I reach for a pair of scissors. I am about to unbox. I have unboxed before. I have unboxed watches, and I have unboxed leather planners. I have unboxed shoes, wallets, handheld massagers, coffee makers, and more bags than I care to admit. But this is different.
The blades sever the packing tape easily. I unhinge the cardboard flaps and reach inside. Slowly, ever so slowly, I lift the contents and place it on my desk. I remove the paper packaging and stare at my purchase.
It stands, or rather sits, only six inches tall. It is a gold statue of a man, seated in the lotus position: legs crossed, eyes closed, hands resting on his lap. He appears to be deep in meditation. The crown of the man’s head is bald, but long strands of hair unfurl along the sides, settling on his shoulders.
The resemblance is not obvious—it takes me a few seconds—but it is undeniable. The man is Benjamin Franklin. Buddha Ben. I reach for the card that accompanied the package. It begins with a Ben quote: “He that can have patience can have what he will.” Then, this: “We hope this Buddha helps you find patience. Be free, Steffi & Austin.”
I discovered my Buddha Ben the way all great discoveries are made: on eBay. I had grown obsessed about the connection between Franklin and Buddhism. The more I investigated, the more I became convinced of the Buddha nature of Benjamin Franklin. I searched library shelves and bookstores and the deepest recesses of the Internet when—WHAM!—up popped Buddha Ben. And for only $14.95. A bargain Franklin would like, I’m sure.
My Buddha Ben obsession began innocuously enough. At first, I noticed the physical resemblance. Ben—older, rotund Ben—looked an awful lot like the laughing Buddha found everywhere from upmarket spas to ratty college dorm rooms. The same corpulent belly. The same cherubic yet vaguely mischievous smile.
Then I saw the philosophical similarities. Like the Buddha, Ben had no patience for metaphysical puzzles. As he said, “Many a long dispute among divines may be thus abridged: It is so; It is not so. It is so; it is not so.” Ben, like the Buddha, focused his considerable energies on the practical, the here and now. Like the Buddha, Ben valued silence. Both were empiricists; experience, not dogma, guided their actions. Both Ben and the Buddha believed in the power of habit to shape our characters and thus our destinies. Both avoided going to extremes, steering a middle path through life. Both worked hard to transform anger into something less toxic, more productive.
Both developed detailed plans for overcoming suffering: the Buddha had his Noble Eightfold Path and Ben had his Thirteen Virtues. Ben, like the Buddha, soared above the turbulence of life, maintaining an ironic distance from the updrafts and downdrafts. He was disinterested but not uninterested. Both men were pseudo-doctors. Ben had his honorary doctorates. The Buddha and later teachers saw themselves as physicians of the mind dispensing good medicine, the dharma. As the eighth-century Buddhist monk Shantideva said: “May I be the doctor, the medicine/And may I be the nurse/For all sick beings in the world/Until everyone is healed.”
Both the Buddha and Ben recognized the inherent impermanence of all beings. The Buddha illustrated this essential fact with a number of parables, Ben with a charming bagatelle about a species of fly whose life span is but a single day. Writing toward the end of his long and useful life, Franklin connected the fly’s fate with his own: “What will fame be to an ephemera who no longer exists?” And with his serial masking, Ben seems to intuitively recognize the Buddhist notion of a fluid, impermanent self. That’s why he could be a middle-aged widow one day and an Algerian emir the next.
Everywhere I look, I see more signs of Buddha Ben. Am I onto something big, or have I deluded myself bigly? Have I fallen prey to confirmation bias, like the person with a hammer who sees nails everywhere? Franklin was keenly aware of these sorts of traps. “It’s the easiest thing in the world for a man to deceive himself,” he said.
I’m not sure if it’s by coincidence or design, but across the street from Franklin Court, Ben’s old home, is the Philadelphia Museum of Illusions. I visited one day. Ben greeted me at the door. A modernist portrait constructed from sundry geometric shapes—trapezoids, rhombuses, octagons—and with bright blue eyes (his eyes were brown) staring into the distance and looking quite insane. Scary Ben.
Inside, I couldn’t believe what I saw. Or could I? So many mind tricks. There I am standing on the ceiling or hanging bat-like from a wall or grown to ten feet tall and then shrunk to a few inches. At one point, my head departs my body and rests on a platter. All is maya, illusion. Our senses are unreliable. Our powers of reason too. We can rationalize anything. Franklin recognized this quirk of human nature at an early age. He was sailing from Boston to New York and was, at the time, still a vegetarian. He stuck with this diet for several days on the ship, but then the winds absconded, and the ship slowed to a standstill. Provisions ran low, so people fished and soon were hauling huge amounts of cod aboard and frying them in a pan. It smelled “admirably well,” Franklin recalled.
