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Table of Contents Table of Contents: Chapter One: Introduction p. Chapter Two: Setting the Scene--An Overview of Buddhism in America, This Half Century’s Developments p. Chapter Three: Methodology p. Chapter Four: Personal Introductions p. Chapter Five: The Occurrence of Epiphany p. Chapter Six: Suffering as the Path p. Chapter Seven: The Jewish Something p. Chapter Eight: The Teacher--Finding and Relating to a Spiritual Mentor p. Chapter Nine: The Dialectics of Plot--Narrative Movements of Becoming p. Chapter Ten: Summary p. Bibliography p. Chapter One: Introduction How a Nice Jewish Boy or Girl Became a Buddhist Master, Or, The Phenomenological Beginning to This Study Several years ago I had a surprising interview with the teacher of one of the meditation retreats I did at a Buddhist temple in southern Thailand, on the island Ko Pah Gan. The teacher was Steve Wiessman, a Jewish man in his forties originally from New Jersey, who had been leading retreats for years at this small wat, temple, with his wife Rosemary. It was an idyllic setting, high upon a hill dotted with leaning palms, overlooking the island bays of turquoise waters and tiny islets. Steve and Rosemary ran a tight ship, with a strict schedule of meditation practice in total silence for ten days under spartan living conditions: we slept on mats, four to a room, rising before dawn, eating the simplest of food--the same meal of rice and vegetables was served once a day throughout the retreat; the washroom was, of course, a hole in the ground, and we washed using a bucket of cold water. Every couple of days each yogi, retreat participant, would have an interview of five minutes or so with one of the teachers to check up on his or her meditation practice. When I reached Steve’s hut for my interview, he smiled and waved me to the seat next to him, exhibiting the first sign of emotion since the beginning of the retreat. I had become used to poker-faced meditation teachers and senior students, and had come to associate much practice with a decline in emotional affect. At some retreats all contact among people is discouraged, including eye contact, never mind a casual “good morning”. Steve and I began to talk, the ice quickly broke, and within a few minutes we were discussing our Jewish backgrounds and places of origin. The five-minute interview stretched to over half an hour as Steve told me stories about his childhood in New Jersey, about his parents and his bar mitzvah (when the rabbi transliterated the Hebrew verses into English which Steve then recited at synagogue—a meaningless affair for him), his high school experiences and his spiritual awakenings which led him to search within Buddhism. Being in Thailand for so long, and having a Jewish mother back home, he shared with me the joke about the Jewish guru1 and reminisced about some of the smells and tastes of his Friday nights at the family dinner table. We were drawn into a narrative discourse where I was asking more of the questions, Steve was providing most of the content, and together we co-created and rediscovered a territory of memory which became a storied present moment. During the conversation Steve touched upon memories long inhibited, and my interest in the narrative process as a research tool was born. The divisions between teacher and student, interviewee and interviewer, were at once blurred and maintained, so that our subjectivities mingled within the exploration of a narrative past--that it was more Steve’s than mine did not exclude me from the creation of it, for it was the context of my interview with him (which was originally, in the retreat context, meant to be his interview of me), and our mutual interest in the narrative, which allowed his stories to emerge. At times during the interview I was reminded of his status of a very accomplished meditation teacher, not just by hearing stories of his arduous practice and experience with famous teachers, but by his current subtle examples as someone further down the path: at one point in the discussion a mosquito landed on his eyelid, and proceeded to bite him; Steve did not blink, but simply continued to speak with me throughout the whole landing, biting, drawing of blood, and departure of the insect. As I witnessed the whole thing in close detail, and scratched my eye in sympathy, I was reminded of his powers of concentration as well as ethic not to harm other creatures. It was a small gesture which left upon me more of a lasting impression than all of his teachings during the retreat. Like this example, the narrative was delivered in more than verbal ways: his focus and body language, our rapport and shared interest, our sense of common narrative elements, such as within the Jewish, and the present shared Buddhist context all combined to expand the narrative subjectively into a lived experience for both of us. The interview became an exercise in co-authorship, in which both of us were altered by the uniqueness of the experience: the emergence of narrative memory as a present and shared moment, equally revealing the past and present. I left that interview without a lot of advice for my own meditation practice, but with a new direction for research which began to consume my interest: the narratives of senior Jewish Buddhists. I had been meeting a disproportionate number of Jews in all the Buddhist retreats I had been doing over the years, and had recently become more aware of their presence as the teachers. The narrative encounter with Steve brought the different worlds together, which went far beyond the discourse of Jewish-Buddhists, and into the complexity of memory, identity, and their permutations through time. In hearing parts of Steve’s life story I had learned not only about much of my own life as I was able to identify with some of his background and spiritual search, struggles, joys and disappointments (all embedded in narrative episodes), but I was able to gain insight into worlds beyond my experience which he had traversed. Above all, I was able to share in the memory reconstruction of the world of another human being, which meant to see and learn about the world through those remembered experiences. My horizons were expanded in the active listening, and through the experience his story became in part my story, as well as being a story of that is part of the world. Listening deeply, I was hearing the universal as it was being expressed in the narrative of an individual. No translation of terms was necessary; the “I” which he spoke expressed simultaneously a subjective and universal truth. I left our meeting wanting to hear more stories, and to meet more worlds which intersected with my own. There can occur in the sharing of narratives, of life stories, a kind of unity which is both self and other revealing. I call it a narrative meeting, which I was fortunate to experience during several of my interviews. The meeting, or revealing, can occur during the interview, or during the course of repeated readings and study of the transcript. An example of the former, which is the more powerful and insightful, happened during my interview with Jacqueline Mandel, whose quote I use in different sections of this study as a summary statement of the power of narrative: Well I think, I’ll probably talk around your question….Um, well in many ways, your inquiry is matching my own inquiry. Because like I said, I’m sometimes surprised at the steps that I take as well, um, and so I’ve had some time to look back, and I too am just understanding my own life. …(five second pause) so I would say it feels good, because it’s um, ..it’s what I’m doing too. Does that make sense? You know, your inquiry is also my inquiry. We find ourselves aligned in an investigation of the meaning of life as mantled in the particular narrative drapery of an individual life. Narrative studies in the field of qualitative research have become more acknowledged and published over the past decade; the phenomenon of the Jewish Buddhist, however, is something which only certain groups within both the American Buddhist and Jewish worlds are aware of. There have been no narrative studies performed on the lives of Jewish Buddhists, and there has been little recognition of the cultural, ethnic, and religion of origin diversity within the studies of Western and American Buddhism. This study of the narrative development of Jewish Buddhist teachers will contribute to the academic study of Buddhism in the West as an in-depth exploration of one such ethnic, cultural and religious group within Buddhism (being Jewish spans all the definitions), to the academic study of contemporary Judaism as Jewish Buddhists represent a significant movement both within the Jewish world and the Buddhist world, and to the non-academic interest of those compelled by questions of religion, identity, and examples of the pursuit of a spiritual path which is informed by plurality. The narrative life development of a Jewish Buddhist teacher becomes a goldmine for insight into issues that touch everyone trying to live a meaningful life in the contemporary world. The perpetual popularity of biography and autobiography among general readership gives evidence to the potential of narrative accounts to expand one’s awareness of oneself and one’s world. We are all nursed on stories that range from fairy tales to hearing about our parents’ first meeting, and we are told stories about our childhoods enough to wonder whether our own memories are more from us or from others’ accounts.
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