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PART ONE

Discovering Ancient

Wisdom in a

Modern World

The religion of the future will be a cosmic religion. It should transcend personal God and avoid dogma and theology. Covering both the natural and the spiritual, it should be based on a religious sense arising from the experience of all things natural and spiritual as a meaningful unity. Buddhism answers this description…. If there is any religion that could cope with modern scientific needs it would be Buddhism.

—ALBERT EINSTEIN

The coming of Buddhism to the West may well prove to be the most important event of the Twentieth Century.

—ARNOLD TOYNBEE, HISTORIAN

WE ARE ALL BUDDHAS

May all beings everywhere, with whom we are inseparably interconnected, be fulfilled, awakened, and free. May there be peace in this world and throughout the entire universe, and may we all together complete the spiritual journey.

1971 Kopan, Nepal

It is morning in the lush Kathmandu Valley. I am in a small, clay, mud-floored hut at the top of Kopan Hill, surrounded by gleaming snow-covered Himalayan mountaintops. The rising sun has started to evaporate the mist covering the rice paddies below. At the bottom of the hill I can see three barefoot young Nepalese villagers filling water jugs from a spring. Soon one of them will put a jug on his head and carry it up the hill and leave it outside my hut.

I am alone for a week on my first solitary meditation retreat. As I watch the sun rise and set each day, I meditate, watching my breath and looking within. Later in the day, following the ancient oral teaching traditions, a Tibetan lama will come to guide me.

There is a joke about spiritual seekers and travelers—men and women like me: Margie Smith, a pleasant-looking woman who gave birth to her children in the 1950s (think June Cleaver or Harriet Nelson), approaches a travel agent.

“I must get to the Himalayas for my vacation,” Mrs. Smith says. “I’ve got to talk to a guru.”

“The Himalayas, Mrs. Smith! Are you sure?” the travel agent asks. “It’s a long trip, different language, funny food, smelly oxcarts. How about London, or Florida? Florida is lovely this time of year.”

Mrs. Smith is adamant. She must go to the Himalayas to talk to a guru. So Mrs. Smith, wearing her best blue suit and her black pumps with the sensible heels, heads East, taking a plane, a train, a bus, and, yes, an oxcart, until she finally arrives at a far-off Buddhist monastery in Nepal. There an old lama in maroon and saffron robes tells her that the guru she seeks is meditating in a cave at the top of the mountain and cannot be disturbed. But Mrs. Smith came a long way and she is a determined woman who won’t be put off.

Finally the lama relents. “All right,” he says, “if you must, you must. But there are some ground rules. You can’t stay long, and when you speak to the guru, you can say no more than ten words. He lives there alone, in silence and meditation.”

Mrs. Smith agrees; and with the help of a few lamas, monks, and Sherpa porters, she starts trudging up the mountain. It’s a long hard climb, but she doesn’t give up. With an enormous effort of will and energy, she reaches the top—and the cave in which the guru is meditating. Her mission accomplished, Mrs. Smith stands at the entrance, and in a loud clear voice, she says what she came to say:

“Sheldon…. Enough is enough! It’s your mother. Come home already.”

My name was Jeffrey Miller. But it could have been Sheldon. There was a Sheldon living on the next block in the suburban Long Island town where I was brought up and Bar Mitzvahed. My parents were long-time members of a synagogue; we were a middle-class Jewish family. I was always a regular guy, a three-letter high school jock. I grew up wanting to be a ballplayer. I had friends, good grades, and an intact suburban family. What was I doing meditating and chanting Buddhist mantras and prayers on a mountaintop in the Himalayas? Today, my own mother, Joyce Miller, jokingly refers to me as “my son, the lama,” or even more amusingly as “The Deli Lama.”

FOLLOWING THE OVERLAND ROUTE