At AA, the Buddha’s Got Cred

12 Steps on Buddha’s Path: Bill, Buddha, and We
By Laura S.
Wisdom Publications, 2006; 176 pp., $12.95 (paper)

Reviewed by Joan Duncan Oliver

These are hard times for memoir, particularly those about drinking and recovery. Memoir still outsells fiction by a wide margin, but the genre has taken a bit of a beating since James Frey’s best seller A Million Little Pieces was unmasked as a souped-up version of his addiction story. The bits about rehab are mostly fabrication, it seems.
    This is too bad, because Frey notwithstanding, one of the few places left you can count on hearing close to the unvarnished truth is in a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous. Alcoholics stay sober by telling one another their stories—cautionary tales of descent and redemption. By the time most people reach AA they’ve suffered enough shame and degradation, and created enough damage, that their stories need no embellishment. Why lie when the raw truth is so compelling?
    The tempest around Frey is precisely what AA’s founders strove to avoid when they urged its members to maintain anonymity at the public level. That way, they reasoned, any individual notoriety wouldn’t affect the fellowship’s collective mission to help suffering alcoholics. This tradition—“ever reminding us to place principles before personalities,” as the AA literature puts it—prompted the author of a new memoir, 12 Steps on Buddha’s Path: Bill, Buddha, and We, to publish anonymously, as “Laura S.” For reasons less clear, she’s gone under even deeper cover: “Laura S.” is a pseudonym.
    The recent furor might be enough to make any memoirist duck for cover, but here the layers of secrecy are somewhat puzzling. There’s not much in these pages to feel ashamed of: no searing admissions, no poignant confrontations with the damage drinking wrought. Just a laundry list of transgressions that are common among active alcoholics: promiscuous sex, suicide attempts, job loss, family problems, runaway emotions, bad judgment. This is not to say Laura S. didn’t suffer mightily—just that we don’t really know what happened. What’s missing here is the narrative, the anecdotes with details that invite identification—the source of AA’s power to heal.
    Ms. S. seems less interested in a trip down memory lane, however, than in the material that makes up the bulk of the book: a step-by-step reading of AA’s Twelve Steps to recovery (the “Bill” in the subtitle is AA cofounder Bill Wilson); a point-by-point examination of basic buddhadharma; and a section weaving together the two (“We” refers to the collective support of the AA fellowship and the Buddhist sangha). The focus here is a disquisition of how AA and Buddhism mesh, not the nuts-and-bolts of the author’s practice. We never find out, for example, who her teachers are. Had Laura S. been more self-revealing, she would have given every recovering drunk who sits down to meditate reassurance that the Buddha really, truly knew a lot about addiction and how to spring the trap of desire.
    Like an alcoholic who’s done it all and lived to tell the tale, the Buddha had street cred. He was the real deal. Whatever you believe about his past lives and the Jataka stories, as far as we know the Awakened One didn’t just invent his deep realization under the Bodhi tree.
    Spiritual awakening is the essence of the AA recovery program. The Twelve Steps, like the Buddha’s teachings, come from direct experience—what AA’s founding members did to stay sober. Without a connection to a “Higher Power,” they said, recovery is unlikely. Evidently, the program works: after 70 years, AA has arguably the highest success rate of any recovery model, and its principles help with a range of addictive behaviors.
     Still, for some newcomers, the “God-talk” can be a hurdle. Early on, AA was influenced by the Oxford Group, an evangelical Christian fellowship, and although the program evolved along ecumenical lines, the idea of surrendering one’s ego to “God as we understood Him” remains. When the Sixties generation started getting sober, many were already practicing meditation, or soon latched on to it as an alternative to the childhood faith they’d abandoned. It was this crew who concluded that AA and Buddhism had a lot in common. Buddhist meditation became an accepted way to practice AA’s 11th Step: “Sought through prayer and meditation to improve our conscious contact with God as we understood Him, praying only for knowledge of His will for us and the power to carry it out.”
    Today, no one doubts it’s possible to stay sober without believing in a Higher Power, at least as traditionally defined. Some substitute “Good Orderly Direction” for God, or the spiritual force of the fellowship. Laura S. solved the God problem for herself by changing G.O.D. to “Group of Drunks” and praying to “Honey Pie”—an homage to her favorite Beatles song, about a music-hall star. She envisioned Honey Pie as a “fluffy, warm, older woman”—the better for intimate chats, it seems. (This was before Laura S. discovered Buddhism, though Honey Pie seems to live on in her heart.)
