Fri, 13 Oct 2006
Tergiversation
Tergiversate is a fancy word that means to renounce a belief and return to another belief you previously held. It's the title because I was asked why Eric lost his faith in Buddhism. I can't give a complete answer, but here's what I know. Eric started and ran the Towson Dharma House for several years. He was a novice monk (getsül) who took ordination with Garchen Rinpoche about a year after he became a Buddhist. He worked enthusiastically to promote Buddhism, giving most of his time and money to promote the Towson Dharma House. Here's a description he wrote of it at the time:
Serving as a private home for a few Western ordained Buddhist monastics with room for visiting teachers and a shrine room for practice and public teachings.
So it was a surprise to see him lose interest in Buddhism so quickly. What he told me is that he had trouble accepting emptiness. Emptiness is one of the central ideas of Buddhism and means that all phenomena have no existence over and beyond what is established by convention. (That's my personal postmodern spin on emptiness, but I digress.) For a while he was studying the Jonangpa, who put a more positive spin on emptiness, almost like a Buddhist version of Advaita. He did a retreat with Lama Dawa and I hear that Lama Dawa tried to explain emptiness to him, but he wasn't accepting it. So that's what losing faith in Buddhism meant to Eric. He stopped believing in emptiness and from that he lost faith in all of Buddhism.
Of course, there probably were other reasons he left Buddhism. Being a monk is hard and I think he had a hard time giving up sex and rock and roll. (He was a drummer in a punk band before becoming a monk.) I don't fault him for that. Hell, I'm not a monk because I know I couldn't do it. But I think the strain of being a monk caused problems. Because of his personality, Eric couldn't do things half way and return to being a lay Buddhist, so he gave up Buddhism altogether.
So that's all I know about Eric's tergiversation. It's not the happiest subject, but I was asked.
