I Think I Might Suck At Buddhism

I don‘t want to alarm anyone, but I think I suck at Buddhism.

That’s not going to be a problem, is it? I suck at lots of things--math, jump shooting, training dolphins--and my life has gone okay. The only reason I mention this particular shortcoming is because, well, because I want to be a Buddhist monk.

Suck is a broad term. Many of us say we suck at things without taking a look at what that means. We write ourselves off as failures instead of exploring the specific ways we fall short, possible strategies to improve, or even examining how realistic the expectations we have of ourselves are in the first place.

The first way I suck is technical. I’m trying to learn our scriptures by heart but my memory’s save slots are filled with 80s music lyrics, movie quotes, pro wrestling trivia, and comedy bits.

Granted, Tettsu Gikai is far less memorable a name than Macho Man Randy Savage or Ricky The Dragon Steamboat, but can my teacher really be expected to ordain someone who knows more about the history of the Intercontinental Championship than he does the ancestral line?

And let’s talk about The Scripture of Great Wisdom. Thousands of words of scholarly and spiritual commentary have been written on this sutra, one of Mahayana Buddhism’s richest and most foundational texts. My addition to this centuries-long dialogue is, “needs more jokes.”

This will change as I keep working at it. What scares me is that I don’t entirely want to change.

So that’s a thing. Here’s another:

I already miss what I‘m going to leave behind.

I miss my friends. I miss my family. I miss dancing at the bar. I miss sex and hamburgers and watching sports, and I miss endless streams of comments on the internet. I miss the library. I miss the streets of Edmonton and St. Albert, some of which I have walked since I was five years old. I know these streets well; each step carries with it a thousand memories and sense impressions.

I miss my nephews.

But I don’t miss any of these things enough to stay…and as a consequence I have the vague feeling that I am the most Abandoning Abandoner that ever abandoned.

My koan over these last few months has been this: How can I say I want to be a monk when I love my current life and the people in it? How can I claim to love my life and the people in it if I want to leave them and become a monk?

I don’t have an answer to that question. I’m surprised to notice in myself I don’t particularly feel I need one. On the contrary, the times I've tried to explain anything about my desire to be a monk, whether to myself or others are the times I have most felt like I was full of shit.

I do know that wanting to be a monk has nothing to do with me being unhappy with lay life or any of the people in it. If anything, I strongly believe that I wouldn’t have been happy as a monk until I learned to be happy and fulfilled in lay life and relationships.

We don’t talk about faith much in our society. We live in a secular age, so for many of us, admitting to setting aside meticulous planning and research or evidence-based solutions and rational explanations to trust in the unknown feels faintly embarrassing.

I’m not even talking about religious faith. I’ve heard the same tone in people talking about changing jobs or moving to another part of the country to be with a romantic partner. No matter how strongly they believe in what they are doing, the fact that they cannot rationally explain their decision feels somehow…shameful. We make decisions that we know in our hearts are right for us and we worry about being judged--perhaps not even so much for the decision itself but the WAY we made it, with no carefully collected facts and figures to support our choice.

A choice made out of faith is not an impulse decision. We’ve all felt the difference, whether we can explain that difference or not.

And Faith > Fear.

It trumps fear of loss. It trumps fear of judgement. It triumphs over the fear of abandonment or the fear of abandoning. Even the fear of sucking is nothing in the face of faith. And it’s also important to remember that while faith is stronger than fear, it will not necessarily make that fear go away.

This is true of all things: Work. Parenting. Friendship. Love.      

It’s also true of ourselves. We can be afraid and still have faith in ourselves.

Besides, what choice do we really have? We all have the thing in front of us--the screaming baby, the snow covered sidewalk, the Scripture of Avalokiteshwara Bodhisatva to be recited even if one verse makes me giggle because it reminds me of a line from Ghostbusters where Rick Moranis is talking to a horse.

We do what we need to do as best as we can because it is what we are called to do. Sucking is beside the point.