Slowly slowly O mind;
Everything in own pace happens,
Gardener may water a hundred buckets;
Fruit arrives only in its season.
—KABIR
I went back to Kolkata with my parents, feeling like a prisoner dragging his chains. My sisters welcomed me home with tears and scolding, tiptoeing dramatically through the minefields that stretched between my parents and myself. The three of us had always been very close and played together easily despite our age differences; we had learned to rely on one anothers’ company when our frequent moves left friends behind. The worst-case scenarios of my disappearance horrified them, as did the pain I had inflicted on my parents. Shefali was a teenager then, mature enough to understand the real risks of my adventure, and to inhabit both sides of the argument. You could see the lawyer she would become. She defended me to my parents, argued for my right to choose my own path, then turned around and advocated on their behalf to me. “A spiritual life is noble, yes, but you’re just a kid. You don’t know how the world works. You’re too young to think about such things, and certainly too young to be traipsing across the country all alone!”
In my own mind, I was no longer a child, having already made the most serious decision any individual could possibly make. I had given up this mundane world! Why couldn’t they understand? My younger sister Shilpa was truly the little kid. She was just six then, and she idolized me. She clung to me as if I might disappear again at any moment, and she knew too that her hero had done something bad, which of course was fascinating in its ambiguity.
Returning to boarding school in Asansol was not possible—it was obvious I would bolt at the first opportunity. My parents insisted I start school in Kolkata.
“I don’t want to go to school. I want to go back to Rajgir.”
“That is out of the question at this stage.” It was an article of faith for my father that my obsession was a phase that would eventually pass.
Neither of us would budge. My father would hold his tongue diplomatically, but it was only so long before he couldn’t resist raising the threat of school again. We might escalate to harsh words and slamming doors or go directly to heavy silence. Either way we would stop talking to each other for a few days, until a thaw produced another opening. He would try again and the cycle would repeat. Doors slammed. Meals were tense, often skipped.
What began as a stubborn rebellion devolved into a prolonged chill of disillusionment. I still saw friends but I begged off of any family activities and spent hours alone in my room, waiting for a solution to our impasse to somehow present itself. My parents realized that they were groping in the dark. Someone suggested that perhaps a psychiatrist could throw some light on the workings of my mind. A psychiatrist was a rare species in those days among the multitude of healers of the spirit that inhabited Kolkata, but the seers and tantrics circling the house had not yet produced a cure, so I was delivered for a couple of visits. I found the experience mildly amusing, which didn’t add to the limited confidence my parents had in the process. We didn’t continue.
I remembered that Nabatame had mentioned a Japanese temple in Kolkata. I had been too distressed to ask for details at the time. I pored over the phone book in search of a familiar name. It was a mysteriously slim volume to account for a metropolis of more than ten million, and it yielded nothing.
Meanwhile, gossip was traveling like a bad smell on the wind. My father smoldered after encounters that began with the warmest of greetings and then revealed a smirking curiosity masked as friendly concern. “How is your son doing? I hear he found religion. So he will not be following your footsteps into power?”
When the tension at home became overwhelming, my only remedy was to walk. Our home was in a modest apartment complex built for the civil service, but in a fine location facing a park with playing fields. On the far side, across a busy road, was the entrance to the green space that surrounds Dhakuria Lake. There was calm in the open waters, a sense of the city held at bay, the buildings banished to a distant rim behind the trees.
And then, one fading dusk as I walked, I thought I heard a sound: a low boom, a steady beat, barely audible. Not my heart, though almost as familiar. I followed the sound, past the lotus pond, past the swimming club, losing it now and then behind the insistent birdsong and the shouts of kids playing. Out of the park and a block farther down Lake Road. The building that boomed with the sound of the drum could have passed for a modest Indian temple, much smaller than the temple at Rajgir. Its whitewash was due for a freshening. I wasn’t at all sure if what I’d discovered was what I hoped. The drumming stopped just as I got there. A caretaker was locking the main door and shooed me back out the gate to the street. “Closed!”
