come to me

This is an updated and expanded version of a post from June, 2008.

Part One

1980: I didn't appreciate it at the time, but I had a wonderful childhood. I had two parents who loved me. I had enough food, a great education, plenty of exercise and lived in safety. There were some problems, but I can now see how they arose and that, really, I got through my earliest years relatively unscathed. At the time however they seemed overwhelming; and so, to what I imagine was the utter bemusement of my parents, I became a Christian.

I wore a badge that said "Jesus is Lord" (amazing that I never got bullied) and carried a battered copy of the 'Good News Bible'. Our Christian Club was tiny and congregated around one of the school's two RE teachers and I believed in it all totally. I had a relationship with Christ, was loved by Him, and loved Him back. I still miss that relationship, I"m pretty certain I'm still looking for the same thing again.

1985: The transition from Christian to Communist must have taken less than six months. No sooner had I put on a Christian CND badge than I was denouncing all religion as a tool in the armoury of the ruling class used to enslave and exploit the proletariat. The Miner's Strike, Wapping, The Poll Tax; my theology was that of Socialism, my gods were Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Castro.

And again, I believed totally. I didn't have a friend who wasn't a Stalinist; not a weekend went by without some kind of rally or meeting or paper-sale. I lost count of the number of times I was convicted and fined for putting up posters or for spray-painting slogans on East-End walls. And I had only contempt for anyone claiming to be Left-wing but who had the wrong theory or who put in fewer hours.

1995: Thanks to my first wife's encouragement I finally managed to finish university (a four year string of Marxist essays) and get a Tefl certificate. I then totally forgot all about politics as I suddenly discovered just how much fun was available in the classrooms, bars, and nightclubs of Eastern Europe. I got divorced, spent the proceeds from the sale of our London flat in a single year of fun in Lithuania, and still kept partying hard.

2000: Bangkok. Dao changed my life. I stopped smoking, I gradually stopped drinking, I worked incredibly hard and we struggled to get by. I think she planted a seed in me, or watered one that was already there. One day, before going to an important interview, she asked me to kneel down next to her in front of her stone monk, and we prayed that I'd get the job. That was ten years ago almost to the day.

We went to Korea and fled back to Thailand again. We went back to Korea a second time. Sometimes I drank too much, still I was argumentative and arrogant and selfish, but that other seed was gradually growing. We left Korea and went to England. I worked in the bacon factory, attended Quaker meeting and spent hours in a small Anglican church nearby. Dao worked in the chicken factory and I've no idea where she spent her weekends.

2005: We split up for a while and I lived alone in Cambridge. No drinking at all. I'd go to Quaker meeting in the morning, St. Mary's in the afternoon, and to a Theravada meditation group in the evening. When Dao became pregnant we moved into a beautiful flat and I massaged her legs and felt our baby in her belly every night. We had a shelf full of Buddhas, a white porcelain Bodhisattva of Compassion, and I prayed every day.

The angels I experienced on the morning Joseph was born is not a metaphor. I was walking to the hospital and there they were, behind the clouds, singing his arrival. I believe that. A few hours later I saw my son born, the greatest fear and joy I've ever known, and not a day goes by that I don't kneel and pray for his safety, health and happiness. I pray to God, and I pray to Buddha. To the Bodhisattva, to the sky, to the trees, to the universe.

2010: Six weeks after he was born, Dao left me and took Joseph with her. The police said there was nothing they could do. The Health Visitor said Dao was safe but said she wasn't going to tell me where she was. Dao wouldn't talk. Dao's friends told me Joseph wasn't mine. Dao told my parents I'd beaten her and had beaten Joseph. I didn't know what to do. I left. I went back to Thailand.

I spent hours in Wat Suthat, sitting and chanting, looking up to the Buddha, praying he'd hold Joseph in his arms. I moved to Korea and lived there with Ikumi and learnt to bow and how to call the name of the Bodhisattva. I took refuge and practiced letting go, entrusting this pain and confusion to my Buddha-nature. I returned to England, Dao refused to let me see Joseph, and then, stupidly, I came back once again to Thailand.

Part Two

There are many Buddhisms. A Tibetan peasant making the proscribed number of offerings to the deities every morning has little in common with a secular Western practitioner siting down to observe the mechanics of his own mind. And whilst I am a Buddhist - I have taken refuge in the Buddha-Dharma-Sangha and consider the five precepts as the most essential part of my practice - there are problems.

Of course I've not personally realized for myself, at a fundamental level, much of what the Buddha taught, and even on an intellectual level I still have difficulties, especially in the Pali cannon, where I find the Four Noble Truths to be particularly challenging. Even in the Buddha-nature teachings of Zen, which do ring true for me, I have real problems with the idea that there is no reality outside of mind.

