Soon after I start reading James Austin’s Zen and the Brain,[1] I bump into a section entitled “A Brief Outline of Zen History.”[2] In the fourth paragraph he introduces Siddhartha Gautama, who vowed to take up his own search for the meaning of existence when he was twenty-nine years old.[3] I immediately jot in the margin that this was my age when I started my Residua, too. In the following paragraph Austin mentions that the Buddha reached supreme enlightenment six years later at the age of thirty-five.[4] As I am sixty-two at the moment, I immediately draw a sad face in the margin. And then I laugh. I am happy about the Buddha’s own search, that is.

Footnotes

1. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1999 (first published in 1998).

2. Op. cit., pp. 7-11.

3. Op. cit., p. 8.

4. Loc. cit.