When COVID hit full stride in 2020 I went with the flow and stayed close to home, trying some of the popular methods to keep busy such as bread-baking. (I was and still am a lousy baker.) A master chef and baker I once worked for explained it perfectly thus: “Cooking is an art, baking is a science.” And because he maintained precise measurements, his perfect croissants rivaled those of any Parisian boulangerie. (Another tip courtesy of Messr. Alton Brown; never use warm tap water to activate dry yeast, because municipal water systems add chlorine, which kills live enzymes. Instead warm up spring or distilled water to the recommended 110 – 120 degrees F.)

SO back to the title of today’s post: the “B” doesn’t refer to bread, but to Buddha. When I failed at baking, I took that opportunity to turn off the TV, close the laptop and re-kindle my love of reading. After breezing through a couple well-regarded landcare journals — Noah’s Garden by Sara Stein and Bringing Nature Home by (fellow Allegheny College alum) Dr. Douglas Tallamy — I was ready for some heavier literary lifting. My return to the Church combined with a desire to better understand the concept of a “higher power” led me to realize that I was quite ignorant of Eastern philosophy. So instead of diving straight into the I-Ching (the spiritual equivalent of climbing Mt. Everest without a Sherpa guide) I felt more comfortable learning the basic teachings of the Buddha. It was a good choice.

The first thing I chose to read was Siddhartha, an allegory of the life of the Boddhisatva, by the Swiss-German poet/author Herman Hesse. I biked to the local library, borrowed it, biked to a nearby beach, devoured the book’s 120 pages, and promptly read it again. Without exaggeration, I felt my third eye slowly begin to open. The many sacrifices made by the wealthy prince in the story, casting aside royalty and riches, recalled my own (alcohol-derived) fall from grace and loss of everything I owned, except what I carried in my move back to Connecticut: a bag of clothes, a guitar and my legendary and loyal cat Mouse the Boomer (who deserves her own future post.)

Since I like to keep you, dear reader, interested and coming back by keeping these posts essentially brief, I’ll hold until next time how I was drawn further toward Buddhism and its parallels to my own Christian faith formation. But for now, I’ll leave you with some “homework,” but the fun kind:

As a hardcore fan of The Simpsons, I remember watching an especially genius episode where they divided this 1/2 hour into three brilliant and insightful religious re-tellings. My favorite was titled “Sidd-Martha” and starred Lisa as the gender-reversed main character from Hesse’s story. But as hard as I’ve searched on YouTube, etc, I’ve never been able to find that epic animation. So if some intrepid reader/web hawk/Simpsons loyalist ever finds it, please leave the URL in my “reply” box.

Thanks, and Namaste.