FED UP WITH HIS SUBURBAN LIFE, JAIMAL YOGIS Buddha... · fed up with his suburban life, jaimal...

ISBN 978-0-8617-1-535-0 $14.95

Wisdom Publications • Bostonwisdompubs.org

wisdom

SALTWATER

BUDDHA

JAIMAL

YOGIS

“A delightful narrative in the genre ofZEN AND THE ART OF MOTORCYCLE MAINTENANCE.”

JACK RICCHIUTO, AUTHOR OF JACK/ZEN

FED UP WITH HIS SUBURBAN LIFE, JAIMAL YOGISran off to Hawaii with little more than a copy of Hermann Hesse’s Siddharthaand enough cash for a surfboard. His journey is a coming-of-age saga thattakes him from communes to monasteries, from the warm Pacific to the icyNew York shore. Saltwater Buddha is a rousing chronicle of finding meditativefocus in the barrel of a wave and eternal truth in the great salty blue.

“[T]his terrific first book [...] will surely find the audience it deserves—among surfers, among seekers, and among those who enjoy being swept

along on a curious ride.” —Daniel Duane, author of Caught Inside

“Saltwater Buddha will help you appreciate all thedays in your life—even when you’d rather be surfing!”

— Dailystoke.com

“Heartfelt, honest and deceptively simple. It’s greatstuff with the words CULT CLASSIC stamped all over it.”

—Alex Wade, author of Surf Nation

“As Jaimal gains hard-won spiritual lessons with a teenager’seagerness and a surfer’s passion, we cannot help but see our own

spiritual life with fresh, beginner’s eyes. I couldn’t put this bookdown.” —Michael Ellsberg, coauthor of Flirting with Disaster

“An incredibly fun ride.”—Steven Kotler, author of West of Jesus

“Yogis’s attractively self-deprecating story offers richreading for both surfers and spiritual seekers, who are,

we learn, sometimes one and the same.”—Thomas Farber, author of The Face of the Deep

“It’s the perfect read for those who love the ocean—or for anyone who wants a deeper understanding of the

spiritual practice that is surfing.” —Yoga Journal

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More Praise forSALTWATER BUDDHA

“A motivating book that reminds us to follow our heartswithout fear and limitations. Refreshing, easy-to-read,

and a lot of fun.”—Urijah Faber

“In this terrific first book, Jaimal Yogis has done what every artistand writer strives to do: he has made something beautiful and uni-versal from the particulars of his own life. Saltwater Buddha willsurely find the audience it deserves—among surfers, among seek-ers, and among those who enjoy being swept along on a curiousride.”—Daniel Duane, author of Caught Inside

“Jaimal Yogis starts off as an Everyteen with two deep hungers—to learn surfing and to calm his mind—and his simple, amused,deadly serious report on how he tries to satisfy those desires mayultimately launch an entirely new breed of memoir: the coming-of-sage story. Yogis’s prose is etched yet effortless, a conversationwith a friend who pretends to be naïve, but has clearly drunk upso much life experience that you trust his authority as a truth-teller more than you know. He rocked me happily for chapters ashe recounted his journey from an Atlantic island to Californiasuburbs to a series of beach towns (including, memorably, Brook-lyn). But each time I was lulled, I always was also on edge, won-dering if bigger surf may be coming. Indeed, it was: severalmoving, sharp-edged episodes—sets, really—that will stay vividin my mind for a long, long time.”—Bruce Kelley, editor-in-chief of SanFrancisco Magazine

“At sixteen, Jaimal Yogis ran away on a spiritual journey of amagnitude few of us even dream of, to learn to ride the waves ofthe world’s oceans, and the bigger surf within his own mind. AsJaimal gains hard-won spiritual lessons with a teenager’s eager-ness and a surfer’s passion, we cannot help but see our own spir-itual life with fresh, beginner’s eyes. His journey started innothingness—at least in a material sense. But it ends in deep richesof spiritual insight, human warmth, and humor. The pages keptturning. I couldn’t put this book down.”—Michael Ellsberg, coauthorof Flirting with Disaster



