When I was still playing the cello, I had a friend who was a bass player, a guy much younger than me, I was thirty at the time, he was in his twenties. One day he took me to a “Buddhist” meeting with other guys even younger than him, organized in the house of one of them with a living room bigger than my whole house put together. It was a nice experience. First, kneeling in front of the Butsudan (a small wooden altar that the Japanese usually have in their homes), we prayed repeating over and over the Nam Myōhō Renge Kyō and ringing a little bell at the end of each phrase. Once the prayer was over, we sat down on the large sofa and they began a conversation in which they reviewed the teachings of their guru, whom I later met at a second meeting. The sight of these young men rehashing absolute truths struck me as so repulsively artificial that I could not contain my temper and burst out, pointing out to them what was not right in what they were saying, urging them to think for themselves. They accepted my impertinence with good grace, and one of them, it seems, even understood what I said.
As I said, shortly after I was taken to a meeting with the guru, which was also attended by the mother of my bass player friend (a woman who was very difficult to argue with), both she and the guru were around forty-five (maybe I got the numbers wrong with these two, but politeness doesn't take away courage), there were no other older people at the meeting. The guru spent a while imparting "truths" to her disciples, that this is so, that is so (surely distortions like everything sold in the West taken from Eastern culture), and at the end she asked us all if we had any questions. One of the girls jumped in with a question I had made at the previous meeting, at the same time she looked at me out of the corner of her eye waiting for me to start arguing with the guru, the guru noticed the maneuver and asked me if I wanted to say something. I shook my head and didn't say a word.
As I left this meeting, my friend confronted me, looking at me with disappointment. “Now that you had to talk, you didn’t!” he told me, tacitly calling me a coward. I explained to him that, on the contrary, I spoke when it was time to talk. Young people still had time to learn to walk on their own, as long as they start doing so when they are young, but to an adult who has spent his life clinging to a truth, taking it away from him is taking away the only thing that sustains him. What do I gain or how do I help a cripple by kicking his crutches? Wouldn’t this be the cowardly act?
©2024 - Walter Alejandro Iglesias