RITA M. GROSS I am both a convert to Buddhism and a longtime practitioner of Buddhism. I consider that I became a Buddhist in 1973, when I was thirty years old, though I had knowledge of Buddhism for some years before that time and did not go through a ceremony of “Going for Refuge,” the point at which one formally becomes a Buddhist, for some years after that time. Though I was brought up Christian, that religion and I had parted ways, quite unhappily, some years before