DHARMA PUNX

The first work I turned to was the autobiography Dharma Punx, by Noah Levine. Though at face value this story of a California punk rocker who became a Buddhist seems atypical, it actually points to a larger trend among young people who are increasingly attracted to the Buddhist path. The first generation to discover the ancient tradition at the hands of American teachers, most of them are under the age of thirty, and their numbers have multiplied at such a fast rate in the past decade that they now compose fifty-six percent of all American Buddhists. Dharma Punx has become increasing popular among these new young Buddhists, but it also claims to be the larger story of Generation X.

The book begins when Noah is five years old, sitting under his mother's deck holding a steak knife, listening to his step-dad shouting at his mom, and contemplating suicide. This is the age, Noah writes, that he first knew he wanted to die, started smoking cigarettes, lighting fires, and stealing from both parents and friends. When he was ten, he discovered punk rock and “found [his] place in this fucked up world.” These early chapters of Noah's story resonated with my own experience growing up, as they undoubtedly would with many other Gen X and Y'ers. Our rebellion started prematurely young, with an almost compulsive need to identify with anything different from what we perceived as “normal.” Privileged but dissatisfied, intelligent but short on life experience, our “war” lacked a proper outlet or a consciously articulated purpose. Thus rebellion imploded, resulting in a kind of indulgent self-destruction always aided by drugs and alcohol. At the age of seventeen, Noah landed in juvenile hall after living on the streets as a junkie. There he began to meditate and eventually got sober through AA. After several trips to Asia to visit monasteries and meditation retreats, he became a Buddhist practitioner and teacher.

Fifteen years later, Noah uses Dharma Punx to explore the motivations behind his teenage rebellion; he writes that it was fueled by a hatred for the hypocrisy he perceived in his mother's and father's narcissistic lifestyle and the hippie new-age values they supposedly embodied. His mother was an “addict,” always involved with boyfriends that she met on meditation retreats, and his dad (author Stephen Levine, a famous Buddhist teacher in his own right) was distant, consumed by spiritual pursuits while Noah was growing up. “I totally rejected meditation and all the spiritual shit they built their lives on . . . we saw that peace and love had failed to make any real changes in the world.” Later on, he writes, “I felt that peace was for hippies and that as a punk rocker it had been my duty to fight against those passive, useless people, to foster some real changes. . . .”

Noah writes about his turn to Buddhism as a shift from the outer punk rock rebellion to the inner rebellion against the mind that is the core of the Buddha dharma, a transformation that, in no uncertain terms, saved his life. When I met him in New York, he said, “I knew, for whatever reason, that I had a choice to either take on spiritual practice, or perish.” Considering his former attitudes toward “spiritual shit” and his undying allegiance to the punk rock ethos, there's an irony in the fact that he's now the student of dharma teachers who are both friends and peers of his own father, including Jack Kornfield, Ram Dass, and Sharon Salzberg. Aren't these the same people, as Noah himself claims in Dharma Punx, whose values he was always rebelling against? When I posed this question, he simply said, “I'm not going to hang out with these people all the time, and I don't really want to be like them, because my attitudes are different. But they have this wisdom that I want.”

Like Noah, many of us have grown up with a negative idea about what being “spiritual” means—that you have to become a kind of über-romantic idealist, fundamentally out of touch with the reality of the world. One of the great appeals of Dharma Punx to Gen X and Y'ers may be that it negates this cliché by representing a spiritual ethic and attitude towards life that is decidedly rooted in realism. As Noah writes in the preface, “This is not a fictional tale of romantic suffering or a Hollywood love story. It's about real people, real loss, and genuine spiritual growth.” This realism is in part relayed through Noah's candidness when writing about his life experience, of which nothing is left out. Drugs, spiritual experiences, punk music, sex, despair, or elation—it's all there.

Granted, there are times in the book when his candidness lapses into a kind of confessionalism, weighed down by a tedium of details about his personal life. (“Ondrea offered to make me some food, but I wasn't hungry yet. The burrito I'd eaten for lunch had been more than enough.”) But this tone in Dharma Punx is undoubtedly representative of our entire generation. Our sense of individuality has become the source of greatest meaning and value in our lives, and as a result, we're inclined to be narcissistic. Yet part of what makes his book interesting—and again, a reflection of our generation—is that this extreme self-interest exists simultaneously with an enormous emphasis on the importance of working for the benefit of others.

For the past six years, Noah has dedicated himself to community service programs working with AIDS patients, teaching children and teens the philosophy of the dharma, and traveling to juvenile halls and prisons around the Bay Area in order to “plant the seeds of mindfulness, the greatest gift I could ever give.” Such “socially engaged Buddhism” has become central to the younger generation of Buddhist practitioners, no doubt inspired to some extent by Noah's example. It was this passionate commitment to engaged service in the world—or as Noah phrased it, “finding freedom and then spending the rest of our lives giving it away”—that led me to seek him out in person. What would his perspective be, I wondered, on young people's potential to respond to the world's ominous future?

The night I arrived in New York City to speak with Noah, he was holding a dharma talk in a large art gallery in Soho. He cut a striking figure in his white creepers, signature shaved head, scores of tattoos, and big smile that revealed several gold teeth. Noah is a punk of the old school—you can see it even in his stance. With legs planted wide apart, he looks ever ready to start bending a knee, nodding his head in sync with a furiously fast drum beat, just before he lets loose and joins his comrades by jumping into a throbbing mosh pit. He seemed to emanate sincerity and a feeling of good humor throughout his talk, qualities that were further confirmed for me when we met the following day at his friend's house.

I began by asking what he made of Larson and Saraswathi's quote, where they said, “Nothing less than a full mobilization of young people to higher goals and ideals is required for humankind to make it through the new century.” True to his style in Dharma Punx, Noah replied, “My immediate reaction is, like, wonderful, but it's not going to fucking happen. That's what the Buddha was saying. Everyone's not going to do it. It's too hard. But I have hope. I don't feel totally hopeless. I feel totally committed to that revolution among young people and . . . I don't really see it.” “But do you think that Buddhism is capable of offering solutions to the problems that face us?” I asked him. He paused for a minute and then said, “No. I know it would be much more popular to say, 'We have this tradition that can solve the problems of the world,' but I don't think that's what the Buddha taught. We're here in samsara, and this is a realm of suffering, of ignorance and greed and hatred. It always has been and it always will be. The spiritual tradition of enlightenment, from that perspective, isn't about trying to make samsara into nirvana. It's about personal freedom. That means the best thing we can do is free ourselves from the cycle of death and rebirth.”