The Bodhi Stand Presents

UPASAKA KUO MIN KELLERMAN

       Coming from England, Roger Kellerman joined the Sino American Buddhist Association at the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas about a year ago. He has been diligent in his cultivation and works hard to cooperate in helping maintain the Bodhimanda, contributing his efforts wherever a need arises. As a member of the teaching staff at Dharma Realm Buddhist University, Kuo Min teaches English as a Second Language while also studying for a higher degree of his own.

The following is his account of events that lead to his arrival at the City:

"Rather than dwelling on details of a comparatively uninteresting life, it would be more profitable to concentrate on one detail which in retrospect proved to be a 'turning point.' In Buddhism one comes to grips with birth and death. Yet the emphasis is not on any intellectual understanding, but on a knowing that goes

beyond words; a knowing that comes from 'Walking the Way.' For the greater part of my life, I have striven for the former, both through science and philosophy. However with the totally unexpected death, after a short coma, of my father, the values of my life changed.

"No amount of 'intellectual understanding' prepares one for the actual sight of the death of a loved one. There before my eyes was my father, transformed from the perfectly healthy one that I had last seen a few months prior to the now ghost like body kept alive by tubes in an intensive care ward. All his hopes and loves, his likes and dislikes, his 'everything' had literally gone down the drain. And there I was, standing there, full of my own great loves and hopes and when one is in the middle of them one never has any real inkling as to their impermanence, seeing exactly what will happen to them they will also go down the drain. What then occurred was the intuitive realization the depths of which mere words fail to convey of 'Why bother?'

I arrived at the City of Ten Thousand Buddha within seven months of my father's death and here was the means provided for both transcending the ordinary existence and also reaching beyond mere intellectual understanding. It is up to me to make use of these means to 'Walk the Way.'