THE GENERATION of the 1960s—my generation—was the first in the West to practice Buddhism in appreciable numbers. In those days, the sense of upheaval was very strong and, for young men facing the Vietnam draft, immediate and dire. I remember this all too well. I left college in 1968 with a very hazy future. At any moment, I could be drafted to fight in what I considered to be an unjust and futile war. And just a few short years before that, everything had seemed so bright. The war in Vietnam shattered my generation, leaving us dazed and confused.
It was also the era of the psychedelic revolution (which had, ironically, come about as a result of Cold War CIA experiments). This promised a way out: though we might have no future, we could “tune in, turn on, and drop out.” We could revolutionize our minds.
When the drugs turned out to be an unstable answer, and the anti-war politics an exhausting dead end, many of us turned to Eastern religions, which seemed similar, but more solid. They included mind-bending meditation techniques that had the advantage of not being illegal or dangerous, and profound ancient teachings that provided a sanctioned way of looking at life that was radically different from the American consumerist culture we were so fed up with.
In short, we craved transcendence. The last thing on our minds was morality, which we considered part and parcel of the false and uptight America that was ruining our lives.
We are once again living in traumatic times. Probably now, as then, many hope to find escape and relief through Buddhist practice. They will find, as we have, that as one’s Buddhist practice matures, the impulse to escape relaxes as one’s point of view opens up. Eventually, it becomes clear that ethical conduct, and moral restraint, however much this is not what we may have been looking for, are essential elements of the path to liberation.
Classically, the Buddhist path consists of three great practices, ethical conduct; , meditative absorption; and , transcendent wisdom. These three depend on one another.
