This summer, I observed the tenth anniversary of a life-changing event. In July 2011 I was struck head-on by a car as I was riding my bicycle on a country road in Pennsylvania. A helicopter took me to Hershey, where surgeons repaired and reinforced my spine. But the accident made me a paraplegic, unable to feel or use my legs.
After three and a half months in hospitals and nursing homes, I began a new life from a wheelchair. My pain, now chronic, was barely tamped down by an anti-seizure medication that also works on neuropathy. An apartment adapted for a handicapped person, a modified minivan that I could drive with hand controls, and changes to my office and the building that housed it enabled me to return to work as a professor of religious studies specializing in Buddhism.
Many people remarked on my resiliency and lack of self-pity during those difficult months, as though it was something unusual. I don’t know whether that was true, but I think I know the source of my strength: the holy buddhadharma, which for forty-five years has been my touchstone.
I call the buddhadharma “holy” because I know from my own experience that it saved me, and continues to save me. Almost a half-century of absorbing dharma teachings
