Journey to the East

My family moved from Manhattan to what had been our summer home in Montauk, at the tip of Long Island, NY, when I was 6. There my mother, a lapsed Catholic, started taking my younger brother and me to the local Catholic church on Christmas and Easter, where we’d see our friends from the local public school and their mothers. Our fathers rarely attended. When I was 8, my mother suddenly decided that she would go to Hell if my brother and I didn’t get some religion, and we were both belatedly baptized and forced to attend religious instruction at the local Catholic school for three years. Thus began my formal religious education by the nuns at St. Theresa’s in Montauk, NY, whose Bible teachings were…off-putting. They didn’t make a lot of sense to me.

Fortunately, in that same year of our lord (1972), I chanced upon the TV series “Kung Fu,” in which monks of the Shaolin monastery in late-1800s China taught a young, Chinese-American novice the philosophy and spirituality of Taoism and Zen Buddhism, including the concepts of balance, harmony and non-violence. The teachings transcended religious and cultural boundaries, emphasizing peace, understanding and inner strength, and made way more sense to me than those incredible Bible stories (though I eventually realized their allegorical truths through my study of comparative religion & mythology—thanks, Joseph Campbell et al).

Thus began my informal, then formal, study of Eastern traditions. I bought the I Ching and the Tao te Ching, and studied Buddha’s teachings. When I was 20, I spent my third year of college in Japan, then lived there 1987-2007, during which I often visited Thailand, India and Nepal, from which I twice made a pilgrimage to Mount Kailash and other sacred places in Tibet. In 2008, to escape the ratrace, I moved to Dharamsala, India, in the Himalayan foothills, home-in-exile of HHXIV the Dalai Lama.

My brother, a writer & musician two years my junior, has also “gone Asian” and made visits to India and Thailand, where he is now, working on a way to stay there part-time, if not permanently. Like me, he prefers the cultures and wisdom of the East. See his essays and photos at Chrisink.substack.com

What is it about the East that we find so appealing? Here are some choice excerpts from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism_and_psychology The Buddha saw the human mind as a psycho-physical complex, a dynamic continuum called namarupa. Nama refers to the non-physical elements and rupa to the physical components. According to Padmasiri de Silva, "The mental and physical constituents form one complex, and there is a mutual dependency of the mind on the body and of the body on the mind."

Buddha's theory of human motivation is based on certain key factors shared by all human beings and is primarily concerned with the nature of human dissatisfaction (dukkha) and how to dispel it. In the suttas, human beings are said to be motivated by craving (tanha, literally 'thirst') of three types: Kama tanha - or craving for sensory gratification, sex, novel stimuli, and pleasure; Bhava tanha - craving for survival or continued existence, also includes hunger and sleep as well as desire for power, wealth and fame; and Vibhava tanha - craving for annihilation, non-existence, also associated with aggression and violence towards oneself and others

These three basic drives have been compared to the Freudian drive theory of libido, ego, and thanatos respectively. The arousal of these three cravings is derived from pleasant or unpleasant feelings (vedana), reactions to sense impressions with positive or negative hedonic tone. Cravings condition clinging or obsession (upadana) to sense impressions, leading to a vicious cycle of further craving and striving, which is ultimately unsatisfactory and stressful.

The Buddha saw each person responsible for their own personal development, similar to the humanistic approach to psychology but, since Buddhist practice also encompasses practical wisdom, spiritual virtues and morality, it cannot be seen exclusively as another form of psychotherapy. It is more accurate to see it as a way of life or a way of being (Dharma).

Personal development in Buddhism is based upon the Noble Eightfold Path which integrates ethics, wisdom or understanding (pañña) and psychological practices such as meditation (bhavana, cultivation, development). Self-actualization in traditional Buddhism is based on the ideas of Nirvana and Buddhahood. The highest state a human can achieve (an Arahant or a Buddha) is seen as being completely free from any kind of dissatisfaction or suffering, all negative mental tendencies, roots and influxes have been eliminated and there are only positive emotions like compassion and loving-kindness present. (end of Wikipedia excerpts)

Americans these days sure need some compassion and loving-kindness from (most of) their politicians and billionaire overlords (the shameless Mammonists). Those who can no longer afford to live in the US might want to check out my first blog post: https://outofunitedstates.com/p/home-in-the-himalayas