The Best Buddhist Writing 2010 - Melvin McLeod [30]
“Um, thanks,” I said. But then other people told me. And it was hard to believe. Having started surfing later than most, I never thought I’d impress even my own mom. But apparently my hard work was paying off.
And then came my downfall, running up to me in a yellow bikini, eyelashes batting. The cute surfer girl I had a crush on, Emily, was saying, “Jaimal, I saw you out there. Maybe you should start competing.”
That’s when my mind warped.
In my mind, I started seeing myself on the cover of Surfer magazine, women fawning, cameras flashing. Result: I gradually started becoming the thing I most despised.
It started with me seeing myself as having some divine right to waves. I was still a small fish in a big pond of incredibly skilled surfers. I still knew my place (almost). But I began to see the beginners as somehow undeserving of waves. Sometimes, much as I hate to admit it, I didn’t even like going out with my friends from school who were still learning. They embarrassed me. My reputation was at stake.
My attitude was trickling into my life outside the water, too. I found myself doing things I never would’ve done before. I caught myself in little lies. I got in a screaming match with one of my best friends over money. And the weirdest part was, I could even observe the process happening. Worse still: I didn’t care.
Then one day I snapped. It was a sunny day at Honoli’i and there were tons of waves, more than enough for every surfer to get dozens. I had surfed plenty, but I still wanted more. And that was when some oblivious tourist—looking much like I once looked in those first days on Maui—dropped in right in front of me and fell, ruining a very nice wave, my wave.
This had happened a hundred times before and I’d never cared much. “No worries,” I usually said, and paddled on. But this time, I lost it. The words just spilled out of me. “Watch where the fuck you’re going,” I growled. I startled even myself.
The kid looked terrified. “Sorry, man,” he said. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t see you.”
I looked back at him—teenager, not even with any tan yet. He had the same exact look I’d had at sixteen: innocence, excitement, fear.
And that’s when it hit me. I’d really gone too far. I was becoming a Surf Nazi, an extremist. I paddled over to the kid. “Look, don’t worry about that fall,” I told him. “Sorry I flipped. I was just worried I’d hit you.”
He looked relieved. “No, that’s alright. It was my bad.”
I felt like such a jerk, like I wasn’t any better than the Surf Nazis who I found so difficult to bear. The whole reason I’d started surfing was to find a life that was free.
Surfing was my religion—but in my confusion I was twisting it into something unrecognizable, mistaking the method for the goal, the means for the end.
I guess it happens all the time, to religious fanatics of all stripes.
The Buddha understood this problem of attaching to methodology, even though he also took great care to hone the methodology he did teach. He warned his students about engaging in unproductive practices that were all the rage in India at the time: rubbing your body in ash, worshipping fire, having sex with skulls. (I’m not sure how popular that last bit was, but it was popular enough to make it into the Buddhist rulebook.) But then he went further: He said even his own teachings were not to be taken as Ultimate Truth. He asked his students not to worship him like a god or make statues of him. He said that his teachings, to borrow a Zen phrase from centuries later, were merely a finger pointing at the moon, not the thing itself.
He also compared his teachings to a raft. The raft could be employed to cross the river of delusion and suffering. But once that shore was reached, the teachings had to be let go of. It would be foolish, he said, for someone to reach the opposite shore—of enlightenment, of freedom from suffering—and still carry