Buddha Brad
Zen and the art of self-delusion
Brad sat in half-lotus on the rooftop of Fulton House and waited for an enlightenment that would not come. Bundled up in an olive overcoat, flaps down on his fur hat, he looked more like a Red Army deserter than a bodhisattva.
He could just make out a sliver of the Golden Gate Bridge peeking out over the verdant hump of the Presidio as the sun rose from his right over the bay, catching in the windows of all the rolling stacks of houses and casting shadows on the hills of the Marin Headlands. It was a hell of a view, 50 likes or more on Instagram if you got the angles right.
Below him, the city croaked and creaked to life: the rheumy coughs of old Mr. Liu clearing lung build-up before his morning t’ai chi; the spaceship vrooms of the trolley buses accelerating up vertiginous hills, guided by crackling wires; the moans of a woman covered in stained rags emerging from a tent and shuffling down the sidewalk of Geary Avenue.
The device next to Brad buzzed frequently and at random, piercing his equanimity, tempting him to reach for it, which he usually did each time it buzzed, because several million past thoughtless Brads had already set that habit into place, making it an almost-automatic response, the reaching — but at least a few past Brads did the present one a solid by not reaching, enough disciplined temptation-rejecting past Brads that he did not reach for the device that morning, and all that manifested with each vibration was a slight twitch in his body, a slight lapse of attention, which he corrected by bringing his awareness back to his breath, same as it ever was.
Brad’s breathing was deep but forced. He only rarely reached that place of watching the breath without controlling the breath, which was what the teachings said was the true way. When the thoughts in his head were particularly loud, as they were that morning, he would breathe even deeper to try to drown them out. He’d long thought that this deep breathing wasn’t audible to others, like how the sound of one’s heartbeat or one’s interior extended-release soft farts weren’t audible to others. But lately he was coming to appreciate that he really didn’t know anything at all.
His attention meandered to a Tuesday night some months prior when he had sat in zazen with thirty or so other practitioners in the great meditation hall that Suzuki Roshi built. Tuesday evenings at the San Francisco Zen Center were geared towards spiritual but not religious lay people in their twenties and thirties who’d read blog posts on the benefits of mindfulness or some such and wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Brad had long felt the sessions were beneath him, given his spiritual prowess, but he derived something of an ego boost from hearing his fellow practitioners’ facile questions, in sensing their discomfort as the sits stretched past twenty minutes.
During the sit that Tuesday night, he had been worrying about a sebaceous cyst he’d recently spotted on his scrotum when the warm breath of a young woman whispering in his ear jolted him out of his delusion drifting. “Excuse me,” she said damply. “Do you think you could maybe try breathing a little less loud? You’re taking up a lot of space.”
There were a few scattered chuckles among his fellow practitioners, knowing chuckles like, “Ah, finally someone said something.” Brad was utterly devastated. He stayed after everyone had left so that he could ask Rupert, the British Zen instructor who looked and preached like the second coming of Alan Watts, if he also felt that Brad’s breathing was maybe a little loud.
“Why, certainly it’s loud,” Rupert said as he gathered cushions off the bouncy tatami mat floor. “For what it’s worth, it’s never bothered me. But perhaps others are not so equanimous.”
Brad asked Rupert if anyone had brought it to his attention before, given that he’d attended the Zen Center regularly for several years, and Rupert said yes, a few times, and this sent Brad careening headlong into a pit of despair for having taken up so much space, because taking up space was the thing he wanted to do least.
Rupert told Brad that in general he didn’t need to try so hard during zazen. He reminded him that it was about watching the breath, not controlling the breath, because we breathe all the time without conscious intervention. He advised Brad to try to dwell in that space as a witness instead of as a manipulator.
That night, Brad called Moose, his old meditation pal and best friend from college, and asked him if he ever felt his breathing during zazen was noticeably loud.
“Oh yeah, dude,” Moose said, laughing. “Oh yeah.”
Brad asked Moose why he had never said anything before. Moose said he saw it as part of his spiritual practice to transcend his feelings of aversion toward the distractions of the present moment, of which Brad’s heavy breathing was definitely one. And so Moose had endeavored and ultimately succeeded, after much practice, to get over Brad’s heavy breathing, but in case Brad was wondering (and Brad was wondering), it was something that was definitely noted and discussed by the other attendees of the meditation course that non-athletic students like Brad and Moose availed themselves of to satisfy the college’s physical education requirement.
The whole thing really screwed with Brad’s head and left him feeling deeply paranoid. He wondered about how many other things he did that bothered people but not enough for them to mention. Or maybe they didn’t tell him because they knew it would devastate him, which was almost worse, because Brad liked to think of himself as someone who could take critical feedback, and it disturbed him to think that enough people in different chapters of his life over the years had concluded that he could not.
