Great wisdom from my Stepson, Zachary Jucha
I have been studying Buddhism for the past 11 years and tonight for the first time I realized what it means to be a Buddhist. Buddhism is not a doctrine, it is not a set of rituals or morals, it is not endless ontological intellectualizations, it is not even a daily practice of meditation, prayer or yoga.
Being a Buddhist simply means that you have made a conscious decision to be a hero.
For those of you that don’t know why I have devoted so much of my life to this religion, that is the reason.
Tonight I met up with an old training partner who I grappled with periodically and occasionally watched MMA fights with before I was injured and fell ill this year. He was leaving town and wanted to see me before he left and to be honest beyond these limited, specific interactions I did not know him very well. However, I could not have prepared myself for what I was about to discover. As we sat and drank beers and watched the fights as usual he began to talk about what he thought of me.
What I found out is that even though since becoming ill this year and losing my ability to do martial arts or even exercise at all indefinitely, losing about 20 lbs of mostly muscle that I worked my ass off for, losing my ability to work, losing my girlfriend, losing every ounce of self worth or motivation to the point that even when I can physically get out of bed I mentally can’t think of any reason why I should; even in spite of all of these things; even though this is the person who I see when I look in the mirror, this is not who my old training partner saw.
The person who he saw was a teacher, a person who grasped intuitively the mechanics of our shared art, a person who he hated because he was so formidable, a person who put his heart into the practice and a person who changed the person who he was for the better. Basically, a person who in my mind I would call a hero.
Did I ever think these things about myself for a second? Of course not.
The only thing that ever crossed my mind when I was training was one thing: This is my life. This is me baring my soul to the world. For better or for worse, this is the very core of who I am. There will be no moment after this and there was no moment before this. Every movement of my feet, every punch, every throw, every time I got hit in the face, every time I was slammed on the ground, every time I choked someone out or bent their arm backwards, this was the poetry of my value as a human being. This wasn’t something I manufactured or some measurable attainment that I wanted to achieve for myself. This was the air I breathed and the liquid flowing through my veins and I gave it freely to anyone around me who was willing to receive it.
Someone recently asked me what my “center” is and after trying poorly to explain it I now realize this nearly ineffable concept is just that. I can only describe it as giving your whole self without question instantaneously for someone else for no ostensible reason and without any expectation of a beneficial return.
The point is that if your life’s work doesn’t reflect this, meaning what you do with yourself every single day, then give it up.
There is no solace in God. There is no satisfaction in acquiring things or status. There is no refuge in friendship or family.
There is no reward for serving yourself.
After almost 9 years of searching for truth in martial arts, I found it, and I found it at the all time lowest point in my life.
All life is equal and not a single one of us can pick and choose which suffering befalls us or decide who deserves this suffering. Any attempt at doing so is masturbatory. We can only realize that suffering permeates every facet of the existence of every living thing and we have the choice of endlessly attempting to relieve our own suffering or try, against all of the odds, to relieve the suffering of others. On the one hand we toil and labor and fight and argue and obsess over mere mirages that lead us into a barren desert where in the end we find out we never really got anything we wanted and when we did it never lasted anyway and we will leave this transient existence without ever accomplishing anything worthwhile.
On the other hand, there is but one goal worth toiling over. One goal which is immortal. One goal that can never be taken from us.
This goal is simply the decision to be a hero.
We will never know whose heroes we become and we can never expect recognition for making this decision. We can only live this way fully; protecting, nurturing and caring for all forms of life at any cost to ourselves and our ultimately unremarkable, generic, silly ideas about our personal wants and needs.
This is what it means to be a Buddhist.
This is what it means to be a martial artist.