I feel I should speak a little about the name of this website – The Surfing Buddha.
This name came from when I was a lot bigger (I’ve lost about 9 stone!) and I was talking wetsuits with my friend and he nick named me “The Surfing Buddha”, and it stuck. That was nearly 20 years ago now!
Whilst I’m on the subject of the Buddha an Buddhism, I thought I’d write a piece about how surfing relates to Buddhism. Yes, there are similarity’s…
First lets talk a little about Buddhism and the Buddha himself.
The Buddha was a real person, not a theory or deity, but a real person. A Prince in fact by the name of Siddhartha Gautama, who sought enlightenment sometime in the 6th century.
Siddhartha was raised in luxury and trained as a warrior. One day, this guy got curious about the outside world, a world his father tried to shield him from, and he went outside of the palace.
On this jaunt, he saw an elderly gentleman, and sick person and a dead person.
This moved Siddhartha greatly and he became a monk, escaped the palace, swapped his oppulant robes with the first beggar He saw and started roaming the country. And the rest as they say, is history.
How does this relate to Surfing?
Good question, and I’m not going to go in-depth about Buddhism here, but I’ll touch on how it relates to surfers and surfing.
Taken from this website:
Buddhists believe that nothing is fixed or permanent and that change is always possible. The path to Enlightenment is through the practice and development of morality, meditation and wisdom.
Lets have a little look at that. “Nothing is fixed or permanent and change is always possible”. Is there anything more unpredictable or changeable as the ocean? No. How many times have you been in the water, on a rare predictable day when you thought you had the break nailed for the day and got hammered by a sneaky set or wave that came out of nowhere? It happens and that’s one of the things that makes Surfing so darn exciting.
“The path to Enlightenment is through the practice and development of morality, meditation and wisdom”.
Now I’m not saying that surfers are Enlightened beings, but every time we surf its often a deeply personal thing, your mind is clear of everything except what’s going on at that precise moment. If that’s not meditation, I don’t know what is. Morality? Well, there’s always the etiquette. Wisdom? We surf, we’re wise!
Do I think the Buddha would surf? For sure. I reckon if someone had given young Siddhartha a Surf board or Body Board back then, he would shred.
