In 1965, I was five years old living in Westchester, California which is not too far from LAX.  Our neighborhood consisted of families who, like mine, had just bought their first home.  There were children my age up and down the street and around the block.  We would play together after school until the street lights came on and then we would all run home for dinner. 

We got a lot of exercise running from house to house. We loved climbing trees and playing hide-and-go-seek.  But one day there was a revolution.  It was a technological advance that I had not seen coming, one of my friends rode up on a bicycle. I realized suddenly, that feet-people would evolve into wheel-people. I needed to be part of this movement to remain socially relevant.

Luckily, I had an old red vintage bicycle in the garage.  Really vintage, it even had solid rubber tires, no air. I got it out, dusted it off, hoping I could just immediately ride away with my bicycle friends. But instead, I immediately tipped over. I needed help. I needed someone to teach me how to ride a bike. This responsibility was shouldered by my Father.  For weeks he would run alongside me holding on to the back of the seat helping me balance, saving me from tipping over.  

But ultimately, I would have to go solo.  I would have to learn to stay balanced all by myself.  But each time my Dad let go, I would fall,  I tried so hard. I held the handle bars so tightly and would quickly jerk back and forth trying to maintain my balance. If I felt like I was drifting right then I would jerk myself to the left.  I was always over correcting. I was overthinking about balancing myself rather than experiencing balance.  

After weeks of effort, I was feeling defeated.  I think my Dad was even losing enthusiasm for this Father-Son project. At five years old, I felt that I would never successfully ride a bicycle. But this would mean losing contact with all my newly mobile friends.  There was one option left for me, I also had a vintage red scooter in the garage, again with solid rubber tires. I swallowed my pride and rode away.  I was the only kid riding a scooter but at least I was still riding with my pack. I decided to make the best of it and enjoy my scooter.

Over the next month or two I got really good on this scooter. I could fly up and down the street often faster than my bicycle friends. I was truly free.  But then one day, as we were taking a break, I got on one of my friends’ bike. It felt comfortable this time. It felt part of me. And for some reason, I just rode away. My eyes were as big as saucers. I rode all the way home to show my Dad that I was now a cyclist. 

It seemed too good to be true. I was able to ride a bicycle without ever having to practice. But I had been practicing effortlessly on my scooter all along.  When I had given up trying to balance myself, I had unwittingly let an internal sense of balance develop within me without any calculation or effort. Of course, riding a scooter takes much more effort than riding a bike but the effort was different. 

This is much like the difference between Self-Power practices and Other-Power practices in Buddhism.  We often think of these two terms as nouns.  For example, a Self-Power practice is sitting in meditation while an Other-Power practice is saying Namuamidabutsu. But I have recently realized that it might be much more effective to think about them as adjectives.  In my example, I was practicing Self-Power cycling and Other-Power scootering. 

When I had given up trying to balance myself on a bicycle then I was able to let the scooter balance me. It was a different perspective. I wasn’t trying to accomplish anything.  I merely wanted to get from one end of the block to the other. It was only then that my internal center and that of the scooter were able to merge. The scooter had become an extension of my body.

I present this example not as a metaphor for religious practice but as an example of how effective practice actually works, religious or otherwise. This is how we can find balance between our finite self and the infinite self while merely saying Namuamidabutsu.

In gassho, Rev Jon Turner