my buddha experience

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My Buddha ExperienceEugene StelzigPublished online: 08 May 2007.

To cite this article: Eugene Stelzig (2006) My Buddha Experience, Life Writing, 3:2, 99-113, DOI:10.1080/10408340308518315

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I

What, for the lack of a better term, I call my Buddha experiencecame in March 2004 as I was touring the Hong Kong HeritageMuseum in Sha Tin. I had flown to Hong Kong several days earlier toattend an academic conference on autobiography hosted by theEnglish Department of the Chinese University, which was scheduledto begin the day after the museum visit. I arrived in Hong Kong earlyin order to have several days for sightseeing, and I went to themuseum with an academic colleague and friend who had also arrivedearly. The museum visit came on my third day of sightseeing, aSunday. It was an uneventful venture in cultural tourism until myextraordinary encounter with a Buddha statue in one of thegalleries—a powerful, mysterious, and electrifying experience thatwas totally unexpected.

I still have no clue what to make of it, or what, if anything, it hasmade of or done to me, but I’m sure I will remember and reflect onit for the rest of my days. I don’t think this experience hasfundamentally changed me, but it has opened my mind—by way ofwhat I am inclined to interpret now as a powerful and dramaticdemonstration—to the fact that the reality we normally perceive isbut a very small part of all there is. Perhaps my Buddha experiencewas also a type of confirmation of a deep and inchoate intuition of“something more” underlying my skeptical and rational (orrationalizing) worldview, one largely materialist, secular, andhumanist.What has frustrated the rational or intellectual part of meis that I can’t fit the experience into any category with which I am

Life Writing | Vol 3, No 2 | 2006 | pp 99–113

My Buddha Experience | Eugene Stelzig

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Life Writing | Vol 3, No 2

familiar, such as the romantic concept of the sublime, Freud’s oceanicfeeling, the religious conversion experience (Saul on the road toTarsus, St.Augustine), or the epiphany. It has elements of all of thesebut does not coincide with any of them. It confounds me; it eludesmy attempts to pin down, frame, or comprehend its nature, purpose,or meaning. It is both meaning-full and meaning-less. I continue tobe powerfully affected by it, but I am still largely at a loss as to whatto make of it.

One strong urge that has only recently subsided is the desire orneed to share this experience with people I know. The day after myvisit to the museum, I buttonholed a colleague and friend in religiousstudies who had arrived in Hong Kong the evening before, and toldhim about it. We had been in James Olney’s NEH seminar onautobiography back in 1983, and we had kept in touch sporadicallyover the years.Two summers ago he chaired a session in which I reada paper at a conference in Australia, and last year I was the firstreader for his forthcoming book on spirituality and solitude inWestern autobiography. Despite being jetlagged, he was verytolerant, receptive, and understanding.The advice he gave me was towrite the experience down while the memory was still fresh andvivid in my mind. I am grateful to him for this excellent suggestion,because I don’t have a good memory, and I’m sure that without sucha record the experience would become altered over the course oftime and retelling. Although it still reverberates powerfully withinme, many of the details, such as the exact appearance of the statue ofthe Buddha, are already growing faint, and the experience itself isstarting to feel very far away. For the sake of accuracy andauthenticity, in the following section I reproduce my account,written rapidly the day after, without any alterations (stylistic orsubstantive).

II

In the course of touring the Heritage Museum with JE, and aftervisiting several galleries, including ones on ancient village life and amajor twentieth-century Lignan painter, I wanted to take a look at alife-sized Buddha statue I had glimpsed from a distance. As I


