Breakfast with Buddha

by Roland Merullo

The world had not changed, not really. With all our impressive technological achievements—the book, the automobile, the airplane, the computer, the looping satellites bouncing TV shows into dry, well-heated homes—we were still the species described in the first parts of the Bible. Some of us murdered and stole and raped; some of us spent our lives chasing money or distraction or the so-called sense pleasures. The family, the village, the tribe, the nation—we still formed ourselves into units in the hope of escaping or softening or denying a kind of ultimate loneliness. And then, conversely, we still seemed to need to divide ourselves into “us” and “them,” liberal and conservative, black and white, native and immigrant, man and woman, believer and nonbeliever, Jew and Christian and Muslim and Buddhist and Hindu. We still laughed. We still faced death on a field of interior solitariness.