Adventures with an Enlightened Buddha

By Jim Harris

Jim Harris, musician and professor of philosophy, first meets Gene Wagner, Buddhist priest, Rolfer, and unrelenting challenger of assumptions, at a Thanksgiving dinner in 1983. The two immediately launch a decades-long  friendship andtogether explore Buddhist philosophy, healing, self-discovery, and wisdom. In this

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harris/Glass-Harris
• Release date: May 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781736890431

Book preview

PREFACE

Back in the near-Thanksgiving time of 1963, I dropped out of college—just for the year. While my brainiac classmates continued in Ivy League and Sister schools, I worked in a glass factory and lived at home. I was there to help my father build a new family house in the South Jersey farm country, an hour from the Atlantic Ocean.

That November 22nd of 1963, I sat in my mom’s favorite rocking chair in the front room of their newly completed home, drifting as I looked out onto the golden autumn fields. I was wondering again if I’d made the right decision leaving school. Nesting in that chair, questioning myself about where my life was headed, I felt fragile. I’d turned twenty-one that summer.

I became aware that my brother, who was fourteen, had come into the room. I didn’t look up, and he was silent for a while. He finally spoke.

Did you hear what happened to Kennedy?

As the words jet-streamed from his mouth, I knew the answer in my gut. Still, I asked dumbly, What?

I jumped out of my mom’s rocking nest and rushed to the corner of the house where my father had once come across a huddle of brown recluse spiders. I stood there I don’t know how long, sobbing.

It was a grim time.

That was in my mind twenty years later, the evening I met Bub-In. Thanks to him, I learned that where I was at twenty-one—and where I was the day I met him—is where I am now, a long four decades later. I’m pushing eighty, and there’s no such thing as linear time.

By his own admission, Bub-In said he was not enlightened. But I understood something different, which will unfold in this spiritual memoir of my life and times with him.

Bub-In influenced me, and it is this influence that is the first point about him and me. It has compelled me to ponder it, to inform about it, to write it.

Rev. James Eugene Bub-In Wagner

Chapter 1

THANKSGIVING

I met Bub-In on Thanksgiving Day in 1983. If there were ever anything to be thankful for, it was him.

Exactly two years earlier, providence and good fortune had met when I was introduced to my beloved girlfriend, Lorraine. Now, two years later, she and I were a couple, invited to a dinner with family and friends.

As we watched the televised replay of the assassination of President John Fitzgerald Kennedy two decades prior, I fell deeply into the event. There was no time lapse, no reflection. I was twenty-one, in the day when my brother told me JFK had been shot.

Now, writing in 2020, I can still see myself during the Thanksgiving party of 1983: When that documentary of JFK’s assassination came on TV, I was inescapably tossed back into 1963. Without any thought or acknowledgment or permission of my own, the black-and-white footage had me pinned to the day it had happened.

Then, at the Thanksgiving dinner in my forty-first year, I didn’t perceive immediately in any way how time and its passage are an illusion. There and then, I was in a space and a time of the moment of assassination. It was momentarily the moment, the now moment, glued into my mind. It was Thanksgiving 1963, and I was in it.

This was the first day I began having my buttons pushed—in a way that was uprooting, challenging, compassionate.

I couldn’t resist the pull. I felt it every time I looked across the room at him—which was again and again. He was leaning against the wall, looking around, at me and through me, simultaneously.

Having heard of him, who he was, and being who I was, seeking attention, I asked him an inane question: Are you a Buddhist?

He shrugged a shoulder. Oh, yeah, he said.

I went right on with my questions, like I knew anything about anything. Have you attained Nirvana?

There he was, continuing his smiling eyes, chuckling. Oh, many times, he said, nodding with a casual shoulder shrug and a wave of his glass of bourbon.

In 1983, I was still a full-time college teacher, being paid part-time wages. I’d been teaching about Buddhism and Nirvana, related classes in one form or another. So full of myself and my important questions, I began my interrogation of him.

What do you see in people when you look at them?

His nodding again, his mild smile. Illusion.

I was feeling more and more a need to be with him, so I asked another question just to keep him there: Illusion about what?

Smile, nod, soft chuckle. Illusion in people about what they think they are, mostly what they’re not.

Dinner was called. The evening wore on. Many of us went into the next room to watch the documentary about that day twenty years earlier when President Kennedy was murdered in Dallas-Don’t-Mess-With-Texas.