SALTWATER BUDDHA



SALTWATER BUDDHA

A SURFER ’S QUEST TOFIND ZEN ON THE SEA

JAIMAL YOGIS

Wisdom Publications • Boston



Wisdom Publications199 Elm StreetSomerville MA 02144 USAwww.wisdompubs.org

© 2009 Jaimal YogisAll rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, elec-tronic or mechanical, including photography, recording, or by any informa-tion storage and retrieval system or technologies now known or laterdeveloped, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataYogis, Jaimal.Saltwater Buddha : a surfer’s quest to find Zen on the sea / by JaimalYogis.

p. cm.ISBN 0-86171-535-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Yogis, Jaimal. 2. Buddhists—Biography. 3. Surfing—Religiousaspects—Buddhism. 4. Buddhism. I. Title.

BQ998.O43A3 2009294.3’927092—dc22[B]

2008054063

13 12 11 10 095 4 3 2 1

Cover design by Phil Pascuzzo. Interior design by Tony Lulek. Set in Sabon11/15.

Wisdom Publications’ books are printed on acid-free paper and meet theguidelines for permanence and durability of the Production Guidelines forBook Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Printed in the United States of America.

Excerpts by Hung-chih on pages 1 and 226 are from Nelson Foster and JackSchoemaker, eds., The Roaring Stream: A New Zen Reader (Hopewell NJ:The Ecco Press, 1996), 178. Excerpt by Hung-chih on page 63 is from TaigenDan Leighton, Cultivating the Empty Field: The Silent Illumination of ZenMaster Hongzhi (Boston: Tuttle Publishing, 2000), 24.

This book was produced with environmental mindfulness. We haveelected to print this title on 30% PCW recycled paper. As a result, we havesaved the following resources: 21 trees, 15 million BTUs of energy, 1,875 lbs.of greenhouse gases, 7,782 gallons of water, and 999 lbs. of solid waste. Formore information, please visit our website, www.wisdompubs.org. Thispaper is also FSC certified. For more information, please visit www.fscus.org.

ISBN 978-0-86171-998-3 (ebook)



Table of Contents

Prologue ixIntroduction 1Part I: Leaving Home 9Part II: Zen and Surfing:

A Brief History 59Part III: Monkhood 69Part IV: Pohoiki 83Part V: Wizards and

Water-Walking 95Part VI: Surf Nazis Have

Buddha-Nature Too 125Part VII: Wanted: One Guru,

Apply Within 149Part VIII: Paddling Out 173Part IX: Not Dead Yet 211Part X: One More Wave 225Acknowledgments 237About the Author 239About Wisdom 241



Prologue

The ocean is in constant flux, and when you spenda lot of time in it you become like a floating bot-tle with a message inside; you know you’re going

somewhere, sense you have a purpose, but you alsoknow you’re at the mercy of the winds and currents,that surrendering may be your only good option.

Lately I’ve been surfing a lot. And there’s some-thing different about the saltwater life. One becomesfloppy, like seaweed, while at the same time agile, likean eel. One becomes, I suppose, more like water itself.

The Tao Te Ching says, “Nothing in theworld is more flexible and yielding

than water. Yet when it attacks thefirm and the strong, none canwithstand it. They have no way tochange it.”

This is a book in praise ofwater. On its surface, it is a series

of short stories about my encounterswith the sea and Zen practice. But



underneath, it’s just a homily about water—to thatwhich sustains life.

I am no expert on Zen, and certainly no expertsurfer. But I have an ongoing love affair with the ocean,which, through years of meditation, I have come toview through what might be called Zen-coloredglasses. If I have a message inside this empty vessel—if it hasn’t been completely dissolved by the saltwaterleaking in—this book is it. May the winds blow it toshores where it will be useful.

