Buddha in Your Backpack: Everyday Buddhism for Teens

By Franz Metcalf

“Here’s a handbook to teendom that wins its hipness the hard way: by using good humor and the wisdom of a 2,500-year-old man.” —Booklist

A guide for navigating the teen years, Buddha in Your Backpack is for young people who want to learn more about Buddhism or for those who simply want to understand what’s going on inside themselves and in the world around them. Buddha in Your Backpack tells Buddha’s life story in a fashion teens will relate to, describing Buddha as a young rebel not satisfied with the answers of his elders. It then introduces Buddha’s core teachings with chapters like “All About Me” and “Been There, Why’d I Do That?” The author presents thoughtful and spiritual insights on school, dating, hanging out, jobs, and other issues of special interest to teens—inviting readers to look inside themselves for answers.

“Flush with good advice, sensibly given. As such it should prove useful both to students interested in Buddhism and to others who simply need good counsel. In fact, Metcalf’s approach is so down-to-earth and inviting that many adults may sneak it off the shelves for themselves.” —School Library Journal

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Nov 8, 2002
• ISBN: 9781569758533

Book preview

INTRODUCTION:

YOU AND THIS BOOK

Studying the Buddha Way is studying the self. Studying the self is forgetting the self. Forgetting the self is being actualized by all things. Being actualized by all things, your body and mind as well as the bodies and minds of others drop away. No trace of realization remains and extends endlessly.

ZEN TEACHER DOGEN

Teenage life (like other parts of life, but even more so) is really hard. You have to be a daughter or son, a sister or brother, a grandchild, an extended family member, a goof-off, a hormonally deranged adolescent, a student, a citizen, a worker, a future leader, a part of the ecosystem, a psycho-spiritual being, a human person. You have to be all that. It takes some doing. This book can help. Being a teenager is an astonishing amount of work. You know that, but this book will show how deep that work is and how you can make it deeper. Your teen experience is so central to what Zen Buddhists call this great matter of birth and death, that to be fully awake to your teenageness is to be a genuinely spiritual person.

Buddha in Your Backpack can be your Buddhist guide for dealing with that deep, important, spiritual stuff that also happens to be the seemingly regular, everyday, even sordid stuff of your life. It’s a spiritual guide even when it’s talking about homework or sex. And it’s a practical how-to book even when it’s talking about the Buddha’s awakening or some meditation practice. This book will show you that there’s a genuinely spiritual dimension in every aspect of your life. Using the tools of Buddhism, you’ll learn how to hold an awareness of that dimension of life from moment to moment.

Okay, but why use Buddhism? Because Buddhism is focused right on you, right on your experience in this very moment. You are the center of attention. You are the one who makes Buddhism real. And Buddhism can help make you real, too. Buddhism is about reality because it grows from the real life of a real person, the Buddha. He taught a way to find deep happiness, a way that still works now. It can work for you. That’s why people care about the Buddha. That’s why I wrote this book, and that’s why it’s worth a look.

Maybe somewhere along the line you learned how amazing Buddhism is. If so, you already suspect it can help you in your life, right now, if you knew how to apply it. You’re right. Or maybe this is the first Buddhist book you’ve ever picked up and Buddhism is a total blank to you. You might think this book is about some Indian guy who lived 2500 years ago. You might think Buddhism is like some other religions that seem to focus on the founders and ignore you. If Buddhism were like that, it wouldn’t matter to me, and I would never have written this book for you. But Buddhism is totally not like that.

Buddha in Your Backpack is about you and your life. It’s also about the Buddha and his life and his teachings. There’s a lot about the Buddha and Buddhism here, but it’s always information you can use. In this book we don’t worry too much about the Buddha; the Buddha can take care of himself. We use his teaching to help you.

The Buddha would be fine with this. One of the central Buddhist sutras, or sacred writings, says that at the end of his life the Buddha told his followers, The teaching and the rules I’ve given you, after I’m gone these will be your teachers. And 2500 years later, they still are.

So you can read this book to learn about that amazing man, the Buddha. You can read this book to gain more awareness of a big part of our new, global culture. You can read it so you’ll have wise words to drop on your friends at parties. You can read it to learn something about the most flexible and down-to-earth religion ever. These are all excellent reasons to read this book, but the main reason to read it is to bring Buddhist wisdom into your everyday life.

