January/February 2012 This I Believe
Buddha Alone in It
by Robert K.C. Forman
It snowed again last night. A heavy drift blew up the locust tree, nearly covering the little Buddha at its base. Only his head pokes out of the snow bank this morning, like some crowning newborn. His topknot and curls stand out regally. He looks especially content there so alone.
He’s always alone, now that I think of it. You never see “Buddha and Wife.” Why is the spiritual journey always taken alone?
As Pir Vilayat Khan, head of the Sufi order in the West, once put it: “Of so many great teachers I’ve met in India and Asia, if you were to bring them to America, get them a house, two cars, a spouse, three kids, a job, insurance and taxes — they would all have a hard time.”
Jack Kornfield, in his wonderfully self-critical A Path with Heart, describes coming back from his years in an Asian Buddhist monastery. Although he returned from the monastery, he says, “Clear, spacious and high, in short order I discovered, through my relationship, in the communal household where I lived and in my graduate work, that my meditation had helped me very little with my human relationships. I was still emotionally immature.”
Me too. By the early 1990s I had come to understand silence and had woven much of it into my own personal psyche. But doing so was not enough. I was still too cut off, too introvertive within myself. Only if I could somehow learn to live the ease of enlightenment within and through my marriage, my friendships and all my relationships, I thought, might it be enough.
— Robert K.C. Forman, author of Enlightenment Ain't What It's Cracked Up To Be, presents workshops in Portland and Seattle on Jan. 14, 15 and 21. Visit www.enlightenmentaint.com.