Rebel Without A Clue

Having been gifted with the seasonal lurgy as a New Year present, I have developed a close personal relationship with my bed and have become an unwilling television addict. It’s hard to find the concentration for anything useful when breathing feels like an optional extra, so I’ve sat through some pretty dire stuff as a distraction from my own endless soundtrack of coughing and wheezing. However, my eyes lit up when I spied a new BBC programme called Extreme Pilgrim, where a Church of England vicar sets off on journeys to China, India and Egypt, in search of a more mystical path to enlightenment. That just had to be good …

Hmm. The Rev Peter Owen-Jones turned out to be a rather weather-beaten ex advertising industry Indiana Jones wannabe, with an enormous streak of hubris for a local Sussex vicar, who states – with no sense of irony, despite his astonishingly closed mind – that “What I’m looking for is a spirituality that is absent from Western Christianity. A spirituality I know exists in the extremes of world religions. I hope to enter worlds where rule book and doctrine are replaced by an individual relationship with God and where the attainment of enlightenment is won by hardship, privation and pain. I have to become an extreme pilgrim.” Holy Spiritual Quest, Batman!

As the Rev sets out on his own personal Boys’ Own trek towards enlightenment, he heads for the Shaolin temple, deep in the Henan province of China – the spiritual home of martial arts. Being a gentleman of a certain age, it’s more than a little shortsighted to assume that a quick week of training at a Wushu school nearby would give him the necessary martial arts preparation to gain enlightenment through the practice of Shaolin kung fu. Shockingly for our Pete, he finds it rather tough. Funny that. Practitioners spend lifetimes just mastering small aspects of these forms, yet he can’t crack it – or become enlightened – in only a few days. Go figure.

Then he makes the classic tradesman’s mistake and starts to blame his tools. He finds Shaolin too busy and commercial, as it draws visitors from all over the world, saying he’s “not sure the Shaolin brand has a great deal to do with Buddhism really; even less I fear to do with meditation”. Sadly, he hasn’t managed to grasp the concept that his inability to find any inner stillness even in the heart of a temple says more about him than it does the location. So he decides he will fare better at the much more remote stronghold of San Yang, an 8-hour trek away, 5,000 feet up in the mountains behind Shaolin. That’s where it really gets interesting.

San Yang is Shangri-La – a stunningly verdant restored monastery carved into the mountainside, a dizzying drop to the valley below, reached by vertiginous stairways and rope bridges. Again, the approach is free of doctrine and simply consists of the practice of a traditional Shaolin form and treating all daily activities as opportunities for flowing movement. Again, the Rev fails to grasp the concept and just becomes annoyed that he can’t do the moves in the right sequence. Finally he asks the Zen master for further instruction to get him on the right track, but doesn’t get quite what he bargained for.

Still blaming the environment and the practice, Peter asks “Why in this place of stillness do I feel such frustration? Why is Zen so difficult to comprehend?”. What follows is a masterclass in Zen, so beautifully clear and descriptive that it actually made having to endure the perils of Pete utterly worthwhile.

The Zen Master replied, “The reason is very simple. You don’t have a profound understanding of Zen. The environment here is different from Ta Gou and Shaolin – all you have to do is become harmonious with it. All your anxiety and worry is generated in your mind. So you have to question yourself thoroughly. What are the reasons for your disquiet? You have to think deeply about it. You need to learn Zen to release yourself from life’s problems. You have to enter Zen before you can learn martial arts. Like this morning, carrying things up the mountain – this is a kind of realisation of Zen. Everything is constantly changing, including your life in the UK, but all difficulties are temporary. Things are changing non-stop. Just now you’ve seen the birds in the sky soaring so naturally. Look at these trees, how peaceful they are. When it’s windy, they’ll bend with the winds; without wind they are very calm. To really learn Zen, you have to become one with nature – very harmonious, very relaxed, very carefree. This way you can have a healthy body and a good mind, and rid yourself of all obstacles.”

In his inimitable style and finally with a glimmer of self-awareness, Peter responded, “Maybe I was more wound up than I thought. I have a lot of realising to do.” D’ya think?

It’s so frustrating to watch someone being given the enormous privilege of studying within the Shaolin temple and at San Yang, yet who didn’t appear to have done any real preparation for the experience, was not open-minded and quite frankly was astonishingly insensitive to the culture in which he was supposed to be immersing himself. At one point the Rev told a Shaolin monk that he found meditation difficult because he was distracted by images of women’s breasts. Can’t imagine that would seem particularly tactful if he were chatting to his local bishop, so it’s safe to assume it’s not de rigueur for a Buddhist temple either. Let’s hope he grows a little more self-awareness (and an ability to self-censor) before he mixes with the Sadhus in India and the Christian desert hermits in Egypt. God help them.

This week, take a look at where you are focusing more on the process of something rather than the essence of it. We lose our joy when things become rote and functional and we forget to simply engage in the pleasure of each moment of practice. If you want to reawaken a sense of aliveness, either engage more deeply in something you love or do something completely different. What could you be more open-minded about? Is there something – a practice, a sport, a game – you’ve never tried and have always pooh-poohed? Take a risk and give it a try. The aim of the game is to immerse yourself in an activity so deeply that it becomes a meditation for you, bringing you a greater sense of inner stillness.

If you’d like to see for yourself the questionable spectacle of a pseudo-trendy English vicar making bizarre observations on the spiritual behaviour of Johnny Foreigner, you can download Extreme Pilgrim at www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer, where it is available for 7 days after transmission.


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All material © 2008 Alison Porter. No article may be reproduced in full or in part without the express permission of the author. (Originally posted 7 Jan 08)