He had taken a vegetarian vow, believing that “taking every fish is a kind of unprovok’d murder.” But then he noticed smaller fish inside the larger one’s stomachs. If the fish could eat each other, Ben reasoned, why couldn’t he eat them? “So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do.”
Have I done something similar—rationalized my belief in Buddha Ben? I’m not sure. It is so; it is not so. I’m going in circles, the sort of metaphysical machinations that Ben avoided.
I email Mitch Kramer, a Franklin interpreter (never call him an “impersonator,” I learned) who looks and acts and sounds an awful lot like Ben. He knows the man the way few do, from the inside out. What does he think of my Buddha Ben theory? Mitch replies a few hours later. He had also made the connection—aha!—but (there’s always a but) it’s not so simple, he says:
Franklin seems driven by the quest for personal and societal betterment. He trained himself to be intensely observant, especially when it came to the natural world. Do these seem like attitudes common in Buddhism? Some of them. But they are also comparable to other seekers. His views on scholarship and ethics have been related to Judaism. His embrace of certain Christian ideas is only matched by his disdain for their orthodoxy. He was familiar with Islam and offered positive remarks regarding his contact. Overall, I think he was most driven by what he would call reason.
Sigh. So, Buddha Ben was also Jewish Ben and Muslim Ben? Same hammer, different nails. I’m determined not to give up on my Buddha Ben theory. At first, my library and Internet search unearths nothing, so I redouble my efforts. Then I find it: an obscure academic paper titled “Dharma of the Founders.” The paper’s author, Ryan Aponte, makes a compelling case that several of America’s founders articulated ideas remarkably similar to those found in Buddhism, especially the Mahāyāna school practiced in Tibet and elsewhere in Asia. Yes, I think; I am not crazy. Or at least I am not the only crazy one.
Ben was a Buddhist but not the way the Dalai Lama or Californians are Buddhist. He never read the Dhammapada, the classic collection of sayings of the Buddha. They had yet to be translated into any Western language. He did not meditate. He did not join a sangha, a Buddhist community, for there were none in Philadelphia or London. He did not say things like “That’s very Buddhist of you.” No, Ben was a purely accidental Buddhist. He didn’t study Buddhism, but he thought and acted like a Buddhist.
I am the opposite. I study Buddhism but don’t act or think like a Buddhist. My bookshelves overflow with works by monks, lamas, rinpoches, and various other enlightened beings. As I type these words, I hear a distinct clinking sound as the mala, or prayer beads, I’m wearing brush against the keyboard. When I look up, I see at least four tiny Buddhas gazing at me.
I travel to Buddhist lands like Thailand and the Himalayan nation of Bhutan. I can spin a prayer wheel with more force than Rafael Nadal’s forehand. I can talk maya and karma and dukkha with real Buddhists, and for a good fifteen minutes, sometimes longer, pass as one of them. I can do Buddhist math. I know my Four Noble truths and my Noble Eightfold path. I meditate, though sporadically and only while heavily caffeinated. I am Buddhist adjacent. Being Buddhist adjacent, though, is like being lottery ticket adjacent. Either you’ve got the winning number or you don’t.
I’m not sure why I’m incapable of making the leap from theory to practice. It is a short distance, I know, yet it feels as wide as the Grand Canyon. Sometimes it’s the smallest jumps that are the hardest. The truth is that I’m more comfortable in the world of words and ideas than I am in the world of experience. Over the years, this disposition has protected me, made me feel safe, but has it helped me? I used to think so. Now I’m not so sure.
Ben wasn’t just any kind of accidental Buddhist. He was a bodhisattva, an enlightened being who defers entering Nirvana to help their fellow sentient beings. The bodhisattva does not sit in a monastery meditating, at least not just that. They get out into the world and help others advance in their journey toward enlightenment. Every bit helps. As Shantideva said in his classic text, A Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life, even relieving someone of a headache is “a beneficial intention endowed with infinite goodness.”
