Should you find a wise critic to point out your faults, follow him as you would a guide to hidden treasure.
—BUDDHA: DHAMMAPADA
Sometimes a jewel can lie right under your nose for years before it catches the light at a particular angle and you finally see its brilliance.
The first time I met Reverend Sasaki, I was around twelve, still living in Kolkata. I had told my parents that I wanted to go to the holy city of Varanasi to pay my respects to the Ganges. Perhaps they felt a glimmer of hope that I was showing interest in my Brahmin roots rather than Buddhism, or perhaps they were just tired of arguing, but they let me go.
Is a pilgrimage that’s hidden under a veil of pretense any less of a pilgrimage? When I reached Varanasi I didn’t wander in the dark lanes of India’s most sacred, ancient, shining city, or linger on the steps descending into the slow drift of Mother Ganga’s expansive embrace. Just a few kilometers farther, at a quiet and green remove, was my real destination—Sarnath. This was the place where the Buddha first taught, and it still holds a deep power, as if an elephant’s footsteps reverberate through the earth many centuries after it walked this ground.
The words that the Buddha spoke there are said to have set a wheel turning that would continue in motion at Sarnath, at Rajgir, at Vaishali, and far beyond. Those words would be remembered, repeated, expounded, and they still echo now, two and a half millennia later. That wheel left a deep impression in India’s soil and even marks the flag of its rebirth as a secular state since Independence. Sarnath was the site not only of the Buddha’s first teaching but also of the first retreat, the quiet season of meditation during the monsoon rains. When the rain ended and the roads were passable, it was the center from which the Buddha first sent monks out to travel homeless in the world, embodying what they had learned and making themselves available to others.
Sarnath remains the still center of the turning wheel and it drew a young Sasaki into its axis, much as Fujii Guruji was drawn to Rajgir before him, both of them spurred by Nichiren’s prophecy that Buddhism would return to India from Japan and be revived there after dying out. Though Sasaki went back to Japan for regular visits, his roots had dug deep into the soil of Sarnath. Nothing that life in India could throw his way ever shook his resolve to stay, not even several near-death bouts with illness.
When I first showed up at the Horinji temple in Sarnath, I knew nothing about this monk or how he had built the temple slowly, through decades of determination. I was surprised that his face lit up when he saw me. “Somebody came here searching for you a while ago.” He showed me a small, dog-eared, black-and-white photo of myself—the photo my father had distributed to temples and mosques and shrines in his dragnet across India when I ran away. We laughed together at that slightly younger me, and I felt oddly welcome.
We met again on several occasions, at Rajgir, at the temple in Kolkata, and in Delhi. Though the Japanese monks in India were from different schools, their paths crossed often, and on those paths, Sasaki’s reputation preceded him. He belonged to the Nichiren Shu school, the “mother ship” that Fujii Guruji had sailed from, and he was known as something of a rebel, simultaneously esteemed by and at odds with the establishment back in Japan. He expressed strong opinions about how monks in Japan had been reduced to functionaries in the funeral business; how that was demeaning and not what Buddhist monks should be doing with their lives. His compatriots in India got a more tongue-in-cheek critique. “These monks are too lazy,” he would say, dismissing them as well as his own verdict on them with a laugh. “Just come to Sarnath.” With that he would finish off his glass, bottoms up. It wasn’t unusual for Japanese monks to drink alcohol, unlike Buddhist orders elsewhere. Even so, Sasaki was legendary. I often heard him joke that he was the Old Monk who gave India’s most popular brand of rum its name. Then he would light yet another cigarette and puff away, adding to the very effective smoke screen with which he surrounded himself. He worked very hard at not having followers.
By the time I got to know Sasaki, I had already become a zealous perfectionist in the matter of monastic vows. The fact that I wanted so badly to be ordained, and fought so bitterly for it against my parents, made me fiercely determined to keep the vows in all respects as if I really were a monk. I had discovered the Vinaya, the text that explains the very detailed rules governing the conduct of monastic life. I had met monks from Sri Lanka and Burma, whose discipline was an inspiration to me. For them the rules of the Vinaya were still vital in a way that had largely faded from memory in Japanese Buddhism. I decided, like a good monk, that I would not eat after the midday meal, which my mother took as the worst possible offense of Buddhism against the health of a growing boy, and I lost that battle after a couple of months. But my righteous adolescent self remained quick to judge the discipline of every monk I encountered, and Sasaki was not excluded from that exercise.
The lesson that I needed to learn in all this was one that Sasaki held in reserve. He would wait until I returned to Sarnath after a long detour to Syracuse, New York.
It had become perfectly clear that my parents would never back down: Over their dead bodies would I become a fully ordained monk. I was caught in the gears of a machine that was manufacturing my future, step by incremental step. In desperation, I threw a spanner in the works. I decided to fail the national board exams that controlled the fate—the eligibility for college—of every high school student in India.
