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THE NOVICE (A MEMOIR)OVERVIEWThe Novice is my memoir of monkhood in the Tibetan Gelugpa tradition, the path that led me there and the events that ejected me unceremoniously back into the world. Individual images in the collage above lead to some extracts from preliminary drafts of this work in progress. INTRODUCTIONI wrote this book because I was mystified by my own life. Why would a middle-class, privately-schooled Anglo-Italian Catholic boy from rural Gloucestershire abandon his education, career and family to travel to the Tibetan refugee camps in India and become ordained as a Buddhist monk? Why would he then throw it all up and spend twenty years trying unsuccessfully to write about his failure? After dozens of fruitless attempts I finally found the courage to put down the facts one at a time and arrange them into a coherent narrative. It was a frightening task, and more strangely enlightening than all my years as a monk. I was horrified to see how many secrets I kept, but as I dragged them into the spotlight I took courage and eventually dispelled much bitterness. I learned to accept and finally to like myself. I also realised that this great existential bafflement wasn’t unusual at all. It isn’t simple to tell the simple truth. In an early draft I wrote, ‘If only I’d known how difficult a task I’d set myself …,’ but the fact is, I knew very well. I had to trace all the conscious and subconscious motives of the young man I was thirty years ago – as sophisticatedly confused as my own culture, itself struggling through its awkward growth spurt of the sixties. It all came down to two very persistent questions – why I became a monk in the first place, and why I subsequently left the glorious heights of solitude to resume the daily, stressful grind. The truth was elusive, for every answer seemed woefully inadequate and the words rang hollow in my ears. For years I wrestled with these two questions in conversation, prose, poetry and fiction. Two decades of my life are littered with false starts and dead-ended manuscripts. Only in middle age did I eventually find the voice and endurance to carry my story through from beginning to end. I rose each morning at the crack of dawn to rake through the embers of my past. Exhilarated at first to put pen to paper and see the story finally taking shape, I soon began to wonder what I’d do when it came to an end. This is a true story but not a work of simple non-fiction. During the two decades covered by this book (from the early nineteen sixties to the eighties) I lived by denial, too proud to feel pain and blindly pretending I knew what I was doing. The narrator however, is a relatively disentangled product of thirty subsequent years of reflection and analysis. These paragraphs took shape each morning over a period of eight years, during which I was sometimes startled by the clarity of my recollections. I’m certainly aware that memories evolve and are embellished over time, and that they’re more than a simple reflection of life as it was. I accept these traces of the past as a gift – a legacy of the person I once was – and take fatherly pride in the lifelike shape they’ve taken on. I’ve been as painstakingly honest as I can, have no agenda other than to hold your attention and trust you, dear reader, to come to your own conclusions, if conclusions be necessary. I don’t know, as some people say, that our society is entering a golden age of spirituality, but I’m heartened by those who can face their weaknesses without resorting to some exclusive system of beliefs. We all prefer to be happy. We know at heart that we’re better off facing our truths, no matter how unpalatable. I grew up spiritually terrorized by totalitarian religion, searched high and low for refuge and thought I’d found it, but I was just clinging to an elaborate signpost. The real journey began only when I let go. The day I gave back my robes I fell precipitously from the imaginary heights of spiritual ascent, and it took me twenty years to clamber back on to dry land. Now at last I have love in my heart, worth in my own eyes and scars enough to expect no guarantees. For a brief, shining moment, I aspired to an enlightenment of transcendental light and bliss. The illusion faded, I cried bitterly, but in time the simple truth settled down again, plain as day. It was – it always had been – staring me in the face. Even if we are in a period of unprecedented self-examination, I don’t believe in any inevitable march of progress. The notions that we’re continually bettering ourselves through science or belief are the great competing myths of our time. What’s extraordinary is that we so easily go along with the implication that we must choose one or the other, and submit to stresses that undermine what could be a life of exceptional leisure and reflection. We’ve gone to great lengths to create wealth and security – but for what? The decadence of life today has forced many a person to engage in a personal search for peace, truth and good sense. This book is for them. The Novice is being finalized and will be available soon |
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