It is a chicken/egg question, but one worth asking because it provides insight into the path of each individual practitioner. It is, in my view, a private question that may or may not have a clear, definitive answer and which the individual may or may not choose to share with others. In this talk I choose to share some of my answer with you. Both question and answer will lead to further questions (and answers) and will inform and illuminate each person’s practice.

For instance, is watching a spectacular sunrise a spiritual experience? Why? Is being taken to church against your will as a child spiritual practice? Why?

What has led so many of us, whose entire western culture spiritual tradition is Judeo-Christian based, to the spiritual practice of Buddhism? Spirituality is an inherent aspect of every human being, but each person’s concept of spirituality, spiritual practice and spiritual experience is different.

Religion was not part of my upbringing. My father was an atheist, my mother an agnostic who was baptized a Catholic on her deathbed, though so far as I know she never set foot in a church except to attend weddings and funerals. My religion was the outdoors, but as an English major I studied several religious traditions from a literary perspective and my college advisor taught a great course entitled “The Bible as Literature” which I did not take because at the time I associated it with the Elmer Gantry, evangelical type of hucksterism.

Fortunately the ‘60s happened, and like many others I embraced psychedelics and the consciousness expanding ideas of Timothy Leary and Richard Alpert (Ram Dass) as if they were the path and guides to Nirvana. They weren’t, but they were a first step to spiritual experience and I am eternally grateful to them. For a few years after that introduction to spiritual experience I studied the ideas of Meher Baba and then practiced Transcendental Meditation for a couple of years before becoming, spiritually speaking, aimless, rootless and disconnected.

Though I read many books about spiritual matters and was particularly interested in Buddhism from an intellectual perspective, for all those years after the ‘60s I didn’t have a practice until I became a Zen student and took my vows of refuge in Buddhism through the Jukai ceremony in 1988. When I took those vows I was acutely aware that an experience I had in China eight years earlier, one I can only call spiritual, had directly led me to Jukai.

In one of my old journals from that time I wrote about that experience.

From my journal: “June 30, 1980. Peking (Beijing), China….Each day here has magic in it. Yesterday at the Temple of the Azure Clouds something very strange and special happened. The Hall of the Luo Han has a group of 508 five foot statues made of gilded wood. Each is a different face and character, and I think but do not know for sure that each represents a different aspect of Buddha nature. As soon as I went in there I felt something beginning to happen and as I walked around in there I found myself separating from the others. I wanted to be alone, for my mind and awareness was shifting into that plane I sometimes reach in special moments. Difficult to describe that place, but it’s something like being stoned on a heavy dose of acid, having x-ray vision into time. It started with one of the statues who caught my eye, and the eye that caught mine was not dead, not wood, not paint. It contained the living spirit and it did not frighten me. And then as I looked around all the statues began to radiate the soft gold color of holiness. The whole room was alive. Each statue has its own spirit and living presence and message and reason, and yet they are all one and the same. I was filled with energy and deep and abiding peace. I was home. I could have stayed there forever, except that is not my path in this life. I walked the aisles and enjoyed my vision and learned all I could and only left when I felt I might be hanging up my mates. I would like to go there again in my life. It is a place of power.”

So, for me, I can say with certainty that spiritual experience comes before spiritual practice.