ERASED NO MORE
THIS TIME IT HAPPENED at the silent retreat. Even the know-it-all didn’t know it all. Even the big people falter. Even the teachers.
It is so easy to surrender my intelligence to them, my own knowing to theirs. Smile and say, yeah, like I don’t know.
Just like when I was a kid. Smile, and drop the grammatically correct English that newly arrived immigrants speak. If I want to fit in, if I want to be American, I gotta drop the intelligence. Pretend I don’t know. Numb the mind and learn to say I don’t know.
Forty years ago that felt demeaning, and it is happening again at this class for experienced meditators. A student just commented in front of the whole class that we have much to thank the community’s founder for, because he invented Buddhism in the U.S. “Oh, I meant he brought Buddhism to the U.S.,” the student quickly corrected herself.
Buddhism wasn’t invented or brought over to the U.S. by him or any of the other white stars of “convert Buddhism.” What about the Asian folks
