What no one in the West tells you about becoming a Buddhist is that it’s like being trapped in a Porta Potty full of your own shit, but you keep telling yourself it’s everyone else’s crap. Inevitably, you eat your own toxic waste, fling it at your favorite people and eventually learn to sort it out because we all know a Porta Potty doesn’t flush; it fills.
Before descending into nihilism, rest assured, I have good news! All that caca fertilizes food for the body and mind. Let’s remember: flowers spring forth from manure! My friends, even maggots need love.
That’s me. I’m the maggot.
I’ve slithered out of homelessness from under bridges, the needle-point of drug addiction, and ritualized sex abuse. I’ve seen the dregs, been the dregs, and have convened the dregs in rank bungalows. But those were lifetimes ago. Light never fully filled the shadows, and depression consumed me the hardest after the death of my Love, which is when I landed at a local temple.
What I’ve come to learn is that Buddhist temples are where we invite our demons to transform into our most precious teachers. Mine just happened to be in the form of the ugliest breakup of my entire life.
It started with The Child, who followed me everywhere. When I raked leaves in the temple’s rock garden, The Child insisted on holding the bag to contain piles of decay. I remember one time The Child wanted to kill a spider that dangled from a branch, but I showed a way to move the spider without harming it. I saw myself in The Child, and we became friends over the months I volunteered at the temple.
One day at service, The Child sat with me while The Parent was in the kitchen setting up tea for later. We chanted mantras as sandalwood incense permeated the hondo. When The Parent ascended to the pews and sat next to The Child, The Child got up and sat on the other side of The Parent, which forced The Parent to slide next to me. Knees bumped, and eyes averted as we stuttered through classical Japanese mantras. Our dynamic changed from then on.
I should’ve known when The Parent invited me over, and The Child wasn’t at their home as I was told, things would go sideways. After that first lie, the lies piled so high I could write an entire Book of Lies based on them. The next lie was the worst lie and matched the last lie: The Parent was still fucking The Manipulator after their divorce. This news literally brought me to my knees in full-body sobs: first, on The Parent’s kitchen tile; then, at the end of our relationship, on the scratched wood in front of the altar at the temple.
But it wasn’t all hell. Sometimes it was kink, like when I was spread eagle on The Parent’s bed, tied to a 10-foot bamboo pole that was thicker than my arm, a la Hojojutsu: the rope bondage technique used by Samurai to detain and torture prisoners. This was accompanied with Daoist sex magic, skipping all the trust-building preliminaries and launching straight into mantra recitation and mudra penetration. In retrospect, that was the dumbest fucking idea: if not supernaturally, then psychologically, it added more layers of delusion and power struggles for us to dissolve. Not even Kali Ma could cut through that much dramatized transgression.
Truthfully, when The Parent lured me into bed, I knew better and crawled under the sheets anyway. The love of my life had died of fentanyl poisoning seven months before, and I had no reason to care about myself anymore. I was on the brink of suicide ever since Death stole my Love, and The Parent’s deceit was the unlikely antidote. Navigating the hall of mirrors cast before me kept me too preoccupied to jump off a bridge. In an ironic twist of fate, the seductive yet toxic cocktail of sex and drama saved my life. I didn’t have that insight at the moment when the relationship rollercoaster spun out of control, though.
Looking back, instead of participating in the hurt, I should’ve bailed, but I chose to lash out at The Parent’s deception with self-righteous anger, over and over again on a hell-loop. Those are the times I steered the situation from bad to worse. I hate to admit it, but the end of this toxic pairing helped me shed unhealthy relationship habits. I needed to learn there is no difference between any one maggot and any other maggot. We were both to blame for all the pain.
