Being a Middle American Buddhist

The broad goal is to make information about Buddhism ever more readily available to the world. The specific goal is to create a vihara, or Buddhist meditation center, preferably in a red state.

There is enormous value in knowing that people who have not traveled to Asia, or studied directly with any Asian teacher, still manage to make substantial progress on the path. It is actually a bit tricky to articulate the point because, especially in Zen, but for all Buddhists, the point of the exercise is not really to achieve anything. In some ways, Buddhism fits well in modern American society, but in some ways, it offers a profound critique of the way most Americans live our lives. In the United States, we tend to focus on accomplishments, on getting results, on completing major life tasks, such as graduating, from high school, or college, or law school, or graduate school, or whatever. Our culture typically gives us repeatedly the message that we are somehow inadequate as we are and that we need to do something or buy something to remedy the lack.

Again, the Buddha said you already have what you need, you just need to figure out that you have it and how to use it.

The Buddha did talk about the Noble  Eightfold Path, but this is much more a metaphorical than a literal path. The Buddha himself awakened completely by sitting under a tree,  meditating, having resolved not to move until he had achieved total awakening.

So you can get done what you need to do by sitting still. Awakening in the Buddhist sense denotes a profound, enormous change in your subjectivity, in how you perceive and think about the world. You don’t achieve anything or get anything, you just rearrange dramatically what you already have.

The key point is that we boring, middle Americans, with or without a college degree, with or without travel to India or Asia, or even outside the United States at all, can replicate the Buddha’s achievement completely, except that we cannot be the first in the current era because the Buddha already beat us to that one. Not that Buddhists care much about such distinctions. We mostly revere the Buddha for having done what he did — done was what had to be done, as Buddhists like to say — and then spent 45 years teaching and compiling a record that his followers could write down for us to continue using some 2,500 years later.

I know. I have done this. I’m an ordinary, American person who grew up in Oklahoma City and long had the thought that I was, or should become Buddhist, a thought I finally acted on during my second semester of law school. i started meditating regularly at a center in the city where I lived at the time, then took refuge, the formal act of becoming Buddhist, about a year later.

Awakening occurs gradually and I am much more fully awakened now than I was when I started. All I did was meditate, which has its own benefits, but the ultimate point of the exercise is to realize complete liberation from samsara, or what we might call this vale of tears. You can do this, too. Anyone can. That's the point.