The Novice by Stephen Schettini

Author’s photo of his hut in the outermost reaches of Sera Monastery in 1981 from The Novice (environs of Bylakuppe, India) © Stephen Schettini
 
 

The complete title of this 2009 memoir is The Novice: Why I Became a Buddhist Monk, Why I Quit & What I Learned.  Stephen Schettini’s book is an exploration of Buddhism in the 1970s and ‘80s.  He commented in the preface:
 

I wrote this book because I was mystified by my own life.  Why would a middle-class, privately schooled Anglo-Italian Catholic boy from rural Gloucestershire abandon his education, career and family to travel to the Tibetan refugee camps in India and become ordained as a Buddhist monk? 

 
His introduction to Buddhism began when he arrived in Dharamsala, India.  “I sat to meditate each morning and evening, but never got very far.  Hoping to fall into a state of complete absorption, I was more often carried away by distraction or boredom . . . but I also wanted to experience Awakening!”
 
Buddhism impressed the author after growing up “spiritually terrorized by totalitarian religion.”  He understood Buddhism as “a practice, not a belief system.”  In Kopan, Lama Yeshe explained to him how Western consumerism is a form of superstition during a lecture about the mind.
 
A youthful experiment with LSD brought Stephen the realization that “our everyday interpretations hid the infinite from view.”  Lama Yeshe commented on the subject of Westerners taking drugs:
 

Because your way of life is so material and the mind is so completely ignored, those who take an acid trip sometimes go beyond the physical body and notice wider possibilities of the mind; they might even glimpse reality.  That’s if you take it once.  But taking it all the time, hoping to experience sunyata, is just another superstition.

 
The lama gave Stephen some advice prior to his return to England.  “Avoid bad friends, bad situation, drugs, alcohol, all that.  Good friends encourage meditation.  Bad friends encourage distraction.”
 
Following his return to England, Stephen at age 23 decided to pursue the opportunity to become a Buddhist monk.  After learning Tibetan lay people traditionally support monasteries and monks, he promptly found a jindak (sponsor).  The Buddha’s Awakening offered him what he thought was a worthy spiritual objective.  “Awakening was a dream of freedom, and I clung to the idea that there would one day be a breakthrough in which all this would become effortless.”
 
I was surprised to learn that there could be atheist monks — “There we were, a bunch of Westerners who’d given up on God, praying together daily.”  Although there are such Buddhist terms as Tri-kāya, Dharma and Karma as well as an expression signifying ‘Oneness’ or ‘The One Mind,’ there are Buddhists whose perspective of ultimate reality revolves around an organizing ‘energy source’ rather than humanity being a personification of an all-creative Force/Creator.
 
During his travels as a Buddhist monk, Stephen never achieved an immutable Awakening.  Visiting Dharamsala six years after his first visit led him to ponder his progress.  “I was fully ordained now, spoke Tibetan well and was ready to start teaching. Why did I still feel like a novice?”
 
When Stephan began to teach, representing the Tibetan tradition in Geneva, he gained an unexpected insight.
 

I’d longed for the day when I’d finally begin to teach, not just language and philosophy but the bread and butter of the path to Awakening.  Now I’d earned the right—and was on my way—but felt like a fraud.  All I’d delivered were words.  If they could see inside me they’d find no wisdom; just confusion.

  
At the end of The Novice, Stephen offered some joyless conclusions.  The comprehension of a moral Higher Power is essential to spiritual awakening.