I headed back there first thing the next morning. As I rounded a bend by the lake, a cluster of bright yellow and white robes caught my eye in the distance. I ran for them as if my life depended on it, and pulled up panting through my tears in front of Nabatame. Calmly, as if this were the most ordinary encounter, he said, “Come to the temple. We can talk there.”
So I had indeed found Fujii Guruji’s temple in Kolkata, a mere fifteen minutes’ walk from my home. Once inside, there was no question. The building was aging; it had been built in 1935 and was donated by Raja Birla who was also one of Gandhi’s biggest funders. But it contained that same aura of intense care and respect I had felt in Rajgir, the same blend of abundance and precise symmetry, the flowers, the dangling gold ornaments, that same face that had appeared so mysteriously in my mind on the altar, and here, seated in front of it all, a statue of the Buddha made of glowing white jade, looking down with the kindest expression.
Nabatame listened to my lament and advised very simply that my parents were right: I really should be going to school, but of course I could come to the temple whenever I had free time. And so began a life precariously balanced between two worlds. I conveyed my surrender to my parents, who found a school that was willing to admit me halfway through the term. It was not the best but good enough. I made my way to the temple whenever I could, leaving home at four in the morning in time for meditation before the dawn prayer session. Many days I came back again after school, did my homework there and stayed for the evening prayer session, walking home after nightfall. My parents kept their disapproval in silence until the next time some provocation rekindled the conflict.
“This nonsense has gone on long enough. You are wasting your life.”
“I never wanted to come back from Rajgir. You forced me to be here, so I’m doing what I need to do.”
“You are aiming for a life of poverty and you have no idea what that means. I’m paying for the roof over your head, your food, your clothing.”
I pulled off my shirt and threw it at my father. “You can keep it.”
As I headed for the door, a final shot found its target: “If you keep this up I will have those foreign monks deported.” The words sank in as my feet pounded the road to the temple. Could my father do that? Yes, he could. It was well within his powers, and not beyond where his anger might reach. I would feel the constant chill of that threat for a very long time.
Soon after I had found him, Nabatame vanished again. Communication at the temple was minimal at the best of times and it took me a while before I could piece together that he had left to work on a project in Nepal. The elderly monk who was in charge of the Kolkata temple never spoke a word to me. Every effort I made to connect with Reverend Shinozaki was met with daunting silence. If I tried chatting away regardless, and mentioned Nabatame or Rajgir he would lean forward a little, recognition flickering. When he chanted and beat the large drum, I would sit down uninvited beside him and join in with the small hand drum that Nabatame had given me. The rest of the time he buried his face in a book or the Japanese newspaper, which was at least a week old by the time it reached him. And yet his presence had a cordial warmth. He didn’t ignore me, he was just silent. I could only guess that he spoke no Hindi or English, though I learned that he had lived in India for thirty, perhaps forty years.
When the Bangladeshi kids showed up, then he beamed. There was an encampment of refugees along the railroad tracks that ran behind the temple, and a ragamuffin gang of dirty little kids routinely swarmed the temple as their playground. Other visitors would raise an eyebrow at the racket, or sidle away from the unwashed throng with a look of disdain, but Shinozaki never scolded them or treated them with anything other than gentle respect. Sometimes they would sit for the prayer session and he would invite one to take a turn on the hand drum. They had learned to show up about ten minutes before the end of the prayers in anticipation of the handful of sweets that Shinozaki would pass out as prasad.
Eventually one day he passed the sweets to me and gestured that I should distribute them. That was a victory. Shinozaki’s persistent silence was becoming my personal challenge. A few days later I spotted an opportunity. I knew he didn’t want anyone besides him to touch the altar, but that meant he had to interrupt his drumming and get up to light a new stick of incense whenever it burned out. He was aging, and getting up and down wasn’t that easy. The next time the incense burned to the end, I jumped up quickly and made eye contact with him, as if to say: Don’t stop! I’ll take care of this! I lit the incense. Mission accomplished. Contact was made, even if no words were exchanged. The altar suffered no harm.
