The questions and answers in this book have been taken from dozens of journals and diaries compiled during my twenty years of monastic practice. The questions originated from the hearts of other spiritual seekers whom I have happened to meet along the way. The questions were directed to me, and I responded to them as best as I could, treating each with respect, and knowing that if my mind is empty, I will be free to respond to the essence of the question and the need of the questioner in that moment.
Looking back, I recognize the truth that sincere inquiry always sparks our movement toward truth and compassion. Deep questions that arise naturally in the process of life’s unfolding signal the manifestation of the very energy through which we grow further. We would be arrogant to believe that we can proceed far without pondering the important questions life asks of us.
How did my karma bring me the opportunity to answer such questions? And how did I come to this place? And why did I come?
I was born in Chicago in 1940. My family had Jewish roots, though a mixed ethnic heritage. Our neighbors were mostly Catholic—Italians, Poles, and Irish. It was an interesting experience to grow up in a predominantly Catholic neighborhood at that time. An undercurrent of anti-Semitism was always lurking about, which generated confusion in the minds of my friends and myself. The heart of the problem was that since we were not aware that there was any difference between being a Jew and not a Jew, we couldn’t understand what was wrong with being one.
Two significant experiences came out of that somewhat confused identity. When I was a little boy, my grandfather, who spoke only Russian and Yiddish, took me regularly to a tiny, un-heated Orthodox synagogue. There I would be squashed between two gigantic, bearded old men garbed in heavy, full-length black woolen coats, with skullcaps on their heads and prayer shawls over their shoulders. The mingled smells of perspiration and wool and adult bodies moving in prayer were at once awful and wonderful. Being wedged in there between these old men, who were alternately sitting and nodding, half-bowing and standing, touched me profoundly and connected me to something safe and beautiful. After passing through all the business of my youth and adolescence, I would search all over the world for similar mystical experiences.
The second important experience that has remained with me was the intuitive understanding that to be a Jew was to be a person who seeks God. Being a member of the “chosen people” meant that one had the authority and permission to do that. I also knew, even if it was heretical to think this, that everyone was a Jew in this regard and that searching for God was a sign that one was chosen. For me, being a Jew was about not a religion but a calling; being chosen meant that God was the priority in one’s life. Later, I knew enough to express this insight in Buddhist language: to be chosen meant that one had arrived, through unfathomable lifetimes spent in the service of goodness, at a lifetime in which one would have the opportunity to seek and the sensitivity to develop that positive potential.
I completed grade school and high school in an ordinary way. From the age of ten until my teen years, I was encouraged and groomed to become an amateur boxer by our neighbors, who were boxing promoters and managers. While they watched prominent fighters work out in the gym, they would assign some jaded (and usually loopy, punch-drunk) guy to give me lessons. I fought in some Golden Gloves events, managing to win a few. The other sport in which I invested time was bowling. I believe my classmates and their bowling fathers still remember me as the kid who bowled the highest game in the junior league: 277. For ten years, that record stood as the highest score for bowlers under eighteen across the country.
A third significant experience occurred in my teen years. One day, when I was fourteen, I noticed a carousel of paperback books in a drug store. I had never seen books displayed like that before. At that age I didn’t go to bookstores—though I frequented school libraries and read more than anyone I knew—so this was the first rack of books I had encountered. My eyes went right to three books on Buddhism: one by Alan Watts, another by Christmas Humphreys, and a third by D. T. Suzuki. They were inexpensive paperbacks, so I bought them all. I read these books six or seven times each within a month, missing a week of school in the process. I was enthralled. They confirmed what I intuited to be the nature of the world. But in the turbulent years that followed, when hormones began turning my attention to school proms, clothes, cars, and the like, this spark of spiritual interest was subdued. It wouldn’t be reignited for fifteen years.
In college, first at the University of Illinois and later at the University of Miami and DePaul University, I followed the directions of my family and high school advisors and spent years studying only things that I wasn’t interested in, including three years of law school. Back in Chicago after a year of service in the Naval Reserve, I began working in real estate. I fully expected that if I applied myself to the pursuit of success and money, hard work and dedication would pay off handsomely. I married, my new wife and I settled into a comfortable life, and we lived happily ever after—that is, for about four years. We had no children—we were the children.
By twenty-nine, I recognized that business ability coupled with a driving ambition had effectively trapped me. Either I had to turn away from this never-ending, never-resting lifestyle, forfeiting the large commissions still owed me, or stay with it until I dropped dead behind an antique oak desk, stacks of files, and three telephones.
