Tim Ward and I first met backstage at the Vancouver’s Writer’s Festival in 1993. Tim was launching The Great Dragon’s Fleas, the second book of The Nirvana Trilogy. What the Buddha Never Taught had just come out in the United States, so it was something of a double birth. I will never forget the easy rapport we shared from the moment we took our places at opposite ends of the stage and the evening unfolded. It was almost as if we were a long-established team, a two-man road show. Tim naturally, as anyone will know who has read his marvellous books, was the funny one. I remained my earnest and serious self. But our thoughts flowed effortlessly, each complementing the other, until it became difficult for us or the audience to recall who had in fact written which book. Indeed, as the night went on the flogging of books was forgotten. My work as an anthropologist and botanist had taken me to the Amazon and Andes, and the outer worlds of plants, culture, and landscape. Tim’s journeys, in so many ways more profound, had led him through Asia and an inner world of spirit and faith. He had lived on the streets of India, pursued the Dharma in Buddhist monasteries in Ladakh, taken vows as a monk, and joined the community of devotees at Wat Pah Nanachat, a commitment detailed with such humour, honesty and grace in What the Buddha Never Taught.
Only years later when my own thoughts turned to Asia did I discover what the Buddha did in fact teach. It is distilled in the Four Noble Truths. All life is suffering. By this the Buddha did not mean that all life was negation, but only that terrible things happen. Evil was not exceptional but part of the existing order of things, a consequence of human actions or karma. The cause of suffering was ignorance. By ignorance the Buddha did not mean stupidity. He meant the tendency of human beings to cling to the cruel illusion of their own permanence and centrality, and that this caused their isolation and separation from the stream of universal existence. The third of the Noble Truths was the revelation that ignorance could be overcome. The fourth and most essential was the delineation of a contemplative practice that if followed promised an end to suffering and a true liberation and transformation of the human heart. The goal was not to escape the world, but to escape being enslaved by it. The purpose of practice was not the elimination of self, but the annihilation of ignorance and the unmasking of the true Buddha nature, which like a buried jewel shines bright within every human being, waiting to be revealed. The Buddha’s transmission, in short, offered nothing less than a roadmap to enlightenment. The proof of the efficacy of the science of the mind that is the essence of the Buddhist path is the serenity achieved by the individual who embraces the practice. Many Tibetans do not believe that we went to the moon, a lama once told me, but we did. We may not believe that they achieve enlightenment in this lifetime, but they do.
But they do not do so easily. I once met a true Bodhisattva, a wisdom hero, a realized being who had found enlightenment and yet remained in the realm of samsara, of suffering and ignorance, to assist all sentient beings achieve their own liberation. She was a Buddhist nun who as a young woman had gone into lifelong retreat. She had distilled her entire religious practice into a single mantra, Om Mani Padma Hung, six syllables representing the six realms that must be passed before the whole of samsara is emptied and complete purity is embraced through the heart essence of the Buddha. In reciting this one prayer every waking moment for forty-five years she had dedicated her entire life to the spreading of compassion and loving kindness. With each breath she had moved that much closer to her goal, which was not a place, but a state of mind, not a destination but a path of salvation and liberation.
Buddhism, as my old friend Matthieu Ricard once quipped, is not about the twiddling of thumbs. For all its wonderful evocations of life in a Thai forest monastery, the sharp portraits of the mystic saints and miscellaneous characters that stumble into the scene, the personal moments of doubt and near madness, this really is the central insight of What the Buddha Never Taught. Were Tim to be asked to add a coda to the fourth of the Noble Truths, it might well be “easier said than done.”
It is often remarked that Buddhists spend their time getting prepared for a moment that we spend most of lives pretending does not exist—which is death. They remind us that all life grows old and that all possessions decay. Every moment is precious and we all have a choice: to continue on the spinning carousel of delusion or to step off into a new realm of spiritual possibilities.
Tim Ward long ago removed his robes. But having been his close friend now for nearly fifteen years, and having watched him grow as a writer, husband, and especially as a father, I can attest that he has never fully stepped away from the Buddhist path of wisdom and loving compassion. We often find ourselves together on rivers, sometimes in the wilds of northern Canada, more often these days on the placid eddies of the Potomac in Washington, DC, where we both live. I always associate Tim with rivers, and rivers of course with vitality, constancy, whimsy, and life. I think you will find all these things and much more in this splendid book.
Wade Davis,
author of The Wayfinders