My next advance was bolder. At the beginning of one dawn prayer session, I asked Shinozaki if I could beat the big drum. He nodded and moved to a seat on the floor. I took his place. I brought the stick down on the drumhead with the most satisfying sense of release, the vibration rumbling through my body. The old walls above us shook with delight. Shinozaki offered a glimmer of a smile in approval. It was an excellent prayer session, I thought to myself, and confirmation came in the form of a gesture that beckoned me to breakfast. A simple meal was provided after the prayer session for those who were staying at the temple. There was often a visitor or two from Japan, perhaps a monk passing through as Nabatame had done. That day we ate in eerie quiet, not a word spoken, with the cook and the watchman staring at me from across the table with unashamed curiosity.
Since there was no instruction forthcoming from Shinozaki, I made his every move my lesson. I watched how he cleaned the temple, how he carefully arranged the flowers and tended to the shrine. When he recited the Lotus Sutra, I listened intently, trying to catch familiar phrases in the flow of Japanese and memorize every inflection.
This continued over many more weeks. I showed up. I sat in quietude for long stretches. I joined in the chanting. Once in a while Shinozaki signaled that I could beat the big drum; other times I used the hand drum. I lit the incense, and I handed out sweets as prasad to the kids. I sat for the quick, silent breakfast. I watched and I waited for something more to happen, though it never did. I was not tempted to quit, not for a moment, but I was conscious that I was running on the fumes of a promise, a faith that the gears would somehow engage and I would find myself in a different kind of reality. Surely Shinozaki would break his silence and start to teach me what a monk needed to learn. Surely I would find a way to prove that I belonged, that I had a purpose there.
The temple had a small library but, with the exception of a few translations of Fujii Guruji’s writings into English, it was entirely in Japanese. It was not until a couple of years later that I was able to start Japanese language classes, and much longer before those books would offer up their secrets. At that time, the World Wide Web was still just a proposal on someone’s desk at CERN and finding information required actual legwork. The bookstores in Kolkata turned up nothing. The Sri Lankan Maha Bodhi Society had a substantial library, but it was far from home and they were reluctant to lend books out to a kid or even to let me read there. I found a small Buddhist temple that served the Chinese community that had settled around the leather tanneries in Tangra, but no one there was willing to answer my questions. The Bengal Buddhist Association looked promising at first—who knew there were actually Indian Buddhists?—but they too were impenetrable.
Though I was trying hard to learn more about Buddhism, I hadn’t closed my mind to other possibilities, regardless of what my parents assumed, and information regarding my own roots was far more easily available. I was inspired by Swami Vivekananda, who was the only Hindu teacher I was aware of who broke the familiar Brahmanical mold by being young, well educated, and attuned to the wider world. I made a weekly trek to the temple he had founded at Belur on the far side of Kolkata to attend private tutorials that Swami Ranganathananda was teaching on Advaita Vedanta and Kashmiri Shaivism. I was a seeker. If my understanding of the philosophy was basic at that age, the devotional tone of what I was learning resonated deeply in my being. It also found expression in the songs that I first heard from Baul singers wandering on the train and then tracked down to their community in Kolkata. I pressed them to teach me and I sang like they did about the crazy devotee on the riverbank calling the name of the Lord over and over in ecstasy, or the funny song that pictured Allah, Hari, Ram, and Kali sharing a table together in a restaurant. When I teased them that their anklets were what women wore, they corrected me: “There is no such thing as women or men. The divine is alive inside every body.”
Lessons appeared spontaneously too. There was a sadhu who showed up every few days in the park, trailed by a strangely orderly queue of a few dozen stray dogs. He wore a white dhoti and T-shirt, and his gray hair was matted into dreadlocks that were tucked inside the neck of his shirt and tailed out at the bottom. He carried a big box of the cheapest biscuits in his cloth bag. He would sit and the dogs would sit, quietly, patiently, as he called each of them, one by one. He inquired of each one very gently, very politely, about its health, its family, how its day was going, just as if he were speaking to a person. To some he offered a few words of guidance, expressed with love, and he fed each one a biscuit as if he were a priest giving communion. When that task was complete, he would take out a spoon and a small bag of sugar, and sprinkle it on the anthills by the path. I looked out for him, tried to anticipate his coming, and bought biscuits to add to his. His manner and the dogs’ respectful patience were mesmerizing to me.
