Tricycle | Awake in the World

Twenty years ago this winter, a few weeks short of my twenty-first birthday, my college boyfriend and I sat in a guest apartment at the Zen Center of Los Angeles and listened to a weeping American Zen Buddhist nun warn us that we were on the verge of single-handedly destroying Buddhism in the West.

“The dharma is very young here. It’s fragile, like a new green shoot,” she said, tears splashing into her black-robed lap. “If you tell the world what is going on here at the Zen center, you could wreck the flowering of twenty-five hundred years of Buddhist practice.”

Lou and I looked at each other. We didn’t know what to say. Outside, I could hear the distant wail of a police siren. I definitely didn’t want to destroy the Buddha-dharma in the Western world. At the same time, I couldn’t help thinking, “This is my senior thesis. If I don’t finish it, how am I going to graduate?”