The Discovery of Mindfulness
“The Discovery of Mindfulness,” by Carl Stimson
* * *
The Quiet Mind (1971) by John E. Coleman
One Night’s Shelter (1985) by Bhikkhu Yogavacara Rahula
Journey of Insight Meditation (1978) by Eric Lerner
Note, following the publication of this article, Carl Stimson went on to speak on an Insight Myanmar Podcast episode about his review of these three books. To hear more of his analysis of these books and what they tell us about the mindfulness movement overall, take a listen!
It’s hard to do anything these days without running into mindfulness. It’s in book stores and app stores, Ted Talks and podcasts, offices and classrooms. But rewind twenty years and that’s not the case, at least outside of traditionally Buddhist countries. In my country, the United States, meditation was certainly present in the 1990s, but it was mostly found among the new-age set, where it was part of a familiar landscape, a bit beyond buying organic but not as far out as astral travel. Go back another couple decades and it’s barely on the map. Someone might have tried transcendental meditation during a hippie phase, or checked out an ashram on a trip to India, but serious practitioners were rare, to say nothing of retreat centers or other such formal infrastructure. Back then, you might have been careful about who you revealed your meditation practice to; friends and fellow travelers sure, but maybe not a welcome topic at family gatherings or around the water cooler. Fast forward again to today and things have changed—people now feel little compunction telling the world about their deep meditation experiences. A YouTube search brings a flood of selfie testimonials that provide more in the way of cringes than insight, for there’s little more tedious that hearing a meditator describe their practice. But a Westerner having a serious encounter with Buddhist practice before 1980, well, that’s enough to write a book about, which several people did, three of which are the subject of this review.
Two of these books cover Dhamma encounters in the 1970s, with the other set mostly in the 1960s. The first two are by verified hippies and the third is written by someone quite a bit more “square,” in the parlance of the day. All are male, all are white, all are heterosexual, and all are American (although Journey Into Burmese Silence would fit solidly into this genre, a book written by an Australian woman who meditated at Ledi Sayadaw and Saya Thet Gyi lineage monasteries in Myanmar in the 1960s). There are a number of common threads in their Dhamma experiences, including travels to Myanmar, India, and Sri Lanka (only one author went to all three), being significantly influenced by the tradition of S.N. Goenka and Sayagi U Ba Khin, and spending time in Bodhgaya, site of the Buddha’s enlightenment. As it happens, I also share these traits (which raises serious questions about the diversity of this review). Of course, my own meditation journey began much later, in 2002. Being the son of two hippies roughly the same age as Eric Lerner and Bhikkhu Rahula, I had some predisposition to look upon meditation with curiosity. Taking my first course in the early aughts made me less of a pioneer as these three gentleman, but definitely ahead of the McMindfulness curve that has since developed. So, having already witnessed first-hand the transformation of mindfulness from mysterious curiosity to commercialized buzzword, going back to read about a time when so much was still so unexplored generated a kind of nostalgia in me. Perhaps this is like when Americans pine for the “simplicity” of the 1950s or the “freedom” of the Old West—it says more about the psychology of the one doing the pining or the state of current society than about those actual time periods.
* * *
Eric Lerner’s career as a serious meditator was not long, but it was bright. Journey of Insight Meditation (1978) focuses on a period of a little over a year that starts with his first encounter with Buddhism, a 1972 course in Massachusetts conducted by Robert Hover, a teacher who had learned under U Ba Khin. The introduction sets the stage a few years earlier and by the third sentence, psychedelic drugs have entered the scene. The years immediately before meditation were ones of drugs and travel, including two trips to India. Unlike the next book in this review, Lerner says very little about this period, choosing to focus on the arc of his spiritual journey. Not long after that first course, Lerner was back in India, this time off intoxicants and armed with only the address of Goenka’s business office. His journey to the East is spent meditating at courses in India taught by Goenka and again under Hover, at the International Meditation Center in Yangon (at a time when the country was almost entirely closed off to foreigners, no less), at a Sri Lankan monastery, and finally back at IMC. The book and the journey end back where they began, in western Massachusetts.
Lerner goes fast and hard at meditation. His practice is filled with dramatic storms, both emotional and physical. Hearing about someone else’s mediation sessions can be as boring as hearing about their dreams, but some of Lerner’s descriptions are gripping, particularly his experiences in Sri Lanka:
“The rain continued to roar against the roof. I was sure it was pouring into the hut, and that I should get up and try to plug the leaks or just mop up the water. But I continue to sit. Something in me was both fascinated and too terrified by the events for me to move. I didn’t want to open my eyes. When I finally recognized what it was that kept me rooted in my place I nearly screamed. The room was full; I could feel the stultifying presence of beings everywhere around me, as close as the rafters above my head. I sat there in the rain and thunder while my nerves were blasted for as long as I could. It seemed that the storm would not end until I ended it. There was an utterly strange sensation in my body, one that I did not recognize. My eyes cracked open and I saw toothy, grotesque faces that stared at me from the crowds miles deep. My heart almost stopped. Somehow, though I wasn’t even aware of it, I got up and left lamp.”