All this bolsters my Buddha Ben theory, but there is one pesky problem: money. The Buddha advocated a simple life, free of excess desire. Ben’s face is plastered on the hundred-dollar bill, an image news outlets unfurl to illustrate a report on inflation or a banking crisis or any other dollars-and-cents story. One-Hundred-Dollar Ben has permeated our culture, infiltrated our online lives. I noticed that since I started researching Franklin, I see targeted ads on my social media feeds from companies like the Penny Hoarder.
We’ve got Franklin all wrong. Yes, he believed in capitalism and free trade and, yes, he thought amassing some wealth was good. “It is hard for an empty sack to stand upright,” he said. But nowhere does he say the sack must be full or, worse, overflowing. He never argued for unbridled capitalism—quite the opposite. He saw money as a means to an end, never an end in itself. “The use of money is all the advantage there is in having money,” he said. Reading Poor Richard’s Almanack, I’m surprised how many of the proverbs strike a similar, Buddhist theme. Here are just three examples:
Franklin never patented any of his many inventions, forsaking a small fortune. His was a pay-it-forward philosophy: “That as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously.” Franklin retired at the peak of his business career, aged forty-two, to devote himself to his electrical experiments and then public service. He gave to causes in which he believed: supplying wagons to the ill-fated Braddock Expedition during the French and Indian War and donating his $1,000 per year salary as US postmaster general to help care for soldiers wounded during the Revolutionary War. During an outbreak of smallpox in Philadelphia, he printed and distributed, at his own expense, 1,500 copies of a pamphlet describing how to administer inoculations.
He opposed the unchecked amassing of private property, sounding more like a socialist than an apologist for American capitalism. “I imagine that what we have above what we can use, is not properly ours, tho’ we possess it,” he said. And he liked to tell friends this story:
One day, a Quaker man invited him to see a house he had just built. Franklin was struck by the grandeur of the place, especially since the man lived alone and rarely entertained.
“Why do you need such huge rooms?” Franklin asked the man. “You live here alone.”
“It’s nothing,” the man replied. “I can afford it.”
When Franklin saw a vast dining room with a beautiful mahogany table easily capable of seating twenty-five people, he asked, “Why do you need such a grand table?”
Again, the man replied, “It’s nothing. I can afford it.”
This time Franklin shot back: “Why don’t you have a hat that size? You can afford it.”
That sure doesn’t sound like a cheerleader for unbridled materialism. How did we get Franklin so wrong?
Blame it on Poor Richard. With the hapless astrologer, Franklin had created his best mask yet—a perfectly believable character. Maybe a little too believable. Over the years, people began to confuse the mask and the man. Like any other well-drawn character, Poor Richard took on a life of his own.
In 1758, Franklin published his last almanac. Donning a new mask, that of one Father Abraham, he uncorked his most mercenary maxims: “He that goes a borrowing goes a sorrowing” and “Nothing but money is sweeter than honey” and the classic “Early to bed, and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.” Publishers smelled gold and reissued Franklin’s essay as a pamphlet called The Way to Wealth. The title wasn’t Franklin’s, but that didn’t matter. The Way to Wealth cemented his reputation as the avuncular face of capitalism. It was only a matter of time before his face landed on the hundred-dollar bill.
I’m feeling good about my Buddha Ben theory, but something is missing, some irrefutable piece of evidence. One day I find it, hiding in plain sight at the corner of Spruce and Ninth Streets in Philadelphia.
I don’t like hospitals. No one does, I know, but I like them even less than most people do. I trace my hospital-phobia to the fact that my father was a doctor, an oncologist. His idea of quality father-son time was dragging me along while he did his rounds. He’d park me in the cafeteria of one hospital after another, often for hours at a time. I can still see the doctors, exhausted and numb, and the families, exhausted and worried. If I close my eyes, I can smell the burnt coffee and the fear.
As I enter the grounds of the Pennsylvania Hospital, threading a brick-lined archway (“Ben’s Den,” a sign reads) into a pleasant outdoor café and garden replete with flowers and soft spring air, I think, Yes, finally a hospital I like. The grounds feel more like those of a college campus. I spot a plaque that reads: “The Nation’s First Hospital. Founded 1751.”
Nearby is more signage. I learn that the archway was the old carriage entrance. A guard closed it at midnight. If you needed medical attention later than that, you rang a large bell that roused him and he opened the gate. Today the hospital is in the center of Philadelphia, but at the time, it was stranded on the outskirts, a lone building amid a vast field, reachable only by rough, unpaved road.
