(279 pp., Shambhala Publications)

Gavin Harrison had been practicing vipassana for many years in his native South Africa and elsewhere when he was diagnosed HIV positive. “I felt as though I had been taken by the scruff of the neck and forced to confront aspects of myself that I’d stayed clear of all my life,” he writes. “The impact of the diagnosis brought a sense of urgency and immediacy that were not there before. There simply was no time to waste.”

In the Lap of the Buddha is his penetrating account of the deeper awakening to which suffering brought him. As both a student of Joseph Goldstein and an accomplished teacher in his own right, Harrison beautifully interweaves his personal story with the life and teachings of the Buddha and the techniques of insight meditation. The result is a fresh, authentic integration of Buddhist fundamentals with the lessons learned from a life in which pain has been the primary teacher. With the authority of one who has been to hell and back, Gavin Harrison tells us how to enter our anguish and find great joy. For anyone seeking help in struggling with acute emotional or physical suffering, this is a book to study and trust.

It is not a book to be feared, however. Although working with physical pain is the core of Harrison’s practice, In the Lap of the Buddha is a pleasure to read. The story of his childhood sexual abuse and his later HIV diagnosis is sometimes quite moving, but he tells it with an unsentimental clarity that inspires action rather than tears. If the dharma can heal this man’s multiple wounds, surely it can heal us all.

Born in 1950 in an affluent white suburb of Johannesburg, Harrison grew up in an “almost perfect” family of four. But the apparent perfection concealed much pain. He was abused in infancy by someone, now dead, whom he does not publicly name because he feels it would serve no purpose. Wanting the best for him, his parents, whom he loved dearly, sent him to an all-boys boarding school in Kimberly. There he was caned, forced to perform sex acts, and ostracized. The experience left deep wounds that festered under layers of denial until 1983, when he began digging reluctantly into his anger, self-hatred and fear. Six years later he was diagnosed HIV positive.

“For me, the line between recovery from abuse and living with AIDS is often blurred,” Harrison writes. “The pain, rage and frustration are similar in both areas.” His method for healing is meditation, and he has developed a sharply focused inner eye that puts the pain of his life in its proper perspective. “We watch our inner life go by like a show,” he writes. “This delivers us from victimhood.”

Through meditation and much forgiveness (the book is saturated with metta) Harrison has discovered new ways to address abuse through meditation. For example, he has found that the imprint of childhood trauma can make awareness of breathing a difficult or impossible practice. As an alternative to following his breath, he visits touch points around his body, bringing awareness to where the lips touch each other, where the hands rest in the lap, and so on. All of this is part of a near-heroic inquiry into turning fearsome hindrances into helpers, which he modestly calls making “our experience workable.”

The result of this creative and determined investigation is a freedom that allows Harrison to describe pain almost as if it were an old friend. For example, he chides himself for occasionally giving pain only a “cursory glance” rather than the full attention it demands. And again: “When times are hard, there is a margin of peace in just feeling OK about being overwhelmed.” This is the hard-earned wisdom of one who has learned firsthand that we do not become free from pain but, rather, free within it. “If the mind is steady and clear it is possible to move into the center of physical pain and ask again, ‘What is this?’”

His keen observer’s eye sees a lot of suffering, and in this he shares the Buddha’s point of view. “The Buddha said, ‘I teach one thing, and one thing only. The truth of suffering, and the way out of suffering.’” Suffering, Harrison notes, can wake us up to faith, guide us to the truth of interbeing, and motivate us to practice the simple but difficult work of mindfulness which eventually verifies our faith. But the work is also play. He tells us how he learned to make fun of his own savagely critical inner voice by putting his thumb on his nose and wagging his fingers in response to it. “It felt great to play with this thing that had hurt so much,” he writes.

Harrison brings so much joyful illumination to the dark, heavy themes of AIDS and child abuse that we are tempted to forget what this man’s body and mind are enduring. To my best recollection there is not a single line describing the murderous symptoms suffered by people with HIV disease. Having seen its ravages, I am awed by Harrison’s vast courage. (He relies quite a lot on the “call to warriorship” of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche.) There are many, many things to admire in this book, but perhaps its greatest achievement is that it is not really about AIDS at all. In the Lap of the Buddha is a work of dharma instruction as pure and incisive as the finest South African diamond. Having gone deep, Gavin Harrison has reached the place where the jewel is in the lotus. As Joseph Goldstein notes in the foreword, “only someone who lives the teachings could have written it.”

∞

From the Spring 1995 issue of Inquiring Mind (Vol. 11, No. 2)

Text © 1995–2020 by Merrill Collett