A later experience in the same hut leads him to believe he has attained nibbana, or full enlightenment. He returns to IMC, where he had felt a close personal connection with the senior teachers, to confirm his glorious achievement with them, only to be shown just how much ignorance he still carries. Facing that hard reality is painful, and to Lerner’s credit he retells the fall honestly. His first description of his experience to the group of teachers elicits a mere instruction to keep observing sensations. When he tries again one can almost feel the rebuke:
“When I finished, Sayama spoke quickly again. I braced myself instinctively against her words and listened to U Tint Yee’s translation of her description of the signs one manifests before the nirvanic state. I struggled to portray them but I knew I couldn’t. Then I became furious. How could it be just that way? How could she know? I stared directly into Sayama’s calm, almost sleepy eyes and the pit of my stomach dropped through my feet as my body sagged in the chair. She was staring right through me. I had no idea what she saw but she knew. I knew what she knew. And when she knew that I accepted that, she chuckled and looked away. My brain teetered toward collapse.”
As devastating as this encounter is, it is a turning point, one which reverberates both immediately and into the future. First, it gives him a kind of “reset” for his last several days of practice at IMC, which he approaches with less hubris and more clarity. The effects are still there at the end of the book, where he is still meditating but with a more sustainable intensity, like a simmering kettle instead of one on the verge of boiling over. Not that this transition is easy.
In the book’s final chapter Lerner returns to the United States and struggles to adjust. Soon after he returns a friend challenges him, “What happened to your testosterone?” It is a question that may come across as a superficial doubting of macho masculinity, but is intended to highlight Lerner’s struggle to find a place in the world. As the friend puts it, Lerner has the energy of a renunciate but the uniform of a householder. This kind of struggle with identity is something many young meditators go through, even more so back when meditation was not a socially acceptable activity, and some of the values cultivated by practice were in fact contrary to the norms of one’s native society. In general, the early twenties is an age when Westerners are expected to figure out what to do with their lives. This pressure and uncertainty is difficult enough for young people who are immersed in the conventions of their culture, but for those who have undergone drastically different experiences, whether internally from intensive meditation or externally from extended time in Asian or other foreign societies, it is even more disorienting. It can take years to figure out how to function as a serious meditator in a place where few others even know what “meditation” actually consists of, or how to integrate perspectives and habits picked up in Asia among people who can barely find Myanmar on a map.
In my own life, my first experience with Dhamma came in my early 20s while living in Japan. Returning home at age 25 having been deeply affected by the culture of Japan in particular and Asia in general, including Buddhism, I had seen there were other ways of being a man than the more aggressive, macho model presented by my native culture. However, merely being aware that one could combine gentility and calm with masculinity wasn’t enough to provide a roadmap for how to actually implement it, and the confusion of returning to familiar haunts and reconnecting with old friends (like former fraternity brothers!) highlighted this sense of awkwardness, all of which came to mind when reading Lerner’s account.
By the book’s end, Lerner appears to have reached some kind of conclusion. The first line of the epilogue has our protagonist wielding a chainsaw and fixing stone walls, and the scene feels more peaceful than any of his accounts in deep contemplation. He claims to be as dedicated to meditation as ever, just in a different way, facing his “garbage” in real-life situations instead of “masking it in silence.” Lerner does not give much physical description of himself, but in the epilogue I pictured him lean and muscled in a flannel shirt, jeans, and work boots, with a face made ruddy from hours in the cold autumn wind. Lerner on his Asian sojourn, however, I imagined dressed in thin fabric garments hanging loosely on a pale gaunt body, meditating furiously in the heat.
While Lerner’s account only covers a short period of his youth, some online sleuthing provides a few details about his life in the years between then and now. He appears to have maintained an interest in Buddhism and meditation. In 2018, he published a biography of the singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, who Lerner knew through their mutual interest in Zen and studying under the famous, if controversial, master Joshu Sasaki Roshi. He has published other books, including fiction, and was involved in writing and producing Hollywood films. Asked about his meditation memoir in an interview from 2008, he responded, “I think it is best to write about Buddhism when you are young, impressionable, and somewhat oblivious to the strong possibility of sounding foolish.” I admit to thinking the Lerner of Journey of Insight Meditation came across as impressionable and sometimes foolish, but I am glad he wrote his book when the experiences were fresh and had the courage to present them honestly.
* * *
Bhikkhu Yogavacara Rahula begins One Night’s Shelter (1985) as Scott DuPrez, born in Southern California. His account is the most complete of the three taken up in this review, going essentially from birth to his donning of robes, in addition to a short postscript that covers quite a few more years as a monk. Quite different from the other two books, its entire first third of the book does not have him involved in Buddhism or meditation at all! Instead, in the majority of these pages the protagonist is stoned out of his gourd, mostly on marijuana or LSD. Scott is the quintessential hippie, starting off as a free and easy SoCal surfer boy who lives purely for pleasure and experience. This life is interrupted by a (relatively soft) military tour in Vietnam… which he also spends mostly stoned. After the army, he gets serious about the hippie life. While continuing his college career he makes a summer trip to Europe and Morocco, which inspires him to make another, bigger trip the following year. He drops out of college and flies off to Sweden with a thousand tabs of acid to sell hidden in a sock. Little did he know he would not be returning for many years, and when he did it would be in the robes of a Buddhist monk.