I went looking for Mother Teresa, who had sparked my curiosity when she visited our school in Asansol. I knew a couple of boys there who had originally come from her orphanage. I found Nirmal Hriday, her “house of pure heart,” which was a couple of kilometers’ walk from home and I spent time on the weekends watching the goings-on quietly from a corner. Occasionally I would have the opportunity to help out with a simple task like moving beds, but there was usually a surplus of volunteers, many of them foreigners. Once I took the opportunity to ask Mother Teresa about the pin she was wearing. She told me it was Saint Francis and explained that he was a saint who had inspired her, and who cared for animals, like dogs and wolves, as well as people. Her words brought to mind the sadhu feeding the dogs, and though I’ve learned much more about Saint Francis since then, his image has bonded in my mind with the sadhu in the park in Kolkata.
Mostly I was just a fly on the wall, trying to understand what it was that moved through this woman and rippled out over the family of strangers she had gathered around herself; trying to understand how it was that a religious life expressed itself in this intimate commitment—all this feeding, washing, touching, caring—to human beings who were at the most extreme bottom rung of poverty and precarity. It was a kindness, without boundaries or bias, that didn’t flinch at sights that most of the world turned their eyes from. And yet she was fiercely bossy and stubborn. Was that a side effect of celebrity, I wondered, or was it necessary to getting the job done?
Not that the job would ever be done, not that way. I was no stranger to the debate about how to cure India’s poverty. My family argued fluently in the language of policy, with the conviction that education would shift the story. They did not lack for passion to turn their ideas into action or their resources to charity. What I witnessed at the “house of pure heart” was very different. Solving systemic problems was not the agenda. The nuns’ vow of poverty would not serve to end anyone else’s poverty, and their medical care was rudimentary at best. But that didn’t matter. What they offered was not scalable, practical solutions so much as a potion concocted of love, dignity, human warmth, and attention. On its own terms, on its own scale, it worked miracles.
Six long months after I first came to the temple, Shinozaki finally broke his silence. We had finished the morning prayers and were sitting down to breakfast, just the two of us that day, when he turned to me and said in halting Hindi, but with an expression of uncomplicated pleasure, “Yah ek sundar din hai, hai na?” “It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it?” It was indeed. A most beautiful April morning with the flame trees bursting into blossom in the park and my heart flooded with gratitude and relief in that moment.
It wasn’t as if Shinozaki suddenly became loquacious after that. We never did have the deep philosophical discussions that I longed for. But there was a genuine thaw. He seemed happy to see me each morning, and offered tokens of trust wrapped up in small requests: Could you change the flowers in the shrine today? Would you polish the statue a bit? Now and again he offered a few words of encouragement. Sometimes we even went for long walks together in the park without a word needing to pass between us.
Little by little I was spending more time at the temple. My parents grudgingly granted permission for me to sleep there a couple of nights a week, avoiding some of the walking to and from home in the dark and the monsoon rains. I kept up my side of the bargain. I transferred to a better school, got good grades, won debates, excelled at sports. On the surface I was doing well, but the effort of constantly shuttling between two worlds was exhausting.
Our truce was fragile, and my parents periodically mounted fresh attacks in unexpected ways. My mother’s strategy was spiritual diversion. The family went on a long road trip to Ajmer to visit the shrine of the Sufi saint Moinuddin Chishti. I remember the press of the crowd, the noise, the fluorescent tube lights eerie with their wrapping of green cellophane, the smell of frankincense, and then somehow slipping into a sense of profound peace in the midst of the chaos. I think Ma’s intention was to suggest that religion was a broad and diverse realm and one ought not to focus with too narrow a fixation on one tradition. Be open-minded and eclectic. Instead of a life commitment, let it be a hobby. Like collecting stamps.