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Introduction

In water, everything is “dissolved.”—Mircea Eliade

A person of the Way fundamentally does not dwell any-where. The white clouds are fascinated with the green

mountain’s foundation. The bright moon cherishes beingcarried along with the flowing water.

—Hung-chih

Ua ka ua, kahe ka wai.The rain rains, the water flows.

—Hawaiian Proverb

In Zen there is nothing to explain,nothing to teach that will add toyour knowledge. Unless it growsout of yourself, no knowledge isreally of value to you, a borrowed

plumage never grows.—D.T. Suzuki



Two weeks ago, I moved onto my girlfriend’sdad’s sailboat in Sausalito. Dulce is the boat’sname. She is thirty feet long, mostly white with

lacquered wooden paneling around the windows. Hersails are wrapped in teal canvas.

At first, I thought Dulce rocked too much. Butnow she lulls me to sleep. The bed is so small, curlingup in it while the waves lap against the hull is a bit likereturning to the womb: not that I remember thewomb, of course, but I imagine it to be something likesleeping in the bow of a sailboat.

I don’t sail. Simply to live on the water is the point.After a couple years sequestered inland, always driv-ing to the coast for surf, being on the boat feels like ahomecoming. “To come back down to the ocean,”writes Thomas Farber, in On Water, “is to reexperi-ence an essential memory trace, something onceknown well, to recall that one has been trying toremember.” I like that Farber writes “to recall thatone has been trying to remember” rather than, “torecall what one has been trying to remember.” Itdescribes the truth that when away from the sea youcan easily forget what you feel homesick for. But thevestiges are always there. And upon return, the saltair, the incessant roar of waves, what Mark Twaincalls the “limpid depths.”

Basho, the seventeenth-century Zen monk andpoet, said in a haiku:

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Mother I never knewEvery time I see the oceanEvery time

Maybe having evolved from aqueous amoebas,and being in our current form two-thirds water, weare hardwired to connect to the sea.

Or maybe we are even part of water’s big plan.Tom Robbins suggests that human beings (like everyother living creature) “were invented by water as adevice for transporting itself from one place toanother.”

Farber points out that we are not so far removedfrom the sea as we think: our skin is smooth like thatof a dolphin or whale; our fingers and toes are slightlywebbed; we float; we are streamlined and surroundedwith a subcutaneous layer of fat; our blood itself isclose to the consistency of seawater. And as demon-strated in recent years by free divers, we even have thecapability, like dolphins and whales, to slow downour heart rate in order to reach great depths—morethan 400 feet without oxygen.

The view from the boat is impressionistic: specksof light flickering on the bay like stars looking up.The golden grasses of Angel Island twitch under thefirst rays of light. Directly south, the San Franciscoskyline stretches up, barely cresting a comforter of

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fog—“a city inside a snow globe,” as Anne Lamottonce described it. North, Mount Tamalpais, a pyra-mid of green, blocks the winds, creates this sanctuary:one of the most expensive stretches of waterfrontproperty on the planet—expensive, that is, unless youlive on your girlfriend’s dad’s sailboat.

As on many mornings in Marin, there is this slystrip of fog—water in its most mystical incarnation—slithering over, around, and through the hills, makingeverything look ancient and unsolved. I climb backdown into the cabin, a cramped space barely tallenough for me to stand in, and sit down on a littlebench, pulling my legs into full lotus: left foot on rightthigh, right foot on left. Today will begin, as mostmornings do, with a little zazen, a little Zenmeditation.

It’s such a common word these days, Zen, usedmostly it seems for marketing, as in the current ad cam-paign for MP3 players—“Find Your Zen”—or SanFrancisco restaurants—Hana Zen, Now and Zen. Butmany people have no idea what real Zen is. And some-times I fear I don’t, either. I knowwhat the wordmeans,of course. Literally, Zen is Japanese for a Sanskrit term,dhyana, that translates loosely as “meditation.”Dhyana, as I have heard it described by one of my mostacademically versed meditation teachers, might betterbe translated as “the concentration that is completed,”a focus that encompasses rather than narrows.