Scott’s trip takes him from Sweden down to Morocco, over north Africa, up to Greece, then through Turkey and Iran into Afghanistan, where he gets hung up a bit but eventually makes it to India and then Nepal for his date with destiny. The trip is an epic one, another version of which could have been a travelogue glorifying this kind of living. He loses much of his LSD inventory straight away by naively trusting a drug dealer, but retains enough to sell for a tidy profit at a music festival in Denmark. He spends a number of weeks living with a whole houseful of hippies on the Canary Islands, then sails for Morocco to travel to remote villages in the northern Sahara. All through his trip he is picking up and parting from friends, constantly buying pot and hashish, and generally having a grand time, up until he and a buddy are caught trying to smuggle a few pounds of hash out of Afghanistan. They spend some (relatively easy) time in jail, and are deported back to Greece.
Writing many years removed from this purple haze, Bhikkhu Rahula faced a difficult task in how to portray his former life. Naturally as a monk he no longer condones such behavior, but nobody wants the narrator going tsk-tsk every time someone lights up a joint, though neither should the monk fully inhabit that time and imbue it with all the gusto he then felt. While not a particularly skilled writer, Bhikkhu Rahula relays his story with honesty and dispassion, which helps him strike the right balance in telling the tale of hippie Scott. He approaches his former self’s misdeeds, which in addition to sex and drugs include some fairly ugly selfishness and even minor thievery, told with neither shame nor pride. He often describes his drug experiences as pleasurable, passing up numerous opportunities to tuck in a Dhamma lesson on the dangers of intoxicants. That is not to say he leaves out the Buddhist perspective on his former life, only that the touch is light and does not sacrifice story for preaching. This authentic approach to his younger self’s journey, rather than imposing retroactive judgments, results in a portrayal that shows how his then-mind perceived, was affected, and was then changed by these experiences, allowing the reader to appreciate what ultimately landed him into a spiritual practice. This can be seen in his account of what I believe was his last acid trip, during a full-moon party in Goa. Bhikkhu Rahula successfully conveys how whimsically trippy the experience was, but without making it sound aspirational. This is also an excellent portrayal of a young Western backpacker caught between two worlds: one of sensual pleasure, psychedelic experimentation, and communal experience; and the other of structured meditation, conservative ethics, and sensory moderation advised by the Buddha.
“At sunset I sat on a mound of sand nearby in the difficult lotus posture and began doing some deep rhythmic breathing to get the energy flowing. I contemplated the image of being a perfect yogi and tried to feel the prana life force coming in with the breath and filling up my body. This was a good way of getting a high feeling because of all the oxygen that invigorates the blood and stimulates the brain. As I was really getting into it, I heard the first sounds of the evening’s rock music. A few minutes later a long haired freak wearing only a G-string and toting a shoulder bag appeared in front of me. He had a big grin on his bearded face and held out a tiny piece of paper to me saying, “happy trails.” He had appeared so suddenly out of the clear blue that I was dumbstruck, and could not say anything to thank him; it did not even seem necessary. I lost sense of time and orientation for a few moments and before I knew it, I had swallowed the paper acid trip and the guy seemed to vanish into thin air in the way he had come.”
His eventual plunge into meditation happens in Nepal, at a course taught by a Tibetan lama. The experience is a powerful one, and sets Scott on a path that will culminate in his transformation into Bhikkhu Rahula. Yet his first course presented the budding Buddhist with several challenges. First, for the duration of the four-week course he would be expected to follow sila. This meant he had to give up all drugs while attending, something that, based on his narrative, he might not have done for more than a few days at a time for several years. He is nervous about this stipulation, and smuggles in a nugget of hash just in case, though he never smokes it. For the course’s final two weeks, he and the other students are asked to follow ten precepts. Interestingly it is the eighth—prohibiting body adornments—that brings about a major turning point. Since leaving the army, he had been dutifully cultivating the image of a hippie, or “freak” to use his own term. Thus a large part of his identity was tied up in his long hair and beard, fanciful or “exotic” clothing, and carefully chosen jewelry. But he dutifully adheres to this instruction, and instead of just taking off his rings temporarily, he gives them away. And in an even greater step, he decides to cut off a mane of hair he had spent years growing out. While a lice infestation was also a motivating factor, the act leaves him feeling lighter and cleaner. The beard stayed, for now.
At the end of the course, Scott “officially” become a Buddhist by publicly taking the Three Refuges, as well as vowing never to kill or steal again. As for the other three precepts (lying, sexual misconduct, intoxication), he feels less certain and decides to wait. Though he indulges in a bit more sex and drugs before becoming a monk, he never comes close to his past behavior.
