When I was a little boy, my Mother’s keys would always seem to be misplaced whenever we were in a hurry to go somewhere. Then my Mother, my sister and I would frantically search the house as the dog chased after us barking. Eventually, my Mother would find her keys and then she would say that she always found them in the last place she looked.
I always thought that this was a really funny thing to say. You have to find your keys in the last place you look. Who would keep looking for their keys after they had already found them? I knew what she meant but this always struck me as funny. I began to realize that this is exactly what we do in our spiritual lives. We have already found our keys and yet we keep looking for them.
When I was a sophomore in high school, I felt that there must be something more to life and yet I did not know what it was. So I began to read the four gospels of Mathew, Mark, Luke and John in the New Testament. Jesus had always intrigued me but I never understood God. God of the Old Testament seemed very harsh and judgmental to me while Jesus seemed to have transcended that way of thinking through understanding and love. I wanted to emulate the life that Jesus led, a life free of harshness and judgment.
I decided that the way to do this was to live a life free from sin. If I purified myself, then I would be worthy of this kind of transcendence as well. This seemed to be a very easy thing to do. I was only fifteen and far too young to have committed any major sins and it should be easy to avoid all the minor ones. So with the Ten Commandments as my guide I was off. I was very excited and optimistic after all there were only ten sins to worry about.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I was practicing what Rev. Ryojin Soga calls a "Jesus-centered Christianity." This type of Christianity has much in common with Buddhism. It is a Christianity of understanding and focuses on the teachings of Jesus and not so much on the personality of Jesus or the historical Jesus. This is Jesus as Teacher and not Jesus as Christ. Many Christians would not consider this Christianity, but I didn’t know better. This was merely how I interpreted the New Testament.
However, I quickly noticed that the harder I tried to purify myself, the more I realized how sinful I really was. I was not stealing or committing murder, but I could see that those thoughts existed in my mind even if my body did not act them out. I became very frustrated. How could I be moving further away from Jesus while I was trying so hard to be like him? It seemed like something was fundamentally wrong but I did not know what it was. I had given a sinless life all my effort and I was in worse shape now than when I began. So I gave up at age fifteen and turned my back on Christianity never knowing what went wrong. Perhaps religion just did not work for me.
I decided that if transcendence could not be found in religion, then perhaps Truth could be found in the objective world of Mathematics. So, during college, I buried myself in the physical sciences and philosophy. I became a realist. If something could not be independently verified through empirical observations then it did not exist. In theory, if I studied long enough and hard enough then as I neared death I would have enough information to answer life’s most profound questions.
Surprisingly, this approach had quite the opposite effect. Rather than coming closer to Truth I actually receded away from it. As I objectified the world, I was no longer a participant but rather an observer. The world became a very cold and lonely place. All connections are lost and nihilism sets in. Not only had the world been objectified but I also became just another object myself.
Realizing that this didn’t work either, I then tried to find meaning in material things while in my thirties. All the while, I kept feeling that there had to be something more than another TV set or another new car. Having a wife and children helped but still something seemed to be missing. What was missing was a connection to my own life. Rather than being truly alive, I was instead trying to live my life for things and other people.
Luckily, as I reached my breaking point, I stumbled upon Shin Buddhism by a series of coincidences and happenstance. Initially, I had become a Shin Buddhist because it was the closest English speaking Buddhist Church to our house. Isn’t karma wonderful once you get out of the way?
It was only Shin Buddhism that could explain what had happened to me in my teens while I was trying to lead a moral and ethical life. The failure I felt was in fact a meaningful teaching but I was not yet ready to receive it. In many forms of religion you abandon the secular world for the spiritual world. You throw away material things in order to obtain mystical ones. But from a Shin point of view, we are merely replacing one attachment with another. Instead of collecting "prestige" we are now collecting "purity." Chogyam Trungpa discusses this pitfall in his book Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism.
If impermanence really is the one great teaching of Buddhism, then we must ourselves be empty. We cannot claim anything as our own and it would be impossible to become anything other than what we already are. There is no-self to change. You are fine just as you are.
I experienced this lesson at fifteen but I did not realize it. This is the key to Shin Buddhism and the beauty is that we can relax in the here and now and stop searching about frantically. We have already found our keys; we can stop looking for them. Instead, for the first time, we can begin to live our lives.