Basically, I suppose, what appeals to me is not the theory, but the glimpse Buddhism gives of something deeper. I sometimes sense this depth in my practice, but also see it in the faith of ordinary Buddhists. When Dao knelt me down to pray that morning, an expression of her faith and the daily practice of Buddhists all over Asia, it re-awoke in me what is basically my religious and devotional nature. Based not on insight, but on feeling.

What varies, almost from day to day, is the extent to which my faith is in either Buddha-nature, or in more outward forms of devotion. Yes, of course the theory says that Amida Buddha and the Bodhisattva of Compassion are, actually, expressions of one's own True-nature and reside within that nature, but it has to be said that I am very comfortable with an other-power perspective and a path of faith in the salvic powers of the Buddhas.

Part Three

This is often challenged when I talk to western Buddhists of course. And my own internal critic can be just as bad. When I feel a connection with the Bodhisattva, when I use petitionary prayer, and I pray every day, the suggestion is often there that, despite my experience and what I see happening in every temple I ever go to, this is not 'real' Buddhism somehow. It's just my old Christianity in a new guise.

And perhaps that's right. After all, what I miss most from the Christianity I knew as child is that sense of personal relationship with the Divine, and the ability, through it, to constantly express gratitude. Gratitude for being held and for all the blessings of this beautiful world. I now realise too that there is another aspect of relationship that I still miss; the relationship found in the church.

One Sunday morning a couple of weeks ago, in a post-Christmas mood, I went along to the Anglican Church here. There must have been more than three hundred people for the English language service, from dozens of different countries, and I fitted right in. Nobody turned around in their seats to see who the strange foreigner was, and not for a moment did I have to explain or justify my being there.

I remember being in a temple in Korea, chanting and bowing for over an hour with everyone else and, as I left, someone asked me if I knew who the Buddha was. Don't get me wrong, all the Korean Buddhists I've ever met have been wonderful people, and those here at the Bangkok Seonwon have done so much to make me feel very welcome, but being a westerner in an Asian temple always carries the assumption you are an outsider.

Because you are. Asian countries don't have the welcoming immigration policies of the west, so while nobody would look twice to see an Asian person in a British church, a westerner in an Asian temple is always first assumed to be a tourist. But on another level I suppose it's true. I mean, still now, the words of the Lord's Prayer, which I learnt at school as a four-year-old, come more easily to me than those of the Heart Sutra.

Still, there are many reasons I couldn't join the church, not least the discomfort I feel with the Old Testament. But I'll admit I was tempted. The Hanmaum Seon Centre here has been amazing, doing so much to help me feel part of the community, even setting up the English-language Zen Club, but looking around me that Sunday morning, at the possibility of re-connecting with my first faith in a lively congregation sharing a spiritual life and culture in an ancient church, who wouldn't be tempted?

Part Four

The fact is, I'm a kind of religious schizophrenic. Putting it more kindly, you could say I speak two religious languages. I'm fluent in Christianity, my native tongue, but can speak some Buddhism too. I can see how certain words translate, Buddha for Jesus, Christ for Amida, God for Buddha-nature, Heaven, Pure Land, Mary, the Bodhisattva, vows, sacrifice, compassion and love, but no one can speak two languages at the very same time and hope to make any sense.

So what I do is, I find myself switching from one to the other. I can go to church and pray for Joseph, and ten minutes later I'm doing prostrations in a temple with just as much devotion. I expect this sounds quite insane; it certainly feels insane. Am I a fraud in both places? "Just rest and observe your mind" some will say. "Let go to the unnameable fundamental place" others might rightly suggest. "Don't worry about it" my friends say, "it's just you".

They are right. Observe, let go, accept. But finishing this essay remains difficult and depends entirely upon where I currently find myself in terms of devotional practice versus awareness of fundamental oneness, and how that intersects with the other axis of Buddhism and Christianity. I mean, my devotional impulse doesn't have to be in opposition to the recognition of non-duality, but whose name do I call as the plane goes down? Whose name do I call right now?

Taking the leap of faith comes naturally to me, the problem is knowing in which direction to jump. Hopefully, as that plane hits the earth, I'll remember to follow the breath and relax deep into myself. Perhaps that's enough. After all, I know there are arms to hold me, does it really matter which language I'm speaking when I express my gratitude? And yet, and yet my impulse is to call that name. Not begging, not asking for anything, just knowing I'm home.

Part Five

Because here I am, a pot-bellied, middle-aged man with no money incapable of running his own life. I am hugely alienated from a world I don't understand and increasingly fear, weighed down by decades of idiotic and selfish behaviour, and separated due to my own stupidity from both Joseph, who lives goodness only knows where in England, and Ikumi, who, with the patience of a saint, is waiting for me in Japan.

Clearly unable to look after the people who most need it, it's no wonder I turn to religion, but even then I make a mess of it. I long for simple faith, an abandoning of myself, but even when coming close (close to God, or to Buddha-nature, or to the Bodhisattva) I put up barriers of intellectualism, arrogance, and ego. I'm stuck in confusion, looking for answers that don't exist, rather than simply taking that leap.