The Power of Story – Not The Buddha

by Stephen Jenkinson

Not the Buddha is excerpted from
COME OF AGE, The Case for Elderhood in a
Time of Trouble, Ch 19, pages 335-340

I was in yet another bookstore in yet another airport a half year ago. It isn’t the best place to buy a book to while away the transcontinental hours, but the whole enterprise can get you to thinking. Really, they’re not even bookstores. They are grottoes of grim fascination with technology, and they are selling gizmos that promise to enhance the reading experience but are clearly helping to make books—the paper kind, what they call now the bricks-and-mortar of the trade—a nostalgic memory. This is something that is happening in your lifetime. Nostalgia sells well (the word means “the return of pain”), and it is a halfway house on the road to oblivion.

I don’t know by what criteria books are chosen for inclusion in airport shops. As I’ve scanned the pointless isles, I’ve been stymied by it. There are the usual items appealing to the business class, star elite, gold and platinum partners, and so on. They are clever for the first couple of pages but seem to burn out beginning with the witty titles. There are the deeply misanthropic items that feature profanity in the title with one letter starred out, coy and mockingly clever slanders of modern peoples’ ways. There are all manner of self-esteem and self-help offerings, of course. There are biographies of people you’d not be likely to inquire after, and some cookbooks. Always cookbooks. Not much in the way of literature, I’ve noticed, unless it has been discounted to retail oblivion. Taken as a whole, the range of titles suggest that the people who choose this stuff credit the travelling public with little or no attention span, contemplative chops, or general give-a-shit. I know this: I’ve written two books that made it to the marketplace, and I’ve never seen either of them in the airports I’ve passed through. I don’t know what that means, marketability-wise, for what I’ve done. It may be a compliment, and it may not be.

Regardless, I was in one of those shops, trolling, thinking that I’ve lived long enough to see reams of books about the zeitgeist of the times with the mark of ephemera all about them. One promised a brief history of mankind. Now, provided you haven’t caved into misanthropy entirely and you still imagine humanity as something like a worthy subject and a worthy audience, why would you settle for a brief history of anything? Imagine what gets left out. Imagine that a good story might take at least as long to tell as it did to happen. Isn’t the enterprise of learning something of how things have come to be as they are worth the time it might take to learn it? When did learning become cruel and unusual punishment? Yes, I know that not everyone will read the Loeb classics in their wondrous bilingual splendor, in their scores. Almost no one will. Still, when did the value and merit of the hours of your life come down to a matter of how easy they’ll make it for you as you go along? Old school is what I’ve become on this and other matters. Not old school as in vintage leather jackets and 33 rpm stereo sound—not cool that way—more like old school as in stuck and left behind by the thrum of the next new thing. I suppose I’d never be accepted into the kumbaya congregation of The Church of What’s Happening Now. Too late for that.

I myself don’t while away hours. A protestant-in-manner to the death, though largely lapsed now, I am prone to working. Not droning. Working, by which I mean giving myself to something, hopefully to something like the highest, noblest bidder. There is, of course, the problem of fetishizing activities that are not much more than dithering. If you don’t find the highest bidder for your attention and your skills, and still you are fond of working, and you obey the fondness to a fault, you could, in time, resemble someone on the subtle end of the autism spectrum, full of involuntary getting on with your life, life probably going the other way. But if you work at it, and the reason for your birth comes into view, work can be good for you. So it has gone for me, anyway.

The indignities can mount as you go along. They truly can. I do not mean the long list of dissemblance that becomes your body in time. Books that catalogue “infirmity” as synonymous with geezerdom are out there now, playing their part in discrediting elderhood by discrediting age, though they’d never own up to it. Being left out of the time parade: that would be undignified. You’d be a freak of nature. Give in to that kind of lunatic cheerleading, and then do the existential math of the thing. You see that you are sentencing subsequent generations to navigate this veil of tears utterly bereft of the venerable signs of time making its way, of time leaving its maker’s mark upon you. You discredit whatever cooperates with time as a losing proposition, as a failure of the will. How is anyone to come of age when age has become “too much sun,” “too much stress,” “too much”?

No, by indignities I mean the laurel of vague regard bestowed upon the greying head by the peak-income-generating boors racing to their deaths. I mean the graceless approval heaped upon whatever they mean by timeless. I mean those cantos of crafty delusion and secret dread sung for change, for novelty, for the newest shiny thing. It leaches dignity from the bones of our mutual life for people who are old enough to know better to line up for a better deal than still being here. Though they might no longer remember what they wish they could or are glad they can’t, they themselves are memory for people half their age. They are living testimony, living witness to the vagaries, to the unleavened mercy that comes with not being, in the mortal and enduring and utterly faithful words of the patron saint of the Orphan Wisdom School, “in full command of every plan you wrecked.” Bail out of the age parade and you betray those unwittingly seeking sustenance from your creaky presence on the scene. That is not a right. It’s not truancy, and it’s not a day off. That is dereliction of duty.

I’ve been teaching about this fractious phantom called elderhood for maybe half a dozen years, and over the last year I’ve begun to make some preliminary gatherings of my take on it all. Happily I’ve found that there was some willingness out there in the world to consider this very thing. I’d begun to call the sessions “Meditations from the World Tree, Withered.” I’d intended to use that as the subtitle for this book, but I’m fairly sure that every focus group in the hemisphere would pooh-pooh it as hopelessly long and confounding. It doesn’t give itself away in seconds, and in that way is not pornographic, and so it has no seat in the marketplace of book cover designs. But people seem to figure that elderhood is the preliminary phase of dying, so at first blush, those who figure I am The Death Guy might go along with it.

