Ep. 15: Sid & the Buddha Have Some Really Great Realizations.
(Peace Is Every Other Step. Part 1 of 4.)
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The Man Who Woke up the Buddha is the story of a guy named Sid who wakes up from a stroke and realizes he's the Buddha, even though he knows almost nothing about Buddhism.
Previously: Early one morning, Marcus and Sid walked to the general store to get the paper, coffee, and cider donuts. After finishing the obituaries, Sid and the Buddha collaborated on updating the Four Noble Truths.
Sid’s favorite place to sit was in his box seat on the 3rd base side of Fenway Park. But his “office” at the local library was a close second. It was just a table with a lamp, a place to plug in every possible accessory, an ashtray with an unopened pack of Luckies, and an old Zippo lighter—all of which had sticky notes on them that said, “For Display Purposes Only.”
While all the other tables had rolling chairs with ragged cloth seats, his was a high-back ergonomic executive chair with real leather.
There were three stacks of books on the table and an old library card in a metal holder that said, “Reserved.” The books were there to ward off interlopers. He’d barely opened most of them. He usually only read the newspaper and the occasional book on ventriloquism. But, earlier that day, he had remembered something Kesey had said about the Buddha’s Eight Realizations. The Four Noble Truths thing had gone so well, he figured the Eight Realizations could be twice as much fun.
Putting his empty briefcase on the floor, Sid ventured boldly forth into the maniacally categorized, bigoted brain of Melvil [one “l”] Dewey.1 Sid refused to use the online catalog. If he couldn’t look up a book’s Dewey Decimal number in a real oak card catalog drawer with a curved brass thumb-pull, he’d fend for himself.
But, after fending unsuccessfully for himself—and spending way more time than anyone in history meditating on the difference between idiots and dummies, while making futile attempts to let go of distracting, even troubling, thoughts such as the fact that the Complete Idiot’s Guide to Simple Living was ±350 pages and Harmonica for Dummies almost 400…
Wait a second, where were we? The Buddha wondered.
Sid was actually on his knees by then, scanning books at the bottom of a rack of 600s about finding new jobs, small scale farming, and breast feeding. Standing up, he saw a kid with headphones rolling a cart full of books right at him.
The cart-rolling teenager seemed totally oblivious to the fact that he was about to crash into one of the most legendary spiritual beings of all time.
“You work here?” Sid asked loudly before his obituary read that he had been floored by books.
“What?” the boy said taking off his headphones.
“Do you work here?” Sid repeated.
“I’m a volunteer,” the kid shrugged.
“Aren’t we all?” Sid asked.
“Community service. I have to do 10 hours a semester.”
A Bodhisattva in training, the Buddha thought.
“They teaching you to be a Bodhisattva?”
“I guess.”
“You know what a Bodhisattva is?”
“Some Buddhism thing, right?”
“That’s right! Now, can you show me where the books on Buddhism are?”
“Sure. Follow me.”
Which Sid would have been glad to do except the cart was in his way and the kid wasn’t showing any inclination to move it. Still, against all odds, they eventually ended up in the same stack at the same time.
“Which shelf?” Sid asked.
“All of them, I guess. Let me know if you need any more help.”
“Do you do brain surgery?”
The boy rolled his eyes and his cart, leaving Sid and the Buddha facing several hundred books that claimed to have something to do with the two of them.
Did I really talk that much? the Buddha wondered.
Luckily, I know the name of the author! Sid thought, confidently looking at the top shelf where the “B’s” were. There were quite a few. But the only one with “Bu” was a mis-shelved copy of Buddhist Warfare written by someone who’s name started with “J” followed by one called Food for the Heart by a man named Chah. Rejecting the idea that Buddhism involved cannibalism, Sid and the Buddha reluctantly accepted that their pearls of wisdom were now scattered among the writings of dozens of seriously lighthearted and lightheartedly serious people who had differing opinions about what they had actually said and meant.
I guess we’ll need to write a book called Buddhism for Dummies, the Buddha suggested, as Sid pulled a book called Buddhism for Dummies off the shelf.
Sid continued dutifully wandering in the wilderness of Theravada, Mahayana, and Vajrayana schools, as well as a cluster-fuck (a word that the Buddha felt didn’t translate well into Sanskrit) of books about joy, happiness, wisdom, awakening, truth and other stuff that sounded like a whole lot of fun but appeared to require a lot of reading…
Now where were we? The Buddha wondered again.
