Finding My Religion

[Guest guest]

FINDING MY RELIGION

Buddhist pastor Heng Sure talks about his 2½-year

pilgrimage up the California coast

 

Source >

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2005/05/02/findrelig.DTL

 

 

David Ian Miller, Special to SF Gate

 

Monday, May 2, 2005

 

Buddhist pastor Heng Sure went on a 2 1/2 year silent

pil...

 

 

 

Rev. Heng Sure likes to talk. Wander into the Berkeley

Buddhist monastery where he resides as pastor, and if

you're lucky enough to find him there, he might ask

you to sit down for a cup of tea and conversation

about anything from ancient Chinese Buddhist texts to

the pros and cons of the latest Macintosh operating

system. Before you know it, you've been chatting for

two hours. Actually, you've been listening while he

does most of the talking.

 

That's why it's hard to believe that Sure, who grew up

in a Methodist Scots-Irish family in Ohio before

converting to Buddhism while attending graduate school

at UC Berkeley in the '60s, went six years without

saying a word. He took a vow of silence in 1977 after

being ordained as a Mahayana monk.

 

At that time, Sure also began an arduous, 2½-year

walking pilgrimage from downtown Los Angeles to the

City of Ten Thousand Buddhas, in Talamage, near Ukiah,

with a fellow monk. Along the way, he completed a full

prostration, or bow to the ground, every three steps.

 

In part one of a two-part interview, I talk with Sure

about how he became a Buddhist and his experiences

during his long journey. Next week, I'll speak with

him about how Buddhism fits into his larger worldview.

Monks in the Chinese Buddhist tradition are given a

new name after they're ordained. Often, it's designed

to help them progress along their spiritual path. What

does your name mean?

 

Heng Sure means " constantly real. " I was in theater

before I became a monk. As an actor, the quality of

your role is determined by how well you portray the

illusion. My bad habit was to continue the illusion

offstage. So the name is a reminder to always get back

to the truth, get back to what's genuine and real.

 

What kind of acting did you do?

 

I was in summer stock -- Broadway musicals, mostly. I

was Guy Masterson in " Guys and Dolls, " J. Pierpont

Finch in " How to Succeed in Business " and Mr.

Applegate in " Damn Yankees. "

 

That's quite a transition -- from musical theater to a

Buddhist monastery. How do you relate to your former

life as an actor?

 

You know, theater is theater. It was great fun. I

still remember all the songs and a lot of the

librettos. But I've been a monk now longer than I was

a layman. So I think there's a place for

entertainment, but I also know there's also a time for

looking deeper.

 

How did you discover Buddhism? I'm guessing there

weren't many Buddhists in Toledo, Ohio, where you grew

up in the 1950s and '60s, right?

 

The key to my spiritual path, the turning point, was

the Chinese language. My mother's older sister worked

in Washington, D.C., at the U.S. Information Agency.

And her beat was Asia. She sent me a catalog -- I was

13 years old at the time -- of a Chinese painter's

exhibit. I saw the Chinese characters in the catalog,

and something about them really caught my eye. It was

-- I don't know -- like I had seen them before.

 

So you started learning Chinese?

 

Yes. I was lucky enough to study Chinese language in

high school. It was one of three programs in America

at that time, I think. And my parents, bless their

hearts, said, " Go ahead -- it will be broadening. " So

that was the path I followed all the way through

university. I got my master's at Berkeley in Oriental

languages. And, at that point, I met my Buddhist

teacher, Venerable Master Hsuan Hua.

 

How did you meet him?

 

My former college roommate had come out to California

and met him at Gold Mountain Monastery, which was

located in, of all places, a converted mattress

factory in the Mission District. One day he called me

up and said, " Hey, remember we used to talk about how

someday we wanted to go find a patriarch of Buddhism? "

We used to talk about meeting such a person in the

Himalayas -- maybe Rishikesh [in India,] or Indonesia.

But my friend said, " No. he's right here in San

Francisco. Come on over and meet the abbot. " So I

drove my Volvo across the Bay Bridge and walked into

this old building on 15th and Valencia. And I had a

very unusual experience.

 

What happened?

