A Break for Meditation — News & Observer, 16 March 2001

The front page of the Life, etc. section of the Raleigh News & Observer, Friday, March 16, 2001 — a feature by Vicki Cheng on four college-age students who spent part of spring break at the Wat Carolina Buddhist monastery in Bolivia, North Carolina, learning meditation from the abbot, Phrakhru Buddamonpricha.

Chuck is in the inset photograph in the headline area — the blond student in the foreground in the Indian-pattern shirt, in front of the student in the “Doherty’s Disciples” t-shirt — listening to the abbot teach what the caption calls “the Wheel of Life and Death.” This is Chuck during his Duke years: a Duke undergraduate on the spring-break trip from the Triangle down to the southeastern North Carolina coast where Wat Carolina sits.

The article’s opening line — “Patiently, the abbot Phrakhru Buddhamonpricha tried to explain the secret to world peace” — and the lede that follows (“Our mind is like a monkey,” the monk said to the four college-age guys kneeling before him) place this exactly inside the spring-break window of Chuck’s Duke degree, before the MIT PhD and the move to the West Coast that would close the line into Stanford.

It is the earliest piece of public press in the archive that has Chuck in the frame.