Ronin Buddhism: Walking a Spiritual Path Alone

By Darren Lamb

Traditional Buddhism teaches us to take refuge in three things; The Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha (those people we practice with). These three things make up the foundation of almost all Buddhist practices. While the Buddha and the Dharma can be found almost anywhere, often times there might not be a Sangha to be a member of. What if there is not one in present in your state? Or what if it’s illegal or dangerous to practice in your area? You may have to practice alone.
In the days of the Samurai there were people called Ronin. A Ronin was a Samurai without a master to serve. Those who practice Buddhism unconventionally might feel a bit like a Ronin since they don’t have a formal teacher, and will often times feel alone.
Ronin Buddhism is about believing in ourselves to the point where we dare to walk a spiritual path alone.
Siddhartha didn’t have a Sangha. He ultimately ditched others and went it alone. After all, you’re the one who has to sit on the cushion. No one else can reach enlightenment for you.
Whether you’re a beginner or a reincarnated Lama, this book has something for you. Taking a nontraditional and often silly approach to the practice, Ronin Buddhism will make you think about Buddhism in new and entertaining ways.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Darren Lamb
• Release date: Oct 20, 2015
• ISBN: 9781515228264

Darren Lamb

Darren Lamb is a former Marine and a Veteran of the first Gulf War. He has BA’s in Philosophy and English Literature from The University of Utah and has studied the martial arts for over thirty years. Darren throws a mean yo-yo and frequently wears a pink astronaut suit. He has taught Zen and meditation throughout the nation and is available for workshops and meditation groups. He lives in Salt Lake City.

Book preview

Introduction

Mom, Dad…I think I might be a Buddhist.

Buddhism kind of snuck up on me.  I never intended on practicing, and in fact for the majority of my life, I have had quite an aversion to most organized religions.  Growing up in Salt Lake City, I was raised Mormon as one might guess.   I began to go to the local Mormon Church at a young age, mostly because I saw all my friends and neighbors going to the big, cool looking building in my neighborhood every Sunday, and I wanted to see what all the hullabaloo was about.  I was way too young to have an understanding about the differences between religions, or that there even were differences.  To my young mind, church was kind of like football, the Catholics were the Cowboys and the Muslims were the Raiders.  There were lots of different teams, but we were all playing the same game.

The first time I ever realized there was a difference, and how this difference affected people, was when I was around eight-years old and in the Cub Scouts.  In Utah, the Boy Scouts hold all of their meetings in Mormon churches, and in fact it’s a LDS church calling to be a Scout Master. Every Scout meeting started and ended with prayer and this seemed completely natural to me.

Then, this boy moved into our neighborhood and became my friend.  His parents saw my scouting uniform and asked me about it. Once they saw my enthusiasm, they decided they wanted their son to join the Boy Scouts as well. It would be a great way for him to make new friends and give him something to do during the summer months.  What none of us realized was that my friend and his family were Jewish, and we were living in Utah.

When my friend wasn’t allowed to become a Boy Scout because of his religious preference, it was the first time in my life I saw the stigma between religions as anything more than a friendly rivalry.  It also made me want to know about all the differences intimately.  If we were going to pass judgment and hatred upon people based upon a belief, I wanted to know why.    I became fascinated with the different ways people interpreted God and how they chose to worship.  It’s important to state that this was when religion became fun and interesting for me. I never looked at any of the differences as a way to prove I was right,or even worse, make someone else wrong.  I never understood the hostility I would sometimes see in one person’s feelings towards another’s of a different belief.  I thought it was all great, and everything I learned about other religions brought me closer to my God.

When I turned thirteen, I was introduced to Buddhism, but wouldn’t be aware of it until many years later.  At my Junior High School there was a community education program where they would hold dance and cooking classes throughout the week.  As I was looking through the class catalog, I saw a listing for a six-week Kenpo Karate class.  I asked my mom if I could join, and she reluctantly said yes.

I had an incredible instructor who taught me so much more than just a system of martial arts.  He taught me how to be a man and was a father figure to me when I really needed one (Thanks, Dave).  If you were to ask him about any of this, he would completely deny it and say he did nothing more than punch me around a little bit.  It seems like all the best teachers have this attitude.  I stayed with Dave long after that community education class ended.  He took me on as a private student, although many others would join us from time to time, and my life was never the same.

When I was around seventeen, the LDS church did what they do to all men of that age; they started to train me for a mission.  Part of my training was to teach a primary class to five- and six-year olds.  Primary, for those non-Mormons out there, is basically like Sunday School for all the little boys and girls.  If you were to hang out with me for more than two minutes, you will find I’m basically a big child myself, so having me teach children is either the most natural thing in the world or the most chaotic.