 

At the time, I had come gone through two years in my

graduate program, and the Vietnam War was raging. I

was thinking, " Do I want to be an academic? Nah, too

sterile. Do I want to be a folk singer? Nah, too

risky, too dirty. Do I want to go to Canada? Nah,

that's not the right thing. " All of this was running

through my head. But when I walked in the door of the

monastery and smelled the smells, felt the chill in

the air, heard the bells and saw the stillness in

there, all of that stuff racing around in my mind fell

away. The doubts and fears just drained out through my

toes. And I distinctly heard a quiet voice say,

" You're back. Go to work. You're home. "

 

So you began studying with Master Hsuan Hua at the

monastery. What did he teach you?

 

He was from Manchuria -- a Chinese Buddhist monk who

was the real deal, practicing dharma. It was not, you

know, " We're doing Zen because it adds to our

lifestyle. " He taught it from an ethical foundation:

How you were as a person was as important as what you

practiced; it was the source of what you practiced. He

taught us as much about Confucius as he did about the

Buddha. The other thing he drilled into me was the

importance of education. I'd been in school

continuously for 18 years, but I wasn't really

interested in the life of the mind. When I met Master

Hsuan Hua, I could just see that he had this love of

learning. There was joy for him in watching young

people's minds encounter knowledge and growth. Pure

joy.

 

Let's talk about the pilgrimage you made after

becoming a bikshu, or Buddhist monk, in 1977. Over a

period of 2½ years, you and a fellow monk walked from

Los Angeles up the coast of California, doing a

complete prostration every three steps along the way.

That must have been incredibly difficult.

 

Yeah. The bowing was hard enough, but the toughest

thing was being silent. I took a vow of silence for

six years [beginning with the pilgrimage].

 

What was the most challenging part about being silent

for so long?

 

The hardest thing was being patient, watching my mind

want to talk. We're really hardwired to communicate.

One of the joys of being human is this gift of speech

-- it's magic. So, when I just bit that off and

stopped talking, it didn't subside for a long time.

There was a moment when I noticed that I hadn't been

forming words for about a week. At that point, the

sutra (religious text) that I carried on my back --

it's the sutra that I was bowing to -- came alive. It

was funny -- the words on the page became like a

commentary to the world I was seeing around me once my

mind was really quiet. What I discovered was that,

strangely enough, we are wired to connect to the

outside world in really subtle and powerful ways, but

once we come inside to live under a roof, all that

goes to sleep.

 

If you couldn't speak, how did you communicate while

you were on the road?

 

I didn't have to say much -- the other monk did all

the talking. My job was to concentrate my mind.

 

So, why did you go on the pilgrimage in the first

place?

 

I decided that if I could transform my own greed, my

anger, my delusions through walking, staying silent

and doing the prostrations, then maybe I could do

something to make the world more peaceful. I would

work on the part of the unpeaceful world that I could

control, my own thoughts and words. So the pilgrimage

was for world peace, but starting with my own mind.

 

You mean that by controlling your own behavior, you

were symbolically promoting world peace?

 

It was more than symbolic. You have to understand that

I was very involved with politics as a college

student. I saw my friends getting their heads broken

during the Chicago police riots at the Democratic

National Convention. I was in school when Dr. Martin

Luther King Jr. was assassinated and Robert Kennedy

died. So here I was as a grad student, trying to

figure out what in the world made sense to do, how I

should respond to these events. And my thought was,

" Well, the traditional Buddhist answer is that you

work from the inside. You start from your own mind. "

Everything is made with the mind alone in Buddhism --

that's one of the idioms. I thought if I could

actually understand my own confusion, then that's

real. That's not theater. It's not trying to shake my

fist at the military-industrial complex. It's not

dropping out and getting stoned. It's actually getting

to the root of the problem, my own thoughts of greed

and delusion.

 

What was it like out there on the road? What kinds of

people did you encounter?

 

We met every kind of person you can imagine. Many

showed acts of kindness and generosity. Some were not

so nice. We had guns held to our heads three times.

 

People held guns to your head? Were they hoping to rob

you?