With this first course, the author is now a dedicated meditator and Buddhist, and never really wavers from this path. As he recalls this moment in his ordination speech, “This was the crucial turning point in my life; it was what you might call a spiritual rebirth. And since then this mind has more or less been one-pointed in delving into and trying to penetrate the subtler aspects of those Truths. It is as if I am helpless in resisting the quest for greater understanding and mental transformation in line with Dhamma and for the ultimate realizations it will bring.” It takes him some time to go from cutting his hippie hair and taking two precepts to fully renouncing the householder’s life, but it is not a path with twists and turns. Seemingly with every day Scott gets closer to becoming Bhikkhu Rahula. Practically speaking, his journey took him from Nepal to northern India to visit Bodhgaya and attend a course taught by Goenka. He then traveled south to the great hippie convergence of Goa, where he had some of his last sensual experiences with drugs and women. Eventually he sails for Sri Lanka, where the rest of the book is set (except for a brief sojourn back to India to train at a yoga ashram) and where he dons robes to begin his life as a monk, which will prove to be much longer than his life as a layman.
Bhikkhu Rahula’s experiences have much in common with Lerner’s. They both spent time on the hippie trail and were strongly influenced by the teachings of Goenka early in their meditative practice (although neither would follow the tradition later in life, another similarity I share). Both men had strong predilections to seek out secluded environments for intensive meditation. Sites were judged for how useful they would be for isolation, rather than opportunities to delve into Buddha’s teachings via interactions with teachers or fellow pilgrims—something that continues to be common among Westerners . This tendency can be so strong one might question the need to be in Asia at all, but perhaps that is a tangent for another essay. Both also threw themselves into meditation after only a single retreat, spending much of the subsequent months in courses or isolated sitting, or else seeking the next opportunity to do so, which contrasts with the academic study and focus on merit-making or monastic discipline found among many Asian Buddhists. Yet where Lerner is a whirlwind, careening from one wrenching experience to another, soon-to-be Bhikkhu Rahula plunges into the life like a submarine, gradually taking on ballast on its way to the depths. While Lerner ends his book in a steadier place, it is nothing compared to Bhikkhu Rahula, whose tale finishes with him recounting more than a decade in robes already. As of this writing he remains alive and still a monk. He has maintained a strong connection to Sri Lanka where he ordained, and has been instrumental in establishing monastic communities in the United States, where he is currently director of the Lion of Wisdom Meditation Center in Maryland. In this case, his narrative can be read not as a youthful flirtation with spirituality and asceticism, but as the “origin story” for a Dhammic life he would end up committing to wholly, and certainly more than the other two authors.
* * *
John Coleman’s The Quiet Mind (1971) is probably the most read and best known of these three accounts, owing to its availability on Pariyatti’s website, but it is by far the least interesting. This is unfortunate because a brief description of the book–a CIA spook’s search for enlightenment through meetings with some of the most influential Eastern teachers of the 20th century–makes it sound super-duper. Sadly, Coleman gets through nearly 200 pages without revealing much of anything about himself or his experiences in the subjective sense, turning his tale into little more than a series of pamphlets on different spiritual traditions.
One might argue that Coleman is of a different era than Lerner and Bhikkhu Rahula. When the book begins in the 1950s Coleman is a CIA agent posted to Bangkok, on the front lines of the Cold War—at a time and place, no less, when we now know the CIA was infiltrating the Sanghas across Southeast Asia in an attempt to undermine Communism. Prior to this, Coleman served in the Korean War (which I learned from Wikipedia, not his book). Thus he was most definitely not part of the hippie movement (about which he does not have great things to say) and was of a generation that revealed less about themselves and their emotions compared with those that came after. Yet there are many first-person accounts written contemporary to and before Coleman that manage to convey the personalities of the authors and their personal involvement in the circumstances they describe. Travelogues by Victorian era British explorers and imperial officials come to mind, and these were men and women of a notoriously buttoned-up society. No, Coleman’s failure to express himself is not the fault of his generation. (It should be noted that reviewers on Pariyatti and Amazon do not share my negative impression of this book. With personal accounts largely discouraged by the Goenka tradition, perhaps meditators are so hungry for water in a desert that they are willing to forgive its many flaws.)
The book starts off somewhat oddly with a deep dive into hypnosis, mind control and ESP with a group of Thai Buddhists. Coleman’s first foray into meditation was intended as a two-week retreat at a Bangkok temple, kept secret from his spy colleagues. But the experience is intense and he leaves abruptly after just a few days. Not long afterward, however, he attends (and completes) a ten-day course at IMC in Yangon, led by U Ba Khin himself. He came away quite satisfied with the teaching, if not with his own execution of it: “I completed the ten-day course at the center but my enthusiasm to learn let me down. I spent a good part of my time analyzing, speculating, making copious notes, and in my zeal I’m afraid I missed the whole object of the exercise. U Ba Khin saw this and went to great lengths to get me to come down to a less lofty plane…I left with an excellent intellectual comprehension of the process but was so involved in a desire to understand that the very desire prevented full understanding. Unfortunately my search for understanding was to continue some time before I was able to return to the basic and simple requirements to transcend my inquisitive mind.”