Already, I was in the process of being unbuttoned by this Buddhist I’d met. But at the moment, I didn’t quite get it. Here and there, now and then, I became preoccupied with the old and emotional story of the precious JFK and how twenty years prior his life had ended too early and so suddenly.

I was flooded in my feelings and in my mind, the entrancing word illusion—which Bub-In had just told me was an important word—popping in and out of my thoughts. But all the while, in my mind I was somewhere else, glued to what had happened around Thanksgiving 1963.

Feeling trapped in an all-too-tender ego, my need for recognition, and the urgency to get all the moments I could get with Bub-In, I gave in to the temptation to quote some Buddhist text. So I recited a Tibetan mantra: Om mani padme hum (Hail to the jewel in the lotus).

In response to the mantra, he said to me, smiling, Oh Mommy gimme some.

Through his childlike words, I saw instantly that he saw everything—my mother, how I always miss my dear, precious, clairvoyant, beautiful, wonderful, singing mother. And about my inherent love for female contact, maybe for my own feminine past lives.

That Thanksgiving of 1983, as Bub-In was leaving, putting on his hat and coat at the door while looking straight into my eyes, I could tell something was going on and was vaguely aware that it had to do with me.

He looked away, giving up the piercing stare he’d been leveling at me. Then, looking back with a kind of negligent glance, he said, Be good, Jim.

That’s when I understood that Bub-In was profoundly psychic, a creative being with deep understanding and knowledge of other beings and what they wanted. He knew I was about to have a brief affair with a woman other than Lorraine, with whom I was living.

And I knew I had to see more of him.

Chapter 2

OUR FIRST DINNER TOGETHER

A week after our Thanksgiving meeting, I invited Bub-In out to dinner. My need to see him hadn’t diminished.

I picked him up at his apartment and drove to an old Chinese restaurant. I sensed immediately that Bub-In was happy to be there. Later, I learned that he’d been a Chinese monk in a previous life—perhaps the reason for his pleasure at being at the restaurant.

As we were being seated, I found myself thinking about what Bub-In had said to me as he left the dinner the week earlier: Be good, Jim.

Somehow, Bub-In knew I’d been divorced by my first wife and was now living with a wonderful woman I loved and who would become my wife.

At the time, I was having persistent problems, still coping with my divorce and constantly trying to determine what kind of relationship I needed or wanted. I was telling Bub-In about an artist named Linda who was a student in one of the world religion classes I taught. She was older than the other students, ten or twelve years younger than I.

Bub-In kept smiling as I continued to talk about Linda. I related how, one day, I’d begun to talk with her in the hallway after class and something had happened as we stood together talking. She’d looked into my eyes in a way that was hypnotic, and I started feeling a click between us—that there had been a relationship between us in a past life. Our previous mother? I’d wondered.

I told Bub-In how attractive Linda was, and in a kind, matter-of-fact voice,he said, You want to go to bed with her.

Much later after that dinner, I determined not to begin an affair with Linda until the semester ended and she was no longer a student in my class. But the affair once begun, I quickly broke it off, afraid and concerned that my almost wife would be angry with me.

When I told psychic Bub-In, he said mildly, Oh, she’ll forgive you. And, of course, he was right: My beloved Lorraine forgave me and seemed to forget about it.

Even in those early days of our relationship—though I didn’t realize it at the time—Bub-In was working to educate me about the role of sex and sexuality in human life. And not least, the ethics of it. He once told Lorraine and me that we should not harm wife or husband, which he’d been teaching me in a different way for some time.

At that time as well, I often felt alone, perhaps to avoid relationship trouble. Bub-In saw that about me, and after Lorraine and I were married, he once told her, He could easily be a hermit, but it would not be good for him.

It’s true that in those days, I spoke often of being drawn to monastic life. What a blessing Bub-In was, nudging me into the flow of life and embrace of experience, focusing on the path of wholeness and the deep connection to all beings.

During our dinner at that Chinese restaurant, he confessed, I’d like to have a long-term relationship. Then, he unapologetically told me about his failed marriage, which he said was demoralizing, unethical, even as he and his wife had sons together.

He went on to explain that he’d been abused, but he said, I’d enjoy having a partner, but nothing to do with marriage—just a long-term relationship.

Bub-In was telling the Leo ego in me that I was unnecessarily concerned about my ability to have a healthy sexual relationship with a woman. He was gentle, mild in helping me understand that I had no need to be unsure, and why.

With his smiling kindness, Bub-In expressed how much he had enjoyed our dinner together.

Thank you very much, he said with honest-to-god sincerity.

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