In 1963, Helen Tworkov was an anthropology major at New York’s Hunter College when a Buddhist monk named Thich Quang Duc self-immolated on a Saigon street. His action was in protest of the South Vietnamese Roman Catholic government’s mistreatment of Buddhist clergy. The incident drew its intended global media coverage; the image’s shock value and its political implications were immense.

But that’s not what fueled Tworkov’s fascination. In her newly released memoir, Lotus Girl: My Life at the Crossroads of Buddhism and America (St. Martin’s Essentials), the founding editor of Tricycle magazine writes that for her, more compelling was the elderly monk’s composure; his astounding ability to remain in a rigid seated meditation position as his ‘living flesh turn[ed] to ash.’ 

‘In order to make a political statement he reset the very parameters of human potential,’ she continues. ‘It was impossible to imagine sitting in the midst of flames without flinching. Impossible. And no degree of political passion or moral righteousness could explain it.’

For the 20-year-old Tworkov — a stubborn 60s rebel burdened by a killer inner-critic that unleashed overwhelming feelings of inadequacy and stay-in-bed depression — the very idea that humans could achieve Thich Quang Duc’s extraordinary state of mind was transformative. 

It was her awakening to the belief that the deep emotional pain she endured might be curbed by her mind.

Tworkov struggled to gain the relief she craved. She remained a self-described cranky self-critic. Years after her immersion in Western Buddhist life — moving between Tibetan and Zen teachers and groups — she remained insecure and rootless. 

Her lesson was to understand that Buddhist practice is not a quick-fix but requires a long-term, disciplined commitment to change.

She blossomed when she founded Tricycle in 1993 (along with such members of the American Buddhist convert-elite as Rick Fields, Lex Hixon, Philip Glass and Spaulding Gray). Today, Tricycle is North America’s premiere pan-Buddhist magazine, thanks in large part to Tworkov’s journalistic determination to cover Buddhism’s blemishes as well as its blessings. 

She writes:

Whatever doubts I had about myself, my abilities, my choices, my understanding, I never had any doubts about the benefits of introducing [via Tricycle] to a society gripped by materialism the radical idea that lasting happiness can never be attained  by having more and more and more  — money, cars, clothes, houses, stuff; that the mind is the source of suffering and the source of liberation; and that our daily lives can benefit from the Buddha’s … foundational building blocks … To participate in this dissemination was deeply moving, very rewarding, and I had confidence in my own integrity.

Tworkov, now in her 80s and long retired from Tricycle, is a skilled writer (though her book contains a handful of minor editing oversights) who appears to withhold little in telling her story. Her relatability is strong, her vulnerability palpable.

She confronts her difficult relationship with her father, a well-known New York artist, the inadequacies of her culturally Jewish childhood, her psychedelic drug use, her early encounters with the Arica training, psychotherapy, sex and relationships (including her marriage and miscarriage). It’s all fascinating and not unfamiliar to many of the 60s generation of educated, alienated Americans.

(Full disclosure: Tworkov was a consistent source for me on Buddhist issues when I was a full-time journalist covering global religions for mainstream media. We spoke regularly then but have not done so in more than a decade; the last time was when we stumbled across each other visiting Bhutan’s iconic Tiger’s Lair monastery.) 

Of greater interest to me, and arguably of greater historical import, are her memories of Buddhism’s early growth in non-Asian America. She moves from the waning days of the Beat Generation and her encounters with Allen Ginsburg and Gary Snyder (the name-dropping is impressive), through the coming to America of a slew of Asian Buddhist teachers, to the conversions to the dharma of such now-popular Western teachers as Pema Chodron (who would move into Tworkov’s Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, house for months-long, solo silent retreats as Tworkov went about her business elsewhere in her home), Sharon Salzberg, Joseph Goldstein, and Jack Kornfield.

Nor does she shy away from the inappropriate sex and alcohol-fueled scandals that upended some of the period’s most popular Buddhist communities, including Richard Baker’s San Francisco Zen Center and Chogyam Trungpa’s Boulder and Nova Scotia-based Shambhala organization.

Surprisingly, she includes a risqué tale of going to Plato’s Retreat, the long-shuttered but legendary Upper West Side sex club, with friends and two recently arrived Tibetan lamas being shown the sights. She surmises that the monks likely regarded the scene ‘as one more consensual hallucination.’ She also notes that the lamas never removed their undergarments and that that she herself was too prudish to partake.

Tworkov also unloads on the gross misogyny she encountered over the decades in both Asian and Western Buddhist circles. She’s also critical of what she sees as the wholesale abandonment by Western Buddhists of the dharma’s deepest and most ‘radical’ aspirations, settling instead for self-satisfying but largely ineffectual, knee-jerk American liberal politics and limited ‘self-help’ psychological growth. 

Her sharpest attacks, however, are leveled toward American society in general, which she declares has entered ‘the bardo of dying, it’s vital signs diminishing as the last gaps of stage-four capitalism approach the death rattle.’

Yet, she adds, ‘I could not ask for more favorable conditions than being in the bardo of old age, in a country that is falling apart, and in a world on fire. I have been dealt an extraordinary hand. The rest is up to me.’

Tworkov does not address Secular Buddhism as we understand it today. She makes no mention of Stephen Batchelor, the leading popularizer of the secular approach to Buddhist philosophy and psychology. She does, however, write the following in a section in which she notes that critiques such as her’s have long been part of Buddhist discourse:

My own current and personal understanding is that for those on a Buddhist path, if you are fortunate you will outgrow the questions, the concepts, and the elucidations and place your faith in the experience of practice itself. 

That sounds darn close to my own understanding of Secular Buddhism. So I’ll go out on a limb and say she approves.