GROWING UP PAKEHA BUDDHIST

-- an interview with Erin Taylor

INSIGHTAotearoa : Tell us about growing up in New Zealand in a pakeha, buddhist family.

Erin Taylor : I was born on Auckland's north shore in 1954. The north shore was very different from what it is now, it wasn't an affluent place and there was lots of space. It had just been converted from farmland and my parents built a very small two roomed bach which they moved into shortly before I was born. Later on, when I was two, they started to build a house on the section next door.

My parents are Bobbie and Brian Taylor. Dad had trained as a rehab carpenter after the war and then as a schoolteacher, teaching at a primary school at Murrays Bay. His father had died when he was young, and he didn't have much guidance and direction about the kind of education he could aspire to, so he joined the Navy when he was very young and became a radio operator. It was in the navy that he met people who educated him. He became interested in opera and literature and maybe it was at that time that he started to explore philosophy and religion and then, after the second world war, he travelled overseas with some friends. They were bohemian people, politically left, interested in art.

Dad started to write, his brother is a painter, and when they came back from overseas they were mixing with the bohemian element in Auckland. Dad went flatting with a man who had lived in India and who introduced him to hinduism. They bought a copy of The Life of Ramakrishna, which was the first book of very many. Before mum met dad, she had begun to practise yoga and was a vegetarian; their interest in eastern spiritual practices has been central in their lives together.

INSIGHTAotearoa : How old were you when you first noticed there was buddhism in the family?

Erin : My first real memories about buddhism were from when I was five or six and a man came to live at our place, actually in a tent at the bottom of our garden. His name was Arthur Martin, he was an old friend of dad's who had gone to England and become a buddhist there. He returned to New Zealand having spent time studying buddhism with Christmas Humphries. Arthur used to meditate outside his tent, which is what inspired me to sit in the posture and look like I was doing it -- I have a black and white photograph of me sitting in the meditation posture in front of a hut I'd built.

Arthur Martin was fascinating because he lived a very austere life in this tent. He ate ships' biscuits, which my sisters and I used to hang about his tent hoping to eat, goodness knows why, and he used to drink green tea.

My father used to do wood carvings, they were our toys, I used to play with them. One of them was someone sitting in a meditation posture.

INSIGHTAotearoa : How long was Arthur Martin living at the bottom of your garden?

Erin : Maybe only a couple of years, but it's a very strong memory for me. He used to talk to us about non-attachment and letting go and he loved nature. He had a sparrow that he used to call Mate that used to come and sit close to him, so he kind of embodied buddhist ideals. As a small child I vaguely understood that buddhism was something to do with nature, with eating very simple biscuits, drinking green tea and living in a tent, not aspiring to living in a flash house or anything.

INSIGHTAotearoa : So he would have left the garden when you were about seven?

Erin : Yes, maybe seven or eight. In winter though he lived downstairs in the house, but I found out later there was a little bit of tension between my parents about that because mum was having babies and Arthur was probably, interestingly, a rather socially unaware sort of person. He used to have lots of little books with yellow covers and very fine paper ... I was trying to remember the names...

INSIGHTAotearoa : From the Buddhist Publication Society in Sri Lanka perhaps?

Erin : No, no, they were a quarterly journal from the Buddhist Society UK called The Middle Way. There seemed to be lots of them around and we used to play with them as children. I'd open them and read a few words. There was a special feeling around all that. I was conscious it was unusual and I felt it made my family different and interesting. Mum and Dad talked a great deal about philosophy, buddhism etc.

INSIGHTAotearoa : Apart from having Arthur at the bottom of the garden, what would happen in your household that made you think it was a buddhist household?

Erin : It wasn't buddhist in the "ist" sense that you might be able to think of today because there really wasn't a structure. There may have been a buddhist society in Auckland, but we lived on the north shore, the harbour bridge wasn't there until later and mum and dad didn't have a car until I was ten.

When I first started school and came home and said, "Well, there are anglicans and presbyterians and methodists -- what are we?" He said, "We're buddhists".

So I went to school and told the kids that I was a buddhist, which caused a certain consternation. I started to be dragged by my friends around various Sunday schools. I actually remember going to a Sunday school once, a Methodist one I think, and this woman said to me very pointedly, "you know buddhists don't go to heaven".

INSIGHTAotearoa : How did you feel about that?

Erin : I actually thought, thank god, it sounded like a horrible place. We used to spend hours arguing about religion, I used to argue with my friends with great commitment against the existence of a god who sat up on a cloud, and all that.

So I wasn't ashamed of it, I was proud of it which seems odd, but the reason I think is that dad was a teacher at the school we were at, and he was the favourite teacher and all the kids adored him. I thought he was right about everything, it was alright to hold those kinds of views, I felt I had a higher authority.

INSIGHTAotearoa : Your father?

Erin : Yes, that's right.

INSIGHTAotearoa : Did your father have a practice of any kind? Did he meditate?

Erin : I think he did at times but it wasn't something we saw a lot of. This is one of the things that interested me. Buddhism at that time, or my sense of it, is very different from what it is now in the west:. It was very intellectual and I remember Arthur Martin as being very intellectual. He and dad would talk for hours and my sense of it was that the understanding of letting go was more like pushing away or repressing, and that non-attachment was "don't attach". I think their understanding was a little bit skewed.

What I understood growing up was that you weren't supposed to have, for instance, anger and that you had to push it away: you weren't supposed to feel it. Dad might have had a much more complicated understanding than that but I do think that buddhism did have an element of "thou shalt not", very intellectual. So the practice might have been there a bit. We did do yoga, mum and dad did yoga, mum particularly. I think in terms of buddhism it was more a value system and a belief system than a practice.