Day after day I sat in the exam room. I wrote my name and number on each paper, sat quietly until the end of the session, and handed in the blank papers. I was not going to walk out early and merely get disqualified. No, I was determined to fail, unequivocally, irrevocably, and without remedy. Word got out. My silent protest was the talk of the school. When my parents learned, they were in shock; they refused even to believe the story until they saw those big zeros. Their fury then was tempered by the sadness of genuine loss. I had indeed thrown away my future. Any possible damage control was now severely circumscribed by those zeros, but they swung into action regardless. I would be packed off to live with my uncle’s family in the suburbs of Syracuse, New York, airlifted to safety beyond the reach of the Japanese monks’ mind control and India’s too-pervasive fog of spirituality. They found a school in Syracuse with an international exchange program that accepted me.
I didn’t want to leave, and it was only Anju-sama’s blessing that finally got me out the door. Education was never a bad thing, she insisted. It was what her own son had lacked, and she wished she had been able to provide better for him. My father and my grandfather saw me off at the airport. All around us, families were saying goodbye to departing students with a familiar script: Study hard! Don’t go to clubs, don’t party, stay away from alcohol! Just study, focus on your studies…My grandfather gave me a big hug, and said, “Enjoy yourself. If you find a girl, send me a picture.”
On the flight, thirty thousand feet above nowhere, I made a decision, late as it was, to stop making my parents miserable. The only way I could see to do that was to give up my practice—no more meditation, no more prayers—and turn my back on the spiritual life. I would fill the hole that was left by studying hard.
And so I entered into a time of strangeness that sticks in memory as an extended bad dream, a cultural disorientation compounded by a spiritual one. I struggled earnestly to blend in, but like any kid fresh off the boat, I stumbled on the rocks on shore: My courtesy offended the female teachers’ gender politics. I was spooked by American teenagers’ mating rituals—did going on a date mean you had to get married? I acquired the nickname PD because Priyadarshi was unpronounceable. There were pleasant moments—I enjoyed playing soccer and DJ’ing for parties—but ultimately it all seemed a pointless charade and my participation was forced, acted out in obligation.
After four months, my body joined forces with my mind in full-on rebellion. I felt sick, and couldn’t muster the effort to talk to people. Food sat heavy in me and refused to digest. One morning I woke up in a worse state than ever, and instinctively I sat to meditate and do some prayers. I felt like I had just been given oxygen and could breathe freely for the first time in many weeks. A drink of cool water in the desert, a freshness that people commented on repeatedly that day. It was obvious that trying to stop was a mistake. I would have to figure out how to integrate practice into this life that my parents had conjured up to cure me. Discreetly, quietly—no loud drumming—I set aside time each morning and evening in my room.
I did well at school, but going home when I graduated wasn’t an option. Much as I missed India, I refused to return to the domain where my parents had total control. I went through the motions of applying to college and collected a stack of Ivy League acceptances that would have thrilled my parents if only they knew. I didn’t tell them. I was determined not to accept their financial help, but my student visa didn’t allow me to get a job. I was stuck in a stubborn bind until a scholarship to Le Moyne College in Syracuse rescued me.
The Jesuit brothers of Le Moyne also provided a balm for my deeper problem. No one there was going to argue that the spiritual dimensions of life were not a worthy priority. I finally felt at home. I found my footing in the international students’ organization, in interreligious dialogue and the philosophy symposium. I studied Christian texts with the Jesuits and argued Jewish philosophy with my advisor Rabbi Michael Kagan, who was very dear to me. In fact, I was doing so well that I was on track to graduate early, which was a problem, given my student visa and uncertainty about next steps. Rabbi Kagan suggested that I could solve the problem by declaring additional majors and taking a year to study abroad. Never mind that I was already “abroad”—I realized that it meant I could go home to India for a year on my own terms, to reconnect with old teachers and seek out new ones. I could continue studying Buddhism, and because it was all part of the university’s program, my parents could not object. Father Ryan found a grant to cover airfare, a laptop, and a camera—I would have to report on my experience—and I knew I could stay at monasteries and live on almost nothing.
After a few days in Delhi, in the limbo of reentry, I was on my way to Sarnath where I had an invitation to study at the Central Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies. This brought me back to Sasaki. I figured I could stay at his temple, at least until I got my bearings.
Somehow, in the confusion of boarding the train in Delhi—passengers matching tickets to seats and stowing luggage and families squeezing in—my daypack disappeared even before the train pulled out of the station. With it went the new laptop, the camera, and all the cash I had on me, enough to cover the months of my stay. The ten-hour ride was time enough to defuse the surge of anger aimed both at the thief and my own carelessness. By the time the train pulled into the station at Varanasi, I had settled into acceptance, but I still needed to get to Sarnath somehow without bus fare.