When that failed, she fought fire with fire, her faith against mine. There was a celebrated Aghori, a fiercely ascetic devotee of Shiva, who was much respected by my grandparents. He came to Vishnupur Titirah every ten years and those visits were a special occasion when the entire village would gather to hear him teach. Ma and my auntie dragged me out of the house and sat me down on the veranda in the presence of the great man, with the crowd of about a thousand people seated on the ground before him and the cows tied up at the well completing the picture. My grandmother told him the whole story: the running away, the Japanese monks, drumming and chanting and scrubbing the floor…and asked if he could help. The crowd was hushed in anticipation, half expecting to witness a miracle. He looked at me. We locked eyes for what felt like several long minutes without him saying a word. And then those bulging eyes in that fearsome ash-smeared face, framed by his long beard and big earrings, broke into a smile. “Ye mere vash ke bahar hai…shiv iske sath hai.” “He’s beyond me. He’s with Shiva.” We both laughed and the crowd exhaled. Ma looked perplexed. That was the last of her spiritual interventions.
My father’s strategy consisted in recruiting respected champions of reason to lean on me. He had plenty of allies who could argue for the true enlightenment of education against the superstitious darkness of religion, but Mamu-nana was his ace in the hole. Known to the world as R. S. Sharma, my mother’s uncle was one of India’s most eminent historians. He was a professor at the University of Toronto as well as at the universities in Delhi and Patna, senior fellow at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, with a list of other positions and honors as long as both arms and legs. He had pioneered modern methods of data analysis and the use of archaeology to illuminate ancient texts, dismantled much of the colonial mindset that distorted the study of Indian history, brought the role of peasants and women to the foreground, and—at considerable risk to his own life—debunked the mythical pseudo-history that served as propaganda for ethnic strife. He was a giant in his field and a colossus in our family, where many, including my father, had studied under him.
We would often stop at Mamu-nana’s home in Patna on the way to our village for the summer holidays, so I didn’t suspect an ulterior motive when my parents planned a visit. We sat, as guests always did, in the cane chairs in the small foyer that faced the pomegranate tree, as if the overflow of books that filled every room had edged its inhabitants right out the door. As always, Mamu-nana was dressed in a white dhoti-kurta. If he wore anything else in London and Toronto, which I doubt, we never saw it in India. The very fact that he still made his home in a provincial backwater like Patna was an anomaly for someone of his accomplishment, but his attachment to a simpler life in India’s heartland seemed fitting for someone so deeply engaged with its past.
I’d spent many a summer morning—and there were many more to come—sitting in a corner on the floor of that small porch, listening in on Mamu-nana’s conversation with visiting colleagues as they debated theory, shared news of a new dig, or untangled the meaning of a particular phrase in an ancient text. But this time I was in the hot seat, not just a listener but a full-fledged discussant. After the requisite inquiries about health and family and such, which were brief because Mamu-nana was never one for small talk, we arrived at the topic of the day. To my surprise, it was Buddhism and how I might best apply myself to learning more about it.
My parents were a little smug at their advantage in having the great man in their camp, and it’s true that he argued in favor of education and against my becoming a monk, but his approach was uniquely his own. I don’t know if he sensed how hungry for knowledge the silence at the temple had left me, or if he saw a mirror of his own wide-open curiosity in my eagerness, but he laid out a generous feast.
He began with encouragement: There was much that was good about Buddhism, for sure. Mamu-nana’s view of history was always filtered through a Marxist lens that focused on economics and modes of production, but his Marxism was born out of a deep concern for social justice. He described the Buddha as leading an egalitarian movement in rebellion against the dominant Hindu beliefs of the time, and delighted in the account of how cleverly he subverted the caste system by controlling the sequence of his disciples’ ordination: A prince who became a monk would have to defer to the seniority of a low-caste person who was ordained before him.
The conversation that we began then would continue on and off over many years, and into a time when I brought a more mature understanding to the table, so it’s hard to untangle exactly what was said that day from other days, or to gauge how he simplified things to guide a child who had thrown himself headfirst into deep waters and whose parents were desperate for help. But I remember clearly the awe I felt to perceive a window opening on the historical landscape that the Buddha inhabited, and my excitement at learning that I was connected, personally and intimately, to a world I had discerned only dimly through a Japanese filter.
