Buddha behind glass.
Opening a new door.
24 NOVEMBER—I stared down the long length of the silent room, a space I had spent many happy hours in laughing with friends, sitting in quiet meditation, or listening to teachings. Many of them delivered by the most accomplished meditation masters and Buddhist scholars of this generation.
It had been over a decade since I’d last visited the Buddhist center that was once my spiritual abode. For years I imagined the moment: pictured myself walking the length of the hall, standing before the shrine, taking a seat on one of the blue meditation cushions—a child long lost home at last.
But on that summer afternoon the shrine room was inaccessible, its doors locked. I stood in the vestibule gazing through a barrier of impenetrable glass at the golden Buddha sitting on the altar at the far end of the room. For a moment I felt utterly bereft. There was no welcome to be found here—no one I spoke with had offered to unlock the doors—and the message could not have been clearer: this was no longer my community.
It was then I noticed something altogether strange and arresting. Behind me, the west-facing windows looked onto a canopy of tall maple trees and the sunlight filtering through the foliage cast a reflection onto the glass before me so that the Buddha appeared to be meditating in a peaceful forest grove. Not so unlike the woodlands of Bodh Gaya where he attained enlightenment two and a half millennia ago while meditating beneath an ancient fig tree.
The barrier before me was both transparent and reflective so that distinctions between inside and outside, shrine room and forest, belonging and alienation were revealed as illusory—only now do I realize it.
As is so often the case when faced with a locked door—another one opened. For me it swung wide onto a vaster, wilder, and yet more beautiful landscape—as if the Buddha had been set free.
I left the building to follow Siddhārtha’s footsteps elsewhere, out into the world and where ever they happen to take me.
These days they track through strange territory indeed: from the writings of Christian contemplatives who realize selflessness in the love of God through barren and bombed-out realms where wounded hearts bleed. There is no terrain the path steers clear of however apprehensive a traveler may sometimes be.