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INTRODUCTION

5

The Zen school of Buddhism arose in Chinaaround the fourth century ce when a South IndianBuddhist monk named Bodhidharma allegedlybrought the “mind-only” teaching there and started alineage. The tradition’s simplicity, rigor, and wit flour-ished and eventually spread through much of Asia,becoming well known to Americans only in this pastcentury.

But Zen is more than a lineage, more than a prac-tice of sitting still. It’s more than an aesthetic style,and certainly more than a marketing scheme. It is anattempt to express the ineffable, the deepest paradoxof being. And its definition alone may be as indescrib-able as its core teaching. One of the great pioneers ofZen in America, Shunryu Suzuki Roshi, often saidZen is best expressed simply by sitting.

In my limited experience, Zen practice has beensomething like returning to the waterfront, or likepaddling out into the surf after days without waves.Matthieu Ricard, the French biologist who ordainedunder the Dalai Lama, writes of the stages of medita-tion: “Finally, the mind becomes like the sea in calmweather. Ripples of discursive thoughts occasionallyrun over its surface, but in the depths, it is never dis-turbed.” Sitting quietly in zazen or on my surfboard,I am reminded that I’ve somehow been away frommyself too long, that I need to return more often.



It makes sense to me that surfing and Buddhismshould meet in a concrete form, a book. “Surfing isreally more than anything else a faith,” says formereditor of Surfer magazine Sam George. And surfersoften sound like Buddhists in describing their art.“Then the world vanished,” writes Steven Kotler inhis surfing memoirWest of Jesus. “There was no self,no other. For an instant, I didn’t know where I endedand the wave began.” The photograph of pro surfersDick Brewer, Gerry Lopez, and Reno Abellira medi-tating cross-legged next to their surfboards at MountTantalus has been branded into the mind of almostevery surfer. More recently, meditating pro surferDave Rastovich (“Rasta”) has become something of aguardian angel to the sport, instructing other surfersin forms of meditation and helping rescue dolphinsand whales in his spare time.

On the other side of the spectrum, Buddhist teach-ers have often employed water metaphors to expressthe Buddha’s teachings: impermanence (“The myriadworlds are like so much foam on the sea,” wroteeighth-century Chinese master Yung-Chia), karmaand reincarnation (a human’s life force will “producethe next life just as the energy of one wave producesthe next wave. This energy will never disappear,resulting in a continuous formation of successivelives,” according to the twentieth-century masterHakuun Yasutani), and the fundamental buddha-

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nature within everyone (it “is like the sea, and eachindividual is like a wave on the surface of the ocean,”says Yasutani).

But my all-time favorite Zen-surfing quote is bySuzuki Roshi, one of the people credited with helpingto bring Zen to America, via—where else?—Califor-nia. Suzuki founded Tassajara Zen Center in Big Sur(near some of the best surf on the West Coast) and Ilike to think he had surfers in mind when comparingthought waves to ocean waves. He said, “Even thoughwaves arise, the essence of mind is pure… Waves arethe practice of water. To speak of waves apart fromwater or water apart from waves is a delusion.”

Yes: enough talk of tepid, serene pools reflectingmoonlight. Let us speak of waves, of glassy ocean sur-faces enlivened with surging swells. If waves are thepractice of water, and thoughts the practice of mind,wouldn’t it be wonderful if we all learned to surf?

Some say that the “goal” of Buddhism is tobecome a Buddha—to become awake. And one of thehistorical Buddha’s very first teachings, recorded inthe Avatamsaka Sutra, says “the Earth expoundsDharma,” meaning, I think, that the very world welive in describes how to awaken. And since most ofthe earth is ocean, I don’t think it’s going too far to saythat, with the right intention and awareness, you canlearn to be a Buddha by playing in the waves.