Once when the Buddha traveled to Sarnath, the story goes, he had no money to pay for the ferry across the Ganges. Instead he simply vanished in front of the startled boatman’s eyes and reappeared on the far bank. When news of this event reached the king, he granted free passage on the ferry to all monks, but somewhere in the labyrinth of history that custom had lapsed. I took a cab. It was more expensive than the bus, but that way I could ask Sasaki for help with the fare when I got there.
When we reached the temple and I knocked at his room, the Venerable Sasaki didn’t disappoint. The door opened on a familiar sight—those baggy pajamas, a towel draped over his head, and a cigarette dangling. “Traveling light?” he asked, as a big smile spread across his face. “Don’t worry, you can stay here. I’ll cover your expenses.” Any words I had ready were knocked right out of me. All I could do was laugh.
Sasaki let me use one of the old computers in the office in place of my stolen laptop and shared his Yamaha 160 so I could ride to classes in Sarnath and Varanasi. I settled into what was perhaps the happiest period of my life. A banquet was laid out before me, and I was hungry. I dove headfirst into the Nalanda masters, guided by scholars with a lifetime’s knowledge of Buddhist philosophy. I studied Tibetan, and I sat with pandits who taught Sanskrit orally in the traditional manner—it flowed easily for me and unlocked memories of summers spent reading Sanskrit poetry with my grandparents. I met young monks who were not so unlike myself, made friends from Ladakh and Tibet and began to learn about varieties of Buddhism that were different in so many particulars from the Japanese I had grown up with, though we all shared this heartland at Sarnath. There were whole libraries at my disposal and great minds open for the asking. It was a feast where each dish offered deep nourishment, a season’s bounty bursting fresh in my mind, and the complex flavors of long tradition.
Sasaki observed my voracious learning binge with a certain skeptical reserve. He had always drawn a bright line between textual interpretation and in-the-flesh realization. There were scholars and there were practitioners, and I knew which was the real deal in his mind. Sasaki himself never taught. There was nothing to teach, he said. Those who wanted to learn would come, and they would learn what they would learn. “If Sasaki teaches,” he would say, “they learn what Sasaki says. They don’t learn what Buddha says. Sasaki cannot teach like Buddha.”
So I was more than a little surprised when he summoned me from my room to talk to a group of visitors at the temple. “They’re here to learn about Buddha Dharma,” he said. “Teach them.” Some were Indian, some Japanese, not monks but pilgrims, or tourists with a more than superficial interest. I was nervous and entirely unprepared for this test; I dreaded the critique that was sure to follow. I tried to join the guests sitting on the ground, instinctively aiming for the leveling effect of an American classroom circle. “No!” Sasaki planted a chair and made me sit above them. “Teaching Dharma you have to sit there,” he insisted. He took a seat at the back of the room and glared at me steadily.
Just begin. May it somehow be helpful. Begin at the beginning. “You’re in Sarnath,” I said. “This is the place where Buddhism began, where the Buddha first taught.”
How could I possibly imagine what it was like the first time that the Buddha shared what he had seen that night under the Bodhi tree? Having arrived, the whole of the path he had traveled was visible to him. Where the path ended was where suffering ended. It took weeks before he could even begin to think that it was possible to communicate what he had learned. He walked the hundred and fifty miles from Bodhgaya to Sarnath, to the Deer Park where his five friends who had been comrades on the path were still searching for what he had found. Those five friends would become the first monks. De facto, no rules or ordination; the Buddha’s own presence and example were guide enough. What he had learned could indeed be taught.
I can’t remember what words I found that day, only that I did my best to echo that first teaching, to add my small voice to the centuries of echoes and offer a tiny nudge to help keep the wheel turning. The heart of the Buddha’s first lesson that he shared with his friends is summarized in four points, mnemonically enshrined as the Four Noble Truths. The first describes the world as we know it, the truth that all of our existence is painful: Not just the slings and arrows that the universe aims our way and the harm we do to one another, but also how loss is ever-present in an impermanent world and how it shadows even our fleeting moments of happiness. The second truth reveals the causes of that suffering: ignorance and grasping. How we cling to everything we touch—the people, the possessions, the circumstances that we believe will make us happy—and remain ignorant of a deeper source of happiness that will outlast anything we could grasp. The third truth is that this constant escalation of suffering, though natural and normal, is not eternal or necessary. The Buddha taught that it is possible to free ourselves from this suffering, and the fourth truth is the path to that liberation, which involves practicing ethical conduct, the mental discipline of meditation and mindfulness, and the wisdom that erases the illusions of ignorance, recognizing that there is nothing to grasp or cling to that stands apart from the flux of perpetual change and interrelationship.