This book is about exactly that: everyday reality. Or you might say it’s about everyday spirituality, since in Buddhism what is real is what is spiritual. There’s no gap, no difference between the sacred and the profane. Your happiness, your fulfillment—they’re right here and this book will help you realize them. Someone, sometime, has probably told you that you’re going to look back on these as the happiest years of your life. Don’t worry: it’s not true. I swear, my teenage years were not the happiest years of my life. Sure, there were some days that were great, but years, no way. I needed this book when I was a teenager. It’s a bit late for me, but at least it’s here for you.

teen spirituality

The most important struggles of being a teenager—growing into your adult body, adult society, and adult life, all of which require awareness, insight, and patience—are the very struggles of being a spiritual seeker. The everyday experience of being a teenager can be a genuinely spiritual experience, and so you are a spiritual seeker. If that sounds conceited to you, consider this: right now you are creating yourself, and that’s the most important thing you’ll ever do. You don’t have to call it spiritual, just respect it.

What is religion? What is spirituality? These things are notoriously difficult to define, but here’s a short answer. Religion is a multidimensional system of ritual, myth, doctrine, ethics, social and material forms, and sacred experience. There is no one right religion; instead there are literally thousands of systems through which people relate to the sacred, giving meaning and order to human life.

Spirituality is the individual person’s relationship with the sacred. It’s an inner experience, so it can vary from person to person even more than religions differ from one another, yet spirituality, too, must always grow from certain unchanging truths. Some people find their spirituality through traditional religion. Others experience it through nature, art, science, or love.

As a teen, your spirituality is intense because of what you experience and because you live so close to that experience. No matter how you try to hide from your own experience, drugging yourself with TV or books or video games or even actual drugs, these attempts to insulate yourself only show how powerful your experience is. In your teenage years, you have many fundamental experiences for the first time:

✦ You become morally self-aware and have to make moral choices on your own, thinking for yourself. You stop simply accepting the rules of your parents or your church; you don’t always even accept the laws of your country. Instead, you look to the principles behind these rules and decide whether those principles are valid. Once you take this step, the world will never be the same.

✦ You look to join new communities, based on principles of honesty and justice as you’ve recently come to understand them. These communities usually grow from religious roots. You crave the solidarity of belonging to a group that shares your values completely, whether it’s a gang or a church—even though you may later come to see the hypocrisy in them and grow disillusioned. Because of this, teenagers are the most likely people to convert from one sect or religion to another. Also because of this, when teenagers find a new religion, they can get intense about it.

✦ You acquire the intellectual capacity for formal reasoning—the ability to think about thinking—which allows you to be aware of your own awareness. This experience is literally a mind-blower, since it opens up your consciousness beyond the space of your skull. You open up to the sacred, whatever is sacred to you. This experience, too, can transform your whole world.

✦ You experience your body changing and see your parents growing older. From this evidence and your new self-awareness, you deduce the inevitability of old age and death. The sudden consciousness of your own mortality can strike with such force that you feel vertigo.

✦ You may begin to search frantically for some kind of meaning in a life that must end in death and loss. If no worldly answer seems to transcend death, you have to consider cosmic answers. If you were raised in a religion, you may turn to it now in a powerful new way. Humans can’t live without meaning. Most teens discover that the old meanings of childhood don’t work anymore. Some teens must find new meaning in life, or it is simply not worth living anymore. You need meaning to face death.

✦ You become a sexual being, whether or not you act on it, and so face the greatest physical pleasure, intimacy, and temptation in life. Sex is profoundly spiritual. It’s only considered non-spiritual in religions that deny the sacredness of the body. Buddhism (the Buddhism I teach, anyway) is not one of those. The power of sexuality may be dangerous, but it is surely spiritual.

✦ You begin to enter into romantic relationships and discover the very center of your life—the marvelous interweaving of the physical, the emotional, and the transcendent that is love. Even the most casual crush takes you out of yourself in a way that hints at the ecstatic freedom of genuine love. That’s the goal of Buddhism: ecstasy.

Do you see yet that you are a spiritual being? If not, maybe it’s because you don’t like the word spiritual. I wish there were a better word in English, but this is the best we’ve got. It’s a word the Buddha almost never used. He didn’t teach in those terms. The Buddha always brought people back to their own everyday experiences. Were they happy, or were they clinging to desires or views that made them unhappy? It always turned out to be the latter. Then he would help them let go of the desires and views that were causing their pain and lead them toward calm . . . toward insight . . . toward nirvana!

The Buddha did this by affirming people’s everyday experiences, both external and internal. He was always directing people back to their minds, asking them to be aware of their ever-changing mental states. So he would always be very matter-of-fact about their circumstances, both inner and outer. He counseled people to concentrate their attention on the present moment—a strategy that is perfect for you, too, right now. He focused on the practical, not the airy or religious. So does this book. Don’t worry about spiritual or not spiritual. Whether you choose to see yourself as a spiritual being doesn’t matter. You just have to see yourself as a serious one.

