Retracing Buddhist Encounters

Abstract

My aim is a modest one-to retrace earlier experiences of encounters with Buddhism and share my thoughts with others. I am not writing as a dual practitioner, nor do I philosophize about double belonging, its possibility or impossibility. Neither do I intend to write in an academic, objectifying mode of thought. It is not even about my ongoing personal journey, as journeys seem to imply participation in a continuing process. What I am going to describe are unconnected encounters, years apart, rather than an ongoing journey, perhaps like Grace Burford's postcards than any of the other accounts submitted. I first caught a glimpse, no more, of Buddhist thought in my early teens, in one of my school history books, and was both puzzled and intrigued to see Buddhism described as more of a philosophy than a religion. What could that possibly mean, and how could I find out about this so very different religious thought from the East of which our teacher spoke so highly? Later I learned more, but not much, in comparative religion classes and philosophy of religion courses during my university studies in the fifties and sixties, and from reading Henri de Lubac's book on the Amida Buddha and his study on the encounter between Buddhism and the West, a pioneering but little known work written in 1952, just before the expansion of Buddhism into the West really took off. I also saw Buddhist monks and rituals in some of the documentary films (with Arnold Toynbee as a narrator) I used in a world religions class taught almost forty years ago. But none of this really prepared me for meeting Buddhist people and Buddhist culture in Asian lands, all unpredictably diverse and appealing than any description found in Western books. When I lived with my family in New Delhi from 1965 to 1970, I met a Buddhist monk from Cambodia who had founded a vihara outside New Delhi open to people of all faiths, and it is there that I first encountered and took part in Buddhist meditation, worship, and festivals, but what attracted me most and left an indelible impression were the profoundly moving spirit of wisdom and compassion and acts of loving kindness that I experienced again and again and that moved me deeply to the core. Such experiences are so alive and vivid, so rich in texture and memory traces that they can feed thoughts and attitudes for the rest of one's life, but they are never fully captured in clever intellectual and philosophical abstractions, however