Sasaki seemed to have dozed off. Then one eye opened, and I knew he was wide awake and had heard every word. When the visitors wandered off, he steered me out of the temple and we walked to a nearby tea shop. Now the critique begins, I thought. He gave some change to the chai wallah and told him to go buy cookies. When the box arrived, he opened it with all the excitement of a little kid opening a present, and offered me a celebratory cookie. “I’m impressed,” he said. “You’re learning well.” The cookie was nice. Buttery. And then gone. The praise felt good. Sort of like the cookie, buttery and then gone.
While I was staying with Sasaki at the temple in Sarnath, my father came to visit. He said he had business in Varanasi but clearly he was making an effort to reach out to me. Sasaki insisted that he stay with us and fussed over fixing up a room for him. He seemed as excited in anticipation of the visit as I was apprehensive.
In the end it went smoothly, because both elders found a certain common ground. My father discovered that Sasaki had a wife. She was a nun who lived in Japan and looked after their home temple. This was not at all unusual in Japan, however unthinkable in the Buddhism of other traditions. During the Meiji Restoration in the nineteenth century, celibate monks without possessions or worldly obligations were seen as a threat to the state, much as the samurai were. You can’t control someone who has nothing to lose. So monks were pressured to marry, temples became property that was passed on through inheritance, and monastic ordination evolved into a hereditary priesthood. Fujii Guruji’s return to a stricter vision of monastic discipline that included celibacy was exceptional in the world he was born into.
When my father discovered that monks in Sasaki’s school could marry, a light bulb switched on: Here was a win-win solution to our intractable conflict. Obviously, I should be ordained as a Nichiren Shu monk, just like Sasaki, who thought it was a great idea. To me it seemed pointless and irresponsible. You couldn’t very well support a family and live in the world without ignoring a huge portion of how the Buddha had taught that a monk was supposed to live. You would either be a monk in name only, or a poor excuse for a husband. Neither fish nor fowl. My father clung to the idea until his dying day, but Sasaki conceded the common sense of my position: “So the monk now lives in India and the wife lives in Japan. What’s the point?”
“It’s true, there is no point!” he laughed.
It was this open-minded, nonjudgmental embrace of circumstance that made me feel bold enough to ask Sasaki for guidance on a related question that had gnawed at me for a long time. It was the issue of women. Not the ordinary question of women as most young men might define it, nor even the annoyance of my parents’ obsession with marriage and procreation, but the delicate issue of women and vows, and the seemingly contradictory messages built into the tradition. The prescriptions of the Vinaya are very specific about avoiding contact with women, avoiding even the appearance of impropriety. If I lived in a monastery, no doubt the logistical challenges would be moot, but it seemed impossible to negotiate the physical space of the modern world, the classrooms and dormitories and elevators and crowded buses, without breaking the rules.
At Le Moyne, I lived at Father Daniel Berrigan’s International House, which at that time shared the building with a Latino frat house. My neighbors came from the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and the Bronx. They partied late and had girlfriends who spent the night. Our first wary encounters warmed into a respectful if oddly matched friendship. They could count on my prayer bells to get them out the door just in time for class in the morning, and they welcomed my tutoring in math and science. They made a conscious effort not to swear in front of me, as if I were a Catholic priest, and they warned me in advance if the movie they were watching that night wasn’t suitable. But to the girls I was a challenge. Insistent efforts to teach me to dance salsa—“hold me tighter, PD, like this!”—made me blush, to the loud applause of all present.
It wasn’t really my own feelings that defined the opposite sex as a problem. I may have been naïve compared to Americans my age, but I wasn’t fantasizing about where the dancing might lead or running Bollywood romances in my head. My feelings were neutral, but the texts I was studying were not. From the earliest beginnings of Buddhist monasticism, women were seen as distractions to practice. A monk should control his thoughts. A monk should not be alone with a woman in a vehicle, in a room, in a secluded place. A monk should keep his eyes cast down.
There were practices designed to subdue desire and tame attraction, and I took them on diligently. I had visited the charnel grounds in Varanasi and sat on the ghats as the light faded in the evening, watching the corpses burning atop piles of wood. The sputtering, steaming, twisting, crackling reality of a once-human body, “a sack of pus, blood, and bone,” now fueled the flames. Nothing attractive there. I looked at people on the street and visualized them as skeletons. Men too, but women especially. That hand raised to steady a bundle on her head, the angle of a shoulder, those legs side-saddle on the back of that motorcycle—all were reduced to the minimal architecture of bleached bone. I erased the bare skin, the gleaming hair, the curve of a lip, the colorful swirl of clothing. With my x-ray vision and a harsh dose of impermanence, I defeated the forces of attraction. No, there’s nothing beautiful here at all, nothing more than what will remain when the drama of death’s decay has slowed to a microscopic crawl.
