MYSTERIOUS WAYS | AUG/SEPT 2019 35
I’ve gone to the same church for
years. I’ve served on the board,
taught Sunday school, sung in the
choir, prayed for others and been
prayed for. I suppose you could call
me a pillar of my faith community.
But what would happen if you took
all that away—and while you were
at it, you erased my identity as a writ-
er and editor of an inspirational mag-
azine like GUIDEPOSTS? Where would
my spiritual life be?
Those were the questions I found
myself wrestling with as I read Yong-
ey Mingyur Rinpoche’s memoir In
Love With the World. I don’t think I’m
so in love with the world that I
couldn’t give it up, but could I? Could
I really? All for the sake of my faith,
as Rinpoche did?
A Tibetan Buddhist monk, Rin-
poche is descended from genera-
tions of teachers and monks devoted
to the practice of meditation. At a
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with the masters, learning the se-
crets of mindfulness, techniques he
passes on. Now he’s the abbot of
three monasteries in India. A recent
YouTube video—with hundreds of
thousands of views—shows why he
is such a popular teacher. Practical,
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his audience, many of them West-
erners, beguiled. You want to have
what he’s got.
And yet he has always been capti-
vated by ancient stories of other
teachers like him who gave it all up,
wandering the world with nothing.
Nothing except their beliefs. An ego
suicide, as Rinpoche calls it.
So Rinpoche decides to sneak
out of his monastery in the middle
of the night, alerting no one. He
takes only a backpack and a very
small amount of cash, no cell phone.
He catches a train to a city where
no one will know him, changes his
monk’s robes for the garb of a
mendicant and blends in with the
poorest of the poor—“the least of
these,” as Jesus would say. Who is
he now? What kind of believer?
Though I’m Christian and not Bud-
dhist, I’ve always felt that people in-
terested in distancing themselves
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Rinpoche’s journey reminds me of
Christian tradition dating back to the
Desert Fathers, who gave up their
prestige to live entirely by faith. It’s
almost a universal spiritual practice.
Again and again, Rinpoche turns
to prayer in his quest for ego suicide.
Along the way, he journeys to Kushi-
nagar, the city where Buddha died
some 2,500 years ago, and takes to
sitting in the nearby park to meditate
during the day. It is midsummer, and
there are few tourists there, so the
likelihood of being recognized as a
monk seems small. Still, a man ap-
proaches and asks Rinpoche if he is
a monk. If so, the man asks, could
Rinpoche help him meditate?
To his own dismay, Rinpoche can’t
help but fall back into the familiar role
of master teacher. The man says he’s
on a pilgrimage. That he’s trying to
meditate but his mind is too full of dis-
tractions. Rinpoche tells him that lis-
tening to the mind is a natural part of
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but to notice them and let them go.
Rinpoche goes back to his own