Walking through Chicago’s Loop one miserable winter morning, I noticed a collage of photos in the window of the Pan Am Airlines office. The photos, seemingly taken of every sunny beach in the world, surrounded an ad for a round-the-world ticket—$1249, good for one year. I stopped and stared, edging closer to see more detail of the beach photos. Two days later, on an equally windy, sloshy day, I passed by the Pan Am office again, on the way to an important appointment. After a frustrating and energy-draining morning, I closed up my briefcase and came out for air.
I purposely returned by way of Pan Am. This time I went in, picked up a brochure, and leafed through it for some minutes. I approached the counter and said to the smiling agent, “I’ll take two, please”—one for myself and the other for my wife. After that, everything happened very quickly. Once I recognized that the guiding principle had to be not wanting the whole catastrophe of my job to be waiting for me when I returned, I left everything at work to my employees and business associates.
Leaving from O’Hare International Airport, surrounded by friends and acquaintances who couldn’t believe this was really happening, was comical. Everyone assured us we’d be back inside of two months, bored by travel and homesick for Chicago. We boarded the plane, I took off my necktie for the last time, and we were on our way.
Almost two years later, we returned and settled in Arcata, California, joining a friend there who was teaching at a university. But those two years, spent mostly in India and other parts of Asia, had irrevocably transformed my outlook toward just about everything. Coming home, I could not find a place where I could fit in. Nor could our marriage assimilate all that had happened—and my wife and I went our separate ways.
I began practicing yoga, took up running, explored psychotherapy, studied phenomenology, spent weeks motorcycle-camping in Oregon and Washington, and experimented with psychedelics. The images of Buddhas and figures of monks that I had found so compelling in my travels dominated my mind. Eventually, I became affiliated with several yoga ashrams and moved into one that was a branch of the American Sikh movement.
After eight months with the Sikhs, complete with an eight-month beard, a turban, and a little hooked knife, another yogi and I moved to San Francisco to join the Sufi community there. In that year, I learned Sufi dancing, several forms of massage therapy, and some acupuncture and homeopathy. By now, I had become a vegetarian, quit smoking and drinking wine, and had taken a vow of celibacy. The Sufi community was spread up and down the Northern California coast, from San Jose to Ukiah. I decided to settle in Palo Alto to make use of Stanford University’s libraries. But now, instead of just browsing through Buddhist books, I was taking notes. When I came upon the books of Alan Watts, Christmas Humphreys, and D. T. Suzuki, everything rekindled, most especially my earlier fascination with the Buddhist path.
Soon I was off to Taos, New Mexico, to attend the first retreat led by the founding teachers of the Insight Meditation Society (IMS), who included Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein, and Sharon Salzburg. Notwithstanding one day spent in continuous crying, I managed to survive the ten days. I was encouraged to fly to Massachusetts to take part in IMS’s first three-month retreat in its new center. Those three months led to almost three years of retreats under various IMS teachers, with occasional seven- to ten-day Zen retreats at different centers led by visiting Japanese and Korean teachers.
Meditation practice made my mind clear, soft, and relatively content. But I also felt the need to grow. So I decided to go back to India, with a stop in Great Britain. India held out the hope of finding some obscure teacher somewhere in the Himalayas who could point to the way out of the cycle of suffering Buddhists call samsara. I was determined to endure any hardship and go to any length in order to meet such a master. I had yet to come upon one in whom I had that kind of confidence.
I left Boston bound for India, expecting to have to virtually crawl over the Himalayas naked to find my teacher. Instead, I met a meditation teacher from IMS living in London who invited me to meet five Western monks—Americans and Canadians—who were disciples of the well-known Thai meditation master, Ajahn Cha. At first I resisted the invitation. Visiting monks in their beat-up British monastery was not on my itinerary. However, my friend, who hung around this monastery every day, kept urging me to accompany him, so I eventually gave in. My first visit led to daily visits, then to a postponement of my trip to India, until I put the idea of continuing on to India completely away for awhile. Finally, I moved in to help out as a cook, and soon after began training there.
Three years later I was the first monk to be ordained in the newly constructed monastery, which had taken seven years to complete. In my fifth “rains,” as Theravada Buddhists (the southern school of Buddhists) term the annual three-month retreat, I left for Thailand a fully ordained bhikkhu.