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Eugene Stelzig | My Buddha Experience

approached this statue from the rear, passing on the left side, I felt orsensed a powerful attractive force emanating from the statue,“pulling” me toward it. I went around to the front, facing the statue,standing several feet away, directly in front of it. It was a meditatingBuddha, whose face was a powerful mask of meditation, includingthe third or spirit eye on the forehead. I continued to feel the force,which rose within me in waves or crescendos—a lifting force, whichseemed to pull me upward and inward (as it were, into the spiriteye). I simply stood—for how long?—probably ten minutes, gazingat the Buddha, feeling bursts of this powerful force, including a rushor tingling up my spine. I was experiencing something I had neverfelt or known or experienced before in my life—certainly nevermeditating, or in any church, or in connection with any religious orother artifact. The only remote (?) analogy would be the energy“sent” by the Chinese Chi Gong healer, which I felt as a tingling orwarming sensation up or near my neck.1 Multiply or intensify oramplify that by—perhaps—ten thousand or a hundred thousand andit might approximate the massive non-material force I felt, as a kindof inward/upward pulling thrust, a stream or energy swath, a cosmic(?) pulse or pulsing, waves of it, tremendously strong, powerful,massive. I did not hear or see (hallucinate) or shift to some otherreality but simply stood there, silent, motionless, sensing this cosmicor spirit pulling/pulsing upward/inward as a tremendous power.

The only, as it were, “hallucinatory” element was that the statueseemed to be breathing in and out—I actually thought I saw therhythmic expansion and contraction (the rhythm of meditation) ofthe chest. I know there were some people passing me and the statue,not pausing; I’m sure to them it was a perfectly normal scene—amuseum visitor gazing on, silently standing before the statue. By thetime I left (partly because JE might be wondering where I was), thewaves had subsided, but the sense of the force was still present at alower level. I quickly took a picture to be able to “see” the Buddhaand remember its physical appearance (having a deficient visualmemory). The stone statue (brown-beige?) was probably somewhatlarger than life-sized; one of the folded hands was missing (brokenoff), and although it (the statue) had a rough surface, there were

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polished spots (presumably polished by aeons of human touch).Thestatue (unlike most display items in the museum) was not given anumerical date but only a dynasty label.

I had no sense of fear, of danger, or of a negative or demonicenergy; the feeling I had was more positive—as in (perhaps?) awe,elevation. But not “bliss” or intoxication either. I was and remainedperfectly lucid.There was nothing ghostly or personal in the force—it was a massive impersonal and intensely powerful spiritual,dynamic force—something felt as unquestionably there, and real,and emanating from/located in the statue. I was seized or “grabbed”by it instantly and totally unexpectedly as I passed the statue; therewas no intention or anticipation or expectation of any sort ofspiritual or psychic or paranormal or religious experience. Theencounter came totally “out of the blue.”Waking up during the nightfollowing this day-time encounter, I could still feel after-waves orechoes of shocks of this mysterious encounter with “unknown modesof being” (Wordsworth), and tears ran down my cheeks thinkingabout it, trying to understand or get some kind of grip (?) on it.

I’m writing this down on the evening of the day after, while thememory is still fresh in my mind. I said something about this“encounter” to JE right after (who seemed quizzical), and at theevening dinner to RF, who I think was fascinated, and this morningto JB, who suggested I should write about it right away, even if onlyin fragmentary form. I’m afraid that in writing and talking about it Iwill change, even falsify, or at least distort it. There is a clear gapbetween the experience and the language I can use to try to describeit—I just hope I don’t let the (partial, incomplete, falsifying ordistorting) language replace, stand in or substitute for theexperience.

I don’t expect that I would find anything but a stone Buddha if Ireturned to the museum, and certainly no repetition of theexperience, which I assume is (in this particular form, intensity, andunexpected supervening) a once-in-a-lifetime encounter with ?

I don’t know if this sketchy account can do any kind of justice tothis massive and mystifying and sudden encounter with some kind offorce or presence (?) impinging on me.


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III

I am a rather private person, one not prone to sharing intimateexperiences and confidences even with friends, but the encounterwith the Buddha statue was so powerful that I could not keep it to orcontain it within myself. It poured out of me, like water from anoverflowing fountain. I told several friends and conference attendeesabout it, including a young Chinese scholar who half-seriously, half-jokingly said the “Buddha was calling me.” I did something even moreunusual: at the session at which JB and I were giving our thirty-minute papers, before reading mine I briefly shared my Buddhaexperience with the audience and read a short poem I’d writtenabout it. My normal academic self would condemn such an act byanyone else as a breach of conference protocol—a self-indulgent,self-dramatizing act, and an imposition on the audience. But I wentahead and did it, not before discussing the matter with JE and JB atbreakfast on the day of the session.They seemed understanding andeven sympathetic, and did not seek to dissuade me, and in myopening comments I made the fact that this was an auto/biographyconference my rationale for sharing such a personal experience. I gota round of applause after my brief account and the poem, but no onein the discussion following our two papers referred to my Buddhaexperience.