But other texts that I was studying, and my own common sense, turned that thinking upside down. This whole project of enlightenment wasn’t just about me. Women were sentient beings too, and not just objects of attraction. I should be training myself to feel lovingkindness and compassion for all beings equally, not reducing them to a fraction of their reality or a figment of my imagination. I didn’t have to look further than my own family to know that women—young or old, educated or otherwise—were every bit as formidable and deserving of respect as any man. Whether or not I saw them as attractive had nothing to do with it.
This was the conundrum that I hoped Sasaki could help me untangle. As difficult as it was to ask, I could trust that my question would not be met with ridicule or embarrassment. I told him I needed to talk to him and he set aside time that same evening.
Sasaki was waiting for me in his room. He sat with a pot of green tea, two glasses, and a bottle of Johnny Walker set out in front of him. He poured a little whisky in each of the glasses, pushed one toward me, and took a sip of his own. This was a new twist. Though his habit was infamous, he had never offered me a drink before, and I was dumbfounded. I sat still, said nothing, but in my head I was yelling, No way! You must be crazy to think I would touch that stuff.
He finished his glass slowly, savoring it. He poured himself another. Long minutes went by in silence, maybe half an hour with only the faintest sound of a car in the distance, a fly buzzing. Finally he asked, “Aren’t you going to drink?”
“I can’t drink. It’s against my vows.”
“Oh, I forgot about those.” He said it so disingenuously I could half believe he was not actually mocking me. “Well, you said you wanted to have a conversation. I don’t converse with people who don’t drink.”
This is ridiculous, I thought. Should I just forget about asking for advice? I decided to wait a bit longer, hoping he would drop it. Another quarter of an hour passed. It wasn’t as if we couldn’t both sit silently all night.
Finally he spoke. “Would you like some green tea in your whisky?” I had never heard of such a thing, but I figured he was making an effort to compromise and I should meet him halfway.
“All right,” I conceded. He poured and I took a sip. The burning sensation was strange to me.
“These vows of yours, what are they good for?” I was startled by the harshness in his voice. He normally spoke very gently unless something really upset him. I gave the standard answers as I’d learned them. The vows protect one’s practice. They prevent distractions and wrong turns and keep you focused on the path to enlightenment.
“And what is the purpose of enlightenment?”
“To benefit sentient beings…”
“So do your vows benefit sentient beings? How exactly does that work?”
I groped for an answer. “If I get rid of ego…”
“And these vows—are they helping you to get rid of your ego?”
That landed a blow. I defended without thinking. “In some ways.”
“In what ways?” My mind went blank. He pushed on. “Aren’t your vows inflating your ego? Aren’t they obscuring your view of everyone and everything around you? How can you help sentient beings if you feel superior to them? How can you let go of your ego when you feel superior to everybody here?”
The feeling of something shattering inside me was physical. A cracking sound, loud, hard, and brittle.
“Have another sip.” I didn’t argue. I drank the burning liquid. “Of all pride, the most dangerous is spiritual pride. It’s the blind spot that leads to one’s downfall. So make up your mind if you want to be a Bodhisattva and benefit others. Or else”—and here the nonjudgmental Sasaki returned with a shrug—“just practice well for your own benefit.”
And so, with all that as preface, and from a much more humble position than when I had entered his room, I was finally able to ask Sasaki my question. To be fair, with his typical prescience he had already given me an answer. But still I asked, struggling to choose my words without falling into the whirlpool that circled in my own mind. Having dragged the question around since high school, and up and down the halls of Le Moyne, it seemed complicated, a story with an endless cast of characters, each with their own backstory, footnotes…
His answer was a simple, straight blade that cut through all my circuitous ifs, ands, or buts: “If you’re too attached to your vows, you’ll be blinded by all kinds of discrimination,” he said slowly, and then continued as if the choice were evenhanded: “If you’re not so attached to your vows, you won’t see men and women. Instead you’ll see Buddhas.”
Not men, not women, but human beings. And every human being that stood before me was a potential Buddha, infinitely worthy of love and respect. There was the Bodhisattva Fukyo standing at the gate, bowing in deepest reverence to every man and woman, every dog, every donkey.
Sleep didn’t come that night. I lay awake in the dark for hours, pondering our conversation. I poked gently at the wound that had opened, not wanting to bandage it quickly or minimize the effect. I could recognize that the sting of shame was not something to pull back from; these were growing pains.
Spiritual pride is the blind spot that leads to one’s downfall.
