Tricycle | Awake in the World

SUNDAY, July 25, 1993. Smiling, bespectacled George Weissman meets me at Tel Aviv airport at four-thirty A.M. We drive north up Highway Four via Haifa to Nahariya. George is a nuclear physicist from Berkeley. We discuss Sautrantika and Yogacara philosophy as we pass through dusty towns and villages in a muddle of construction. At Nahariya we turn inland. After straying for miles through country roads, Druze olive farms, and a kibbutz, we locate Clil, an ecological village of thirty families in the hills of western Galilee.

"Buddhism and Consciousness" is the title of the retreat at which I am to give a series of lectures. It has been arranged by Stephen Fulder, a writer on herbal medicine with a long-standing interest in Buddhism. I am to stay at his self-made, solar-powered house with Stephen, his wife, Rachel, and their three charming daughters.

Over a lunch of olives, hummus, tahini, salad, and bread, I hear several staccato bursts of gunfire. I imagine soldiers are doing target practice nearby. "Katyushas," explains Aurielle, the youngest daughter. "Rockets from Lebanon," she adds to dispel myevident confusion. "Will you pass the hummus, please." Every few minutes a dull thud interrupts the meal. Fear tightens my belly. "During the Iraq War," recalls Aurielle with unassuming pride, "at night we used to watch the SCUDs on their way to Tel Aviv." As fresh grapes from the vines around the house are served, the massive thump of a rocket or shell is followed by a palpable reverberation.

Stephen Fulder is only slightly concerned that the train to Nahariya bringing the course participants might be held up because of the fighting. He has heard on the radio that the town is under rocket attack, stores have closed, and people are in shelters.

By mid-afternoon almost everyone has arrived. They sit under trees in the garden chatting, laughing, and sipping cold lemongrass tea. When the intense dry heat of the day fades, we sit in a circle and introduce ourselves. Many are professionals: teachers, psychologists, therapists. One man is here because his daughter has been in India for two years, living in poverty and meditating. He blames Buddhism for this.

MONDAY

I pass on the morning session by Dr. Lydia Aran because it is in Hebrew. Lydia is the author of the only book on Buddhism in the language. It has sold well and received wide coverage in the media. She tells me that Buddhism is drawing widespread attention these days in Israel, partly because of a growing interest in other forms of spiritual practice, partly because young Israelis are now able to get visas to travel and study in India. Nonetheless, there is as yet no Buddhist center in the country. Some years ago a Japanese Roshi lived in Jerusalem and ran a small group, but he left to become abbot of Ryutakuji, a monastery near Kyoto. Informal vipassana meditation groups are all that exist here.

Throughout the morning I hear a continuous series of dull, distant thuds. I learn that these are Israeli artillery bombardments of Hezbollah positions in Lebanon. Clil is only fifteen kilometers from the border.

As I walk through this stony, thorn-strewn land where olive, fig, and pomegranate trees somehow flourish, I am almost envious of this religion that is grounded in such a physical sense of place: Israel. Unlike Buddhism, Judaism is rooted in home rather than homelessness. The land itself evokes the biblical sources of Western culture. Although she has studied the dharma for years in Nepal and is not an Orthodox Jew, Lydia says that she cannot become a Buddhist because she would be betraying those who died in the Holocaust. "You can be a German Buddhist, an English Buddhist, but not a Jewish Buddhist," she declares. She is surprised that when she told her Tibetan lama this he did not understand. I tell her I am not sure I understand myself.

In my opening talk I describe how ignorance (avidya) and conditioning activity (samskara) are the context within which consciousness as we know it emerges. Shantideva compares the human condition to a dark, cloudy night occasionally and briefly illuminated by a flash of lightning. The lightning is awakening consciousness (bodhichitta), which pierces the darkness with wisdom and compassion.

At dusk, Rachel Fulder, in a somewhat distraught state, explains that she has to go to the funeral of the son (by a former marriage) of her sister's husband. Two weeks ago the tank in which he was patrolling the security zone was hit in a Hezbollah ambush. Severely brain-damaged, the young soldier lay in a coma until he died yesterday. His death is given as one of the official reasons behind this latest round of Israeli retaliation.

All evening mustard-colored helicopters whir and clatter overhead on their way north.

TUESDAY

Consciousness, I continue, is always referential. Buddhism acknowledges no "pure consciousness." We are always conscious of something. There is no retreat from the encounter with the world to a spiritual realm of pure awareness. Nor is consciousness an independent "thing." Just as the hand is made of bones, flesh, skin, and nerves, so a moment of consciousness is constituted of stimuli, feelings, intentions, attentions, and perceptions.

It is hot, and the room is buzzing with flies and mosquitoes. People do not seem concentrated. The dry wind comes in gusts, muffling the shellfire, making it sound like distant thunder. Silver jets fly in silent formation northward. Stephen tells me at lunch that two hundred thousand people have fled their homes in South Lebanon to escape the bombardment.

In the afternoon, Marsha, one of the participants, comes to talk to me. She is frustrated that no Israelis are willing to support her in rehabilitating torture victims. The Palestinian groups in Nablus with whom she works estimate that forty-five thousand Palestinians have been tortured. She has just returned from a yearlong, worldwide spiritual quest in search of an answer. Now she is angry that "spiritual" people who talk endlessly of compassion are as uninterested in her work as everyone else. "This society is mentally sick," she says.

The Fulders are fasting to commemorate the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem nearly two thousand years ago. So George and I have dinner with Danny, a Jewish vip ass ana meditator from L.A., who is also the sheriff of Clil. "Hi!" he greets us warmly from his patio, "you've arrived just in time for our latest war." But behind the bonhomie he is worried that this conflict may drag on. His long-haired teenage son sees no future in the country. Danny disagrees. "Israel bubbles with reality," he says. That's why he stays.