File This Under Strange but True

I don’t call myself Buddha Babe for no reason; it is because I am a practicing Nichiren Shoshu Buddhist and have been one for going on thirty years. Oh sure, life is full of adversity and life has been full of problems for me, not the least of which has been because I have chosen to be a Buddhist in a Christian country. I do have to say though that our country has become more open minded and the occasions when I feel prejudged have diminished greatly. Also as an aside Nichiren Shoshu Buddhism is not the same as a group called Sokkai Gaki which is a common misunderstanding with westerners, both groups do recite the mantra ‘Nam-Myoho-Renge-Kyo.

Anyway, even in my early teens I was fascinated with eastern religion and thought and researched yoga, Zen, Hindu, meditation and more. I am sure that my teachers and parents were very concerned about me, but I was single-minded. When I was in my late teens, as luck would have it, an Asian couple moved in next door to my parents and in time we began to talk. From the moment the wife taught me the Buddhist chant that they used, I knew it was for me. I started immediately practicing this chant and I began to learn the sutra passages (in Japanese) of the ‘Lotus Sutra’. She told me that in a couple of weeks they would be going to Chicago for a Buddhist meeting and they would take me with them.

I couldn’t wait, that weekend I jump in my car and took off in search of the Buddhist temple in Chicago. I drove all the way up their and then found a telephone book and simple looked up Buddhist temples. I found it, I thought. I drove to the northern part of Chicago around Foster Avenue and drove to it like a woman possessed but when I found the temple it was closed. A little disappointed, I walked around the neighborhood to look for a McDonald’s or something. The neighborhood was a mixture of Asians and hippies so it was an odd mix to my subdivision mind, but a not unusual for a big city.

One hippie stopped me on the street and singled me out. In slurred English said “You’re so beautiful, man, you are beautiful!”

I smiled and tried to walk around him. Always trying to be polite, it has been my downfall! I am polite in situations where it is not called for and rude when politeness could have worked wonders. Anyway…

“Man,” he said “If I wasn’t so loaded on heroin right now, I’d jump you right here.” He was cute underneath all of the grime so I was oddly complimented, perplexed and frustrated all at once. Why did I have find hippies so fascinating, life as a hippie (at least his kind of hippie) meant drugs and homelessness? As a teenager in the ‘70s it was interesting. I am afraid that today that man is either dead, homeless, or possibly in jail. I got away.

I was disappointed, but happy that I found the temple at the same time. I could go on my own any time I wanted now and wouldn’t have to rely on someone else to take me.

I headed home later that night; I would be worried if my kids took off for Chicago all alone but it was approaching 10 pm, I was driving through south Chicago and Gary when I noticed that I was running low on gas. I pulled off of 94 onto Grant Street, the thought there would be a gas station near the interstate because most businesses do that to make money. There was nothing here. The further I drove, the fewer businesses I saw, but I did begin to see boarded up buildings and businesses with bars in the windows and chained up door. These businesses were all closed, locked up tight. I did see gas stations, but they too were locked down and chained up. I am an optimistic person but I became a little frightened. What if I run out of gas, would I be lucky enough to meet the decent citizens that live in this neighborhood (they are everywhere) or would I encounter the reason for all the chains. Worried that I would run out of gas, I finally came to a screeching halt along a residential area of Grant that had few street lights and few people. I took a deep breath, thought a moment. I looked at the glowing yellow lamp inside the nearby house and thought of knocking on the door and asking directions but my fear got the better of me. I retreated back to the interstate; of course the very next exit had several stations right on the exit. I gassed up and got home.

The next day I found out from my mentor that this particular temple was not ‘the’ temple in fact they had not build an official temple yet, the Buddhist meetings were held in houses at this point. My trip seemed to have been totally for nothing, I did not find the Nichiren Shoshu temple, I was accosted by a heroin addict and I could have been mugged. The very next weekend my friend took me to a Buddhist meeting in Chicagoland. We drove nearly all the way into Chicago but exited just before we got there. The area looked strangely familiar to me. As I looked at the bars and the grey buildings I realized we were driving down that same lonely street I had used before when I searched for gasoline. It was a little friendlier before sunset. She drove through that residential area and finally came to a stop - exactly where I had stopped the weekend before. That little friendly house with the warm yellow windows was the location of the Buddhist meetings. It turned out that I had chosen to stop right in front of the house where the Buddhist meetings are held and I did not know it. I had found the Buddhist ‘temple’ last weekend and I did not know it. I made shivers run up my spine.

I always look at this experience as an example of how deluded our knowledge and understanding can be and that we should be open minded and open to new things. I looked for the temple in a logical way and used the appropriate means to do it - the telephone book and my car. I did not find it that way. How mystical that somehow though my subconscious, my spirit, my Buddhist nature was pulling me in the right direction. Not only that, my fear of the unknown made me look at that neighborhood in one way - a source of danger and the unknown. In truth that neighborhood became for me a source of knowledge and friendship, a begin point to enlightenment.

I only have one problem though, what was the purpose of the heroin addict, I suppose the meaning in that deluded moment is yet to be revealed.