I knew what spiritual pride was, or so I thought. I had seen plenty of priests acting like politicians, concerning themselves with who had the bigger following, who sat on the higher throne, who built the bigger temple. That kind of pride was the very antithesis of the humility that every spiritual tradition honors. It was so clearly grasping, treasuring oneself, clinging to an illusion of identity. Buddhism 101, Noble Truth number two, the root cause of suffering. That wasn’t me. But the self-righteousness, the stance of moral superiority that Sasaki had recognized—that was spiritual pride too, of a more subtle form.
Our blind spots are often surrounded by bright neon arrows pointing straight at them, flashing brazenly. Not only was my fierce attachment to a lofty goal still a fierce attachment, but my whole story—the who-what-where-how-and-why of me, my endless conflict with my family, my future always just out of reach, my very purpose in life—was woven out of tight bands of that same attachment. Behind all the longing, all the devotion, all the pure-minded determination to do it right, there stood a boy with both arms wrapped tightly around himself. And if that wasn’t bad enough, he had his Brahmin nose held high, looking down on everyone else.
What exactly were these vows that my ego was so invested in? The more than two hundred vows compiled in the Vinaya texts (the exact numbers vary in different traditions) were rules to guide the early monastic community. In essence, they guard against doing harm, including the myriad ways that ethical failures might harm the cohesion of the community, or its relationships with the outside world, or a monk’s progress on the path. Ethics shade into etiquette and deportment—how a monk conducts himself in all circumstances. Although the rules are detailed and comprehensive, their spirit is far from absolute. They come with accounts that explain how they were devised to resolve particular conflicts or perceived transgressions that had arisen in the daily life of the monks who followed the Buddha during his lifetime, and so they are embedded in the culture of their historical moment. The Buddha emphasized again and again that their spirit mattered more than their letter, and at his death he said that the minor rules could be abandoned as times changed.
But the monks could not remember with certainty which rules were categorized as minor, and so they kept them all. In the Theravada schools that prevail in Southeast Asia, and have continued in a line unbroken since the Buddha’s lifetime, the rules are recited regularly and are absolutely central to monastic life. The discipline of monitoring one’s own adherence is a core practice that both demands and hones a constant awareness. Living in such a constrained manner requires deep discipline, determined motivation, and constant mindfulness. It is those very factors of discipline, motivation, and mindfulness that will eventually do the work of transformation.
Though the monastic vows emerged from and are entirely enmeshed in communal life, they are individual commitments. They are most emphatically not a competitive sport. The kind of comparisons and score-keeping that hooked my adolescent mind instantly defeats their purpose. But it’s no surprise that we drag old habits of mind along with us onto the spiritual path. The longing to belong, the instinct to discriminate, the enthusiasm that gropes for a way to express itself and finds its form in pride—these urges don’t disappear overnight just because we discover that we have spiritual aspirations. In my yearning for the certainty and identity that ordination seemed to promise, even in the absence of any real monastic community, I had latched on to one of the most pervasive problems of monastic life.
My holier-than-thou judgment was not peculiarly mine. Self-righteous spiritual pride drives the sectarianism that plagues organized religion, and Buddhism is no exception. It might begin innocently, when the eagerness and joy generated by your own practice, your own progress, or the presence of your own teacher, express themselves in superlatives. Eventually those superlatives come to imply the denigration of all others. There is only one “best” and everything else is therefore inferior. Group dynamics—the team spirit of my monastery versus yours—compound the problem. Sasaki often talked about “the ego of institutions” that had caused the historical divisions of lineages, the proliferation of countless schools as Buddhism spread across Asia, each branch splitting off multiple times, some withering, some thriving, growing into great limbs or dividing into further branches, right down to the tiny twig that was Fujii Guruji’s small group.
So make up your mind if you want to be a Bodhisattva and benefit others. Or else…just practice well for your own benefit. Hidden in that evenhanded shrug of equivocation was a finger pointing at what was, by some accounts, the biggest split of all, dividing Buddhism into two streams across the continent of Asia, and separating the Mahayana schools that became dominant in China, Tibet, and Japan from the older tradition that is still very much alive in Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, and Thailand.
In the stream that flowed north, an expansive vision opened, beyond the historical record of one great teacher’s life and legacy, onto a cosmology permeated by the potential for enlightenment. Its driving energy is the altruistic motivation of the Bodhisattvas. It takes as its aspirational models such figures as Avalokiteshvara, protector and guardian, the embodiment of compassion, who hears the cries of suffering sentient beings and takes on whatever form will relieve them. It recognizes the impossible scale of the task without faltering. After countless eons of reaching out in aid, Avalokiteshvara surveyed his work and saw there was still endless need. At the sight of so much pain, he shed a single tear, and from that tear was born Tara, the feminine Bodhisattva of compassion-in-action, swift and effective, saying, I will help; I will be your companion in this work. A Bodhisattva’s life is bound by a deceptively simple intention: to place others before yourself on the path to enlightenment. The radical humility of that intention should serve as an antidote to spiritual pride. If you have boundless aspirations for the welfare of all sentient beings, you won’t get the job done by sitting atop a mountain of righteous virtue, looking down on them as spiritually inferior.