You’re experiencing changes, and you’re going to keep changing. As the Buddha taught, there’s no unchanging you, so there’s no single and final identity for you. We live in the real world, and to be comfortable here we need an evolving identity. We all work on this our whole lives, but we totally focus on it when we’re teens.

So there, you’re on a sacred journey. Your reality and your path through it is a sacred path—if you become conscious of it. This book will help you do exactly that.

what’s in this book?

We begin by looking at the life of the Buddha. We follow him as he grows up and begins to question who he is and what he wants to become. He rebels totally against his parents, rejecting the identity they try to force on him. Instead, he goes off on a painful search for himself. Sound familiar? I hope your relationship with your parents is better than the Buddha’s, but I’m sure it shares some patterns with his. The path of the Buddha is not so far from your own. His questions are your questions.

We then explore the basics of the Buddha’s teachings and the religion that grew from them. For over 2500 years Buddhism has grown and changed, and it’s changing now more than ever—though always remaining firmly rooted in the Buddha’s insights.

In Part Two we look at typical scenes and troubles in teenage life, applying Buddhist wisdom and, as we do, learning to change. Buddhist wisdom can teach you new ways of seeing yourself and your world that will help you to be happier. As we pay special attention to exactly those things that matter—school, body image, identity, sex, all that—you’ll learn that adopting a Buddhist perspective is pretty simple. Not easy, but simple. It does require some serious work . . . okay, to be honest, a lifetime of work. But, hey, no commitment is necessary now and the first steps can take you a long way in a short time.

Part Three is called Taking a Buddhist Path. The path is the classic metaphor for Buddhism. The Buddha saw life as a path with no end; what matters is simply taking steps along it. Part Three lays out the basic steps. Of course there are things that can go wrong on the way—both inside and out. Sorry, but Buddhism is not an escape from reality. It is an escape to reality, which includes disappointment and pain. I give you tips on avoiding inner roadblocks (like resistance) and outer roadblocks (like prejudice) as you walk the path.

Part Three also tells you how to get started in meditation, a traditional Buddhist practice proven to help your body and mind, regardless of your religious beliefs. After teaching basic meditation techniques, it gives you a whole series of spiritual exercises you can begin to practice on your own. You don’t need a teacher for these; all the guidance you need to get started is right here. These exercises act as reminders of what we and this world are really about. See which ones work for you. If you decide to continue farther along the path, they will help you make basic Buddhist practice part of your own day-to-day routine.

An ancient Zen text says, What counts is right now; it doesn’t take a lot of time. Everything I tell you falls away . . . just get this and you’ll be the real person who’s left home, free to spend a fortune every day. In an online teen magazine, Catherine D. quotes a Baci candy wrapper that says, Many people live happily without knowing it. Same message.

Finally, if you want to keep following a Buddhist path, Many Paths, Further Explorations will help by giving you pointers on how you can move forward and learn more. It gives resources—including many websites, like the one for this book: www.buddhainyourbackpack.net—for learning more about the forms and practices of Buddhism. Buddhists are not all the same, and not all Buddhist centers or groups will be right for you. Many Paths can help you choose wisely.

This book offers a new way to look at your life and all the little (but crucial) things in it. It’s not about making you into a Buddhist. Frankly, I just don’t think that’s important. Maybe there are some Buddhists who would be shocked to hear me say that, but at least one agrees with me: His Holiness the Dalai Lama, the highest authority in Tibetan Buddhism and the most famous and respected Buddhist leader in the world today. He says there are plenty of Buddhists, no need for more. People should continue to be whatever they are.

The Dalai Lama says we all should just get happy! The goal of life is happiness, and whatever path leads you to deep and lasting happiness is the path you should follow. It doesn’t have to be Buddhism; it can be any path with heart. In fact, it can be several.

Whatever your path, this book can teach you something. It can open your eyes to your remarkable life and opportunities. It will help you use Buddhist ideas to become happier. And it tells you where to look if you want to discover more. But remember, your choices about what to believe and how to see the world are your own. If anyone tries to take your religious freedom of choice away from you, that person must not trust you to choose for yourself. And it’s hopeless for them to try to prevent you, anyway, because those choices can never truly be taken away. They

Reviews for Buddha in Your Backpack

[trgllylibrarian · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I found it helpful and uplifting, even if I didn't agree entirely with the philosophical basis.

[john_pappas_35 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Neutered and random exploration of Buddhism. However, provides some teen-centric applications so an interesting perspective.