 

No. We were robbed half a dozen times, but not at

gunpoint. Some people just decided to cock a gun at us

-- I don't know why. Marty [the other monk] would say

to them, " Hi, we're Buddhist monks on a pilgrimage for

world peace. Can we offer you some literature? " And

somehow they never pulled the trigger. But what

happened much more often was that people would

spontaneously offer to help us.

 

What's an example of that?

 

We were going through Santa Cruz. It was early in the

morning, and as I came up from a bow, I noticed this

10-year-old girl riding her bike toward us. She was

carrying a package, and she said, " Mister, this is my

sandwich. I think you're going to need if it you're

going to go all the way down there. Here you go. " So

she handed it to me. Those kinds of encounters way

outnumbered the hostility we experienced.

 

Were you ever in serious danger?

 

There was a time around San Luis Obispo when these

kids made it their job every day after school to buzz

us with their trucks. They'd go by in a cloud of dust,

and the gravel would just cover us. It was real scary,

because who knows who these kids were? And I took it,

you know, because I'm supposed to be the bowing monk,

I'm supposed to be in charge of my mind. But after a

while, like weeks, I would be thinking, " Oh, my God,

it's four o'clock. Got another hour to bow, and here

they come. One afternoon I noticed these kids pulled

their cars up, their pickup trucks, in the parking

lot. So I started reciting a mantra about compassion.

But really I was thinking, " Come on, Bodhisattva,

smash them. Protect me. " And suddenly I opened my

eyes, and there was the abbot, my master, Hsuan Hua,

standing in the parking lot in sandals.

 

What was he doing there?

 

I think he had driven down from San Francisco that

day. Anyway, he smiled at me and walked over to the

pickup trucks with the kids. He started chatting with

them. They were thrilled to have this guy who looked

like a kung fu master come over and talk to them. He

gave them beads or something, and they gave him a

Coke. Afterward, I realized I had been using this

great compassion mantra like a weapon. I had seen

myself as a victim. I was not paying attention to my

work as a monk. One thing about the abbot was that his

teachings always came right on time. And he said to me

that afternoon, " That's not compassion. " The next day,

as I was bowing, the same kids came by, but they were

just parked there, watching. Later, I heard one of

them say, " Good luck, monk. You're still weird, but

good luck. "

 

Where did you sleep while you were traveling? Did you

stay in people's houses?

 

Actually, we took a vow not to go indoors during those

three years. We had a '57 Plymouth station wagon that

we'd sleep in at night because it would hold our

Buddha image, our sutras and our cooking pots.

 

What did you eat?

 

We mostly ate wild plants, wild greens on the

roadside. We got a copy of Euell Gibbons' " Stalking

the Wild Asparagus " from a high school biology teacher

in Santa Barbara who was worried we might not know the

difference between, say, Queen Anne's lace and

hemlock.

 

What were some of the main lessons from your time on

the road?

 

I learned a lot about my own mental habits. I kind of

caught on to my mind's tricks. We learn these stories

about ourselves, these perceptions that we get from

our folks, from our TVs, from our friends. And I saw

the dimensions of that. I saw the limits of my

understanding of right and wrong, of self and others.

These are all things that our mind makes. They aren't

the whole of the mind. The sutras compare this to

bubbles on top of the ocean. The mind is the ocean,

you know. By bowing and being quiet, slowly, slowly, I

went deeper into the ocean. It's deep, deep water.

 

Do you ever go back into that deep water? I mean, will

you ever hit the road again?

 

It's kind of like spelunking. When you meditate, you

go down into your mind, and you put a mark wherever

you stop. Then you come back up to the surface.

Eventually, you go down, and you mark it again. I

don't know if I'll ever hit the road again, but I

still meditate; I still bow. So you could say I'm

still on the pilgrimage. But it may take lifetimes --

who knows how long? -- to get to the bottom.

 

Next Week: How Buddhism fits into Rev. Heng Sure's

larger worldview.

 

During his far-flung career in journalism, Bay Area

writer and editor David Ian Miller has worked as a

city hall reporter, personal finance writer, cable

television executive and managing editor of a

technology news site. His writing credits include

Salon.com, Wired News and The New York Observer.