Jiří Holba

“I did not a stamp in my ID book and when you had long hair, you were immediately targeted by the police. It was quite common. ‘What do you have in your bag. Take the stuff out etc.’ – ‘The long hair was a form of protest?’ – ‘Yes, for me it was a form of protest. I was arrested three times, taken to the police. For instance once when Andropov died and they did a check. They saw I didn’t have a stamp in my ID book and arrested me. The I was interrogated. The police officers were rather naughty, so there was this plain clothes officer who asked for names of people. He shouted that he wanted names. So I started saying some names, but I could not remember, so then I thought that it didn’t matter anyway, so I named, among others, Franz Kafka. In short, I invented names. It was rather fun.”

“I started frequenting the Betlehem Chapel pub which was the haunt of the so-called longhairs, people who listened to rock, beat, blues, Western music such as Velvet Underground, The Doors and similar bands. I befriended them and was a part of this community.” – “Who did you meet?” – “Well, it had several phases. There were not many longhairs pubs in Prague, so it was really about groups of people. When you had longhair, somewhere you could not get a beer or even threw you out. There was a lot of bullying. Unfortunately, this life was too closely related with the pub and alcohol, so it was rather shallow. At that time I was living in a rented flat and I simply got tired of that life. I was 27 and I told myself that the life led nowhere and that I was just losing time and was continuing into something I didn’t want to do.”

“I liked Buddhism and I started studying it in more depth. When I was about fifteen I read, in World Literature journal, an article on Zen Buddhism. I did not understand it at all, but then I started visiting Mirek and Iva Vodrážkas. They held flat seminars titled Other Religions. There was this triumvirate of lecturers, Egon Bondy, Milan Machovec and Milan Balabán. It was a rather strange group, as each of them was different. Egon Bondy was an important figure for me at that time, because he wrote the monograph Buddha. It is a very important book, one of the most important books on Buddhism ever, albeit written from an atheistic perspective. He managed to capture many things very well. He had an instinct for it.”

“In 1995 I graduated of Faculty of Arts, Sanskrit. In five years, I did grammar school and university. In five years. I spent more time on the doctorate, it took me seven years and I did it at the Institute of Philosophy and Religion.” – “This is a fast and major transformation indeed.” – “It was quite difficult with the children. What was of key importance for me was that my wife Iva had an utmost understanding for it. In my view, 99 of 100 wives would have sent me packing. They would have said, ‘Either me and family, or the so-called career’. But it was not a career for me, it was something I wanted to do.” – “Did you apply for university during the communist regime?” – “I never applied. First, I didn’t have the necessary ‘maturita’ exam and second, I didn’t want to subject myself to study at that time because you had to meet certain requirements. And they wouldn’t have accepted me either. Had they looked into my personal file, they would have seen what all I had signed, that I went on a hunger strike for Petr Pospíchal etc.”

“I started perceiving the world differently. Until that time I saw the problem only in the regime. I thought the regime was the problem. Well, it was a problem indeed. But then there was I who could do something about it. It is all too easy to blame something – that something or somebody beyond me is the cause of my problem. Naturally, this is not the case, but one has to think about himself, to reflect, which is something that I, or we together, managed to do.”