Saltwater Buddha: A Surfer's Quest to Find Zen on the Sea

Surfing is kind of a good metaphor for the rest of life. The extremely good stuff - chocolate and great sex and weddings and hilarious jokes - fills a minute portion of an adult lifespan. The rest of life is the paddling: work, paying bills, flossing, getting sick, dying.

As on many mornings in Marin, there is this sly strip of fog - water in it's most mystical incarnation - slithering over, around, and through the hills, making everything look ancient and unsolved.

The body moves naturally, automatically, unconsciously, without any personal intervention or awareness. But if we begin to use our faculty of reasoning, our actions become slow and hesitant.

I guess even the prettiest things eventually end up stinking. Everything does. We all will die and rot and decay and be reborn as dirt or flowers or worms, or polar bears who will drown because their ice is all melting, or presidents of war-torn countries, or whales swimming around acidifying seas. And then we will rot and decay again. And so it goes.

What is more malleable is always superior over that which is immovable. This is the principle of controlling things by going along with them, of mastery through adaptation.

disbelief in magic can force a poor soul into believing in government and business.

I’m not striving for the ideal surfer’s paradise anymore, or the perfect life without obstacles. It doesn’t exist. Not that I don’t have preferences or dreams anymore. But it seems like the idea of paradise is just on the horizon, always, while life is here, under my feet, now. Might as well enjoy it, learn to appreciate the good waves, the paddling, the ferocious storms, and the mundane moments - the quiet lulls between swells.

From the perspective of utter love for surfing, paddling was always okay, no matter how difficult, no matter how hopeless. Sure, it wasn’t always as fun as riding a wave. But it was part of it. They were the same - interdependent. No paddle, no surf. No samsara, no nirvana. And if paddling on a day like this could be enjoyable, i figured maybe all of life’s challenges could be - maybe even a real job. Maybe there was no rat race to escape...

Most surf spots are best at low tide when the ocean’s ribs are exposed and vulnerable. People are like this too. When we’re hurting, when we feel rejected or unloved, our usual complacent approaches and all our hard-shelled survival mechanisms no longer seem to work. But lotuses grow from mud - and from brokenness, in my experience, beautiful things emerge. We are forced, out of necessity to write a poem or song in tears. We’re forced to go on retreat, into silence, into the realization that this feeble body and brain can’t do it all.

To come back to the ocean,” writes Thomas Farber, in On Water, “is to reexperience an essential memory trace, something once known well, to recall that one has been trying to remember.

But I looked out at the waves far below the bluff. They looked violent, erupting against the cliff. I watched them rising - up, up, higher, higher - then falling, crashing, swirling into chaos, passing away. I breathed deeply. I tried to breathe space between my thoughts, find the space between the anger.

I felt a taste of that other kind of contentment that doesn't come from acquiring information or getting praise or building a resume, the kind that is just there, like a hidden pearl.

I'm not big on promulgating universal principles, but this seems to be one: confront your fears and they transform.

And maybe death wouldn't be so bad: A sea-change. Into something rich and strange.

Speaking of the different types of compassion, he said, 'We can help others like the right hand helps the left hand.' He chucked at his little metaphor. 'The right hand does not think, 'I should help the left hand, this is the right thing to do.' It simply acts. Because it knows the two hands depend on each other.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m learning to not want to be someone else, to just be who i am, as is, with nothing else added on. I’ve learned that I’m not the things I do, or don’t do; I’m not surfing or Buddhism or writing. And yet all those things are. And I am. And we have naturally run into each other like colliding atoms creating molecules as we sail on into the foggy mystery.

The tides come in, and the tides go out - but low or high, serene or tempestuous, the sea is always full.

water, and thoughts the practice of mind, wouldn’t it be wonderful if we all learned to surf?

Ricard, the French biologist who ordained under the Dalai Lama, writes of the stages of meditation: “Finally, the mind becomes like the sea in calm weather. Ripples of discursive thoughts occasionally run over its surface, but in the depths, it is never disturbed.

Even though waves arise, the essence of mind is pure… Waves are the practice of water. To speak of waves apart from water or water apart from waves is a delusion.

Full fathom five thy father lies; Of his bones are coral made; Those are pearls that were his eyes; Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange

So, without telling any of my Zen-snob buddies, I liked to pretend everything was the Pure Land, that my life was already perfect as it was.

But I'd started believing I couldn't do it. And so I couldn't. But now I had experienced it. And so I knew.