And so after that night he really tried to breathe more softly. But some days it was almost as if he didn’t have a choice, the thoughts were so loud that —
The phone buzzed again, which Brad strained to interpret as a cue to return to the present moment. He kept the device near him during zazen because he used an app to log his meditation sessions, and because in weaker moments he’d peep a glance at the timer to see how much time was left in his sit. He’d been using the same app for years, and even though Moose had, two years ago, purchased him a legitimate brass Buddhist meditation bell to use, he preferred to use the app’s bell instead because he was attached to streaks. He was on an especially long streak, his longest yet, at 846 consecutive days of logging a meditation session, with each meditation session averaging between twenty-five and forty minutes of length. At every milestone reached — ten consecutive days, fifty consecutive days, and so on — the app produced a brushstroke painting in the Japanese calligraphic style of a symbol or character that expressed a fundamental concept of Zen Buddhism. Brad saw these milestone paintings as judgements on where he stood on his spiritual path. He suspected that something extra special would happen if he reached the milestone of one thousand consecutive days. Perhaps the app would award him the ensō, that famous circle, undertaken in a single brushstroke, that symbolized total and complete enlightenment.
When meeting new people, Brad felt for opportunities to work in a mention of his meditation practice in what he hoped was a natural and unforced way, because he felt it was one of the few exceptional things about him. Oftentimes, his friends did the legwork for him. Someone would be talking about their stressful tech job, and say they’d started to meditate for five minutes a week using a guided meditation app and were finding it really helpful. They’d then express some of the insights they’d gleaned from their burgeoning practice — which always made Brad a little sore, like, “You don’t know the first thing about the fundamental nature of reality, and guided meditation is for cowards,” — but of course he wouldn’t say anything, he’d just sit there quietly and think it — and during a pause in the conversation one of his friends would say, “You know, Brad meditates every day, for like, hours.” And the novice meditator would say, “Oh my gosh, really?” And Brad would let the pause grow pregnant before softly saying that he had meditated every day since he was nineteen years old.
This was not true. The app reported that he’d meditated for 76% of all days since he began using it, for a total of 101,324.29 minutes. Which was a lot, to be sure. But it was not the same as every day. He often hung out in that not-quite-honest place when it came to his experiences and accomplishments, as if the truth by itself were not enough.
To wit: he told people that he won the Missouri State Spelling Bee in fourth grade, when he had actually placed sixth (he met his end at “consanguinity”); that he had grown up in “the projects” of St. Louis, when it was in fact a working class neighborhood (delivery pizza was a rare treat but he never went hungry); that he was voted Prom King in high school, when his title was technically Prom Duke (he never stood a chance against George Johnson, who was somehow both the school’s starting quarterback and its valedictorian, the bastard).
As the years went on, and the opportunities to share more truthful versions of these stories presented themselves, he’d sit back and watch himself and wonder if he would do so, or if he would continue to tell the embellished versions. He liked to think of himself as an honest person, and he was about a lot of things, because he felt great guilt about being dishonest, and had, many acid trips prior, lost his capacity to outright lie with eye-contact conviction. Nevertheless, he found that he often gave in to this tendency of embellishing. He wondered if other people could tell he wasn’t being entirely truthful. He wondered how much more embellished the stories would become if he lived to be an old man, and whether he would become the protagonist of other stories that he was previously only a bystander in.
The distant honking of a car horn snapped Brad back to the here and now. He estimated that he probably had seven minutes left in his sit, but he stole a quick glimpse at the timer just to be sure. Twelve minutes, thirty-eight seconds. Thirty-seven seconds. It occurred to him that if the teachings were right, and all sentient beings had buddha nature, that perhaps he could just become Buddha now, instead of working through his karma over a hundred thousand million incarnations — or, if his hopes about the app were right, one hundred and fifty-four more days. He knew what he had to do to become Buddha, had known for many years, had perhaps secretly always known it, but some part of him resisted taking that step, which he considered less a step than a jump off a cliff into the sea. He didn’t know what awaited him at the end of his fall. Would the waters be warm, like a womb? Cold, like the outer reaches of space? Or would there be nothing at all? It was this final possibility that Brad feared most. What point was there in relief from suffering if there would be no “Brad” to witness the relieving? Was it not better to be a Brad who believed he was a Brad, who worried about breathing too heavily and who fantasized about copulating with Alex Cosgrove, even though he knew in his heart that the closest they would ever come to hooking up was thrusting their pelvises through a chaturanga flow on adjacent rubber mats during their weekly post-work yoga meetups?
It was all very confusing. The ringing of the app’s meditation bell brought some modicum of relief.
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