When I was very young Maharishi Mahesh Yogi came to Auckland and dad was his assistant. In fact mum and dad did TM for a while, which of course is transcendental meditation.

INSIGHTAotearoa : Did you have an altar at home?

Erin : No we didn't, although dad used to make little shrines in the garden and it's quite possible he also used to meditate in private down there, away from the children. But there wasn't a shrine in the house and there weren't images of the Buddha other than in books. I don't know where you would have got those things at that time in New Zealand.

INSIGHTAotearoa : Did he have any other friends apart from Arthur who were buddhist?

Erin : No.

INSIGHTAotearoa : There was just the two of them?

Erin : I think so, yes. There may have been people who he met who who were buddhists or were interested in buddhism and I do remember him discussing it with people. As a child my sense was that we were pretty much unique in our community, but that we were up with something that was current overseas and that made me feel good.

INSIGHTAotearoa : As you were growing older, how did your appreciation change?

Erin : When I was 12 we moved from Auckland to Wanganui. Things changed in the family because he was incredibly busy: he was the head teacher of a small country school, he had six children and the focus probably went off buddhism.

My memory of my earlier childhood is that there was a lot of philosophical discussion and artistic stuff happening and that still continued in Wanganui, but I think we were much more cut off there and dad was much more absorbed in his job. And then political events started to come more into the fore because of the Vietnam war: dad started a local anti-Vietnam war movement. He'd been very involved in CND in Auckland and when we came to Wanganui I remember the Vietnam war thing was just huge in our household for years, it was very, very important.

INSIGHTAotearoa : As part of that focus were you aware that there were buddhists in Vietnam?

Erin : Oh yes, and the buddhist monks burning themselves was the cause of a profound concern in the family. As a teenager I remember mum and me being very, very upset abouy that, but at that time, if people had asked me what religion I was, I would have said that I was interested in buddhism rather than saying I was a buddhist, because there was no structure and I was conscious of that.

Dad read very widely not just about buddhism but also the other eastern religions. He got very interested in the I Ching -- taoism, and hinduism had been around quite a lot when I was a kid and I remember some pictures of of hindu teachers.

There were also books around about the Indian yogis and as an adolescent I started to read myself some of those things, as you do when you're 14, starting to get a bit interested in spiritual things. I think I might have even gone through a little christian phase, quite drawn to the Christ on the cross bleeding all over the place -- for a 14-year-old it has a certain attraction! I remember I read the autobiography of an English woman who went and worked with Ghandi and I thought "that's me, that's what I'm going to do".

INSIGHTAotearoa : So down in Wanganui when you were in your early teens there's more of a political aspect to the household, but you're still aware of being a buddhist household?

Erin : Yeah, that's right. You couldn't really say 'buddhist' household in the sense we understand it now because there wasn't a structure, there was no meditation group or monastery to go to, but that's what dad used to write on the census form -- religion: buddhist.

But it was still a philosophy that mum and dad felt comfortable with. There was actually a very open attitude in our house. The 'ism' thing wasn't really important, it was a buddhist household in the sense that that was the major influence but, growing up, in my teens, it wasn't something that preoccupied me. The Vietnam war did, but of course the philosophy around that was buddhist-influenced.

INSIGHTAotearoa : In Wanganui at that time, were there many Asian people who might have been buddhists?

Erin : I don't remember knowing any Asian people at that time. There must have been a Chinese community but we didn't come across them in our small rural community out of town.

I suppose the people we had the most in common with were the quaker community with whom we did a lot of anti-Vietnam war stuff. And there would be the occasional person who would turn up, who would come and talk to dad about ideas and so on, and often they would seem like they were not mentally in that good a space, or not fitting into conventional society.

But generally as a community at that time, at school for example, many people had barely even heard of buddhism until I was to mention it. In the sixties I knew about what was going on overseas because of dad and what he was reading; that there were these big movements in the States, and I always had the feeling that we were ahead of NZ society, up with the avant garde, which of course we were, so I felt quite confident about it all. This was one of the nice things about my childhood.

In my late teens, I still thought of myself as a buddhist loosely, but when I tried to practice I had an enormous struggle because I didn't really understand it. I had these huge expectations of myself to be a certain way; that one had to sit down and meditate and actually 'be' like an enlightened person, not have any anger, just be instantly calm and quiet. Of course it doesn't happen.

INSIGHTAotearoa : You make a distinction between a practising buddhist and a believing buddhist.

Erin : I really believe you can make this distinction. This is something people are starting to understand better now.

INSIGHTAotearoa : Do you feel you're understanding it better?

Erin : Finally.

INSIGHTAotearoa : You saw the very first issue of the American buddhist journal Inquiring Mind, that would have been 1984?

Erin : Yeah, in Palmerston North. A friend from the States came out and had it and we thought of subscribing to it but the postage seemed too expensive.

This was the '80s, I'd had my own family. In Palmerston North where my husband was teaching at Massey University, there was a strong fundamentalist christian presence. We went to the Stokes Valley monastery and I started to take my two daughters to the buddhist Sunday school. Their friends were all incredibly narrow minded so they didn't even tell their friends we were a buddhist family. Before their friends used to come and play, they used to turn the books in the bookshelf that had buddhist titles around so that they couldn't be seen and hide the little Buddha that I had! At one level they loved the buddhist Sunday school, but it was a guilty secret for them; even in the '80s, they were ashamed of buddhism.

New Zealand has only recently become a country where you can practise meditation in a community of lay people and I feel enormously grateful for that.

-- Erin Taylor attends the Wellington insight meditation sits; she spoke with Ramsey Margolis