During one class, I asked the children what they wanted to be when they grew up in life.  In an almost Stepford Wives/Invasion of the Body Snatchers way, the boys all told me that they wanted to go on a mission and the girls all told me that they wanted to marry a missionary.  I thought this was fine, but when I asked them what they wanted to do after they did their mission time and got married, I got the deer in the headlights look.  It’s like they had never even thought life could exist after that.

I pressed them, and finally one boy told me he wanted to be an astronaut. He then quickly went on to tell me how it would never happen for him, because he’s not very good at math and he has bad eyesight.  The kid was five-years old, already giving up on his dream, and buying into the stories we tell ourselves to prevent us from trying.  Other kids in the class had similar outlooks and I found this to be disheartening.

What I did the next week was to bring in some small pine boards and ask the kids if they thought they would be able to break them.  All the kids said no.  I then proceeded to teach them how to throw a proper punch and a proper front kick.  By the end of the Sunday School class, all of them had broken a board with either a punch or a kick.  I explained that they could do anything if they were willing to try hard, have faith in God, and learn the correct ways to do things.  When the class was over, the boys and girls all took their broken boards with them to show their parents.  I went home that day feeling ecstatic.

The next week I was called into the Bishop’s office where the church did something called disfellowship to me.  It’s not quite ex-communication, where they kick you out of the church entirely, it just meant that I would have to find a new church to worship, because nobody wanted me to stay where I currently was.  Apparently, word got out that I was teaching violence in the Sunday School and there was to be none of that.  

I never even got a chance to explain what I was trying to teach.

It was the last time I went to the Mormon Church.

Three weeks later, I got my mission calling in the mail.  I didn’t even open the letter to see where I would have been sent.  With a great deal of depression, the letter went straight into the trash.

Even though I was very distraught and feeling very lost in life, this was the moment where my true spiritual journey began.  For the first time in my life, I was truly alone, without a religious group of peers or a structured system of religious education.  It ended up being the best thing to ever happen to me.

I decided I would bury myself in my martial arts training.  By this time, I already had close to five years of hard training with Dave, and had been training with other instructors as well, including Larry Dillenbeck, who would become my mentor in life and one of my greatest spiritual teachers.

On my eighteenth birthday, instead of leaving for a mission, as had been my life plan, I shipped off to the Marine Corps where I continued to practice, train, and teach the martial arts.  Throughout the next twenty-five years, I traveled to various places to train with specific instructors and continued to learn everything I could from anyone I could.  I even came back to train with Larry and go through a martial system with him, but unfortunately I never had the opportunity to train with Dave again.

Over those decades, as my understanding of the martial arts deepened, I began to see the philosophical aspects to them.  I tried to apply combat principles to every form of my life, I was a hard-ass Marine after all, but then strange things started to happen to me.  You would probably think that applying combat principles to everyday life would just lead to a life of violence and hostility.  However, just the opposite happened.  Like the Samurai who would meditate on their own destruction day after day, I too, would look for every conceivable way to destroy myself.  Yet, I was at peace with myself and generally happy.

When you spend all your time looking for an enemy to fight, your mind will find one, and more often than not the enemy it finds to fight is itself.  All the great masters would say the true battles lie within.  I never understood exactly what that meant until I started to put my training into application in my daily life.  That was when the real changes started happening.

I stopped arguing with people, because I knew what we were upset about most of the time really didn’t matter at all.  I began to see how everything was connected to each other in ways I could never fully understand.  I found the more I relaxed, the harder I could strike, and the faster I could move.  People started wanting to hang out with me more and my sense of humor became the strongest muscle I had.

The drama seemed to vanish from my relationships, and more importantly, I seemed to be genuinely ok if I didn’t have someone in my life.  I started to read books about spirituality again and felt a connection to what I was reading.  My life wasn’t perfect, but it was definitely a lot better than it had been in a long time.

Then, one day it hit me.  I had been listening to the Buddhist precepts for most of my life, I had trained in monasteries under some fantastic Zen Masters, I had been meditating almost every day, and the compassion I had for my fellow man had grown enormously for reasons I couldn’t completely understand.  The only reason that made any sense to me was that I was a Buddhist.

I rejected the thought for a while, and tried to find all the ways it wasn’t true, or find some corner stone in the teachings I didn’t believe in.  I didn’t want to play all the ridiculous games which often come with organized religions.  I didn’t want to walk the religious path again and be a spiritual guy, which is so incredibly stupid, because in reality I had never stopped.

