The Delight of Knowing Very Little

The second of the Three Jewels of refuge is the Dharma. The Dharma is the Buddhist teachings generally but when we say the Buddha - or Buddhism - teaches the Dharma, this brings out a second meaning which is the ‘law’. So Buddhism teachers the law, as in the laws of nature, principal amongst these being that everything is constantly changing. Which has important implications for all of us.

Here I’m not going to go into what these implications are. This is really the subject of everything that is still to come - a really huge subject. But rather I want to focus on what it feels like to have a teaching in our life that says to us, practice me and your life, and the lives of those around you, will be made, at the very least, significantly better. That’s quite a claim and an offer.

My first really powerful exposure to the Dharma came when I was twenty-two and living in Bath. A friend of my girlfriend at that time had recently arrived back from India where he had been studying the Dharma amongst the Tibetans. We met him in a cafe on the corner of New Bond Street, where Anthropology now is, and I remember just two things. The first is how very serious he was. There was something really other about him, not at all like my hippy friends who like me were interested in spirituality. The second was what we talked about - actually we didn’t talk, he did. He more or less sat down with his tea and instantly gave us a long and detailed teaching on the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths. The truths of suffering, its cause, its cessation and the path that makes this happen. The essence of the Dharma. Now looking back I have an image of myself as a desert longing for water. I was utterly rapt and spellbound. Here was someone who was telling the truth at last. What he was saying was something I had been waiting for and yet when I heard it, it was also completely familiar. Writing this, I could almost say it was at this moment that my lifelong love of the Dharma became conscious. However, I was also young and inclined to infidelity!

Eighteen months later my pursuit of the Dharma had lead me to the guest house within the monastery of a very famous lama, Kalu Rinpoche, just outside of Darjeeling, a British hill station situated high up in the Himalayan foot hills. I remember the clouds faintly drifting through our room whenever we left both the door and the window open. In this recollection I am no longer the rapt new convert within the Bath cafe but someone much more conflicted. In my pile of books is C.G. Jung’s autobiography, his Alchemical Studies and William James’s classic, The Varieties of Religious Experience. I am definitely two timing in my spiritual relationships and having serious doubts about the Dharma - wondering would I be better off with my own European mystical traditions?  What I loved in Bath, in India is overwhelming and I feel lost. However, there is also something else going on that I have no understanding of. Visiting Kalu Rinpoche in his room, as I present him with the white ceremonial scarf that is the usual greeting gift between Tibetans, he leans forward and, gripping my head very firmly, says, “Take refuge in the Buddha, the Dharma and Sangha”. I am convinced that somehow he knows what is going on in my head. I feel confused, guilty and very uncomfortably seen. This pivotal moment does not resolve my confusion, and what happens next is another long story, but thinking again about it now it does make me wonder whether the Dharma is just a passive thing - like a big book - or whether there is a power within it, that like Kalu Rinpoche, is capable of reaching out and grasping us? The Dharma is sentient!

So where is this all going? Well, I obviously fell back in love and am now firmly wedded. However, all good relationships have the ability to work through storms and also continue to offer surprises and more opportunities for growth. And I think this is also true of the Dharma. In my experience it is not something to blindly follow. Doing this almost begs the inevitability that at some point we will suddenly switch and be no longer interested. Rather, it is something to properly and continually study. To think about and emotionally explore. Something to test and push about. But also something that we allow to push and test us. It cuts both ways. And I think we are allowed to pick and choose what we believe in and what we don’t. I am impatient with a devotee who says I may not be a Buddhist unless I believe everything my particular school of Buddhism teaches. I’m too much of an historian to not know that the Dharma is also full of the most delicious contradictions and in many of its small details offers a variety of views. This is the challenge, the fun of it. The Dharma has been around for almost two and a half thousand years and is the product of huge numbers of the most intelligent and creative minds in Asia and the Far East. It’s pure imagination. Finally I know it’s a subject I can only ever skim the surface of. I will die knowing next to nothing, and I love this enormity of not-knowing, it’s so exciting.

And of course fundamentally it’s just one big recipe book that shows us how to cook ourselves. Yum.

NW. 9 October 2025