Pick a Path

I cannot begin to read a volume of the graphical novel Buddha, by Osamu Tezuka, without going all the way to the end. I was midway through Volume 4 at the Newport Natural Foods Store when I thought I'd take it into the "yoga room," a multifunctional space where we also sit zazen on Thursday nights. There's also a small, closed-off office with a door to the yoga room that a red-haired woman of somewhat less than my own years uses to do massage therapy. As her appointments sometimes overlap with preparations for the zazen group, we occasionally have words in passing. The woman, named Karen, was today rather early for an afternoon appointment, when she saw me reading in the otherwise empty room. She struck up a conversation.

I had remembered that yesterday, as I was arranging the yoga room for meditation and commenting on how chilly it seemed, she had suggested we wrap ourselves in blankets. "That's how we did it at the ashram." I asked her about it now. "What ashram?"

She had been involved with the Shivananda yoga organization. A rather unscandaled teacher and institution. We began trading stories about Buddhist, Hindu, and Other teachers, and commenting on the various stripes of spiritual seeker one runs across. We mocked the tone of pretentiously earnest young would-be shramanas, "I am but a humble spiritual seeker, searching after the Truth!" "Haven't found any yet, eh?"

Karen had been to India a few times. She related what one yogi said to some people in her presence: "For goodness sake, pick some path and dig into it! Stop wasting your time asking so many questions! You will only find the answers you are looking for by actually practicing something!"

We laughed. Probably a bit cruel to make fun of such people, but we laughed, anyway.