The events in this journal took place over twenty-five years ago, beginning shortly before I took the Five Buddhist Precepts in 1993. I was in my mid-forties, facing the usual midlife crises, exacerbated by an early empty nest. My daughter was in college. My son, age 15, went to live with his father. Now that my children were out of the house, I needed to pick myself off the floor of day to day life in twentieth-century America whose central purpose had eluded me.
Entering a Vietnamese Buddhist monastery, I realize, is not a typical reaction to this stage of life, at least not for a Westerner. But I had some unfinished business, below my level of awareness, that I had yet to revisit. As an impressionable teenager I had lived through the domestic upheavals of the Vietnam War. I had been shaped by images of the horrors we had wrought in that tiny, vulnerable country. Within the broader context of my search for fulfillment and meaning, I believe these early feelings of guilt and outrage led me to the doorstep of a local Vietnamese temple. My spiritual discomfort and yearnings had suddenly presented me with my first learning opportunity. What would I make of it?
This isn’t a journal about how I conquered my problems and fears through Buddhism. My experiences read more like a travelogue into new and unfamiliar territory, a spiritual adventure that led me to some unexpected places. There was quite a bit of blundering involved—sometimes bordering on the slapstick—bliss and pain in equal measure, and a mysterious case of mistaken identity. And plenty of good, old fashioned suffering, which is a case of mistaken identity in itself.