Years ago, sometime after the release of a documentary film about my time in the death trade called Griefwalker, I was approached by the online arm of a Buddhist magazine. They had a kind of movie study group, and they asked me to participate in a month-long online discussion forum. I reluctantly agreed. I say reluctantly because 1) I wasn’t a Buddhist, as far as I could tell; 2) the film wasn’t Buddhist, as far as I could tell; and 3) I didn’t really know how to do an online anything, never mind going back and forth with unknown people about a film in which I appeared. But I was persuaded that this was something the film, otherwise not very well promoted, might deserve.

I was on the road teaching at the time, and I awoke one particularly bright morning in New Mexico with three new companions. I had bronchitis; I realized that I’d utterly forgotten to check in with the discussion group; and I discovered that the allotted month for doing so was already half over. Awash in feeling irresponsible and breathless at the same time, hoping that my silence would be forgiven or, failing that, overlooked, I had my host guide me through the Byzantine machinery of gaining online access to the group. Surprisingly, people had been weighing in on the film, and they’d been weighing in on me, too.

I’d somehow counted on the reviews having a particular Buddhist bent to them, meaning that I imagined they would be gentle in some fashion, of the inquiring kind, flirting with benevolence, maybe innocently but welcomingly bright-sided. I imagined that the group had committed to something like a spiritual equivalent of the Hippocratic Oath. All of which is to say that I knew very little about the on-the-ground realities of North American Buddhism, obviously. These were my fantasies, not theirs, and they can’t be defended, and shouldn’t be tried at home.

So I was a bit chagrined when I read through the reviews. Though it was advertised that I would participate in the discussion, very little of it was directed towards me. It was largely about me instead, as if I was in a room of people who knew I could hear them but seemed unrestrained by that, as if I were a ghost who hadn’t gotten the word yet that I was dead, that my time was over. One particular thread of the discussion centered on an apparent gap between what I was “preaching” and what I was “practicing,” always a ripe killing ground when anonymity prevails. A variety of my shortcomings were explored, their causes revealed. There were attempts to defend me—half hearted, I thought—by pointing out that it didn’t really matter what kind of person I was, that the teaching could rise or fall on its own impersonal merits. And then came the coup de grâce, the murderous denouement. In a gesture of equal parts dismissal and forgiveness, someone ventured that I was to be offered a pass on my shortcomings, since I obviously wasn’t the Buddha.

And that was the one that stung. What was so obvious about it? I wondered. Was it so glaring as to deserve this dismissal from the Pantheon of Worthies? Was the Buddha so obviously the Buddha at the time? Is anyone? It was dismaying that it was so obvious from the film that Buddhahood had escaped me utterly. It was a proverbial chicken bone in the spiritual throat, at the time. But I remembered Hesse’s Siddhartha, which is the extent of my formal study of Buddhism. I remembered that scene from his early life of luxury and comfort and parental design, when he clambered over the garden wall and dropped into the world. Out in the street he saw age, saw its fate, saw what it meant for him and his future, and was gutted by it. He saw suffering, and the rest, and that seems to be all he saw, at least for a while. I don’t know for sure, but it may be that the religion that fanned out from him had some element of that moment in it for a while, too.

Maybe that is a young person’s take on aging, no longer restricted to young persons: diminishment, depletion, demise, then the deep end. Maybe that take on aging is a rookie mistake, entered into as if it is no mistake at all, as if the mists have lifted and heaven and earth have conspired to bring all to this noble truth, that aging is suffering, and that’s all that it is, or almost all. I know that there’s more to it than that, that Buddhism in all its flower is more elaborate on the subject than that. I know that Buddhism’s scholars and practitioners have this whole business of suffering sorted in ways that have escaped me. I know there is attachment involved in the arrangement. Maybe, though, that “suffering from age” is oracular degeneration. Maybe that suffering is the unclaimed bastard child—or one of them—of refusing to age, refusing to fess up to being able to hear time murmuring your name, refusing the deal that was so nobly struck early on. Maybe all of this, and the awareness of all of this, is to be surrendered with greater and greater grace, now that you are coming of age, now that you are singing your grief song of gratitude, now that you are able to stand on the street corner of your life in the dusky light and see it all, finally, and wish the whole thing farewell. Not the Buddha, really, not by then. The witness.

Watch these beautiful short introductory films about the life and work of Stephen Jenkinson:
Come of Age (Ian MacKenzie filmmaker)
Die Wise A Manifesto for Sanity and Soul (Ian MacKenzie filmmaker)
Griefwalker (NFB Film Canada/ Tim Wilson filmmaker)
The Making of Humans (Ian MacKenzie filmmaker)
The Meaning of Death (Ian MacKenzie filmmaker)

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Stephen Jenkinson is the Author of
DIE WISE and COME OF AGE and is the
subject of the documentary film GRIEFWALKER
orphanwisdom.com

Come of Age: A Case for Elderhood in a Time of Trouble by Stephen Jenkinson,
published by North Atlantic Books, copyright © 2018 by Stephen Jenkinson. Reprinted by permission of North Atlantic Books

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