    Laura S. is not the first author to parse AA’s steps in light of Buddhism, or to link recovery and meditation. Dharma teacher Mel Ash (The Zen of Recovery) and Bill Alexander (Cool Water: Alcoholism, Mindfulness, and Ordinary Recovery), a workshop leader, both turned out graceful and affecting memoirs looking at recovery through the lens of longtime Zen practice. More recent authors write from a Theravada perspective. In One Breath at a Time: Buddhism and the Twelve Steps, Kevin Griffin, a graduate of Spirit Rock’s Community Dharma Program, threads his drinking story through a discussion of how AA’s steps illuminate Vipassana practice and vice versa.
    Though Griffin covers much of the same territory as Laura S., his strong narrative lends more immediacy to the material. That said, Laura S. may simply have been concerned that personal story is perhaps the one area in which AA is at odds with Buddhism. In AA you may have lost your home, your family, your job, your shoes, but if you have your story you have all the currency you need. A recovering alcoholic never surrenders that one crucial piece—his identity with his disease: “I am an alcoholic.” Buddhism, on the other hand, is about no story, no self. The point is to see through the autobiographical “I” as just one more defense against the truth of impermanence. For the recovering-alcoholic-Buddhist-practitioner the question becomes “How can I be and not be at the same time?” Even more subversive is the corollary: “If there’s no ‘I,’ there’s nothing to be alcoholic. Therefore, I can drink …”
    This is the kind of crazy reasoning AA tackles head on. One of the program’s slogans is K.I.S.S.—Keep It Simple, Stupid. Alcoholics are notorious for overcomplicating everything in service to their addiction, so sticking to basics is considered essential for recovery. AA has been called “a simple program for complicated people,” but Laura S.’s gloss of the program with a Buddhist overlay makes sobriety seem as challenging as law school. Of AA’s First Step, she writes: “When I deeply grasped the underlying effect of dependent origination and karma on my alcoholism, I understood powerlessness and unmanageability with an intensity I had not previously imagined. The comforting aspect of this understanding is the absolute lawfulness of dependent origination and karma.” Translation, please? The author herself supplies it: “If I don’t drink, I won’t get drunk, and I won’t screw up my life.”
    Why didn’t she just say that in the first place? When you’re drawing parallels between AA’s twelve steps and twelve traditions, and Buddha’s four noble truths, five hindrances, eightfold path, twelve links of dependent origination, anicca, anatta, dukkha, and karma, etc. etc., the temptation to slip into jargon must be irresistible. But it can be mind-numbing. More than once I was reminded of a comment a professor scrawled on one of my college papers: “Nice exposition of the facts, but what does all this mean?”
    In my own case, I was lucky to find zazen early in my recovery. “Just sitting” with my face to the wall, counting breaths, was about as much as I could handle. If I’d also needed to keep in mind the finer points of Buddhist doctrine, I doubt I’d have been able to hold my seat. I took refuge in the saying “the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon” and its suggestion that deep realization probably wasn’t going to come from studying scripture but from direct knowing.
    Visitors to AA meetings are often surprised at the hilarity: “What, you’re laughing about getting drunk and throwing up on your boss?” Some of the laughter is relief—the humor of people who’ve survived a harrowing ordeal and are now sharing the same leaky lifeboat. But there’s something more—a lightness of being. “Wear the world like a loose garment,” the AA literature suggests. One of the promises of AA is that sobriety will bring “a new freedom and a new happiness.” Isn’t that what the Buddha promised? Laura S. is quite right in thinking that Buddhism and the Twelve Steps together can make a world of difference to a sober alcoholic. It’s just not clear how reading an extensive exegesis will improve conscious contact with the Buddha within, or make life more manageable.
    Living sober is a challenge. So is liberation. For some of us the best tools are the simplest. For others, this book might be just what the Buddha ordered.

Joan Duncan Oliver’s most recent book is Happiness: How to Get It and Keep It. Her essay, “Drink and a Man,” appears in the anthology The Best Buddhist Writing 2005.

A Review of 12 Steps on Buddha’s Path: Bill, Buddha, and We, By Laura S.,
Shambhala Sun, May 2006.

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