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INTRODUCTION



My parents introduced me to Buddhism. But I fellin love with it in high school through the Beats. Irecall reading Kerouac’s Dharma Bums and almostweeping with joy when Japhy (modeled on the Beatpoet Gary Snyder) tells Jack, “I meet my bodhisattvason the street.” I could hardly fathom a religious tradi-tion in which I could find truth wherever I go, on myown. I soon found out the historical Buddha stressedthat I had to find it on my own. I could get help fromthe Triple Jewels, of course: the Buddha, the Dharma(the teachings), and the Sangha (the community ofpractitioners). But ultimately, the Buddha said to testeverything on your own, make your own proof.

Upon his deathbed, the Buddha spoke these finalwords: “All things are impermanent. Work out yourown salvation with diligence.”

Ridiculous as it may be, I see myself doing just thatas I flail around on the sea, gliding on the fringes ofour blue world.

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Part 1LEAVING HOME

While still young, a black-haired young man endowed withthe blessing of youth, in the prime of life, though my motherand father wished otherwise and wept with tearful faces, Ishaved off my hair and beard, put on the ochre robe, and

went forth from the home life into homelessness.—The Buddha

Indeed, one feels microscopically small, and the thoughtthat one may wrestle with this sea raises in one’s imagina-

tion a thrill of apprehension, almost fear.Why, they are a mile long, these bull-mouthed monsters, and they weigh athousand tons, and they charge intoshore faster than a man can run.What chance? No chance at all, isthe verdict of the shrinking ego.

—Jack London,writing of waves and his first surf session



1.When Iwas three,my dad got stationed at a U.S.airbase on the island of Terceira off the coast of Por-tugal. We flew there on a military cargo jet, earsplugged to soften the engine roar. We moved into awhite adobe apartment above a shoe store wherewool-sweatered men smoked cigars and stray dogsbegged.

This was before my parents started fighting andyears before their divorce, so there were four of us inthe family. A round number, I often thought, a goodnumber.

My older sister, Ciel, and I found endless satisfac-tion in the novelties of the island: the bullfights oncobblestone streets, the patchwork lava rock wallsthat quilted the hills, the serrated bluffs dotted withold fishermen, the spitting llamas. We adopted four-teen puppies and fed them oatmeal. We built forts outof mud. We climbed into the foggy hills and searchedfor wizards. Most of all, we loved the beach.

The praia—as we called it in an attempt to feellocal—lay just down the street, a two-minute walk.We could always hear it and smell it. The beach waslittered with trash; the wall at its border was stainedin graffiti and urine. But the sand was soft and theocean warmed by the Gulf Stream.

My dad taught us to body-surf. As a teenager, he’dbeen a surfer in New York (one of the brazen fewwho’d surfed Jones Beach in the winter in jeans and a

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wool sweater) and then in Hawaii while stationed onOahu during the Vietnam War. He often told us nos-talgic tales of big waves, near drowning, heroism.Then he taught us how to watch the waves, how tojump off the sand at just the right moment so the wavecaught you in its grip like a baseball mitt and thrustyou forward like a roller coaster.

I remember the Atlantic all inky black and roughlike crumpled tinfoil. But the inner waves, the oneswe rode, were an opaque brownish-green, full of siltand rubbery seaweed. The waves were frightening.But we felt safe with my dad. He could lift us upabove the water, or keep us steady in the midst ofstrong currents.

When a good wave finally came, we laughed andshrieked. Then we turned and dove down the face,shutting our eyes tight, gripping each other’s hands.

Sufficiently tumbled, we jogged up to our big yel-low blanket where Mom was usually reading a book.We warmed up. And then we talked about the islandstogether, told stories about their strangeness andmagic.

Three years later, my dad got transferred again,this time to McClellan Air Force Base outside Sacra-mento, two hours from the nearest beach.

It wasn’t so bad in the valley. I made new friends.I got a BMX bike and a Variflex skateboard. Momran a daycare so there were always screaming kids to

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play with. Occasionally, the four of us went to thebeach near San Francisco and talked about how niceit would be to live by the sea again, if only we couldafford it. Maybe someday.

