I would like to share with you one of my most favorite Buddhist stories. There are many like this one but this one really resonated with me. I would like to think of it as my legendary, quasi-autobiographical Buddhist journey.

There was a young boy who really wanted to learn about Buddhism. He decides to leave home to join a monastery on a faraway mountain top. He shaves his head and becomes a novice monk.         

He quickly finds that he has far too many chores to do. Early each morning he has to clean the altar even though it seems like it is already clean. He must offer the Buddha breakfast prior to morning service which is before even his own breakfast after service. He finds it very difficult to chant on an empty stomach.

He really wants to study Buddhism but it doesn’t seem like there is much time for that. Instead, he is always cleaning, making offerings, chanting and bowing. He wishes that more of his time was spent in lecture, learning the teachings.

He prefers being led from a premise to a conclusion but his teachers seem to talk around the subject, often speak in endless riddles. He didn’t know this but his teachers wanted him to intuit the conclusion. This is called circumlocution but he thought it felt like they were just “talking in circles”.

After a year, he was on the verge of quitting and began to complain to the head monk of his temple. He was hoping for a teaching but was instead given yet another task. It seemed like more of a punishment. The head monk needed a written message taken across town to an older, senior monk at another temple.  

The young boy took the note, tucked it into his robes and went out the temple gates. He hadn’t realized how far he had to walk. After two miles he was only half way there. He was not happy about this and even less so once it began to rain. 

He finally made it to the temple soaking wet. He knocked on the large wooden doors and the older monk answered. The boy handed him the note, expecting a verbal response. But the older monk merely smiled and handed him yet another note. He felt like a carrier pigeon; no longer a novice monk.

He returned to his monastery after another four-mile walk, still in the pouring rain. He made it back, looking and feeling like a wet dog. Waiting for him at the monastery doors was his head monk. He was just standing there smiling as had the senior monk. He handed him the new note. Without reading it he placed into his robes still smiling.

Our young monk finally lost his temper. He was tired, cold and soaking wet. The head monk started laughing out loud. He looked at the poor boy and said “Why are you upset? Don’t you know that when you go out into the rain, you get wet?”     

It was in that moment that the young boy had a moment of sudden insight. The Buddha Dharma had been raining down upon him all along. He had been immersed in Buddhism all along and was soaked to the bone with it. The young boy now knew what the head monk had known all along. “When you go out into the rain, you get wet” – and now, for the first time, the young boy could exhale and practice. 

I realized from this story that just being in a Sangha and showing up for services is enough to immerse myself within the teachings. It is not so much what we learn in an academic way but rather what we realize within our bodies and intuit with our minds. It takes no real effort. It is as easy and natural as getting wet as we walk in the rain. 

In gassho, Rev Jon Turner