Looking Back on Twenty Years As A Buddhist

As of writing, it is late January in 2025, and it occurred to me recently that I’ve been a Buddhist now for twenty years. I can’t exactly remember exactly when this happened, but I definitely how it came about.

Let me clarify. I grew up as a Mormon in my youth, though my family wasn’t devout. I think my parents just wanted us kids to have some kind of spiritual upbringing, rather than explicitly following Mormonism. By my teens, I was exploring “Eastern thought”, and dabbling in many ideas and concepts. I was inspired by the TV show Kung Fu, and the cool flashbacks by Master Po (played by Keye Luke):

Note the first scene with the image of the Buddha in the background. I saw scenes like this, and having never seen Buddhism, I became very curious. In my teens, I continued to explore and dabble in Buddhism, Taoism, but still went to various churches (Mormon, Protestant, Catholic, etc) and such.

I didn’t really become a Buddhist, as in explicitly taking refuge in the Three Treasures, until my 20’s. When I met my future wife, she was raised Buddhist, and approached it very differently. I quickly realized that I had serious gaps in my understanding of Buddhism. Reading books about Buddhism, and being Buddhist in one’s life are two different things. I realize now that, until you take refuge in the Three Treasures, and choose to uphold the Five Precepts, the Buddhist path won’t 100% make sense.

Still, the big moment came when, after we got married, we went to Japan to meet her extended family. We also used the opportunity to visit Kyoto, Nikkō and such. Being at Chion-in temple in Kyoto, I saw a monk chanting before a statue of Amida Buddha, while striking a wooden fish to maintain rhythm. That really made an impression on me. Later, we visited my father-in-law’s hometown, which had a large temple devoted to the Medicine Buddha. The fact there was a Buddha entirely devoted to healing and well-being in Buddhism had never occurred to me.

Soon after coming home, I found the Jodo Shu Research Institute’s (JSRI) English website about Jodo Shu-Buddhism¹ and that very night, I was so inspired that I recited the nembutsu for the first time. The rest, I guess, was history.

If not for my wife, the JSRI, and later Seattle Buddhist Church, I don’t know how my Buddhist path would have turned out. There was so much information that I was missing, and through all these wonderful encounters, I learned a great deal. There’s been many twists and turns, many mistakes, many experiments, bad assumptions, but overall I feel much more richer for the experience. I wonder how things will look 20 years from now.

I’ve tried sharing my experiences since that fateful January night 20 years ago, first on Blogger, and then on WordPress in one form or another. I want other Buddhists, and others curious about Buddhism, to have the full range of information.

When you look at the local bookstore for books on Buddhism, they tend to be dominated by a handful of authors, and tend to be written for either the Zen crowd, or the Tibetan-Buddhist crowd. Such books also frequently downplay cultural aspects of Buddhism, for fear or turning off their Western (read: liberal white) convert audience. Buddhism is much broader than this, and it’s a shame more books aren’t written from the perspective of Asian Buddhists, and aren’t shy about these cultural aspects. Buddhism isn’t just a philosophy for nerds, it’s a living, breathing tradition that encompasses all walks of life.

There’s something for everyone in it, and I hope people feel encouraged to explore the greater tradition, not just what’s filtered through pop culture.

Namu Amida Butsu

¹ The site is long gone, sadly, but the Wayback Machine has an archive of the site.