Due to TravelBlog's memory failure and crash, this article had to be re-published. Sorry for any inconvenience. The End & The Beginning Lying on his back, yet he didn’t know it. He didn’t know he was that turtle, tipped over on his own shell, by his own shell. His mother looked down at him, not knowing what to do, what to say, except the family proverb: “Perry, you don’t have a pot to piss in.”
With a bad back, handfuls of Advil, disgruntled relationships, heavy debts, and not a hand on the twig to snap the curse of his current predicament,
New York Times contributor Perry Garfinkel was on “the path”. Yes, it was his own crumbling path and before long, just at the right moment in Time, Perry would uplift himself at the tipping point. Albeit, to him he already tipped.
The result: a dream job for any writer. When things could not get worse,
National Geographic accepted Perry’s pitch to travel around the world documenting the chronology of Buddhism and its revival as the 21st century’s “engaged” Buddhist Movement—all expenses paid. He was on the path, but it would take ten weeks, plus ten more
unexpected weeks, for him to realize this. It would be a “cosmic bailout” of constant movement, interviews, hours of taxi rides and plane flights, with swarms of luggage, language barriers and a precarious lumbar structure. However, the result would land him a 24-page spread in one of the world’s most renowned periodicals and the book,
Buddha or Bust. But Mr. Garfinkel would come full circle, eventually finding himself back where he started.
West To East To Center The Buddha once said, “All living things, whether they know it or not, are following this Path.” The enlightened prince 500-some years before the birth of Jesus knew what he was talking about. He spoke of the path of life; a winding tumultuous trail of crags, thorns, mountains and exquisite vistas that all creatures travel on Earth. And it is this trail that only becomes known through the breakdown of one’s own mind. When life appears to be at its boiling point, as the ground sways from beneath all fours, only then will one strive hard enough to let go and find meaning.
In Garfinkel’s
Buddha or Bust, another American seeks to find answers, however full or however empty of
the insatiating materialism of the West. Perry’s at the latter end of the wealthy, and once hitched by a buyer, he travels from his mother’s New Jersey home eastward in search of the modern world’s Buddhism.
Like any open door, he’s slammed with the reality of things. Auschwitz is Perry’s first awakening, and a hard one at that. Dug within the shallow grave of his Jewish lineage, he meets face-to-face with his own denial. And from the start, the Ego continues its play, dominating the reality of truth, meaning, happiness and true healing. With a writer’s cynicism and aggressive forefront, Perry’s analysis undermines his own ability to remain on the meditation cushion. How long will he keep falling off onto his own thick shell?
From the deep realities of suffering within his Jewish ancestry, Perry continues into the heart of the East. India, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Hong Kong and China, Tibet, Japan’s Kyoto and Tokyo, before landing back in the heaps of the West.
West to East to West again—full circle. And after a year of constant attempts, the Office of His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama, grants Perry the mightiest of all interviews. Before the
mirror of his own desires, the author flies back to India after a five-day retreat at Thich Nhat Hanh’s
Plum Village in France. At the retreat, after the worldly travels and personal meditations, once more the wandering/converted Buddhist is tempted not by enlightenment, but by a love-story, his own Buddha-sent companion. With the test on his path, it is his patience, understanding and communication that will determine if one circle may be broken and the cycle of personal relationships can take a different turn.
Human Is As Human Does Through the directions and words of various Eastern philosophies, Perry Garfinkel’s questions are never answered. He is only filled with more ponderous punctuations in the morass of possibility. Yet through keen observance, the Buddha’s message thrives loud, but how clear and to what degree is his own take.
The Buddha has as many faces as he does sutras. He has as many ways to smile upon the world as the number of steps in which Gandhi trekked. If one thing is certain, within the face of today’s world, its citizens continue to strive for a more compassionate world and the movement of engaged Buddhism continues to hold the one true purpose: a means to look inward upon one’s Self.
After the months of movement, with the play of the mind, its emotions, and the author’s own words in which he seeks to decipher meaning, the journalist silences and sees his own light. His questions lead him nowhere, except inward. There he discovers the answers true to himself, silently as he falls off the cushion once more, but climbs back on for more meditation.
Here, only in the present moment, beneath all judgment and self-righteous assurance of who he thinks he is, does the simple joy of sitting reside. He is Perry Garfinkel: writer, author, world traveler, and spiritual practitioner. Yes, he is human as any human, just as Tenzin Gyaltso, the 14th Dalai Lama, is as human as was China’s cultural cleanser, Mao Zedong.
Buddha or Bust:
In the Search of Truth, Meaning, Happiness, and the Man Who Found Them All By Perry Garfinkel
Hardcover: Harmony Books ©2006, $24.95
Paperback: Three Rivers Press, ©July 2007, $13.95
This book review was originally written for
Brave New Traveler
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