Crusty editors and newsroom veterans at the now-defunct Arkansas Gazette taught me as a young reporter that hard work, fairness, concentration, commitment, compassion, devotion to truth and social responsibility are at the heart of smart reporting.
They also taught me to nurture common sense and a sense of wonder.
Those are some of the same lessons I learned years earlier about life and religious practice from shaven-headed Buddhist monks in Thai monasteries.
Personal religious beliefs rarely come up in interviews with sources or in newsroom chatter. But these beliefs are as much a part of my work as a pen and notepad.
Growing up in a working class, Roman Catholic family in Philadelphia, religion gave me a reverence for language and a respect for the power of ideas. I spent much of my childhood in awe of church ritual. Flickering votive candles, towering statues, the fog of sweet incense in the Latin High Mass, these seemed wonderful to me.
Occasionally, my Irish immigrant grandmother led me by the arm to an Armenian Orthodox church in a storefront near her house. Why? I’ll never know. But I suspect I learned there was more than one way to regard the great mystery.
Amid the tumult of the 1960’s, I fell away from the church and sought answers elsewhere. I saw real-world Buddhism in 1972 as a teenage G.I. posted to a Thai air base late in the Vietnam war.
Then Beat Generation writers led me to Taoism, Chinese poetry and popular writing on Buddhism. After my discharge, I returned to Asia. I visited Buddhist temples in India, Burma and Thailand, and later ordained as a monk at a Theravada Buddhist monastery in central Thailand.
Young men in predominantly Buddhist Thailand traditionally don the yellow robes, if only for a few weeks as a rite of passage. I followed that custom.
We rose daily before sunrise for a barefoot alms round, met with our meditation teachers and carried out routine temple chores. The monastery’s 90 monks also gathered once a month to hear a senior monk chant the monk’s rules of discipline in Pali, the canonical language of the Theravada or Southern school of Buddhism.
That’s about as far from the raucous serum of American journalism as you can get. But it was in the monkhood that I decided to become a reporter.
Achieving enlightenment or nirvana is at the center of Buddhist teaching. Nirvana, or nibbana in the Pali, is often taken to mean a supernatural bliss or a Buddhist heaven.
But one of Thailand’s most progressive and influential monks, the late Buddhadasa Bhikkhu, taught that nirvana can also be seen as a simpler phenomenon.
“This kind of nirvana nourishes the lives of living things so they survive and don’t go crazy,” he wrote.
Nirvana is not a place, Buddhadasa taught, but a state achieved through ethical living, mental discipline and the development of wisdom. The path to nirvana involves practicing proper speech, action, livelihood, concentration, and resolve. Isolation and contemplative silence are important. But the Buddhist canon, monastic rules and the cultures of many Buddhist countries emphasize community involvement and interdependence as essential parts of the practice.
Buddhism as I understood it fit nicely with Western democratic ideals. An educated society forms institutions of government to make decisions about community life, based on open discourse and free commerce in the marketplace of ideas. Human greed, hatred and ignorance may corrupt the process, but a free and impartial press in a democratic society compensates by finding and communicating the truth. Call it public service.
Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But this system’s success — by Buddhist or any other standard — is the measure of an enlightened society.
With this in mind, journalism seemed a natural choice for a lay career when I decided to leave the monkhood. I returned to the United States, went to journalism school and settled into newspaper and wire service reporting.
Theologically, I suppose I stand somewhere between Trappist monk Thomas Merton and the guy I saw recently with an “I-Love-Tibet” bumper sticker on his Geo convertible.
I’m a little weak on piety, I’ll admit. On the job, I’m less interested in celebrities, scandals du jours and other stories that simply feed the public’s curiosity. Civil rights, criminal justice, the environment, open government and issues affecting the least, the last and the lost seem more important. Where Catholicism, Buddhism and simple news judgment begin and end in the selection process, I have no idea.
There is no “Zen of Reporting” that I’ve discovered. But cultivation of patience and a “cool heart” certainly helps to deal with the many difficult newsroom personalities. My meditation teacher often said impossible challenges are opportunities to practice mindfulness.
A stateside wire service bureau is as good a place to practice as you’ll find for that. I resorted to contemplative breathing exercises while simultaneously juggling phones, collecting high school sports scores, monitoring TV news and handling normal desk duties on solo night tricks in The Associated Press Pittsburgh bureau.
Sometimes principles are sorely tested. Buddhists, for example, are taught to have compassion toward all beings. In the early 1980’s, I covered the rise of armed extremist groups that foreshadowed the rise of today’s anti-government groups and militias. Often that meant arriving unannounced in the Ozark mountain strongholds of heavily armed groups such as the Covenant, the Sword and the Arm of the Lord.
More than once I sat uncomfortably through long, poisonous tirades against blacks and Jews. These guys seemed to have a special venom for “Buddha worshippers.” Happily, they never asked if I was one. In any case, generating compassion for racists with machine guns is a tough assignment.
Religious influences sometimes leave you wrestling with conscience. Covering the executions of three brutal murderers recently, I struggled for balance. As the military reporter for The News and Observer in the late 1980’s, I covered the 82d Airborne Division. I remember a large sign on Fort Bragg’s Green Ramp, the jumping off point for combat missions. “Think War,” it read. In the hustle of daily reporting, it’s easy to forget that peace is always possible and preferable.
The South’s frequent tornadoes, hurricanes on the Carolina coast, the Pittsburgh USAir disaster, the poverty and racism afflicting the Mississippi Delta, prison rape in Arkansas and the everyday violence of American life-stories like these raise the large questions for reporters.
My beliefs perhaps haven’t led me to different conclusions about the moral order of the universe than reporters of other faiths. More likely, we’ve arrived at similar conclusions in different ways.