Stephen T. Butterfield is a poet and English teacher. His memoir about the late Tibetan meditation master, Chögyam Trungpa, appeared in Issue 142 of The Sun.
Butterfield uses the lower-case “b” in “buddhist” because his teacher, Trungpa, “insisted on the small “b” in his usage, to distinguish his lineage, which is committed to meditation practice, from Buddhism as a philosophical scheme or system of religious rites and observances.”
— Ed.
Something was drastically wrong with my lungs: every night, they made sounds like a basketful of squealing kittens. I was always coughing, had pains under the sternum, and could not push a car or even run up a flight of stairs without gasping like an old melodeon full of holes. This condition came on slowly; no single daily or weekly change was ever big enough to scare me out of my habits. For three years after noticing these symptoms, I continued smoking pot.
