Getting into Buddhism

I remember the time when I first "got into" Buddhism. I had reached the ripe young age of 28 or so. I had the feeling that something "wasn't quite right," though I couldn't put my finger on the problem. I had had a relationship break up, but I didn't feel that I was in a crisis. I didn't feel desperate or that I needn't anything in particular, but I did feel that, as D.H. Lawrence once put it, life had left me 'as it were, slurred over.'

I had read some Buddhist books over the four or five years previous, but I hadn't gone running out to find a teacher. I felt in some vague way that I wanted to study Zen, but didn't do much about it. I had a job in downtown Boston. An MTA trip from there to the Zen center would have taken nearly an hour; a ten-minute walk took me to one of Chogyam Trungpa's Tibetan Buddhist centers. They had daily meditation sessions a half hour after I got off, so I went.

I sat every evening for a couple of weeks. My knees hurt a lot. I couldn't sit full lotus the way my Zen books recommended. I didn't have any experiences that I could categorize as "spiritual" at all. I did the meditation technique as well as I could. Part of me said, "This isn't going anywhere." Maybe that was the point: not to go somewhere but to experience the present. It seemed that I had experienced something - I now call it "authenticity"; at the time, I didn't call it anything. Somehow I kept doing the practice. I sat with myself, without supports or distractions. And when I got done each evening, I felt, in some strange way, better. Not less neurotic, necessarily. Not wiser or "more spiritual." But I kept sitting.

I think now, looking back, that I had perhaps had some glimpses of what Buddha meant by his Noble Truths. Just some glimpses, and short ones at that, even though, on the cushion, I just thought a lot either about women, or about my job, or about how I wanted the hour to end, or about other things that probably seemed important at the time. Spiritual experience? Go figure.