of a great inner strength and peacefulness. The story of how she came to Buddhism illustrates another of the common threads – the discovery that what you thought was going to make you happy doesn’t. The piece that I want to quote here demonstrates not so much the powerful attraction of example, though that is there, but rather the way in which such qualities as she clearly had can grow from rather unpromising beginnings. If Theresa can make it, I thought, there really is hope for us all!
I wasn’t thinking about any of the big questions as an adolescent, but I had a really rough time of it socially when I was thirteen. I spent a lot of time in my bedroom. After school I’d come home and lie on my bed and listen to the Top 40 on the radio, and the words of the songs spoke to me about where I was at. They were sad and asking why you didn’t have a boyfriend and saying how wonderful it would be to be in love. The songs were very melaneholy and I was very sorry for myself. Life seemed so wrong. I didn’t feel that people liked me. I was lonely. I had been successful in school up to thirteen, and then my grades just plummeted. I lost all my self-confidence. There seemed to be such an emphasis on how people looked, and I wasn’t pretty. I didn’t fit the image of the ‘popular girl’ so the boys didn’t go for me. I just shrivelled up even more. And the songs were like my only friends. They understood me a bit.
When I went to college looks stopped being the all-important thing, and I started to feel more comfortable about myself. It seemed like I had a personality that was worthwhile. And I even got some boyfriends, so things really began to look up! I started to have a good time – but not thinking about what I was up to. It was cool to be an atheist, so I was an athiest. I was going to parties and drinking beer like I was making up for lost time. Four years! After I left college I went to Kansas City and worked for Hallmark Cards as a graphic artist. I was doing well in most people’s terms – I had a good job, I was making good money, I had a nice apartment and a car and nice clothes. I was going out on dates. I’d become ‘attractive’. I’d got all the things that as a girl I’d thought were important. I got to travel a lot in the States and Europe, and finally wound up married at 27 – because it was the next thing to do, and it kept my Mum quiet! So finally I had a chance to find out what it was all about. I began to question what it was that I’d got, vaguely at first, and then more seriously as my relationship with my husband began to go downhill. It was like I’d finally done it – all the things that are supposed to make you happy, even getting a husband. And I wasn’t. It hadn’t worked. I was in a bad way. I used to just lie down on the sofa and curl up and things would get very dark. I just didn’t want to deal with it at all. I couldn’t. I didn’t know how. I would get very angry and scream and throw plates. I was very difficult! We were living with my husband’s parents in North Carolina, and they didn’t like me at all.
My lifeline was a man I was working for at the university who I could talk to a bit, and he started talking about the possibility of feeling some inner strength and not just being pushed around by other people’s expectations and disapproval. And someone else told me about Transcendental Meditation, which was at that time all the rage in the States. So I thought, ‘Oh well. I’ll try it.’ I did the weekend initiation and learnt the technique. And I remember looking in the mirror the day afterwards, and I really felt different. I felt a real calmness. I liked myself. I felt warmly towards myself for the first time for a long time, maybe for the first time ever. I felt still, and accepting of myself And that experience made me want to practise the meditation hard, which I did. I faithfully did my 20 minutes in the morning and 20 minutes in the evening for two and a half years without fail. Then I started to feel it had lost its value in some way, like, whatever it was good for, I had got it. And I had a sense there was more than the calmness and relaxation I was getting from TM. I started asking people about other kinds of meditation to see what there was.
I went to a weekend retreat in vipassana (insight) meditation, where we just sat watching the rise and fall of our breathing, and walking very slowly. And I found it the hardest thing of my life. By Sunday I was ready to explode. It was so simple, what the teacher was asking us to do ... and I couldn’t do it. And that really showed me something, the fact that it was such a challenge. I hated it, but the challenge absolutely intrigued me. I was hooked. He talked about the importance in everyday life of awareness, of waking up to life and living fully. Many of the things he said felt so inspiring and so right. And I wanted the kinds of things he was talking about. I just dived in and started doing lots of retreats and sitting every day. I started having some of the experiences Buddhism talks about – really seeing into the reality of who I am, and beginning to understand why things had been so difficult. Simply that a thought is just a thought, and I don’t have to get all caught up in it. There is a way out of all the suffering, as Buddhism says, and I was experiencing it – in glimpses. It was mind-blowing. Right here, in this day and age, it is possible. Not 2,500 years ago when the Buddha taught but here and now it is possible to see the end of suffering.
Several of these quotations, as well as showing the power of person-to-person contact and example, also suggest that people may be predisposed, perhaps only unconsciously, to Buddhism as a result of encountering real unhappiness in their lives that the conventional solutions and
