Muddy Footsteps Can Lead to the Buddha

Him I call a Brahmin who walks in the footsteps of the
Buddha. Light your torch from the fire of his sacrifice.
--The Dhammapada

In December of 2006, I experienced the Shawnee County Health Agency. Beforehand I envisioned a large ugly waiting room with cracked white tile floors, white tile ceiling, white plaster walls and large numbers of hygienically challenged people and small noisy children. Except for the size of the waiting room, the condition of the floor tiles, and the color of the walls (mauve), I was pretty accurate.

I waited and waited. So many noisy, small children occupied the waiting room, that I found myself wondering why anyone would want to have children. Then I found myself wondering if I’m the only person who’s ever wondered why anyone would want to have children.

However, I soon got wrapped up in the book I was reading, India: a History by John Keay. I read about the life of the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, rather appropriately since I was waiting for immunizations to go to India for a Buddhist pilgrimage. I heard a child one row in front of me happily exclaiming, “Buddha! Buddha!”

An adult said, “I’m the Buddha?” I looked up. For one instant I thought I was having a mystical experience.

Another adult said, “No, I’m the Buddha!”

I figured out that the child was probably too young to talk but could vocalize sounds and had probably been jumping up and down and pointing at his or her parents while exclaiming, “Buddha! Buddha!” Was it merely a coincidence, or was it a mystical experience? As Shantum would later say on the pilgrimage, “The Buddha is everywhere.”

A few years before that visit to the health center, an uncle died and left me his old house in Topeka, Kansas. It had been my grandmother’s house when I was a kid, and my mother grew up in the house, but I didn’t feel particularly sentimental about it. Fed up with part time jobs and obnoxious neighbors in St. Louis, Missouri, and fantasizing about interior decorating and growing an organic vegetable garden, I moved in six months after my uncle’s death.

Unfortunately, other relatives still lived in Topeka, and those down the street from me proceeded to constantly remind me that everything I do is wrong because I’m the one doing it, and that domineering and war-mongering white males are allegedly superior to everyone else, especially anyone who isn’t male, heterosexual, white, and Christian. From an early age, relatives brought me up to believe that my mother was the good parent and my father the bad parent, and that my mother’s family was the good side of the family and my father’s family was the bad side of the family. Despite everything I witnessed firsthand, I fell for this brainwashing.

That is, I fell for it until a couple years after I moved to Topeka and two local relatives ganged up on me, both verbally abusing me to an extreme because, horrors, my politics reflect my beliefs and values and therefore are the polar opposite of their politics. One of these relatives even attacked me for my lifestyle and personality and proved to be infinitely more deranged and bigoted than I could have imagined.

Suddenly I woke from that state of denial about my mother’s family. Until that point, I had tactfully refrained from saying to local relatives anything about my politics or spirituality or indeed anything meaningful, because I suspected these closed-minded relatives would verbally abuse me, and I therefore had every reason to keep as quiet around them as possible. Certain relatives, and not only those two, are firmly set in their militaristic, phallocratic beliefs. Additionally, they think that because they are miserable or because they have experienced misery that I deserve to be miserable.

Associating with verbally abusive and bigoted relatives; living in the depressing and alienating environment of Topeka; and witnessing the government that my relatives worship wage wars, attack women’s rights and generally put a great deal of effort into ruining the entire world, I plunged into the most severe depression I have ever experienced. If I had been someone else, I would have started taking anti-depressants or jumped off the roof. Instead, I knew I had to get serious about meditation. I finally figured out that it was urgent for me to develop an ability to cope well with verbally abusive people, especially since with my karma it seems I’ll always be showered with contempt. Consequently I got into Insight Meditation, or Vipassana.

Over a period of three years, I temporarily escaped Kansas by going far away on vacations but returned only to immediately sink back into depression. I found myself wanting to visit India, but not as a typical tourist sunning on a beach; I wanted to visit parts of India that are particularly relevant to Buddhism. The chances of finding out about a tour that fit my dream seemed tiny, until I spotted an advertisement in The Turning Wheel, a magazine published by the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. It was a tiny black and white ad for a pilgrimage in India, called In the Footsteps of the Buddha, which includes significant places in the Buddha’s life, and is directed by a Zen teacher named Shantum Seth.

This pilgrimage ad perked up my interest, so I visited the website and e-mailed asking for the brochure. On the website, I read a personal essay by Anne Cushman, who took the pilgrimage, and that triggered a great deal of excitement and anticipation on my part. I also read that the tour guide and teacher, Shantum Seth, was from India, had studied in England, and in San Francisco met the Vietnamese Buddhist monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, and became his student. Thich Nhat Hanh was one of the first Buddhist teachers whose books I had read. If I went on this pilgrimage, the tour guide and meditation instructor would probably be the only Zen teacher from India on the entire planet.

In the summer of 2006, I spent two weeks as a tourist in San Francisco, and shortly after I returned to Kansas, I received an e-mail from Bina, the president of In the Footsteps of the Buddha, asking if I was still interested in the pilgrimage. I replied in the affirmative and after some worry about the expenses filled out the registration form. Suddenly I began preparing for another trip before I finished unpacking from the last one. At the age of thirty-six, one year older than the Buddha was when he gained enlightenment, I would be taking a Buddhist pilgrimage. Given that I’ve only been into Buddhism for a few years, I have a lot of catching up to do with the Buddha.