I descend a small set of stairs and see the hospital cornerstone, the words written by Franklin more than 250 years ago: “The Building by the Bounty of the Government, and of many Private Persons, was Piously Founded for the Relief of the Sick and Miserable.” Technically accurate, but there is more to the story—much more.
I order a coffee, not burnt, and find a seat among the doctors and nurses on break. I exhale. I’ve noticed how a sense of peace adheres to locales associated with Benjamin Franklin. The mulberry tree casting shade over Franklin Court, the Boston waterfront, the snow-dusted cemetery where Ben’s parents are buried. Maybe my impression is real. Maybe it is just another illusion, my mind seeing what it wants to see. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Peace is peace.
The idea for the Pennsylvania Hospital was not Franklin’s. That honor goes to Thomas Bond, a Philadelphia physician who ran a private practice and served as port inspector for infectious diseases. Bond was a good doctor but a hopeless fundraiser, so he turned to Franklin for help. The two men were friends, both members of the library Ben had founded.
Franklin liked the idea. There was no public hospital in the colonies or a medical school. Of the 3,500 Americans practicing medicine (key word: practicing), only 10 percent had a college degree, let alone a medical one. William Douglass, a Scottish doctor visiting Boston, summed up the state of medical care in North America. “Frequently there is more danger from the practitioner than the distemper,” he said, before adding dryly, “but sometimes nature gets the better of the doctor and the patient recovers.”
Dr. Franklin may not have been a real doctor, but he was keenly interested in medicine. He theorized (correctly) about lead poisoning and developed a new (and, again, correct) theory of the common cold. He promoted smallpox immunization and experimented with electrical and music therapies. He espoused the benefits of air circulation and regular exercise long before it was popular to do so.
At first, Franklin didn’t have much more luck than Thomas Bond in raising funds for the hospital. Donor fatigue is not a twenty-first-century phenomenon. He decided to approach the Pennsylvania Assembly for help. The meeting did not go well. Some legislators objected to the cost. The salaries for physicians alone would “eat up the whole of any fund,” they fretted. Others, from rural areas, questioned why they should fund a hospital that would mainly benefit residents of Philadelphia.
Franklin pivoted. What if, he asked Isaac Norris, the speaker of the assembly, he raised two thousand pounds through private donations? Would the assembly then match that amount with another two thousand?
Sure, Norris said, barely concealing his incredulity. There’s no way Franklin could raise that kind of money, he thought. “Utterly impossible.” Norris and his fellow legislators promised to match Franklin’s fundraising effort because they thought it wouldn’t cost them a penny. As Franklin put it, they enjoyed “the credit of being charitable without the expense.” Or so they thought.
Ben got to work. He wrote an anonymous article laying out the case for a hospital. He reached into his bag of masks and pulled out a minister’s disguise, or at least the Church’s vocabulary. Ben was not the least bit religious, but he was no atheist, and possessed what one friend called “the religion of the heart.” For Franklin, religion may or may not be true, but it was useful. Religion, at its best, was a means to an end, and that end was good deeds.
He began his appeal with a saying in Latin. Pos obitum benefacta manent. “Good deeds survive one’s death.” It sounds ancient and wise, but Franklin invented it. He deplored Latin as much as he deplored organized religion but gladly deployed both when useful to do so. He then quoted from the Book of Matthew: “I was sick, and ye visited me.” Then, in his own words, he reminded readers of their interdependence. “We are in this world mutual hosts to each other,” he wrote, and must not “harden our hearts against the distresses of our fellow creatures.”
Building a hospital isn’t only charitable, Franklin continued. It is also practical. The young who train there will share their knowledge with others. It’s economically sound as well. It costs less to treat a patient in a hospital than in a private home. The pièce de résistance is his reminder that “the circumstances and fortunes of men and families are continually changing.” The rich become poor; the healthy become sick. No one is immune from the vagaries of fate. Who knows, dear reader; you might one day be the one in need of a hospital.
Bravo, I think. I had just witnessed a master class in convincing people to part with their money for a good cause. Franklin appealed to both heart and head, other and self. Building the hospital is the right thing to do, and the financially prudent one as well. It will help others, and it just might help you too. By the time I’m done reading, I’m ready to open my own wallet.
People gave generously not only because Franklin had made such a compelling case but because their contribution was amplified, thanks to the pledge by the assembly. In effect, Franklin said, “every man’s donation would be doubled.” He had just invented the matching grant, now a staple among foundations and nonprofits everywhere.