I went to my family, and it was like one of those cheesy after school specials where a child admits that he/she is gay.  I told my parents about the soul searching I was doing lately and had learned a few things about myself I wanted to share.  

I told them I thought I was a Buddhist.

They told me they already knew and they loved me anyway.

After that, I decided I would try to add some formal Buddhism to my martial arts training.  I started to attend regular sessions at a local Zen Center and a Tibetan Temple.  Before long, I had taken formal refuge at both places and was an active member in both Sanghas.  I met several truly wonderful people who were completely willing to share their experiences with me and help me along my own journey.  

In the days of the Samurai, there were people called Ronin.  A Ronin was a Samurai without a master to serve.  

When a person takes formal refuge in Buddhism, they take it in three things: The Buddha-the enlightened ones, The Dharma-the enlightened one’s teachings and The Sangha-those who practice with us.  These three things make up the foundation of most practices.  While The Buddha and The Dharma can be found almost anywhere, often times there might not be a Sangha to be a member of.  What happens to our practice then?  Does this mean that since we can only take refuge in two things we aren’t truly Buddhists?  Does it mean our practice will suffer?  What about those places where it is illegal or dangerous to openly practice?  How would a Sangha survive in those places?   

The Sangha experience is like no other.  A Sangha is what the members of your temple or training center are called.  The connection you feel to others who are practicing alongside you will greatly strengthen your practice, and give you friends to lean on when practice becomes difficult.  When you get up at four in the morning,in the harsh winter cold, to go sit for an hour, and contemplate some Zen koan you swear your teacher invented just to torment you, it’s nice to have company in those moments.

It’s also very comforting to be connected to the Buddhist community through a Sangha.  At my Tibetan Center, this weekend we are holding our Prayers for Compassion 72 hour marathon meditation session with a few visiting Lamas. Watching the members in their commitment to bring the end of suffering to all sentient beings is truly incredible.

Those who practice Buddhism unconventionally or without a Sangha might feel a bit like a Ronin and will often times feel alone.

This is the purpose of this book.  Maybe like me, you have some reluctance to organized religion.  Maybe you have a thing against shaved heads and sitting on the floor.  Maybe you are dealing with something you feel you can’t share with anyone else just yet.  Maybe it’s too horrific to be with other people.  All these things are ok.  Siddhartha didn’t have a Sangha either.

The beautiful thing about Buddhism is it can be practiced anywhere.  All you have to do is sit down and pay attention.  That’s basically the entire practice.  There will be nothing more important in your practice than just sitting.  Ironically, this is the aspect of practice people usually try to skip out on.  I understand why, and you probably do too.  It’s so unbelievably boring!  It’s uncomfortable, time moves ridiculously slowly, and most of the time we feel like we’re doing it completely wrong.  Because of these things, one of the best gifts you can give yourself in your practice is patience.

Make no mistake; what you are about to attempt is a huge undertaking and one not to be taken lightly.  You are going to be using your mind and body in ways most people will never imagine.  It’s going to take courage and a whole lot of patience and forgiveness, particularly with yourself.  One thing I often see among practitioners is a lack of compassion for their own ego.  They are really great at giving it to other people, forgiving every type of offence and trespass, but when it comes to the little voice inside their own mind, they are harsh, abrupt, and cruel.  

Never in a million years would I speak to someone the way my own mind speaks to me.

Have compassion for yourself.  You are doing something very few people will ever attempt.  You are trying to better yourself in every way possible, and therefore trying to make the very universe a better place…and you’re doing it alone.  I think a little self-compassion is warranted.

When you sit, try not to feel alone.  Remember, there are hundreds of thousands of Buddhists just like you doing the very same practice.  Even if you are not a member of a Sangha, or feel like you are the only Buddhist in your community, you are never alone.  This is one reason why whenever you go to a Buddhist temple or monastery you see statues of the Buddha.  We are all connected through the practice.  The majority of statues you will see of the Buddha will have him in a seated position.  This is because sitting is the most important aspect of the journey.  It is where all the changes are going to take place.  While it is possible to practice without a Sangha, it’s almost impossible to practice without sitting.

In some ways, meditation can be a lot like starting an exercise program.  You can buy all the moisture wicking clothes and the best shoes, you can have your

Reviews for Ronin Buddhism

[ernie marton · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Great easy read. Encouraging ss you journey towards being a better version of you.