I still live in northeast Thailand alone in a cave, devoting a good part of my days and nights to sitting and walking meditation, following the tradition of the forest mendicants—a practice identical to that which the Buddha himself formulated after his enlightenment.
At present there are about fifteen hundred monks living in this tradition, spread out in three to four hundred meditation monasteries. Outside of Thailand, branches of this tradition exist in the United States, Great Britain, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand, and Sri Lanka. Ordained monks come from every Western country—there is even one Native American—and others come from Russia, Czechoslovakia, and Israel. There is keen and growing interest in ordination among women as well. And, as with the men, those women who take ordination are staying in robes for longer and longer periods of time.
While meditation monks and nuns prefer to stay in the forest, they also recognize the need for Dharma in modern society. In that spirit, in the past few years I have been traveling and teaching for two to three months each year. And during the monsoon season, I join with a small group of forest monks for the annual three-month rains retreat, which begins on the full moon of July.
In 1994–1995, the opportunity to teach Dharma found its way to my forest cave. English-speaking tourists at a guest house in nearby Kowyai National Park were eager to meet a Western Buddhist monk. When the guest house hosts asked me to give a little talk and to answer some questions, I agreed. I conducted talks there on probably twenty occasions, mostly to Westerners who had little or no familiarity with Buddhist teachings.
The questions asked by these “city” people were always interesting, both for the questions themselves and for what they revealed about the questioners. Sometimes people ask questions to display their intellectual prowess, often missing a genuine opportunity to expand their minds and, instead, falling deeper into the abyss of self. Questions asked merely to accumulate knowledge just add more burden to our already encumbered lives—more data, more trivia, more bytes to sift through in order to get to the present. These questions failed to catch my attention or arouse energy and empathy, and so have gone unrecorded.
Other questions have a ring of humility. They silence the self. These questions open the mind, turn it around, soften it, and make it pliable. They are profound in their asking and remain profound eternally. These are the questions that have been given shelter and space in this book. I have recorded them with the aim of providing an easily accessible reference tool for maintaining spiritual consciousness in the midst of a busy world. Combining these questions with contemplation can push the mind beyond thought, for with thought alone it is not possible to arrive at the truth we seek.
Some of the selections in this book have been gleaned from my personal notes. I’ve kept these questions and their answers at hand because I have found value in referring to them over the years. They came back to me in moments of need and confusion, when I had forgotten what I knew in other moments. So, ironically, some of these answers became benchmarks in my own practice.
Reviewing my notes with other people, many of them said that the questions and answers reflected their own path of inquiry. I decided that it would be useful to make this material more widely available so that others might have an opportunity to study these questions and answers. Soon after that decision was made, several people offered to transcribe these conversations. It is through the energy of these “bodhisattvas” that the original notes were finally assembled into manuscript form.
Later, an old battery-operated Mac laptop computer made its way into my life in my cave. For the most part, I worked on the book in forty-minute increments. This was all the power the computer’s battery had before it needed recharging. So, there was a day for writing, followed by a day for recharging, followed by another day for writing. These limitations served to keep my mind focused and kept the project from distracting me from the sixteen-hour daily meditation schedule I have maintained for years.
As the collated materials started to take shape, I realized that the sequence of questions and answers provided readers with an introduction to Buddhist ideas and a way of applying these ideas to various categories of human concern. I hope that this little book can shed some light on these, in the midst of the confusion and frustration inherent in cultures that suppress and deny our Buddha-nature. Perhaps the comments and considerations contained in some of these conversations will awaken you to “the-way-things-are,” the truth inside you that is just waiting for your reflection and appreciation. Many of my students have used focused inquiry as a means to move beyond a stagnant situation. This kind of self-exploration nudges us along such that we blossom into sensitive and loving beings. Once we recognize the value of truth, the gate to wisdom is thrown open and enlightenment becomes a real possibility.
Solitude, simplicity, and intense introspection—these are some of the aspects of Buddhist meditation that I have emphasized over the years. But while living in a cave as a monk can provide the ideal environment for these kinds of practices, being a lay person should not be considered a drawback to enlightenment. To live in caring and sensitive relationship with others develops the faculties that allow enlightenment to happen. No one can make enlightenment happen. We just have to live wisely; incline our lives toward truth; continuously undercut and diminish selfishness; and develop poise, alertness, and kindness so that the real, loving, compassionate being who we are can be here in this present moment, where enlightenment can happen.