Next he is onto India, where he visits Bodhgaya and learns about other forms of Buddhism. A flight from Benares to Delhi proves to be one of the most extraordinary episodes in the book. Coleman notices a “striking” Indian man while boarding but is seated next to “good-looking” American woman. At a refueling stop in Lucknow, he decides to strike up a conversation with the Indian man, who turns out to be none other than the great spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti. They hit it off and for the next leg of the journey he abandons his seat next to the pretty lady to sit by the elderly gentleman. Though the encounter is short, it makes a lasting impression on Coleman, who goes on to read several of Krishnamurti’s books and meet him a number of more times in the years to come. Apart from the core Buddhist tenets, Krishnamurti’s approach to spirituality seems to have had the greatest influence on Coleman (Interestingly, the same can be said for Vipassanā Acharya Daniel Mayer, who credits Krishnamurti for being the impetus leading to his eventual meditation course with Goenka in India).
Coleman’s path often feels more inquisitive than experiential. He describes numerous conversations with teachers and religious figures in a wide variety of traditions—and his ability to come into contact with so many is incredible in its own right— but he seems to dedicate very little time to his own practice, or at least to reflecting on it on the page. Perhaps this is because he is living a serious householder’s life, not traipsing along the hippie trail like the other two, but it is difficult to know because he doesn’t say. Indeed, when he does spend a month at a forest monastery in Thailand, the chapter is only six pages long and says almost nothing of what he experiences during the stay. The topics become more eclectic after this point. He visits Japan where he meets with another eminent Buddhist teacher, D.T. Suzuki, and visits a Zen temple. He then moves to Britain, where he describes the phenomenon of the Maharishi, dips his toes into the Quaker approach, and attends a couple of Spiritualist meetings. The climax of the book is back at IMC practicing Vipassana under U Ba Khin, which Coleman felt was the soundest of all the teachings he had encountered on his years’ long quest to find “the quiet mind.” (Perhaps his ultimate acceptance of the U Ba Khin method, pleasing to the confirmation bias of current Vipassana meditators in the Goenka tradition, contributed to the book’s positive reviews, as well as its greater popularity compared to the others’ relative obscurity.)
The postscript, a new addition that was not part of the original print run, turned out to be the most interesting part of the book. At the end of the original edition, Coleman was living with his wife and young child in Britain when a letter arrived from U Ba Khin, announcing his desire for Coleman to begin teaching Vipassana. At that point, however, he had not taken up that torch and the book ends with some passages philosophizing about meditation and the Buddha’s teachings.
According to the postscript, after U Ba Khin’s letter arrived, his wife became pregnant again and Coleman began working at a factory in a small town in Britain, having left the world of clandestine intelligence. His life may have gone along like that, only that S.N. Goenka was now holding meditation courses in India, many of which were attended by Westerners who invariably asked their teacher how they could continue practice in their home countries. Goenka remembered an American living “somewhere in England” who had been authorized to teach by U Ba Khin, and passed on his name. Some of these hippies tracked Coleman down and started showing up at his door in a conservative working-class neighborhood asking to be taught meditation. Eventually, just to appease them, he agrees to teach if they organize a course, which they do.
“The students set about organizing accommodation at a Presbyterian retreat in Yorkshire, some 250 miles away in the north of England. Life in our street resumed its normal suburban calm—I think the neighbors were quite relieved— and we sat back to await the birth of our child. But as the date set for the course approached I began to wish that Goenka’s memory had not been so sharp. It was years since I had taken a meditation course and, to my consternation, I found that I had completely forgotten how to go about it. It was not simply a matter of adopting the lotus position, humming a mantra and hoping for the best: there was a lot more to achieving nibbana than that. Two days before the course was scheduled to start Eve went into labour, two months earlier than expected, and was rushed into hospital where Mark was born, a breech baby helped into the world by forceps and suffering from jaundice. We were together for just two days before I had to fulfill my promise in Yorkshire. Had I not done so I knew that back home we would have been faced with a further invasion, this time no doubt a very angry one. Eve saw the dire possibility and agreed that this was the sensible solution.”
The course goes off without a hitch, Coleman returns to a healthy wife and newborn, and so is launched Coleman’s career as a meditation teacher, which would take him all over the world, this time as a Dhamma warrior instead of a Cold warrior. It is a pity this last chapter provides as much detail about Coleman’s personal life and feelings as everything that came before, but I was glad to get even that.
* * *
What meaning can we glean from this genre of books when examined collectively? Lerner, Bhikkhu Rahula, and Coleman all found their way to Buddhist meditation in the 1960s and ‘70s, long before most Westerners had even heard about the practice. Because of this, there is an innocence to their accounts, a sense of exploration and discovery. Lerner traveled to India to meditate with nothing more than an address scribbled on a piece of paper. Bhikkhu Rahula heard about Goenka’s courses during a chance encounter while stoned on a riverbank in Nepal. Coleman was dragged out of meditation retirement by hippies showing up on his doorstep. Were these chance events, which had they not occurred in this particular manner at his precise moment, their lives would have gone in drastically different ways? Or was this the workings of karma, meaning that regardless of the particular incident in question, nature would have found another way to bring the seeds of Dhamma to fruition? Sadly, that is not a question I am capable of answering. Nonetheless, their tales reveal how unusual life needed to be for a Westerner to come into contact with Dhamma back then. Bhikkhu Rahula had to travel for months and halfway around the world before taking his first meditation course, whereas a young man in Southern California today could hear about it in countless it ways, perhaps through a friend’s Facebook post, on a podcast, from a flyer in Whole Foods, or even in a state-sponsored program at school. And a 2020 version of Coleman would have plenty of convenient opportunities to practice and teach meditation, no matter how small of a British town he lived in.