Subsequently, several members of the audience did speak to meabout it during the course of the conference, including an Americanwoman who came over to chat with me in a lunch line. A yogainstructor, she seemed to be fascinated; after I explained to her thatI had been raised Catholic but did not consider myself a religiousperson and had a very negative view of institutionalized religion andthe divisiveness and pettiness of religious sectarianism, she statedthat she shared my viewpoint, but then asked me a question that gaveme pause: “Are you a spiritual person?” I’d never quite posed thatquestion in that form to myself, and, after a moment, I had toconcede that indeed I was. It’s just that I’d never consciously thoughtof myself that way. Another question that brought me up short wasasked by an Australian colleague—RF, both autobiography critic andautobiographer—who asked me if the experience had changed me in

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any way.At that point I had in no way, shape, or form come to termswith my strange encounter with the statue, and it had not evendawned on me that it might have some sort of transformative valueor valence. Much more nuanced was the wry humor of the ever-generous, kind, and sympathetic JE, who playfully referred to myexperience as a “frisson.” Well, yes, and then some . . .

It was on the nights following my museum visit that I would wakeup, after having fallen asleep, and start thinking about what hadhappened to me, and feel powerful after-shocks. I simply could notget a handle on why, of all people, this had happened to me.What hadI done to deserve this? Was it some kind of metaphysical glitch? Hadthe statue zapped the wrong person? Or was I suffering incipientmental illness; was this some sort of breakdown, or brief psychoticepisode? But I refused to give in to the panic of paranoia, because inall other regards I was clearly sane and lucid, attending conferencesessions, socializing, taking a keen interest in the conferenceproceedings, my new surroundings, the Chinese University of HongKong, my colleagues, the Chinese food and the local programmingon the small color television set in my room at Yali Guest House atthe university. Everything about me was normal; I was the sameperson I’d always been, I was in my right senses, I was nothallucinating or delusional, but I’d had this unbelievable andinexplicable and massive experience … of what?

I flew back to the US five days after the start of the conference,which had been highly energizing for me intellectually, and whichincluded a keynote address by Maxine Hong Kingston, whose WomanWarrior is probably my favorite contemporary American memoir, andwith whom I was able to chat briefly at the reception afterwards.During the hectic days of the conference, I did not have much timeto reflect on my Buddha experience, which was pushed mostly to theback of my mind, to surface insistently at night during protractedspells of sleeplessness.The shuttle bus that I took from Sha Tin to thenew and very hi-tech and postmodern Hong Kong airport on LantauIsland passed by the Hong Kong Heritage Museum, and I was able tosnap a quick picture of the colorful new building in which I had my“frisson.” I like to get to airports early, especially these days, withlong lines for security and check-in, and, as it turned out, I had a


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couple of hours to kill after that procedure. Strolling through theterminal, I saw a book titled Buddha: His Life in Images prominentlydisplayed in a bookstore window. Having more than enough HongKong dollars left over, I bought it on impulse, because seeing thedisplay in the wake of my experience struck me as one of thosemeaningful coincidences that life is full of, if only we notice and payattention to them.

Although I did not get around to reading it until after I’d beenback home for several days, what struck me is that none of the manyimpressive color pictures of Buddha statues from various culturesand parts of the world bore any resemblance to my Buddha in themuseum. Some time after my return, I also saw an article in the localSunday paper on some ancient Buddha statues that had beenunearthed—I forget whether it was in India or in China (they hadbeen buried because they were damaged)—and, again, none of theaccompanying photographs of these beautiful and serene statueslooked like the Buddha I saw. The difference between the statues inthe book and the newspaper and the one I encountered in the HongKong museum was the intensity of the expression of concentratedmeditation on the face of the latter. One evening shortly after myreturn, as I pondered my experience, eyes closed, I realized with ashock of recognition that the image of the Buddha face that Iremembered having seen—in connection with my impression thatthe statue was actually breathing in and out—was that of a livinghuman presence, a real human face, and not that of a stone mask.That thought both exalted and terrified me. What exactly had Iwitnessed in the museum? Or had I unwittingly projected myimagination on the stone tabula rasa of the Buddha statue?

