The Middle Path or Detachment: A Predicament with Facial Hair

For the 3 months we’ve been in India, no razor had touched my face. Nature ran it’s course: a squalid, reddish-blond mane grew longer than I had ever seen it, reaching into the corners of my mouth and hiding fallen food crumbs with ease. As I anticipated, this was grounds for plenty of funny looks and joke making, both among strangers and within our circle of SJPD-ers. But none of the joke making—getting called a “creeper” or “old-man-Underwood”—bothered me. As it was, my beard served its purpose. Intentionally disregarding the social mores of our time, my impetus to grow facial hair was in jest. Even I had to laugh at myself for looking more like a Civil War soldier than a college student.

But as the months went by, and adventures came and went, my beard slowly passed into the realm of something more sentimental. The hair lost its novelty as comic relief, and, being tinged by the sun of Bangalore and thickened in the cold air of Darjeeling, grew into some sort of metaphor. What it represented exactly, I am not sure, but my beard and I had been through a lot together. That it is was undeniably linked to my travels, experiences, and personal growth, didn’t sound in the least bit ridiculous. Overcome by this idea, I was compelled to think that 3 months of India had grown on my face.

In short: I became more emotionally attached to my beard than I had expected. By the time we came to the Religion module, I had grown fully accustomed to my beard’s new significance. Popular, religious iconography proved only to bolster my tendency for metaphorical associations; Jesus and Prophet Muhammad, after all, both had beards. What better way to leverage my knack for spiritual, facial hair growth? But then we came to the teachings of the Buddha. The Buddha, who is sometimes fat and sometimes not, but never rendered with a beard; the Buddha who insisted on a philosophy of detachment.

Our guru, Father Emmanuel, taught us well on this philosophy. As he explained it, one of the main teachings in Buddhism is seeing your whole life as suffering. Recognizing that the root of this suffering comes from our desires, those things we become attached to, is paramount. Thus, we should renounce those desires. I balked, thinking about how depressing it sounded: suffering coming from desires? More specifically, though, I thought about the growing attachment I had to my beard and to India; the country that I have to leave so, so soon. Would I suffer for holding on to an increasingly sentimental view on facial hair?

I ruminated over the thought for the rest of the Religion module. I gave due reconsideration to my sentimental tendencies and found the Buddha’s philosophy of detachment to resonate more and more as I realized how fast my days in India were dwindling. Should I rid myself of the facial hair, which had the potential to grow into something too emotionally unwieldy? I think I knew what the Buddha would do, but I couldn’t quite be sure. For all that we had learned on detachment, we had also learned a great deal about the Buddha’s Middle Way: that happy medium between two extremes. Again, I can’t be sure if, according to Buddha, both the Middle Way and detachment concepts can be applied to each other, but that’s what I attempted to do. I decided to detach the experiences garnered over the last 3 months, from my beard and then detach the hair from my face. In other words, my middle way meant having a nice shave.

Yesterday at a near-by Barbershop I looked in the mirror and stroked those associations out of my beard as Kyle got his haircut. When my time came I was ready. My beard was cleansed. The razor clicked on and all I could do was watch as those 3 months of beard fall around me in droves; a semester’s worth of facial hair gone within a matter of minutes. When it was over I didn’t care to say any parting words or collect the tangles of hair on the floor. The experiences of India, however, I planned to keep.