FINGER
TO THE
MOON

This is a first step, and it is built to be one. It does not try to complete anyone’s knowledge of the teaching of the Buddha. It tries only to open a door, turn a light on behind it, and point.

The book is written by a father, not a scholar, and meant to be read the way the other books on this shelf are read: unhurried, over time, more than once. It moves in four movements, with a letter to open it and a letter to close it. Each chapter holds the same shape, a few of the Buddha’s own words, a plain telling, and a long reflection that brings the chapter home to the one thread the whole book follows.

That thread is softness. Yin, the soft and yielding and adaptable, and yang, the firm and accumulating and hard. Everything alive is born into the soft and travels into the hard, and the teaching, underneath all its long words, is one steady counsel: hold the hard things lightly, remember the soft, in yourself and in all things. The subject of this book is Buddhism. That thread is the moon. Everything with a long name is a finger pointing at it. Read past the fingers, to the moon.

Chapter One · The Teaching, in Brief

“I was delicately nurtured, exceedingly delicately nurtured.” “Yet this thought came to me: an untaught person, themselves subject to ageing, sickness and death, is troubled at the sight of it in others. I too am subject to these things. Would it be fitting for me to be troubled, disgusted, repelled?” “When I considered this, the intoxication of youth, of health, and of life, entirely fell away.” from the Buddha’s account of his own youth, in the early discourses

The Story, Plainly Told

A long time ago, in the foothills below the Himalayas, in a small kingdom on what is now the border between Nepal and India, a son was born to a ruling family. The family name was Gautama. The boy was given the name Siddhartha. This was somewhere around two and a half thousand years ago, give or take, and a good deal of what is told about his early life is the kind of story that grows in the retelling. That is all right. The legend can be held lightly, and the true thing inside it found anyway.

The legend says this. When Siddhartha was born, a wise old man looked at the child and made a prediction that split in two. This boy, he said, would become either a great king or a great spiritual teacher. His father, being a king, knew exactly which of those he preferred. And he reasoned, as an anxious parent might, that a boy who never saw anything painful would never go looking for the meaning of pain, and so would never wander off to become a teacher. He would stay. He would rule.

So the father built his son a life with the difficult parts removed. Three palaces, the story says, one for each season. Gardens, music, comfort, every pleasant thing a young person could want, and walls. Always the walls. Inside them, Siddhartha was kept from the sight of anything that might trouble him. He grew up, married, had a son of his own, and lived, by every visible measure, a fortunate life. He was, in his own later words, delicately nurtured. Exceedingly delicately nurtured.

But a person’s eyes cannot be walled off forever. The story tells of four journeys outside the palace, and on them Siddhartha, a grown man by now, saw four things he had never been allowed to see. He saw a person bent and frail with age. He saw a person shaking with sickness. He saw a corpse being carried to its cremation. And he saw one more figure, a wandering holy man, calm-faced, owning almost nothing, who had walked out of ordinary life to look for something the palace did not contain.

And so, the story says, in the depth of one night, Siddhartha did the hardest and strangest thing of his life. He looked at everything soft and warm and his, the sleeping wife, the sleeping child, the comfortable rooms, and he left. He walked out of the padded life his father had built, and went to find out what was true.