The internalized image of the Buddha statue having clearlybecome that of a living presence in my mind, the empirical andrational side of me was in need of some visual confirmation of whatI’d experienced. I assumed or hoped that the picture that I took withthe cheap Polaroid throw-away camera that I bought on impulse theday before leaving for Hong Kong (not wanting to drag along my oldand clunky Olympus 35mm camera) would provide thisconfirmation. As I drove to the supermarket to pick up the

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developed roll, I became more troubled and anxious at the prospectof what the picture might or might not reveal. But even if it onlyshowed an unremarkable Buddha statue, it would be objectiveconfirmation of what I’d seen.At least it would be there, captured onfilm. But as it turns out, it wasn’t. And, indeed, how could it be? Allof the pictures turned out OK, including some rather spectacularones taken from Victoria Peak, with the city of Hong Kong and theharbor and the skyscrapers in the sun-drenched mist or smog belowit, as well as some truly pedestrian ones I took the morning of mydeparture en route to the airport in order to finish the film in thecamera. But the one that did not turn out was that of the statue; thenegative was simply a hazy void or milky blank. I took it to acolleague who is an expert photographer, in the hope that in his darkroom he might be able to develop something from it. But, afterlooking at it, he said that this was not possible, because the automaticflash must not have gone off. After my initial disappointment andshock of realization that the picture I had taken of the statue showednothing, this absence or void struck me as appropriate and eveninevitable. Of course I could have no visual or objective proof ofwhat I’d experienced. As I think of it now, a mere picture would notonly misrepresent but would violate that experience and the veryspirit of the encounter with my Buddha statue. It is not somethingable to be captured or represented on film; but the absence of thatconfirming medium also does not invalidate what I experienced.Thelatter, so I now think, is what matters.

IV

My return from Hong Kong did not leave much time or psychicspace for contemplating my Buddha experience, because I wassucked into the maelstrom that is the last part of the spring semester,with the whirl and the swirl of student advising, preparing classes,grading piles of papers (and, at the end, final exams), and of coursethe committee meetings that can take up so much valuable time. Atone level, being so busy, including having to catch up on the week ofclasses I’d missed (as well as the large reservoir of e-mail messages),was a welcome distraction from the burden of my Hong Kong trip.


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At another level, and despite all the work and time pressures, I couldnot keep myself from coming back to my museum encounter, and totalking about it. I mentioned it rather cryptically in a couple of myclasses, telling the students that the most memorable part of my triphad been a close encounter of the unknown kind with a Buddhastatue. Interestingly, none of them asked me about it after class.

The range of responses of those to whom I have spoken about myexperience has also been surprising and certainly not alwayspredictable. My wife, who was in Holland looking after her ailingmother during the time I was in Hong Kong, and who returned tothe US several weeks after my return from China, has been verysupportive all along, from the moment I called her from the YaliGuest House to share my strange encounter at length. She did notdoubt that what I’d experienced was real—even my seeing the statuebreathing in and out. She did not suggest that I had suffered somesort of hallucination or that I should see a therapist. Nor, indeed, hasanyone else with whom—like some contemporary AncientMariner—I’ve shared my story, or at least intimated it. Thecolleague, CF in the Philosophy Department of my college, whopicked me up at the Rochester airport on a dismal rainy day whenthere were still several inches of snow on the ground—one of thelast blasts of an interminable winter—and to whom I recountedwhat happened to me at the museum, was not in the least dismissive,no doubt in part because one of his areas of interest is Easternphilosophy and religion, on which he teaches a course. He told methat he thought my stress on the impersonal nature of the presenceor force that had impinged on me was consistent with those spiritualtraditions. Another colleague in the History Department, TH, aChinese scholar who has actually lived in Hong Kong, more or lessdismissed my experience with a puzzled but kindly smile as probablya function of jetlag.

