This twentieth-anniversary “reincarnation” edition celebrates the enduring stature of a book about impermanence. Since it first appeared in 1990, What the Buddha Never Taught has been published in seven countries and five languages, including Chinese. It’s sold over 50,000 copies worldwide—an unusual feat for any book about Buddhist experience not written by the Dalai Lama. The book was a best-seller when it first came out in my native Canada, and it has been on the curricula of various Buddhist studies courses for the past twenty years, including, currently, the universities of Toronto, Winnipeg, Charleston, and Truman (in Missouri).
For curious readers, I would like to trace some of the more interesting twists in the life history of this book, my first, beginning with its publication.
I finished the manuscript in 1985, just after leaving the monastery while events were still fresh in my mind. I was still travelling through Asia, so when it was done I sent it home to my parents in Ottawa. They passed it on to a family friend, Bede Hubbard, who was an editor at a Catholic publishing house in Montreal. He had offered to take a look at it. He returned the manuscript to me when I came back to Canada a year later. His note said the book had merit, but would never get published in its current form. He said he had made a few suggestions for revision. Flipping through the manuscript, I saw he had covered each page with red marks. The whole thing had received a detailed, professional edit. It was an incredibly generous gift. I took his comments to heart and spent the next three months revising the book.
I sent finished manuscripts to a dozen publishers, and even made a trip to New York to drop copies off to Random House, HarperCollins, and other big houses. Secretaries blinked at the scruffy, scrawny twenty-eight-year-old handing out thick blue binders with photos taped to them like some high school project. Unanimous rejection letters soon followed. They told me an unknown writer needed an agent to even have a manuscript considered. So I sent manuscripts to dozens of agents. They told me I needed to have a book published to even be considered worthy of having an agent. It was a classic Catch-22.
By this time I was working as a journalist in Tokyo. Whenever I would return to North America, I would check out the Buddhism section of local bookstores and write down the names of smaller publishers I thought might publish a book like mine. This time the rejections were much more personal. Some were even encouraging. I got ninety-two rejections in all before I got a response from Ray Woolham at Unica Books. Ray told me Unica was his own self-publishing enterprise that he ran out of Duncan, British Columbia. There was no way he could publish someone else’s book, Ray wrote, but if I sent him several more copies of the manuscript, he would pass them on to friends in the business.
Within a month I had a contract signed with a British publisher. On the strength of this contract, I quickly found a Toronto literary agent who immediately placed the book with a brand-new Canadian publisher, Somerville House. Somerville’s editor, Patrick Crean, worked with me on the book, as well as two subsequent books. (It was also his idea to do this twentieth-anniversary edition.)
As I have often said to young writers, a published writer is just an unpublished writer who doesn’t know when to quit.
Once a book is published, it takes on a life of its own. Everyone has his or her own opinion about it. Luckily, media coverage for What the Buddha Never Taught was generous, and the reviews were mostly good. The book spent six weeks on the Globe and Mail’s best-seller list. Several reprints followed. Foreign editions came out in Germany and Spain, as well as strange places you would not think of, such as Greece and Taiwan, and then the United States.
For me the biggest shock came when I returned to Thailand in 1996 on assignment for a Canadian airline magazine to write a story about foreigners who had become Thai monks. I found a monastery in Bangkok with half a dozen white guys in robes who agreed to talk with me. We met as a group, cross-legged in the shade of a large whitewashed shrine.
I was in the middle of tape recording their stories, when all of a sudden one of them looked up at me, squinted, and said in a South African accent, “Wait a minute—did you say your name was Tim? Tim Ward from Canada? Did you write a book about . . .”
“Wat Pah Nanachat? Yes!” I said, rather pleased they knew of it.
“Oh, we can’t talk to you any more,” the monk said. As one, they got up and began to move away from me.
“But why?” I was desperate here, not just losing my interview subjects, but also feeling suddenly like a pariah. I followed them down the side of the temple.
“Oh—you went to the monastery in order to write an exposé and make the Sangha [the Buddhist hierarchy] look bad. It’s very bad kamma . . .”
“Wait, no . . . that was never my intention. I just wrote about what happened while I was living in the monastery. If you read the book you—”
“Oh, we never read it. We’re not allowed to read it. . . . We would never read a book like that!”
They dispersed through the grounds, walking swiftly away from the moral contamination in their midst.
Shit, I thought. I was never going to get a story out of them or any other Western monks. I’d been blacklisted. I felt a moment of kinship with Salman Rushdie. Luckily, Buddhists don’t issue fatwas. The Sangha doesn’t need death threats. They can trust kamma to take care of miscreant monk-maligning authors well enough.
I sat down in the shade and immediately started to scribble some reflections on the topic, when suddenly the Afrikaner monk reappeared. He walked towards me, paused as he neared, looked around to make sure no one could see him.
“You know”—he bent in and whispered towards me— “really I think it is good to write books that are critical of the Sangha.” Then he straightened and walked off briskly.
One by one, most of the monks from my earlier meeting approached me in a similar manner and with a similar message—a message they dared not speak in the presence of their fellow monks.
What I like best about this book is the incredible variety of opinions about it I have received from readers over the years. Some people have told me it inspired them to go to Asia on their own spiritual journey, and maybe join a monastery. Others have been repulsed by the flaws in the Thai monastic system, or by the emaciating self-denial and rigor of monastic life. Some are made squeamish by the snakes, scorpions, tarantulas, and poisonous centipedes—insects we had to learn to live with—these people never want to visit a Thai jungle. But they are really glad they could live the experience vicariously. Still others have found the book an affirmation of the harmony that is possible between people and the natural world.
Most of all, I have enjoyed the different interpretations of the book’s title that readers have told me. Some surprised me, some enlightened me, and not a few made me laugh. So I invite new readers of this twentieth-anniversary edition to share their perspective on what they think the Buddha never taught. You’ll find a link for this on my website, www.timwardsbooks.com.
Tim Ward
2010