The Best Buddhist Writing 2010 - Melvin McLeod [29]
“Uh, I don’t know,” I found myself saying. I honestly couldn’t think of anything I was doing but surfing. No deep thoughts. No life outside of the weather patterns.
“Well, tell me about surfing,” he said.
“Well, I do it a lot.”
My mind was saltwater.
I drifted farther from formal Buddhist practice and everything else that didn’t peel or tube or pitch. My grades suffered. I still sat my daily zazen session. But it became shorter and shorter until it almost wasn’t there. Which was OK with me. I saw “merging with the waves” as my new practice. Surfing was becoming my official religion.
It’s not that I was giving up on Zen. But I saw surfing as the best Zen practice. By this point, I’d done weeks and weeks of formal Zen retreats in lots of different monasteries. I didn’t think I was any hotshot meditator, but I’d experienced some interesting meditative states—but so what?
And after all that, it still seemed to me that the mind brought forth while surfing a wave was as close as I’d come to Zen. The great ancestor Sengcan described the Zen mind by saying that the subject disappears without objects, objects vanish without a subject. And centuries later in Japan, Master Dogen talked of the dropping off of one’s body and mind, and the body and mind of others. Riding a wave, this happened naturally. The wave demanded such hyperfocus, there wasn’t room for judging. On a steep, hollow wave, there wasn’t even time to differentiate between one’s body and the wave. There was only this and this and this. Just power and presence.
And, I thought, if I could only hold that focus when the wave ended, I would be a Buddha. But I couldn’t. The wave always ended. The special meditative state always ended.
Impermanence was inescapable, omnipresent.
When there weren’t waves in Hilo, or when it was raining too hard to see them, my friends and I would go to impossible lengths to find surf. We drove and hiked down every dirt road and path on the island. We skipped class and camped in deserted valleys and flew to other islands and paddled to distant reefs. In the beginning, it was fun even when there weren’t waves. We were seeing sights—living the dream. Surfing videos had assured us that the endless hunt for perfect waves was the best life anyone could live. And we were doing it.
But I was also slowly beginning to question whether it was the best life. The more I obsessed with “getting good” at surfing, the more I noticed myself getting frustrated with mediocre waves and genuinely pissed off when the ocean was flat. Surfing was my religion, my one true love. But at the same time, it was slowly becoming an unwholesome relationship with all kinds of unhealthy expectations and needs.
The Buddha talked a lot about not attaching to the good stuff and not running from the bad stuff. Suffering, he said, arises from the mind’s incessant attraction and aversion. He wasn’t recommending people abandon their commonsense attraction and aversion. Putting your hand in fire hurts for a reason. Eating healthful food feels right for a reason. But the Buddha encouraged cultivating a more even-keeled mind.
I thought about the Buddha’s teaching in reference to surfing. On good days, I could observe my obsessive chasing of the pleasurable waves and how it often led to dissatisfaction—but somehow, even then, the idea of “getting better” trumped that awareness.
I just had to be a good surfer. I couldn’t slow down the search.
And I definitely couldn’t stop it.
I immersed myself deeper in surfing, deeper in the waves. For a few months there, I was surfing better than I ever have. My best friend at the time was an insanely good athlete named Tim. He grew up in Hawaii and was a sponsored bodyboarder, one of the best on the island. He pushed me to ride waves I never would have and took me to all the famous breaks on Oahu: Pipeline, Backdoor, Off the Wall.
Around campus,