This sense of wonder and innocence is probably all but gone today, where someone’s first encounter with mindfulness might be sponsored by Google or even through U.S. military combat training. Even those who don’t meditate have some familiarity with the practice, either via pop culture references or from friends and family members who have tried it. There is a wistfulness reading these books in the 21st century, a sense that the adventure and whimsy of Scott’s hippie tour is no longer possible, or that Coleman’s intimate encounters with eminent teachers would now require navigating gatekeepers and layers of bureaucracy. Yet these coins have other sides. Rejecting one’s native culture was almost a prerequisite for Westerners wanting to meditate fifty years ago, something the Buddha would have never approved and which is thankfully no longer necessary. Is it better to have “pure” meditation grounded in a traditional Buddhist culture thrive only among a select few, or to have mindfulness teachings available widely but often in a more “diluted” state? The question may be too simplistic, and moot nonetheless, but it is a dynamic worth keeping in mind as we examine the mindfulness landscape we have today.
Above I highlighted the fact that all three authors were male, white, heterosexual, and American. This is worth mentioning for two reasons. First, because it should not be surprising. The world was much different back in 1970 and most people with the wherewithal to travel the world were Caucasians from Western countries, and even among this population, men had much more freedom of movement. Not that there are no other voices. Marie Byles, who wrote Journey Into Burmese Silence about some of the same places at roughly the same time, is neither male nor American, and there are likely other accounts I am not aware of. And of course the world has since opened up—just one example can be found in the discussion with Sayalay Khanticari, raised a devout Catholic in the Colombian countryside only to become a lifelong Buddhist nun in Myanmar. The second reason is that their identities played almost no role in their narratives. They never questioned their privilege, they never wondered about the racial/colonial factors that allowed them to be hippie wanderers in poverty stricken communities, and they certainly never said a word about sexual orientation or gender identity. I will leave it to others to say whether not addressing these topics is a detriment or not, though I do think these themes would receive at least a glance if they were written by someone today.
Given the time they were written, drugs show up in every book. While Coleman dismisses drug use out of hand, psychedelics are mentioned early in Lerner’s tale and often in Bhikkhu Rahula’s. Somewhat surprisingly, his ordination speech specifically mentions his LSD experiences as being one of the factors that brought him to Buddhism, even though renouncing intoxicants was his most difficult challenge on his journey to ordination. This is interesting given the resurgence of psychedelics recently, particularly among people who are also enthusiastic about mindfulness.
Of the three, One Night’s Shelter was my favorite. It provides a complete account of Bhikkhu Rahula’s journey that is focused on the time leading up to his encounter with Dhamma up until he decides to take robes. Journey of Insight Meditation is more of a tour de force, in places doing an excellent, if not exactly self-aware, job of describing the fierce and often misguided passion that can manifest in new meditators. Both profound insight and profound misunderstanding are present in equal measure here. It should also be noted that Lerner’s path stands in contrast to the other two. Buddhism seems to have remained part of his life, but nothing like the lifelong monastic vow taken by Bhikkhu Rahula or the decades Coleman spent teaching Vipassana. To me The Quiet Mind is either a bad book or a good book that hasn’t aged well. Perhaps if I’d never heard of Krishnamurti or tantrism or U Ba Khin, I would have found it more interesting. Although the impersonal nature of the narrative was the book’s biggest flaw, it is also dragged down by some tired stereotypes of race and gender. There’s nothing terribly offensive, but it doesn’t make Coleman look very good in the modern era. For example, he claims the inherent “Western-ness” of his mind as opposed to the Thais is evident in that he could never sit through two movies in a day. Now that binge-watching is widely practiced throughout the West, is that a sign of our culture becoming more Eastern? He also goes off on a couple odd rants about the Communist Chinese, but I guess a Korean War vet and CIA officer from the 1960s can be forgiven that much.
Perhaps the classic of meditative experience in English has yet to be written. Surely there are better books than these three already out there. Outside the realm of Theravada Buddhism, The Snow Leopard by Peter Matthiessen is a far more skillfully written account by a Westerner, published around the same time period no less, and which tells another story of a male author struggling with the suffering of the world and seeking solutions in Eastern spirituality. I read this book not long before I started meditating and its message resonated with the seeking and curious but ultimately empty and dissatisfied person I was then. Now nearly twenty years later, I read these three tales of discovery with a sense of distance, in part sadness for that passion for practice that has somehow slipped away, but also with a degree of comfort that at least some of these meaning-of-life questions have been answered for me, and I no longer have to burn so hot with desperation.
