For me, the Buddha’s path means more than the Four Noble Truths, and the Noble Eightfold Path.
For me, it is a coming home.
As I described in “My Spiritual String Band Journey” (under essays), I had a beautiful mystical experience in 1968, one which stirred me abruptly awake and changed my life completely; for once you do wake up spiritually, you cannot go back to sleep—or, perhaps you can, but it would take a major effort and more selfishness than I could ever muster.
The thing about beautiful mystical or spiritual experiences is that you want to re-experience them, the sooner the better, and I set out, almost immediately after this awakening, to recapture that wonderful, wonderful feeling.
In vain.
I then became a seeker of religion. For, surely, what I had experience must have been experienced by the religious founders of the world, or they would not have founded their paths.
I should have taken a clue from my friend Erik, who had just returned from India and who called me “The Little Buddha” when I told him what had happened. Well, to rephrase, I should have taken the right clue from him, that about the Buddha. I say that because later I did in fact take a major clue from him and followed him into the religion he had found.
And there started, for me, a forty year long detour.
I shall not lie and say that it was not a beneficial journey, for it was. I learned a lot, and I did get to know the religion’s founder personally. But ultimately, it did not lead me back to my awakening, but rather tended to draw me further away from it, and those I came to know during these many years could not, or did not, understand what I was talking about, for nowhere was my experience described by the founder.
It was not until, in 2007, I decided to go back to Buddhism—and this time at greater depth—that I found, in the writings I pursued, a faithful description of what had occurred to me. I found, at last, both recognition and acknowledgement of what had changed my life (and still served as my spiritual foundation) so many years ago.
Studying then, with renewed interest and urgency (I was not getting any younger), the Pali Canon and other Theravada writings, I finally found myself at home. Words ceased being mere words, they became voices of welcome.
And I saw, both in the Four Noble Truths and in the Noble Eightfold Path, not only a pointing finger, but a voice recognizing where I had been and where I wanted to go.
I was home, again. Finally. This is a path I now recognize, and know. It is a path I love. And it is a path I know will lead to enlightenment and Nibbana.
Ulf Wolf