I had understood that Rajgir was a place of importance in the Buddha’s life, but I had not realized how deeply that life was rooted in this corner of India, how the roads he walked again and again crisscrossed the familiar landscape of Bihar. Did I know, Mamu-nana asked, that Vaishali, where our village of Vishnupur Titirah was located, was one of the places where the Buddha often taught? Vaishali was where the powerful courtesan Amrapali had gifted a mango grove to the great teacher. I was stunned. Were the mango groves that I played in descended from the same trees that had shaded the Buddha? Had he eaten that same fruit dripping with sweet juice? Did I know—Mamu-nana interrupted my fantasy—that the Magahi dialect my father’s family spoke was virtually the same tongue that the Buddha spoke? If I had heard him teach, I could have understood his words easily.
Vaishali was also where one of the Emperor Ashoka’s pillars was found, after serving for centuries as a mud-covered hitching post for cattle. Did I know that my name, Priyadarshi—“he who looks on others with love”—was Ashoka’s name too? And that name, deciphered on an ancient stone inscription and matched in an obscure text, was the essential clue that cracked the mystery of the long-vanished story of Buddhism in India. We would study the Mauryan dynasty and Ashoka’s pillars in history class the next year, but the textbook version paled beside Mamu-nana’s magic.
Beyond the childlike awe, which I’ve never entirely outgrown, at how ancient stories are still alive in my bones, Mamu-nana planted another seed in my mind that quietly put down roots and would become meaningful later in my life: When Ashoka the conqueror stood on the battlefield at Kalinga—the corpses mixed with those still groaning, the sky dark with vultures—and felt his heart moved to profound regret, he didn’t renounce the empire he had won and go off into the forest to be a monk, though he probably considered that option. Precedent and culture would have made it a reasonable choice. Instead, he stayed on the job. He worked at bringing his understanding of the Buddha’s teachings into the realm of governance, and what he accomplished is remembered as a golden age in India’s past. Here was evidence that Buddhist ethics could be put into practice as the foundation for a just and healthy society. In choosing to commit myself to a spiritual path, I had assumed that turning away from the world was a requirement. But here was a glimpse, down the tunnel of centuries, of a choice that was different but no less worthy.
Of course, there was a downside too, and Mamu-nana didn’t spare me the negatives. To a Marxist, the monks’ disengagement from economic production was damnably confounding. Their rituals were so much hocus-pocus and superstition. And the corruption that riddled the once-great monasteries, which came to harbor thieves disguised in robes, was as much to blame for the complete erasure of Buddhism from its homeland as any invading army. But the real reason he warned me against becoming a monk had to do with his own deeply felt sense of what constitutes intellectual excellence. The price of entry to this tantalizing store of knowledge that we were peeking into was an open mind, and I would forfeit the spirit of independent inquiry if I were to become a monk. If I really wanted to learn about Buddhism, he insisted, I should approach it as a scholar, not as a monk. The bias of a believer would inevitably compromise my objectivity and the results would be second-rate.
I didn’t have the language yet to answer him. I had little to refer to beyond the booming of the drum, syllables recited in a foreign tongue, and what I could glean from the behavior of Nabatame and Shinozaki. I couldn’t pull from a pile of books to clarify a thought, confirm a reference, quote a text, as Mamu-nana did so easily. But I knew instinctively that the two realms of faith and intellect didn’t have to be mutually exclusive. Somehow it should be possible to become a monk without making a sacrificial offering of one’s brain. If Mamu-nana could be an internationally acclaimed scholar who jetted from one university to another and yet remained grounded in a sleepy town in Bihar, then maybe I could be a monk who could think for myself. The world didn’t simply collapse in the face of strange contradictions.
What I didn’t yet know was that a reliance on empirical evidence and logical analysis, rather than blind faith, was woven into the fabric of Buddhist thought from its beginnings. The Buddha advised his followers not to take his teachings on faith: Burn them, smash them, test their purity as a goldsmith would test the purity of gold. In other words, subject them to the furnace of reason and observe them in the laboratory of experience. Find out for yourself what their effects are. Do they help to reduce your suffering? Do they make you more skillful in reducing others’ suffering? Do they make you more free?