Two colleagues and friends in my own (English) department haddifferent but non-dismissive reactions. One, RH, a medievalist andChaucer and Dante scholar who has co-authored a book on medievalmysticism—and a devout Catholic who was dealing with the death ofhis aged mother at the time of my Hong Kong trip—was

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encouraging when I said that I was considering going to a nearbyTrappist monastery to talk with the former abbot, whom I had metseveral years ago. I should mention that I have a strong admiration ofthe Trappists for the non-sectarian purity or genuineness of theirspiritual and communal life of solitude, meditation, and prayer, andI thought the unusual and brilliant psychiatrist-monk, who muchearlier in his life had been Thomas Merton’s physician, might be ableto give me a helpful perspective on the religious or spiritualsignificance of my Buddha experience. As it turns out, I have notfollowed up on this impulse because I suspect, perhaps unfairly, thathe might put too much of a Catholic spin on my encounter with thestatue.

Surprisingly, my medievalist colleague (and racquetball and tennispartner for many years), who has both a personal and, as it were, aprofessional stake in religion, did not inquire about the details of myexperience, and I did not force them on him. But then, he had a loton his mind, including the death of his mother and an NEH summerseminar for which he had to select the teacher-participants. Theother departmental colleague, a lapsed Protestant and a scholar ofcomparative (European) literature, was immediately interested tohear all about it, and we set up a lunch during which I told him mystory in some detail. His response surprised me in several ways,because he has quite a skeptical intellect and a quick, mostlydelightful but sometimes cynical wit, yet he had no problem increditing what I told him. I was even more surprised when heinformed me that he was not at all surprised that I had thisexperience, because he’d always thought of me as having a Blakeanside, despite my professional interest in and love of Wordsworth, thepoet who, unlike Blake, is always so much attached to the things ofthis world, even in his most visionary moments. Even moresurprisingly, this in so many ways very cosmopolitan and secularacademic told me in all seriousness that he hoped I would not simplylet my experience go by but make something of it, intimating that Ihad a responsibility to act on it or be true to it after such anunanticipated gift. I was both disturbed by his admonition, which


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seemed to make a demand on me I had not really considered or beenwilling to consider, and amused, because it seemed to betray themoralistic Protestant behind the worldly professor.

V

A couple of weeks after my return from Hong Kong, a group ofTibetan Buddhist monks did a sand painting of a mandala in thebasement of our college library, a process that was also recorded ona videocam that allowed for remote viewing via our college website.I liked the combination of modern technology and ancient religiousritual, and I stopped by a couple of times during the several days thatthe monks were at their painting. On my first visit I asked one of theyoung purple-robed monks (there were several in the lobby manningtables with pamphlets and religious items for sale) who spoke Englishwhether my experience with the Buddha statue was something thathe was familiar with from the Buddhist tradition. He showed nosurprise at my very brief account, but said that it was not part of histradition, and that “even our masters don’t have that experience.” Inthe main area where the sand painting was in progress, there was asmall audience that included several Trappist monks from the nearbymonastery (in Piffard). A Tibetan gentleman in a suit was speakingwith them, answering their questions in very good English. I got theimpression he was a lay spokesman and organizer for the group’sAmerican tour.After he and the Trappists finished their conversation,I took my opportunity and asked him if he was a Buddhist orknowledgeable about Buddhism. He said he was very much aBuddhist, after which I again gave a very brief version of my Buddhaexperience. Like the young monk, he did not seem surprised by mystory, but answered, after a reflective pause, that what I hadexperienced was “some kind of karmic opening-up.” I left quiteimpressed with that bit of impromptu wisdom, but soon enough myskeptical self asserted itself with the question: “It sounds good, butwhat the hell is a karmic opening up?”

