How I Found Buddhism (It Found Me, Really)

I wasn't searching for enlightenment. I wasn't sitting cross-legged on a mountain, waiting for wisdom to descend. I was a guy in my twenties with a dysfunctional childhood behind me, a fog of low-grade depression ahead of me, and no real map for navigating either.

Buddhism didn't arrive with fanfare. It arrived through a friend, the way most important things do.

Someone I knew — a person I respected, not a zealot, not a recruiter — mentioned they'd been chanting. Nam-myoho-renge-kyo. They said it had changed things for them. They invited me to a meeting.

I almost said no. I had a vague suspicion it would be weird. Incense and robes and someone telling me to empty my mind, which, if you've ever tried to empty your mind, you know is roughly as effective as telling yourself not to think about a pink elephant.

But I went. And it wasn't what I expected.

SGI — the Soka Gakkai International — is a lay Buddhist organization based on the teachings of the 13th-century Japanese monk Nichiren. The practice centers on chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo, a phrase that translates roughly as "I devote myself to the mystic law of cause and effect through sound."

There are no monks. No robes required. No retreating from the world. In fact, the whole point is engagement with the world — your job, your relationships, your community, your messy, complicated, ordinary life. That was the part that got me.

I'd always been suspicious of spiritual paths that required you to leave your life behind. This one said: bring your life. That's the practice.

I sat in front of a small altar — a Gohonzon, a scroll that serves as a focal point for the practice — and chanted for the first time. I felt self-conscious. I felt a little ridiculous. I also felt, somewhere underneath the self-consciousness, something shift.

I can't explain it better than that. Something shifted. Not dramatically. Not like a movie. Just a small, quiet opening — like a window cracking in a stuffy room.

I went back the next week.

I stayed because the people in that room were honest. They talked about their problems. They talked about their struggles with the practice, with their families, with themselves. There was no pretense of having it all figured out.

And they talked about actual results — not miracles, but the slow, stubborn work of changing your life from the inside out. A woman who had been terrified of confrontation learning to speak up. A man who had been stuck in the same dead-end job for a decade finally making a move. Small things. Real things.

I was skeptical. I'm still a little skeptical, fifty years later. I think that's healthy. But I kept chanting, and I kept noticing that things were changing — not because the universe was rewarding me, but because I was changing.

It's not magic. It's not a shortcut. It's not a replacement for therapy, for medication when medication is needed, for the hard work of examining your own patterns and deciding to do something different.

In fact, one of the things I've come to believe most strongly after fifty years is that Buddhism and psychology are not in competition. They're pointing at the same territory from different directions. I've used both. I recommend both.

What Buddhism gave me — what it keeps giving me — is a daily practice of turning toward my own life instead of away from it. Of sitting down, twice a day, and saying: I'm here. I'm paying attention. I'm willing to change.

That's not nothing. After fifty years, I'd say it's everything.

This post is adapted from themes in my book Fifty Years of Buddhist Practice, available to read free as a flipbook. No sign-up required.