Franklin and Bond met, and then surpassed, their goal, raising more than 2,700 pounds. I would love to have seen the look on the face of Isaac Norris, speaker of the assembly, when Franklin broke the news. Norris hemmed and hawed but soon relented and cut a check for the new hospital. There were more obstacles—the land Pennsylvania proprietor Thomas Penn had “generously” bequeathed for the hospital was swampy and fetid (“More fit for a burying place”)—but these hurdles were overcome and on February 11, 1752, the Pennsylvania Hospital admitted its first patient.
Franklin was delighted. “I do not remember any of my political maneuvers, the success of which gave me more pleasure,” he recalled years later. His plan, Franklin acknowledged, entailed “some use of cunning.” He had once again tricked people—in this case, a group of self-serving legislators—into being more generous versions of themselves. He believed people were capable of acting selflessly, but they need a little nudging, and even a dash or two of deception.
How to square this flexible view of the truth with Franklin’s famous aphorism that “honesty is the best policy” or his father’s lesson that “nothing was useful which was not honest”? I don’t have the answer, but the Buddha does. It’s called upaya-kausalya, or “skillful means.” A Buddhist teacher employing skillful means tailors his lessons to the student, meeting them where they are. This approach might mean speaking in the vernacular rather than scholarly language. Or it might entail less conventional methods, like telling jokes or wearing masks or, in the case of one Zen priest, concluding a lesson by slamming shut a door on his disciple’s leg, supposedly leading to a profound insight, in addition to the compound fracture. Skillful means can also involve deception. Consider a classic Buddhist parable, the “Burning House.”
A wealthy man lived with his children in a large, rambling house that had only a single door. One day, the man smells smoke and discovers the house on fire. He urges his children to flee, but they are engrossed in their games and don’t budge. The man considers wrapping them in blankets and carrying them to safety, but the one door is narrow and the flames are spreading quickly.
Then he decides to lure them outside with some much-coveted toys. “The kind of playthings you like are rare and hard to find,” he tells them. “If you do not take them when you can, you will surely regret it later.” This stratagem works. The children scamper out of the house unharmed.
The man had dissembled. He had no such toys (though he did later buy them each “a large bejeweled carriage drawn by a pure white ox”). Upon hearing this story, one of the Buddha’s disciples asked if the man was guilty of a falsehood.
No, replied the Buddha. He was not. He had acted wisely, employing skillful means.
The parable could be renamed the “Pennsylvania Hospital.” The burning house was the sorry state of medical care in colonial Pennsylvania. The children were the tight-fisted legislators. The toy was the lure of appearing charitable in the eyes of others. The wise father was Franklin. Both stories have happy endings.
Franklin had stumbled on a big and unsettling idea. We’re told democracy rests on free and frank speech. Honesty. Franklin suggests a different set of ideals: “flexibility, compromise, negotiation, and a measured dose of hypocrisy,” notes scholar Alan Houston.
I’m not sure how I feel about this. Skillful means are well and good in the hands of a benevolent being like Franklin, but what happens when they’re deployed by a more malign leader?
Ben’s writings offer some clues. Franklin doesn’t prohibit all deceit. He prohibits “hurtful deceit.” There is a difference. Helpful deceit is telling your spouse that no, they have not gained an ounce of weight. Hurtful deceit is spiking their low-carb, keto meals with boatloads of sugar. By nudging the Pennsylvania legislators into acting generously, Franklin hurt no one. Everyone benefited. The people of Pennsylvania got a much-needed hospital. And the legislators tapped into a generous spirit they didn’t know they possessed. Drawing the line between helpful and hurtful deceit is tricky, of course. One person’s “measured dose of hypocrisy” is another’s cruel gaslighting. It is, I imagine, like pornography. You know it when you see it.
I gaze at my golden Buddha Ben, looking so serene in his Buddhahood, and his Benhood too. “Were you really a Buddhist?” I ask this aloud, which is kind of weird, I realize.
I hear only silence in return. The “noble silence” of the Buddha and the coy silence of the Ben. It is so; it is not so.
I sigh. Then a thought bubbles up: What difference does it make? Maybe, I think, it doesn’t matter whether my Buddha Ben theory is true. Maybe that’s the wrong question. Asking if my theory is true is like asking if a pair of eyeglasses are true. Do they improve your vision? If so, great; they are true. If not, they are false, and you need to get another pair. My Buddha Ben theory helps me see Franklin and the ideas he espoused, the life he led, more clearly. My theory is useful, and therefore it is true.