Invoking a goldsmith’s tests suggests a reaching for scientific objectivity that controverts stereotypes of religious dogma, and that passage has been a favorite of those who are invested in the idea that Buddhism, among the world’s religions, is somehow specially suited to rational modernity. But the invitation to test the gold is not exactly a claim to objectivity. In fact, the Buddha’s teaching constantly calls into question our assumptions about the very nature of objectivity.
Every one of the sutras—the accounts of the Buddha’s teaching that have come down to us—begins with the phrase Evam maya shrutam…“Thus have I heard…” That opening, hedged as one listener’s experience, implies that this is just one possible account of what happened, filtered by a human mind and the limitations of memory. As scripture goes, it’s a rather tentative beginning. What typically follows next is a sketch of the setting: where the Buddha was staying at the time, who was present to hear him speak, what occasion or questions led to his words. This record offers a glimpse of the Buddha’s daily life: Amidst the communal routine of meditation, the alms round, the daily meal, there was time when monks or visitors could bring their questions to the teacher. His sermons were not composed in advance, but arose organically in response to those questions. The Buddha’s words were often attuned to the needs of a particular audience, a particular time and place. Although some of the Buddha’s teachings are considered nitartha, or clearly definitive, a great many are described as neyartha, conditional and open to interpretation. They are not divine revelation, absolute and incontrovertible, but communication skillfully framed for a particular audience. It was emphasized again and again that each listener heard those words differently, according to their own capacity and their own concerns.
Our encounter with those words today is not meant to be a passive experience any more than it was when they were first uttered. The invitation stands: Test the teachings. We are free to argue and grapple with them intellectually. Doubt is not heresy; it is a necessary part of the process. It is no accident that debate was at the core of how learning was structured traditionally in Buddhist monasteries, or that the formal logic of philosophical debate was finely honed there. And so, with hindsight, I could have said to Mamu-nana that he didn’t need to worry: I had not signed up for a cultish lobotomy.
More to the point, intellectual understanding will never provide the complete picture. If we are genuinely going to bite into the gold, we need to test it in ways that are not just theoretical but grounded in experience. That internalized, living knowledge requires practice. As delighted as I was by what I could glean from Mamu-nana’s attempt to entice me into the scholars’ camp, and in spite of my hunt for books in all corners of Kolkata, I knew that book knowledge was not sufficient to the goal of spiritual learning. There was a reason I had headed for the train station first and the library later. You can learn all there is to know about the physics and biomechanics that go into riding a bicycle, and fill the blackboard with formulas and equations, but until you get in the seat and make the effort, until you fall off a few times and get back on, whatever you can say about riding a bike will fall short of even a child’s experience. Besides, even if one’s goal were a purely scholarly understanding of Buddhism in its historical context—knowledge on Mamu-nana’s terms—surely having personal insight into the spiritual experience at the heart of the historical phenomenon would be an advantage, not a handicap.
There is a place and a purpose for faith, but it doesn’t stand in opposition to inquiry and it’s far more effective when it’s not blind. The spiritual path is a trek into the unknown, and the unknown is a scary place. It’s also a path of indeterminate length. It might take many years, or perhaps many lifetimes, and the destination may not be quite where we thought we were headed at the beginning. Faith is a cloak of confidence that keeps us moving forward, one foot in front of the other, even when the journey seems uncertain or veers off into the unmapped, dragon-infested territory of our actual lives and relationships. Faith is what launched me out the doors of St. Vincent’s, what kept me scrubbing floors at Rajgir, and what drew me back to the temple, day after day, when Shinozaki seemed unapproachable and disinterested.
A good part of faith is patience and perseverance, and those qualities, curiously, are qualities essential to practice. The musician repeating scales over and over might seem to be carrying out a stupefying ritual until you understand how that practice relates to musical performance. Just as faith supports practice, practice also feeds faith. When we begin to see the effects, however small, of practice over time—when we find that practice has made us just a tiny bit calmer, more compassionate, more focused, less judgmental—that positive feedback tells us: Eureka! This is gold.