No doubt these books would carry other messages for different readers at different life stations, but if anything these texts will continue to be of interest in an anthropological sense—rare accounts from an era that no longer exists, like travelogues by explorers to lands that are now familiar and accessible. It’s truly amazing to hear about the distances—physical, emotional, cultural, and linguistic—that these guys had to traverse to get what a Google search can tell you in summarized form today. Yet the sentiment that lies at the core of these books is timeless—that humans who find themselves suffering merely because they exist in this world will be awed by the possibilities of contemplative practice.
Reading these three books close together, it is also impossible not to use them as a prism to examine my own tale. While my journey started roughly three decades after theirs, the aforementioned commonalities make me a kind of “fourth character” in this review. I was 24 years old when I took my first meditation course at Dhamma Bhanu, a Vipassana center in the tradition of S.N. Goenka in Japan. I wasn’t a CIA agent or coming off a tour in Vietnam—just a recently retired amateur English teacher who cared as much about language acquisition as his young Japanese pupils, that is to say hardly at all—but my introduction to meditation did come at moment of painful transition into proper adulthood. While there are no true beginnings in the turning of the wheel of samsara, this course was a beginning. It provided focus and direction, and armed me with a practice that in a very short time would lift me out of a swamp of disillusionment with how I’d been living—one that I knew I was stuck in, but didn’t know how to get out of. If that course was the turning point for my young adulthood, the key moment of my adolescence was at 14 years old, when I tasted the first release of chemical intoxication (I got drunk on a beach in Mexico with my church youth group). Like Bhikkhu Rahula mentioning LSD in his ordination speech, while I no longer engage in or recommend such activity, I fully recognize how my experiences ingesting various substances somehow laid the groundwork for my subsequent entry into Buddha’s teachings. By my mid-twenties I had wrung all I could out of the path of intoxication. I don’t think I had a Substance Abuse Problem, but I had begun to see that going back to the same trough was no longer quenching my thirst, though I continued to do so out of sheer habit, which only generated a sense of empty hopelessness. I am grateful I encountered meditation when I did. A couple of years earlier and I may have not seen the need. A couple of years later and who knows how much further things might have deteriorated. Perhaps I would have stumbled out of my youth into well-adjusted adulthood, certainly plenty of my friends managed as much without meditation. But for myself, I feel the transition came faster, smoother, and more painless than it would have without it.
So I identify strongly with the ecstatic feeling inspired by the early taste of meditation, a kind of “This Is It” moment that runs through these accounts, when the author encounters the Path in all its possibility and wants to grab on as tight as possible. Some of the best writing in these three books describes this feeling in superb, and nostalgic, detail. The years immediately after my first Vipassana course were also ones of intense practice and fierce discipline, different in application than these authors, but similar in tone and motivation. This was a time of great discovery, great progress, and great certainty. It was a time when the most important thing I could do was practice, practice, practice; the longer and more isolated the better. It was a time when I felt part of a great current of Dhamma. To borrow the words of my teacher at the time, I was not just wasting time with the theories of “swim-ology,” but putting the methodology into practice.
At that time, also borrowing the words of my teacher at the time, I envisioned my future path would be as straight as the German Autobahn: continued practice would further cleanse me of clinging desires and unfit habit patterns, and continued devotion would gradually shape my life into one focused on Dhamma instead of worldly achievements. I had the recipe, now all I needed to do was follow the instructions. And interestingly enough, it is at this point where these three authors stop writing. Lerner has just navigated some major storms to reach a more grounded place in his practice, Bhikkhu Rahula has finally decided to leave behind his hedonistic lifestyle to join the welcoming arms of a monastic order, and Coleman has settled on the Buddhism of U Ba Khin after years probing the possibilities of other paths. These are inspiring endings, with some fulfillment achieved, but having lived past a similar point myself, I am also curious about what came next for them. Stopping the story there is kind of like if A New Hope had been the one Star Wars film ever made. It is a great story that reaches a happy and satisfying conclusion… but there’s still a whole lot of Empire left out there!
Lerner did not spend the rest of his life fixing walls in a meditative reverie in western Massachusetts. At some point he moved to California, created a career as a writer, and developed an interest in Zen. Five or ten years down to road, what did he feel about his spiritual journey to Sri Lanka, where he confronted literal demons and for a time believed he had reached the ultimate enlightenment? Did he see it as mere foolish youthful hubris, or did he regret not retaining that fierceness of practice? Similar questions can be asked of Bhikkhu Rahula and Coleman, who remained much more involved in Buddhist practice, the former as a well-known monk on two continents and the latter as a dedicated teacher of Vipassana, roles they both had for decades after their written narratives ended. Perhaps they settled into their roles with ease and executed their duties with grace, but life is not typically so pat. Bhikkhu Rahula in particular, regardless of his devotion to the Path, was quite young when he took robes and likely still had a lot of maturing to do as a man. Did he wrestle with his vows, if not with the choice itself then with how to best live them out? What doubts arose, what crises of spirit was he forced to confront? Coleman, who did not take on such austere vows, was a husband and father who retained the heavy responsibilities of a householder while leading meditation retreats. What were his challenges? Did his wife encourage or even accept the time he spent away from the family teaching meditation? How did he manage the stress of finding ways to support his family while also finding the time to travel to faraway places for weeks at a time, doing what amounts to volunteer work?
