A Teacher’s Hard Lesson: Leaving His Students Behind

Americans, the Buddhist monk would tell his students, think in linear terms, a straight progression. One, two, three, four; A, B, C, D. Logical. Precise. One step leading to the next until you cross the finish line.

But life is far more complex and mysterious than that, he taught, moving in great looping circles, endless cycles of life and death. So don’t get too attached to things, he warned.

Particularly, don’t get attached to the teacher.

Some of us got it, some didn’t.

But even those of us who got it let ourselves get attached to the hip, iconoclastic Vietnamese monk who liked to be called “C.E.” rather than his more formal Buddhist name.

C.E. had hinted that at some point he’d be leaving the monastery in Long Beach, but no one seemed prepared for his startling announcement at the start of a spiritual retreat in late December that he was departing immediately to go into seclusion in an unspecified wilderness.

Several times a week, C.E. had allowed us to bring into the monastery the confusion, ego-driven desires, gossip and tensions of our daily lives. With great patience and conviction he would share his spiritual beliefs, which often clashed with such things as our eating meat, fear of death and striving for financial security.

Usually, for reasons that are still hard to put into words, we left feeling better than we had when we began.

*

When C.E. opened the monastery on Ocean Boulevard a year ago he triggered a life-transforming spiritual adventure for dozens, if not hundreds, of congregants who flocked there for lessons on the dharma, or the essence of Buddhist teaching.

The monastery buzzed with life as worshipers, meditators, students and the just plain curious came from all over Southern California. Some Vietnamese families drove from as far away as Ohio and Kentucky to hear the monk who could make even the most mysterious Buddhist scriptures crystal clear.

C.E. moved easily from English to Chinese to Vietnamese as he looked out on an assembly of people from the United States, China, Vietnam, Burma, Thailand and Taiwan.

It was something special. A dozen members of a “friendship group” C.E. had formed talked about it on a recent outing to Angeles National Forest. They felt they had been part of one of those mysterious opportunities that occurs when gifted people happen along with the ability to change the way you look at the world. With his bald head, begging bowl and monk’s robes, the slender, engaging monk seemed to have stepped out of another world.

He had.

Born in Vietnam 37 years ago, he fled the bloody carnage there in his late teens, spent days floating with other refugees on small boats and then lived in detention camps until he made his way to San Francisco.

He moved to Long Beach about four years ago, but spent most of that time supervising the training of what grew to a group of 20 novice monks, nearly all of them teenagers.

Upholding the ascetic tradition, he had given up money, family and a home life. He spent long hours each day in silent meditation. Once, living hermit-like in a forest in Washington for several years, he memorized half of the 80-volume Avatamsaka Sutra, one of the most revered of Buddhist scriptures.

But he was also thoroughly modern--bright, college educated, witty.

He loved California. It took 600 years for Buddhism to grow deep roots in China, he said. “It will take much longer than that in the U.S. But we are patient.”

Once, during a class, a Vietnamese man referred to a meditative experience as “the sounds of silence.” Without missing a beat, C.E. picked up the harmony of the Simon and Garfunkel standard. “Hello darkness, my old friend,” he sang, cracking the class up.

His decision to open the dark and sober monastery to the public stemmed from the orthodox Mahayana Buddhist tradition of reaching out to people. A celebration of the Buddha’s birthday drew more than 600 people, with congregants filling the Buddha Hall and spilling out the doors onto the lawn.

The events transcended religion. C.E. made sure all the women who entered the monastery received corsages. Everyone was fed elaborate vegetarian lunches. Programs were printed and distributed. Gifts--dozens of them--were handed out in a celebration honoring older people.

Sometimes, the novice monks would put on a taiko drumming recital, with their audience peering at them from tents and tables set up in the monastery’s garden.

C.E., adept with both a laptop computer and a cellular phone, took on the roles of teacher, counselor and administrator, all the while struggling to maintain his vows of sacrifice and seclusion.

Eventually, the paradoxes caught up to him.

*

He tried to explain to his friends that there was a price to pay for reaching out, and the price was the unleashing of his ego.

He told them he would need several years of isolation and meditation in a forest or wilderness to compensate. He also wanted to complete the vows he had made to his own teacher and complete the memorization of the Avatamsaka Sutra.

Because he needed to be alone, he refused to say where he was going.

“I am no longer in L.A.” he said in one of his last e-mail messages.

“Wandering the mountains, looking for my permanently impermanent dwelling among the trees and bushes. Probably this is the greatest time in my life: bye bye to all binds and ties.

“Enjoying freedom in nature, appreciating the dharma, climbing the depths and heights of my minds.”