I remember as a kid how I loved to take my allowance from mowing lawns and baby sitting to Harvard’s Bookstore to buy comic books, three for a dime. Mr. Rice, my father’s old pal, owned the store. He was a retired magician. It was not unusual to find a magic trick in a shelf of books.
I usually took Gary and Chuckie with me to the bookstore who were younger kids. It was about five blocks from our house. As an older kid it was my duty to watch out for Gary and Chuckie and to introduce them to reading comics! You can’t imagine the delight we had when entering Mr. Rice’s bookstore. Heaped up on the east wall were tons of comics; many from the late forties. This was kid’s heaven.
It was not unusual for us three boys to carry fifty comics back to Maple Street where we all lived. And this was just the first part of the great ritual of comic book reading and popsicle sucking that took place during the summer.
I guess the sheer joy of walking into Mr. Rice’s bookstore never left me because when I discovered Zen Buddhism I had the same joy. To hold D.T. Suzuki’s translation of the Lankavatara Sutra in my hand was sheer joy. And to read it not understanding a damn thing was also joyful because one day I knew that if I could understand everything in this Sutra, I would be at least a Bodhisattva.
What I wasn’t too happy about was doing seated meditation. My teacher I could tell also hated to do it. But we all did it. It wasn’t until I really got into the Sutras and then read what the Chinese Zen masters had to say that I began to get a grasp of what meditation was really about. Thanks to my comic book reading, I eventually came to see that meditation is the effort to penetrate through the veil of phenomenal waves; these waves being our mental images and internal dialogue. If we were lucky, we would see the substance from which these illusory waves were made which is beyond birth and death.
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