attending to this issue of how to stop our life, no matter how ‘good’ we are, simply circling around ‘me-at-the-centre-of-everything’. Buddhism is clear that this isn’t a moral issue (we’re not to blame for it), but an existential one. At the same time, if we don’t do something about it, it’s a knot that will only get tighter and, crucially, will stop us fulfilling our deepest potential.
Jagdish Kashyap © Clear Vision Trust
So for Bhante this question wasn’t theoretical; it was an urgent spiritual need. It was clear to him that simply practising meditation wasn’t enough and that, ‘Something more drastic and more down-to -earth was needed’. Eventually, reading the Trappist monk Thomas Merton’s ‘Seeds of Contemplation’, he found what he wanted. The instruction was that the disciple should surrender his will absolutely to the will of his spiritual superior and Bhante resolved to apply this straightaway to his relations with Jagdish Kashyap. At first this wasn’t easy because Jagdish Kashyap was an unassuming man and not all that assertive, but at the end of a visit to Kalimpong he did ask something of Bhante – to stay there and ‘work for the good of Buddhism’, adding that the people there would look after him. Bhante wasn’t quite sure how he would work for the good of Buddhism, nor was he so confident that the people would want to look after him, but he writes, ‘There was little I could say … the word of the guru was not to be disobeyed. Bowing my head in acquiescence, I paid my respects in the traditional manner, Kashyap-ji gave me his blessing and the jeep drove off.’ This may seem very extreme to us. We may not even think of ourselves as having a teacher, never mind surrendering our will to them. But perhaps there is another way of thinking about it. Instead of surrendering our will, we can think of times when our will has blended with the will of another’s. When someone we 12