I ask these questions not just because I want to hear more of their stories, but because these are actual issues I have faced myself, after believing I’d reached something like an “End of History” in my own spiritual journey. As it turns out, I’m not on the Autobahn after all. I was elated and victorious in those first few years of meditation. And this was no illusion. I faced some deep-rooted stuff on the cushion and came out the other side cleaner, kinder, and happier. But just like after Luke blew up the Death Star, it turned out there was still an Empire of dukkha out there for me. After this initial period of enthusiastic devotion, a crisis of faith came creeping along, starting so slowly that for years it was all but invisible. It was difficult to recognize it for what it was at first, because for the longest time I simply saw it as another defilement, appearing as a nail that needed to be hammered down the same way, with the same technique, in the same manner as my teacher had advised me to do since my very first Day 1 discourse. While I had steadfastly maintained a daily practice and attended retreats where possible, life circumstances limited my time for “serious” practice. With the benefits of meditation no longer as apparent, and unable to figure out why on my own or by turning to Dhamma friends and teachers, I continued to think the solution was simply more sitting. Eventually I found the time for my first 20-day course, in Thailand. I had hoped this would be a gateway to deeper insight or help me break through the layers of defilements to which I attributed this sense of ennui. Instead, the teachings and overall experience failed to inspire, and for me the Long Course turned out to be just another course, only longer. The advice I had been following for years—Keep working, and you are bound to be successful—came with a flipside, almost a veiled threat—Stop working, and you are bound to fail. With this logic, the obvious implication behind my difficulty was unavoidable: I was working incorrectly or not hard enough.
Eventually I was able to look at this phenomenon squarely. I came to see the doubt not as a serious defilement I needed to overcome by denying all “food” of further attention, but rather as a serious concern I needed to actively feed with critical thought. Somewhat paradoxically, less than a month after that 20-day course I drastically reduced my daily meditation practice for the first time in over seven years. It is embarrassing to say this now, but at the time I thought doing so would cause my remaining defilements to roar back, reverting any positive progress I had made in those years. That of course did not happen. Dhamma is not a set of six-pack abs, which turn to mush if ignored. Not that there weren’t changes —and some negative ones— when I scaled back daily practice, but some bells cannot be un-rung; that is, just because my bum wasn’t against a cushion two hours per day any longer didn’t automatically erase all I’d learned about dukkha, anicca, and anatta. In some ways my understanding has even deepened, as the daily routine had turned into an object of attachment, tied up with fear of loss, pride, and other defilements, which I was unable to see clearly until I let go.
As prolonged and painful as this process has been, it has changed me profoundly. Similar to how Lerner described himself years after writing his account, during those years I proudly proclaimed myself as being a “serious old student,” I was in fact highly impressionable, and not a small bit foolish. To borrow a friend’s phrase, I was a “Dhamma child,” simply following the path as laid out by my elders, and not totally immune to blind faith masquerading as superimposed reasoning. Not that I was totally blind, as I did approach the practice with a degree of skepticism. Rather, the challenge was that I didn’t know enough or have enough experience to know what questions to pose. Still, I have few regrets about this time, largely because I was fortunate enough to fall into a tradition that offered a practical and effective technique and that overall conducted itself with integrity. But once I was deep enough into my spiritual crisis, it became clear that this tradition no longer suited me. Perhaps now I am starting my “Dhamma adolescence,” which brings greater independence and capacity for critical inquiry, but also more responsibility and uncertainty. Before I looked at Dhamma practice as a recipe, which if followed faithfully would bring the same result no matter who did the cooking. Now I see it more like a storehouse of materials, which I must pick and choose from to build my house of wisdom. The difficulty is that not every material will be suited to the landscape and climate of my life and character, and thus I must use discernment and experimentation to figure out which is best for every time and place. The joy comes from giving myself the freedom to approach practice with creativity.
Yet I also look back at my early period of Dhamma practice with elements of nostalgia tinged with regret. My practice may have been too rigid back then, but it was also stronger. While some of my enthusiasm was misdirected and my knowledge was definitely undeveloped, I miss that clear sense of direction and certainty that comes with just knowing you are on the right path. And though I gave some teachers more faith than they deserved, I long for a Dhamma home with walls and a roof I can trust absolutely.
Nearly two decades after my own Dhamma initiation, I feel sympathetic joy reading how these men found their way to meditation and Buddha’s teachings. Still, part of me is left wanting a fuller account, to be shown how people navigate the intervening years, after the honeymoon ends. I know how people get started on the Path. It’s a good story, and when told with grace and wit is one I’ll never get tired of hearing. I only wish more people were talking about how they’ve managed, or even failed, to stay the course.
(for more on this early sense of discovery, see Insight Myanmar Podcast’s interview with Alan Clements in which he discusses being the first Westerner to live at the Mahasi center in Yangon in the late 1970s)