But we never could afford it. My parents divorcedafter a few years in suburbia. And so there were threeof us—a different three every other weekend. Then thenumbers of immediate family–members rotated: six,then four, then back to three. But it wasn’t weird. Itwas ordinary. We just grew up: soccer and swim team,keg-stands at the river, fireworks and football. It was anormal American upbringing. I can’t complain.

But the sea never left me. I couldn’t let go. Or itwouldn’t let go. Or both.

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2.Dear family,Please do not worry. I am somewhere in theworld and I will call you when I get there.I had some dreams that led me to believethat I need a change and I could not makeit here. I’m sorry. I took some money fromMom’s credit card and I apologize. I planto pay it all back when I get settled.I love you very much.

Jaimal

By the timemymom found this note on my bedroompillow, I was on a one-way flight to Hawaii. I was ajunior in high school and had saved a few hundredbucks mowing lawns and selling old baseball cards.Added to the $900 I stole from my mom’s credit card(which I did eventually return), I had just enough tostart a shiny new life in paradise.

On the ATA flight, movies of waterfalls andwomen in hula skirts readied us for the islands. Andthe further from land we flew, the more I felt theshackles of adolescence dissolving. I was reading abook about the Buddha’s life, which I knew quite a lotabout having grown up with what you might call“New-Agey” parents. (Our home libraries could fillan East-West bookstore.) But I read it again because

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the Buddha’s story made me feel better about runningaway. I thought of myself as leaving home, much likePrince Siddhartha did, to discover truth.

Siddhartha’s story began like this. He was born aprince in present-day Nepal around 2,500 years ago.At his auspicious birth, a soothsayer told his parentsthat Siddhartha would become a great spiritualteacher and abandon his kingdom, or else he wouldconquer a vast stretch of land and be a powerfulleader. His father wanted the latter, so he tried toshelter his son from the sufferings of the world—oldage, sickness, death. He feared exposing the prince tosuffering would push him to seek spiritual truth. Sothe king kept his son surrounded with beauty andyouth within the palace and conned him into think-ing the whole world was roses and immortality. Ofcourse, Siddhartha, an unusually smart young man,soon realized that it was all a lie, and when he wit-nessed the real suffering outside the palace—corpses,leprosy, famine, and an ascetic renunciant—he wasoverwhelmed with compassion and he vowed to dosomething.

He probably had a hunch suffering arose in themind and could also cease in the mind. But he wantedto find out for sure. He abandoned the kingdom,renouncing all its pleasures to become a wanderingmendicant and focus on ending the suffering within.

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I loved Siddhartha’s story. And miles above thePacific, I thought about how similar the prince and Iwere. My parents, having rejected their native Catholi-cism and Judaism, had raised Ciel and me to go toHindu temples, too. Born in my parents’ full-fledgedhippie phase, I was even named after an Indian saint:Baba Jaimal Singh. And it couldn’t have been justcoincidence (I thought) that my Lithuanian grandpar-ents’ name was shortened to Yogis. I figured I wasdestined, like Siddhartha, for spiritual greatness.

By running away, all the elements were comingtogether. I was abandoning the pleasures of thepalace. Okay, so I wasn’t running away because I wasoverwhelmed with compassion for all living beings,and our four-bedroom home in Sacramento washardly a palace. But we did have a pool and a hot tub.And I figured that in modern America, most peoplelived with almost as many luxuries as the prince had2,500 years ago. And I was giving up quite a bit: tele-vision, QUAD 102.5 radio jams, my friends. And justas Siddhartha was fed up with the cycle of birth anddeath, I was fed up with the endless cycle of suburbantrivialities—especially my midnight curfew.

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3.Before I could continue living out my versionof the Buddha’s story, I had to decide which of theseven islands I would settle on. Oahu sounded tooDisneyland. The Big Island: too volcanic. I hadn’theard anything about Kauai. I looked for a spiritualsign. The in-flight magazine said that Maui was the“Island of Love.” This conjured images of me on thebeach with a Hawaiian Tropic model.

I went to Maui.

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