Both are
young, male second-generation American Buddhists. Both have written
memoirs recalling early exposure to the dharma. That aside, Ivan
Richmond and Noah Levine sound about as much alike as a temple
bell and a punk rock band.
Richmond's
story, Silence and Noise: Growing up Zen in America, is steeped
in the monastic calm of Green Gulch Farm, the sylvan outpost of
the San Francisco Zen Center where the twenty-eight-year-old spent
his youth while his father, author-businessman Lewis Richmond,
served as head priest. In Dharma Punx, Levine, the thirty-one-year-old
son of author-meditation teacher Stephen Levine, blasts out quite
another story. Rejecting the Sixties' "hippie spirituality"
of his parents, Levine embraced anarchy and addiction, self-destructively
head-banging himself into a gradual awakening. One rebelled, the
other did not. But both ended up on the Buddhist path.
Ivan Richmond
arrived at Green Gulch in 1977 when he was three and a half, and
left with his family in 1984, after scandal forced Richard Baker
Roshi out of Zen Center. (Richmond recounts that event from the
peripheral perspective of a child beholding something he knows
is important but doesn't fully understand.) Green Gulch was the
archetypal garden, familiar and familial. Richmond's departure
at age ten-"the single most pivotal moment of my life"-is
recounted with an exile's mournful disorientation:
I didn't have the zendo, the communal dining room, the sound of
the gongs reverberating through the valley, or the silence. .
. . I felt as if my whole world had been blown to pieces.
In reassembling
the pieces into a post-Green Gulch life, Richmond experienced
"an ongoing inner tug-of-war" between the Buddhist values
of his childhood and the consumerist culture of mainstream America.
"I am not like most Westerners," he declares at the
outset, in what proves to be an understatement. Faced with conflicts-materialism
versus nonmaterialism, violence versus nonviolence-Richmond makes
fumbling attempts to resolve them via the Middle Way. How, he
wonders, does a Buddhist ask a noisy, burly neighbor to turn down
his music? How long should he wait for a girlfriend in a coffee
shop? The result of his deliberations, we discover, is a low-key
life informed by a karmic moral view.
Not that the
primordial garden was without flaws. Richmond never learned much
about conflict resolution, he admits, and the ascetic life at
Green Gulch left him ill-equipped for the hypersensual, multimedia
world of his peers. Ironically, the greatest flaw he finds in
his Zen upbringing is a lack of religious instruction. Richmond
urges convert-Buddhist parents to make sure their offspring receive
formal training.
If leaving
the garden was the pivotal event of Richmond's life, attempting
suicide while detoxing in a padded cell in juvenile hall was Noah
Levine's unravelling; it drove him to meditation, literally kicking
and screaming. Dharma Punx opens as Levine hits bottom at age
seventeen, then backtracks to chronicle a childhood marked by
violence and upheaval. We meet five-year-old Noah playing with
a steak knife he has hidden from his stepfather-"an evil
Buddhist" prone to explosive rages. Levine's restless energy
finally finds an outlet when he attends his first punk rock concert
at age twelve: "I knew from that night on that this was where
I belonged. I had found my place in this fucked-up world."
Fueled by drugs, booze, and rock 'n' roll, Levine's adolescence
is a low-life version of the classic spiritual quest, as he spurns
the efforts of his father, his stepmother, and others to offer
direction.
The first
systematic step in Levine's transformation is joining Alcoholics
Anonymous, where he finds a spiritual foundation in the Twelve
Step program. Perhaps his most sobering moment, however, comes
when his closest childhood friend dies of a heroin overdose.
A natural
though unpolished storyteller, Levine has a gift for plunging
readers into the belly of his experience, from a foray into car
theft to befriending a Western spiritual seeker on a pilgrimage
to Asia. His deep and wide life tale is an affecting teaching,
conversationally told.
Together,
Ivan Richmond and Noah Levine represent two very different faces
of the dharma, as it threads its way through a new generation
in America. From their stories we see how adaptable, yet enduring,
Buddhism proves to be.
Marcia Z.
Nelson, author of Come and Sit: A Week Inside Meditation Centers,
writes for Publishers Weekly.
Originally
printed in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, Fall 2003. Reprinted
with permission.