And if you weren’t moved to aspire to that impossibly vast embrace of all beings, then, as Sasaki said, just practice well for your own benefit, and aim to get yourself enlightened. Though I knew well enough in which stream he swam, the even-tempered simplicity of his pronouncement truly carried no shade of judgment. But if you did choose that older, narrower path, he implied, you wouldn’t get far by using your vows as bricks in a wall to defend your inflated self-image.
Ultimately that either-or choice was an illusion, two sides of the same coin that flipped on whether you fix yourself first, or throw yourself from the beginning into the project of fixing the world. In truth, you can’t do one without doing some of the other. You’ll never have the skill and the emotional resources to save the world without first developing a certain level of self-knowledge, forbearance, focus, and ethical discipline—in other words, a certain level of spiritual maturity in your own life. And likewise, you’ll never reach that maturity without a simultaneous investment of compassion and openhearted awareness of your kinship with the flawed and needy world. They are one and the same reality, circling each other, and the difference is only a matter of where you begin to tell the story. Sasaki wasn’t going to preach that one choice was better than the other. But whichever side you choose, he was saying, do it right.
Shame is a powerful, if bitter, medicine. My fault was exposed, and that exposure gave rise to a newly reflective awareness. My remorse was genuine. The way to put it right was to study how to avoid repeating the offense. One method—not a method I recommend, but one that comes spontaneously to many—would be to beat myself up, ruminating over what a terrible person I was until my self-esteem shrank so small that it would be a wonder I ever thought I had anything to be proud of.
There is a better method, though it might seem counterintuitive. The problem with spiritual pride is that it takes something good and twists it into something bad. If there wasn’t something worthwhile at the bottom of it, there would be nothing to be proud of. Pride in the ethical discipline of keeping vows was my particular poison, but pride could distort and debase any aspect of spiritual life. You could study the texts—even texts that teach humility—motivated by scholarly vanity. You could approach meditation like an athlete collecting trophies. You could revel in insights and epiphanies, lingering a little too long in the light of wisdom until it dimmed shyly, embarrassed to keep your company. Anything that was good could turn bad if it became a hook for pride. That didn’t mean you should give up on trying to be good.
Is it possible to find virtue in yourself, to recognize genuine accomplishments, to honor them as worthy—and then just let them be, without letting pride put its sticky fingerprints all over them? Surely I had good models. The careful humility of each of the monks I had spent time with was a clear lesson. There may have been an odd irony in Sasaki’s self-effacing reluctance to teach formally, but it wasn’t humble bragging.
Had I been proud that day when he pushed me to teach? Not so much. I was too nervous to be proud, anxious at the very idea of teaching in front of someone so senior to me, and utterly focused on doing justice to the task at hand. I knew instinctively in that moment that the best I could do would be to serve as a conduit of something purer than I could ever produce by myself. It wasn’t about me. Afterwards, in the surprise of having pleased Sasaki, I had felt a moment of pleasure that certainly edged on pride. And I had let it go: I was pleased that he was pleased, and we were both pleased that the Dharma had been served appropriately. That much was worth a cookie.
A month or so later, on New Year’s Eve we did a late-night prayer ceremony marking the turn of the year. I was tired and fell asleep quickly when we finished prayers shortly after midnight. I woke up about two hours later, restless, and noticed a dim light under the door to Sasaki’s room on the far side of the courtyard. Was he still up? I crossed the courtyard, and as I did, sounds from behind the door grew louder. He was reciting something. I couldn’t make out the words, but his voice was intense with emotion, rising and falling dramatically. I didn’t want to disturb him by knocking, so I just opened the door a crack to look in.
I drew back immediately, stunned. The whole room was flooded with a blinding light. I looked again. I could see the shrine at the wall to my left in flames. Sasaki, who sat almost directly in front of me facing the shrine, was lit by the firelight and yet at the same time silhouetted, his profile stark against a blazing circle of light, edged in tongues of flame.
What am I seeing? In a blink, a third look, and it was gone. Sasaki was sitting there chanting in the dimly lit room, just as I had seen him countless times before. Normal, except for the intensity of his voice. He didn’t seem to register my presence or the open door. I shut it silently, and padded back across the courtyard. Sleep was not going to return easily that night.
We gathered as usual for prayers in the main temple early in the morning. I had decided to say nothing. I felt I had accidentally witnessed something deeply private and it was not my place to ask questions. But then Sasaki walked over to where I was sitting. He smiled and said softly, “What you saw last night was for you only.” So he had been aware of my intrusion after all. It was an instruction too, in the gentlest way, that what I had seen was not to be spoken of.
