Would Buddha read this book?

MICHELE MARR

One recent morning right about dusk I had a terrible dream. In the

throes of R.E.M. sleep, I discovered my husband had left me for an

astonishingly successful woman who owned a fleet of boats and

airplanes. (My husband, you see, loves to sail and fly.)

I hadn’t seen it coming. Not at all. And now my heart was

breaking. I was desperate to know (other than the planes and boats),

“Why?”

My husband shunned my question. As a disgruntled spouse often

will, he seemed to think I ought to know. So I turned to one of his

close friends, Don, for answers. I wailed at him, “Nothing told me

this was coming. Did you know?”

The way he pursed his lips and closed his eyes told me. “Why

didn’t you tell me?” I implored, “Why did he do this?”

Don shook his head. “I don’t know. You’re just going to have to

accept this is the way it is.” The floor under me turned into a long

elevator shaft and I began to fall. Then I had a thought: What is the

sound of one hand clapping?

It’s an inaccurate restatement of a Zen koan I once read in Paul

Reps’ book, “Zen Flesh, Zen Bones,” long ago. The koan, a meditation

we might say in English, is actually this: “Two hands clap and there

is a sound; what is the sound of one hand?”

If you asked me why my dream ended there, I couldn’t tell you.

Maybe it was for comic relief. But for reasons that make as much

sense to me as that koan, I seemed destined for a morning of

Buddhism.

I was searching my bookshelves without success for my copy of C.S.

Lewis’ “A Grief Observed” when I came across a tiny white paperback

titled, “What Would Buddha Do? 101 Answers to Life’s Daily Dilemmas.”

I don’t think I bought the book. I can’t remember receiving it as

a gift. But after waking to “the sound of one hand,” I couldn’t

resist it. I pulled it off the shelf and sat down to read.

The aim of the book, according to its author Franz Metcalf, is “to

help you be the Buddha you are, to find your own Buddha Nature and

allow that Nature to guide you through life.” Metcalf claims the

Buddha “in you” is your best teacher.

With a doctorate from the University of Chicago where he wrote a

dissertation titled, “Why do Americans Practice Zen Buddhism?” maybe

he knows.

But four years ago when I interviewed Jon Turner, a member of the

Orange County Buddhist Church in Anaheim and a teacher at its

Buddhist Education Center, who lives here in Huntington Beach, he

stressed the importance of a student of Buddhism having a teacher. He

called it a “must.”

Why? “Studying the self in order to break down one’s own belief

that the world revolves around [you] is very difficult without a

teacher,” he explains. “Your ego will merely invent new ways to

rationalize its existence.”

He also believes Buddhism’s teachings, which he describes as “a

bit subtle,” can easily be misunderstood without a teacher.

On its face, “What would Buddha do?” makes it all look so easy.

In eight chapters with names such as “Walking the Noble Path,”

“The Big Questions,” and “What’s Wrong With Me?” Metcalf poses and

answers questions in a format he calls “simple.”

It goes like this: question; answer from Buddha (“words found in

the sacred texts of Buddhism”); “contemporary explanation”

(Metcalf’s) on how to apply the teaching in one’s own life.

I got first bogged down in the contemporary explanation of the

second question in the book, “What would Buddha do when a friend lets

him down?”

The answer from Buddha reminded me of the general confession in

the 1928 Episcopal Book of Common Prayer. Buddha (Dhammapada 50)

says, “One should not pry into the faults of others, what they’ve

done and left undone. Consider instead what you yourself have done

and left undone.”

The general confession says, “We have left undone those things

which we ought to have done and we have done those things which we

ought not to have done. And there is no health in us.”

Metcalf cleverly points out that even country western singer Hank

Williams agreed with Buddha here (“we better not mind other people’s

business,” according to Williams) but here, as elsewhere, it was

still Metcalf’s two cents that raised more questions for me than it

answered.

He writes: “This doesn’t mean we should ignore evil when we

encounter it.” But he doesn’t say what, other than being accountable

for our own reprehensible deeds, we should do (or Buddha would do)

when we do.

One of Metcalf’s “big questions” is, “What would Buddha do when

his prayers go unanswered.” This surely addresses a universal agony.

Some of the questions aren’t (and aren’t meant to be) so big:

“What would Buddha do when he can’t resist having dessert?” or “What

would Buddha do about that coffee habit?”

The questions are, on the whole, good, true-to-life dilemmas as

the title suggests. It’s the commentary, all in all, that left me

feeling like the answers were as clear as the sound of one hand.

Admittedly, that could be my fault. But if Buddha came across this

book, would he read it? Somehow, I don’t think so.

* MICHELE MARR is a freelance writer from Huntington Beach. She

can be reached at [email protected].