When someone described me yesterday as a former buddhist monk, my first impulsive action was to correct her. Her reaction caused me to realize that she was strangely correct and actually very insightful.
My arc to buddhist thought has been a long and gradual one. I may have appeared, in my younger days, to be a Franciscan friar. But actually I had begun to think more as a buddhist monk might think. I was still a very young and inexperienced monk when I began to turn to and rely on my own insights and early experience. My own observations became a trusted guide to my thinking, living and decisions.
Initially , this was not so clearly an act of rejection of the concepts handed to me by trusted teachers, those purveyors of religion whom I listened to. Initially, I was more likely to bend traditional concepts to fit my own way of thinking. I actively scavenged traditional concepts to support and justify the way I thought.
First, I would focus on what I had evolved to understand. Then, often with serious study and research, I would search how traditional thought might fit. I might even select marginal ideas that seemed to conclude what I had already come to understand.
My teachers called this sophistry, and that was not considered a compliment. Those were the people who knew no other way than what they had been carefully, forcefully taught. They may not have challenged my thought process as sophistry, but I knew they saw the pitfalls of my approach.
Those who may have been aware of my rebellious thought process, mostly honored my ability to shape their view of the world to my own. To them, I was a rather compliant monk. The one teacher who resisted my thinking had to experience the open defiance of someone who was recognized a top student.
Now, years later, I notice that I have been describing myself as a former monk to my two sons. It is my way of describing my former life in a monastery with a term out of their fantasy world of gaming. For them, a monk is someone with mystical powers. For me, that has been a mildly reliable description of how I have come to see my growth in the experience of insight and mindfulness.
I realize that I have a deep identification with the notion of being a monk. I have in recent years thought of myself as an urban monk, as one who lives and moves in a world of tangible, active humanity.
My monastery, my separation from the active world is my home, my garden and my mind. I am not at all barricaded in that monastic place. Instead, I invite friends, lovers, and even strangers to enter my place of retreat. It seems that my heart flows out constantly from that sacred arena of seclusion. I often return to my monastery for time to reflect, to read and to write.
I know and now understand that I am walking in footprints formerly set out by the Buddha and by a hundred generations of the Buddha’s followers. Some things feel very familiar, some things feel new. But I don’t at all regard myself as follower of the Buddha, even though the thoughts of the buddhist tradition often give rich meaning to my own experience. I am still a non-conforming monk, I suppose.
Instead, I consider that the living Buddha resides in my own heart, still guiding me in subtle ways. This has, unknown to me, always been this way. The arc of the Buddha’s presence has been long and often subtle, anchored as it is in the early days when I was first a monk.
I think that I have never left the life of a monk, even though it is now a form of life that is strictly interior. In some ways, however, it manifests itself even more today in the way I relate to people, plants and the planet. The connections I experience daily are what I consider to be the life of a dedicated monk.
I may not manifest myself in the robes of a monk any longer, but my heart is still that of the young monk who set out on this arc of living many decades ago. I continue to be the monk I believe I was destined to be.