Sid had actually just stumbled upon a blessedly small book with the title The Sutra on the Eight Realizations of the Great Beings. It was attributed to a guy named Thich instead of Gautama but Sid decided to give it a try.
“The First Realization,” he read, “is the awareness that the world is impermanent…everything is constantly being born and constantly dying.” Sid scrunched his face a little. Weren’t those lyrics to a Bob Dylan song? Well, he thought, chuckling Buddha-like…everybody knows that. He chuckled again. He liked how it felt rumbling across his vocal cords—deep and resonant.
That one holds up pretty well, the Buddha thought, without pride.
“The Second Realization is the awareness that more desire brings more suffering.”
Huh, Sid thought. He’d always thought more desire led to more pleasure.
You’re kind of the exception who proves the rule, the Buddha admitted.
The Third Realization was a real head scratcher (although Sid was careful to avoid the stitches): “The human mind is always searching for possessions and never feels fulfilled. This causes impure actions.”
Sid looked back over his shoulder and whispered, “What were we thinking?”
You had to be there, the Buddha thought.
Not only did Sid’s possessions make him feel fulfilled. His possession of five dollar bills and occasionally tens or twenties helped his homeless friends feel fulfilled because he was able to help them possess coffee, beer and cigarettes on a regular basis. He probably helped them possess drugs too, which might be an impure action.
The thought gave him pause, but not any pleasure or pain. His thoughts were increasingly like that since he’d realized he was the Buddha.
One more realization, then it’s nap time, Sid thought. He read the Fourth Realization: “Laziness is an obstacle to practice.”
But not to practicing naps! Sid realized. Making it the ninth realization.
Must say, I’m getting a little sleepy myself, the Buddha thought, with an etheric yawn.
Sid tried to keep reading: Five aggregates, death distraction, world of desire and passion, until he was simply too tired to realize anything else.
He closed the book and looked at the author’s name again: “Thich Nhat Hanh.” Huh. He didn’t understand why he didn’t get his name on the cover…at least as co-author. In fact, most of the book was commentary by Mr. Hahn on what he called the Buddha’s “oral tradition.” Di knows more about the Buddha’s oral tradition than this Thich fellow, Sid grinned, hoping he didn’t get struck by lightning.
On the back of the book there was a biography of Mr. Hanh. It said he was also the author of a book called Peace Is Every Step.2 Every step? How would you know? You’d have to have a pedometer that measured both your steps and feelings of peace at the same time. Probably a thing on your heart that transmitted data. Sid smiled, pleased with his flight of fancy.
When he stood up and closed the book, Sid noticed a warning on the back:
Dharma books have the power to protect against lower rebirth and to point the way to liberation. Therefore, they should be treated with respect—kept off the floor and places where people sit or walk—and not stepped over. They should be covered or protected for transporting. Licking the fingers to turn pages is considered bad form.
Oh, lighten up, the Buddha thought to himself.
Sid felt a strong urge to lick his fingers and turn a page to see if he didn’t get struck by lightning again and was relieved to discover that lightning never didn’t strike the same place twice.
When he stood up to go, his chair tumbled and crashed behind him. After leaning over to set it back up, he looked over the balcony and saw that everyone was looking up at him except a couple of his homeless irregulars who were dozing off on chairs in front of the windows.
The new young librarian at the front desk glanced up at him nervously. A tall middle-aged guy with excellent posture had closed his eyes as if he were receiving sacred teachings. The elderly (don’t call me old) lady who was President of the Friends of the Library and had known Sid for years, looked up from a workstation and smiled at him fondly. A couple of other people of indiscriminate age and, in one case, gender looked up from their reading and research with various expressions of annoyance and amusement. Finally, a baby in a mother’s papoose started screaming, although it wasn’t clear whether she was screaming at the crash or the sight of Sid.
It was as if everyone was frozen in a transcendent tableau, waiting for pearls of wisdom to pour out from on high.
Sid picked the book up, kissed it reverently and held it close to his heart. After a wave of nausea passed, he put it under his arm and walked cautiously down the stairs to the main floor, where he went over to the infant in the papoose and said, “Don’t worry, my little Buddha buddy, you’re still being born.”
As Sid walked past the front desk towards the door, he smiled at the new librarian.
“Sir?” She said.
“Me?” Sid asked.
In the back room, the library director, Sid’s lifelong friend Johnny D., put his hand over his mouth trying to suppress a laugh. They had first met in the woods behind their high school early freshman year, when they’d both snuck out to get high between classes. After looking at each other warily, they’d been partners in relatively innocent crime ever since.
