How Did We Get Here?

I often hear people say that everything happens for a reason. I always wonder if they are thinking of a single cause that is attributed to a supreme being. From a Buddhist perspective, I think of it as an infinite number of causes and conditions that leads to many results without any appeal to the divine. This is called determinism. It is the idea that everything is the result of everything that has come before, all the way back to the beginning of time. But life doesn’t really feel this way. We think we are in control of the outcomes in our lives, but this control is imagined. When we look deeply at the events in our lives we begin to sense a flow within our very lives.

            This can be done by considering a single evet in your life and then deconstructing everything that went into making it happen. This list of causes and conditions starts small but quickly becomes overwhelming, perhaps even a bit frightening. However, it does lead to a profound sense of interdependence and gratitude. The example I like to use comes from my own life, It is how I came to be a Buddhist.

            During the 1960’s, I was able to spend time with my grandfather before he passed away. This is also the era of the Beatles. The spirituality of my grandfather and that of John Lennon and George Harrison opened me up to new ways of thinking and of possible futures. My grandfather was Christian, John Lennon was influenced by Yoko Ono’s Zen Buddhism and George Harrison was a Hindu convert from the Anglican church. It seemed to me that George Harrison gave me permission to choose my own religion. If someone that public can convert, then I certainly could. He gave me courage.

            Also, during the 1960’s, there was a young man living in New York City named Jeffery Miller. His “best friend Barry’s nineteen-year-old girlfriend, Allison Krause, was killed at Kent State” by the National Guard. “There was also a peculiar coincidence at Kant State that touched [his] life: One of the other students who was killed was ... named Jeffery Miller.” Many of his friends called him fearing that he too had died. This event led him to change his focus from earning more to learning more.

He recalled that

“During this painful time, my original life goals seemed more and more misguided and out of touch. I had spent the summer of 1969 working at a Manhattan law firm ... [It] had convinced me that I was not cut out to be ... vying ceaselessly for a better birth on the Titanic.”

Then in my early thirties, much like Jeffery Miller, suddenly my boss’s wife died, my best friend died, and my father died. I too realized then that the path I was on was no longer working for me. I knew something was missing but I didn’t know what it was.

During that time, my wife Linda was attending National University. In the spring she was taking a social diversity course. In April, one of the assignments was to do something outside your cultural norms so we began to search the internet for something Buddhist. We had always been interested in Buddhism, so this seemed like a nice opportunity. We found the OCBC Hanamatsuri festival in April. If it had been another month then we likely would have never found OCBC. During the festival, I remember when Linda and I walked into the Hondo together. It was silent, the altar was radiating a golden light and we could smell the incense. I remember thinking “I wish my life felt the way the altar looked.”

After six years of struggling with these three losses, I bought a book on Buddhism that just happened to be the current best seller on Amazon. It was Awakening the Buddha Within by Lama Surya Das, also a convert but this time from Judaism. His mother calls him the Deli Lama of Tibetan Buddhism. I was very lucky that it was this book that popped up on my search list. His secular name was Jeffery Miller, yes, the one that wasn’t killed at Kent State. I was so fortunate to find this book. One convert speaking to another.

I was now a nightstand Buddhist. I read two more books on Buddhism. The second one was Zen and the third was Theravadan. But the Zen book struck me with the advice that you need to find a teacher. So, we went back to google. Looking for Buddhist Temples once again. But to my surprise there were none. How could there be no Buddhist Temples in Orange County? So, on a whim I tried searching for Buddhist Churches and bingo my search list was full. We called many of the temples in our area, but they either didn’t answer or never returned our calls. It may have been a language issue. But there was one near our house that did. So, this was it. That Sunday morning our kids thought we were going to Disneyland but instead it was to Dale Ave.

As we were driving north on Beach Blvd, I kept thinking that “Dale” sounded so familiar to me. Where had I heard that name before. As we pulled into the parking lot, I realized that we had somehow found the same Buddhist Temple twice. Google is somewhat random based on the search terms so how amazing we found the same temple two years apart.

So yes, everything does happen for a reason but so much more so than we can imagine or ever hope to understand. 

Namoamidabutsu, Rev Jon Turner