Now, almost three months later, I’m still under the spell of mymeeting with the Buddha statue, and I still don’t know what to makeof it. Several days ago I watched a PBS Nova episode that dealt with

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recent research on the human brain. The famous Indian-Americanneurologist who was featured in the program and who spoke with anaccent half Bombay and half California repeated the cliché that thehuman brain is the most complex piece of matter in the universe, astatement that strikes me as the ultimate metaphysical chutzpa, sincein order to be able to know that one would have to know the wholeuniverse.A segment in the program featured one of the neurologist’spatients, a man who suffered from epilepsy and who experiencedearthquake-like disturbances in his temporal lobe that left him withpowerful religious feelings and perceptions. I seem to recall he saidsomething to the effect that if his epilepsy could be cured at theexpense of these powerful feelings brought on by his seizures, hewould not want to be cured. The neurologist explained that hisfindings had been misrepresented by the media as proof that there isa religious centre in the brain. He said there isn’t, but theneurological wiring of the brain includes the inducement of religiousemotions.

After watching this Nova episode, I was briefly tempted to thinkthat my Buddha experience was somehow a function of a temporallobe disturbance or malfunction brought on by jet lag, the differentenvironment on the other side of the world, and an overload of newimpressions (after two and half days of sightseeing in Hong Kong),fatigue, and so on. But I have a hard time crediting this neurologicaland—so I think—ultimately reductive explanation. My overall senseand evaluation of my truly strange Buddha experience is not that Isuffered a sudden neurological seizure in which I focused mystimulated religious feelings on the statue in the museum; on thecontrary, I was in a perfectly normal state until I saw the statue at adistance, out of the corner of my eye, and wanted to go over to it andhave a look at it. Only as I walked directly past it did it speak out orreach out to me. I experienced a strong and instant internalsensation, like a wake-up call, an unmistakable signal or messagetrying to reach me.This was even before I had a full-face view of thestatue. I didn’t project onto it; it called me, pulled me into its orbitof power. And the power of that experience continues to resonate inmy mind three months later, something that I have attempted tosuggest in this account.


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On the flight from Chicago to Hong Kong I re-read Conrad’sHeart of Darkness, which I was going to teach for the first time inmany years after my return to the US. In that famous andcontroversial novella, Conrad’s narrator, Marlow, is described severaltimes as assuming the pose of a meditating Buddha. And the story ofhis boat journey up the Congo River into “the heart of darkness” andhis encounter with the evil genius Kurtz is described as one ofMarlow’s “inconclusive experiences.” I would like to borrow thatphrase to describe my encounter with the meditating Buddha in themuseum as my most powerful yet inconclusive experience. What Iencountered was not darkness but an immense non-material andimpersonal force-field or presence. It had no moral or message orinjunction, and it made no demand, but for the brief duration of myexperience, I was lifted up and carried by a cosmic wave.

Looking back on it, my truest sense of the nature or import of myencounter with the Buddha statue is that it was of the nature of ademonstration, as I suggested at the outset—an object lesson,offered completely gratuitously to me, to the massively palpableeffect that there is such a cosmic force or presence or reality. If thereis a tuition fee or a price for such a lesson, I have yet to learn what itis.

Perhaps the most appropriate way to finish my drawn-out accountof an experience that will probably never be finished for me is byoffering the short poem (overleaf) that was in fact my first writtenresponse to it. I have revised it only slightly.

Notes1 Nearly a decade ago I attended a public lecture by a Chinese Chi Gong healer

at a local college. As part of his discussion of the Chi force, he said he wouldsend everyone in the audience a charge of energy that they should feel. He did,and I clearly felt a strong tingling up my spine. I was impressed but was notsure whether he actually “sent” the energy or whether it was some kind ofhypnotic or auto-suggestive phenomenon.

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The Stone Mask(Hong Kong Heritage Museum, Sha Tin, March 14, 2004)

Dead in my tracksstopped I wasby a sculpted rock.The third eyeof its meditating maskdrew me in and liftedme up on a cosmictide immenselypowerful and vast.I felt no fear asthe stone torso breathedin and outbut only a palpable forcefar far beyond anythingI had ever sensed or known.I was very far from home,lost beyond the grasp ofwhere or when or why or what.And all this emanated froma silent Buddha stonethat may have given mea lifelong shock.


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Statue of the Buddha. Hong Kong Heritage Museum, Sha Tin, Hong Kong.Courtesy of photographer:Tanya Kam, 2004.


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my buddha experience

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