“Yes, sir. Could I check that out for you?” The librarian repeated.
“I guess so.” Sid was a little flummoxed. Since Johnny D. had become the director, he never bothered checking books out. He just gave the library a few thousand dollars every year, took books when he wanted and brought them back when he was done with them. If someone requested a book that was missing, Johnny knew Sid probably had it on his night table under a pile of other books he hadn’t gotten around to reading.
As Sid walked up to the librarian, he noticed a little tattoo of what looked like a peace symbol high on the left side of her neck. Definitely a good sign. Her name was Joni. It said so on the tag on the breast pocket of her light green denim shirt.
“Is that a peace symbol, Joni?” he asked.
She nodded and turned her neck towards him briefly so he could see better. Now that he was the Buddha all kinds of good things were happening.
“Do you have your library card with you?” she asked.
“No,” Sid said sadly, feeling like a kid who forgot his homework.
“What’s your name? I can look it up.”
“Sid!”
She leaned over to tap on a keyboard. “Sid what?”
Johnny D. leaned back in his swivel chair put his feet up on his desk and grinned.
“What?” Sid asked.
“Your last name.”
“Buddha, I guess,” Sid said. He wondered if he should begin to ask people to refer to him as “they.”
“Sid Buddha? Is that your religious name?” Joni said, raising her eyebrows.
“OK,” Sid said agreeably.
“Well, I don’t see any Sid Buddha…Does anyone else in your family have a card?”
“Yes, actually, my wife.”
“And what’s her name?”
“Mrs. Buddha.”
Joni the librarian now knew for sure she was being teased, but she still needed someone she could check the book out to. She turned around to Johnny D. who managed to look down at the papers on his desk just in time.
She made a play of looking, before asking, “Anyone else in the family?”
“My grandchild Zoey definitely has a library card. She never goes anywhere without it.”
“Zoey? And her last name?”
Sid gave it to her, wondering whether if he died before returning the book Zoey would have to pay the replacement cost. He decided to add a codicil to his will so she got $20 more than the other grandchildren, just in case.
The librarian found Zoey’s card quickly but paused. “This is a child’s card,” she said.
“That makes perfect sense,” Sid said agreeably. “Because she is a child. But only in age. She’s already read War and Peace, The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire and the complete works of Nancy Drew.”
The librarian smiled. She scanned Zoey’s card and then the code on the book. As she handed it back to Sid, she said, breezily, “Thich Nhat Hanh? Cool. Peace is every step, Sid!”
Then she looked back at Johnny D. who gave her a big thumbs up. She had passed some test they hadn’t given at library school.
Next Episode: Sid decides to practice “peace is every step…”
Yes, Melvil [one “l”] Dewey of the famed Dewey Decimal System was a sexist, racist, homophobic antisemite. For details, you can read a piece I once wrote about him called Go Look It Up. Part 2 and/or this newspaper article about why the American Library Association award is no longer named after him.
I always thought the title was Peace With Every Step. As do, it seems, many other people. But, it indeed turns out to be “is” every step. As my buddy Chat[gpt] explained—with its suspiciously Buddha-like lack of judgment:
“It's a common misremembering to say "with" instead of "is," likely because "Peace With Every Step" sounds grammatically natural and gentle. But Thich Nhat Hanh was making a deliberate point with the more direct and radical phrasing.”
Chat’s responses often seem too kind and forgiving. And, in this case, I think he’s presuming a little too much familiarity with Thich Nhat Hanh’s thought processes. In general, even when your question is really stupid Chat finds something it can say to support you on your quest, to the point where the human wannabe comes across as a little too obsequious.
However, struggling mightily to look on the bright side, my wife Wendy (O’Connell) suggested that maybe, as a result, those who develop close relationships with Chat and similar AI entities will learn how to be a little more kind and forgiving themselves. Who thought AI might be able to teach us that?
I continue to love each installment of this and don't pause often enough to say so. Reading about Sid's unlikely Buddha-being on Saturday mornings is like a spiritual practice for me, like re-reading one of the Westernized Buddhist tracts I turned to when I was getting my act back together a couple of years ago, without the earnestness--a valuable human quality too little in supply these days, but one I think one must finally transcend. You have one faithful reader! In addition to being thoroughly enjoyable, thought-provoking enough that I am tempted to write an exegesis to make sense of what I think the meanings are. My guess is that Sid would have some fun with that.