In this four-part blog series, a Christian seminary professor and scholar of Buddhism explains how the Buddha’s teaching has made him a keener observer of the human condition, particularly the aging process. The four posts of this blog series move through (1) the author’s academic study of Buddhism and love of basketball, (2) the story of Prince Siddhartha becoming the Buddha, (3) the Buddha’s teaching, and (4) what the author has learned from the Buddha about the human condition.
Professor Paul David Numrich. Photo courtesy of Methodist Theological School in Ohio.
Post #1: Studying Buddhism, Playing Basketball
During the summer before entering the doctoral program in religion at Northwestern University, I devoured a reading list on Judaism from my soon-to-be advisor. When I arrived on campus in the fall, I learned that my advisor had left for another university. My new advisor, Edmund F. Perry, asked me what I intended to do in the program.
“Jewish studies!” I said enthusiastically.
“There are too many scholars of Judaism out there,” he replied, matter-of-factly. “You’ll never make a name for yourself. Come with me and study Theravada Buddhism.”
I had studied Buddhism in college but not in-depth. I didn’t have any aversion to Buddhism, but neither did I have the affinity with it that I had with Judaism. (My best friend says I was a rabbi in a previous lifetime.) So, I trusted Perry’s advice and plunged into Theravada Buddhism, eventually writing my dissertation and first book on immigrant Theravada temples in the United States.
I have never regretted that decision. Buddhism continues to intrigue me intellectually and challenge me theologically. As a Christian theist, I must take seriously a non-theistic tradition that has stood the test of time, even longer than my own tradition. Of course, longevity is not necessarily an indicator of truth, but it does bespeak a religion’s capacity to satisfy the existential needs of its adherents. After all, not every religion lasts.
I have written elsewhere about a Christian’s obligations in interreligious relations, which include recognizing the “good things” in other religions, to quote the Second Vatican Council’s document Nostra Aetate. I recognize Buddhism’s core virtue of compassion as good, for example, because it is consistent with Christian teaching. I have also learned some new things from Buddhism not found in Christian teaching yet consistent with it, such as moment-by-moment mindful living, though I admit to being a poor student of the Buddha in that regard.
In this series of blog posts, I reflect on what I have learned from the Buddha’s astute observations on the human condition, particularly the aging process. Richard Gombrich writes in What the Buddha Thought, “My admiration is for the Buddha, whom I consider to be one of the greatest thinkers—and greatest personalities—of whom we have record in human history. Ranking people in an order of merit is a pursuit fit only for parlour games, but I maintain that the Buddha belongs in the same class as Plato and Aristotle, the giants who created the tradition of western philosophy.” That said, I begin, not with philosophers, but with a professional athlete’s observations on aging.
Kobe Bryant was one of the all-time greats of basketball. He played twenty seasons for the National Basketball Association’s Los Angeles Lakers, winning five championships under Phil Jackson, sometimes called the Zen Master Coach (though Jackson is a spiritual eclectic). In January 2020, Bryant, his 13-year-old daughter Gianna, and seven others died in a helicopter crash. The outpouring of shock and grief was widespread.
A few years earlier, Bryant had announced his retirement in a poem titled “Dear Basketball.” It was as much a love sonnet to the game as anything else, but it included some poignant insights about growing old:
You [basketball] gave a six-year-old boy his Laker dream
And I’ll always love you for it.
But I can’t love you obsessively for much longer.
This season is all I have left to give.
My heart can take the pounding
My mind can handle the grind
But my body knows it’s time to say goodbye.
When Bryant followed the line about bidding basketball goodbye with, “And that’s OK. I’m ready to let you go,” Buddhists understand what he meant. It took Kobe Bryant many years to realize that obsessive clinging to something we can’t keep within our grasp causes us suffering or existential stress, so we must let it go. He said he began to see the light during his meditation practice when his mind drifted less and less toward basketball: “to me, that was really the first indicator that this game is not something I can obsess over for much longer.”
Like Kobe Bryant—and with only a slightly less stellar basketball career!—I have had an obsessive love affair with the game. Also, like Kobe Bryant, I see the day coming when I will have to let it go. It is harder each time to muster the energy to play. Every year I tape up more body parts and do more stretching before I step onto the court. I am not yet the age of the Buddha in the following quote, but I know exactly what he was saying to his beloved disciple: “Now I am frail, Ananda, old, aged, far gone in years. This is my eightieth year, and my life is spent. Even as an old cart, Ananda, is held together with much difficulty, so the body of the Tathagata [referring to himself] is kept going only with supports.” (Mahaparinibbana Sutta, transl. Sister Vajira and Francis Story)
Consolation of Ananda at Gijjhakuta, Jamalgarhi, at the Indian Museum, Kolkata. Photograph by Anandajoti Bhikkhu.
Although many readers are familiar with the story of the Buddha, it will be worth recounting key elements of it in my next two blog posts in order to place my observations on the human condition—especially aging—in context.
Contributed by Paul David Numrich. Numrich is Professor in the Snowden Chair for the Study of Religion and Interreligious Relations, Methodist Theological School in Ohio. His publications include Old Wisdom in the New World: Americanization in Two Immigrant Theravada Buddhist Temples (University of Tennessee Press, 1996), Buddhists, Hindus, and Sikhs in America: A Short History (co-author, Oxford University Press, 2008), and North American Buddhists in Social Context (editor and contributor, Brill and the Association for the Sociology of Religion, 2008).