But what exactly had I seen?
Is it possible to contain that blaze in reason’s straitjacket? In the encounter between Buddhism and the modern world we have been quick to discard what seems alien and fanciful, and to highlight what conforms to the Western scientific worldview. When neuroscience affirms the health benefits of Buddhist meditation, we take that as a meaningful validation; the rigorous logic of the Nalanda philosophers seems proof that they share the same reasonable outlook we do. Meanwhile, we tiptoe with eyes closed around claims that push against the unexamined boundaries of our metaphysical assumptions. If we look at all, we dismiss the supernatural as superstition, the sign of a debased form of “village” Buddhism. If it doesn’t match our assumptions, it can’t be genuine.
In all this cherry-picking we are filtering out something important. It’s not that science is wrong-headed, or that we should bend the laws of physics to accommodate the paranormal, but there is more than fits in that box. There are other ways of knowing and engaging with the world that are also valid.
Deep in the heart of Buddhist philosophy, at its most rational, is the premise that the reality we encounter in our day-to-day lives is less solid than it appears, and that it is constructed with our participation. Science doesn’t disagree. From the ambiguities of quantum physics to the biological mechanisms of perception and embodied experience, our deepest understanding of how the world works is a lot less rigid and a lot more participatory than what hard-nosed common sense offers on the surface. And if it’s less rigid and more participatory, then it may also be malleable in ways that surprise us.
Consider the seventh-century philosopher Chandrakirti, whose commentaries still serve as a classic textbook on that less-than-solid ontology. He was a brilliant logician who could take down his opponents’ views with one hand tied behind his back, arguing entirely from their own premises, to prove that nothing exists inherently or independently of its relationships to all other nonexistent things. And yet the world is not nothing, he insisted. However much we are engaged in its construction, it’s not just a product of our imagination.
Chandrakirti was also the abbot of Nalanda, which meant he had administrative responsibilities as well as academic and spiritual ones. So, when a rainstorm caused the monastery’s herd of cows to shelter in a forest at an inconvenient distance and milk was needed, Chandrakirti solved the problem by milking a cow that was painted on the wall. In the telling of the story that has come down to us, there is no suggestion that this is a miracle that stakes a claim to divinity; these are no fishes and loaves. Instead there is a tone of gentle irony: A great teacher’s deep knowledge of the fluid nature of reality finds a surprising, practical expression. A portal to the irrational opens right in the heart of reason. Because he was also a Bodhisattva, as well as abbot and scholar, he was concerned not only to feed those in his charge, but to shake up his students and remind them that whatever view they believed was essentially groundless, useless to cling to.
When Buddhist texts talk about siddhis—paranormal faculties that are said to be within reach of the most advanced meditators—they make it very clear that siddhis are nothing to get excited about. Clairvoyance, walking through walls, being in two places at once—such “attainments” may surface, it’s said, as side effects of practice. But it would be a serious mistake to cultivate such by-products deliberately. Doing so would distract you from more worthwhile work and send you off on a dangerous detour.
And if you did happen to find yourself in possession of strange powers, it would be an even more serious mistake to advertise that fact. Worst of all—a heinous offense that would get you expelled for life from the monastic community—would be to make false claims that you had such powers when in fact you didn’t. The particular peril that looms in the vicinity of supernatural powers, whether real or falsely claimed, is spiritual pride.
In the weeks that followed, I asked Sasaki for guidance on reciting the sutra. He gave me tips on pronunciation and pacing with the moktak, the carved wooden fish with its eyes always open, reminding us to stay alert. But beyond the technicalities, in essence what Sasaki told me was this: “When you recite, you are not reciting a text, you are creating what the words describe. Make the whole thing come alive. Witness it.” A director might say those same words to an actor without calling upon supramundane powers. Was what I glimpsed through the crack of the door that night merely some further degree of impassioned imagination, an extreme form of art? Or was it perhaps a lesson from Sasaki, a jujitsu move intended to knock me off-balance? That self-discipline I had been so proud of was barely a mote of dust in the blazing vision of infinite possibilities.
The truth is, I will never know what Sasaki did that night. I don’t know what “really” happened any more than I know how Fujii Guruji appeared in my dreams or how the Bengali swami came dancing with me. And that’s okay. We would do well to practice knowing nothing for sure, learning to rest calmly in a place of uncertainty without casting about anxiously for answers. The things we think we know most certainly, those solid realities we cling to and never doubt, are the source of most of our problems.
In any case, what I had witnessed was not to be spoken of. That would be tempting spiritual pride. As I said, Sasaki worked hard at not having followers, and it’s only now, years after his passing in 2003 when Sarnath was left feeling strangely deserted, that it seems safe to tell what I saw.