Breakfast With Buddha (19 page)

I set the book on the night table, turned off the light, took off my clothes, and lay on the bed looking up at the patterns of shadow on the ceiling. It was late, and I had promised to call Jeannie, and I knew I would do that. But I lay on the bed caught up in a vague notion, not thinking, exactly, just musing on something, circling some idea, pondering. The metaphor of the piano-playing boy seemed imperfect to me. If I had been editing the book, I would have written in the manuscript margins, “Work this,” meaning that the author should take the general idea and sharpen it, make it clearer to the reader.

And yet, the general idea, the plight of the piano-playing man, would not let me go. I thought back to the encounter between Rinpoche and the tough guy, to the pure joy on Rinpoche’s face when he bowled. I leaned over and reached for the telephone and dialed my home number.

TWENTY-FIVE

I am not a fan
of the so-called buffet breakfast, or of buffets of any kind, Chinese, Indian, or American hotel. But the buffet at the Inn at St. Mary’s was better than average, and I made myself a decent meal of waffle, fruit, and coffee. Rinpoche ate only an apple, which he sliced expertly with one of the inn’s plastic knives and washed down with two cups of water.

“Don’t you want more than that before the big talk?” I asked him. “Don’t you want to fill up the tank so you’ll have some fuel to run on?”

“Fuel last night,” Rinpoche said. “Bohling.”

Between breakfast and the time we left for his talk we strolled over to a nearby shrine of Mary that was surrounded by beautifully groomed lawns. I suppose I shouldn’t have been, but I was surprised when I saw Rinpoche get down on both knees in front of the ceramic Virgin, bow low so that his forehead touched the grass, and stay in that posture for a long while. Mary—any holy woman, really—had never been an important part of the Lutheran pantheon
of my formative years, and I’d come around to the opinion that, though Catholics were stubborn in their resistance to woman priests, they didn’t get enough credit for keeping a female figure so close to the heart of their worship. The shrine was dedicated to something called the miracle of LaSalette, which, according to a plaque on the grounds, referred to Mary’s appearance to three schoolchildren in western France in 1947. It was a peaceful spot.

O’Malley Auditorium was, too, though there must have been 150 people there when we arrived, at quarter to eleven. Marie Desjardins, an elderly woman with a gorgeous Jamaican accent, greeted us warmly and then introduced Rinpoche with a few simple remarks that avoided hyperbole. He was, she told the assembled conference-goers, which included a good number of priests and some nuns, a man who had devoted his entire teaching life to breaking down the barriers between people of faith in all traditions. With that, she yielded him the podium, and he stood up there, looking relaxed but completely out of place in the wood-trimmed room, his shaved head and maroon robe in stark contrast to the priests’ neat haircuts and dark suits and the nuns’ white-and-black habits.

I sat near the very back again, but this time had no urge to flee.

Rinpoche began his presentation by talking, in a fairly general, inoffensive way, about the Bible, about Jesus, about a rabbi friend who spent all the holy days in prayer and fasting. From there he moved on to the Hindu idea of Atman, or soul, and the power, or Brahman, that infuses it; and then to a Sufi master who counseled a steady, patient approach to spiritual practice rather than a “materialistic” one, where there was something to be chased after and
caught; and then to a Vedantic yogi whose central idea was that the mind’s impurities tricked us into believing we were our bodies and not something greater: an essential part of the sacred whole. Toward the end he touched upon Buddhism, with its emphasis on personal responsibility, and said something I’d never heard before: that the Buddha’s last words to his disciples were, “Work out your own salvation with diligence.”

It seemed to me he made a convincing case that, though these belief systems were not identical, they had a large area of overlap, a huge demilitarized zone, as it were, where people of good intention could meet and converse in an atmosphere of mutual respect. The talk was, as I said, inoffensive and no doubt designed to be that way. But in the question-and-answer period he came under attack—I cannot find a more accurate word—from a nun who’d been sitting in the second row. She approached one of the microphones that had been set up in a half dozen places around the auditorium for those who wanted to ask questions.

“Is there, Mr. Rinpoche,” she began, in the tone of a district attorney, “in your tradition or any other that you know of, besides Christianity, an instance of one of what you call holy figures rising from the dead?”

“Yes, in my tradition there is,” he said calmly, happily.

The district attorney had not expected this. “There is?”

“Yes. In the ancient times we have reports of people who appeared to have been died and then came back to living. We have stories of people whose bodies turned into rays of light at the moment of their death. These stories, to me, are inspiring. Inspiring, yes? That is the right word?”

Priests, nuns, and editors nodding all over the place.

“But, to me personally,” he continued, “there is no need
of proof of some Creator, of some Magnificent Ones, that they rose from the dead or made miracles. For proof I look at you, all of you here, and I think: Your hearts are pumping now, when we sit here and think and talk and question to each other. The blood is going. Outside, the trees are drinking in the sun and growing. Beyond them, the planets are spinning. These are facts. No one disputes—disputes, yes?—these things. More proof of God, or some Greater Being, why is it necessary?”

The nun was not assuaged. “Who, then, do you say Jesus Christ was?”

“Very, very, very great spirit!” Rinpoche answered, without a missed beat. And he laughed, the high chuckle. I smiled. No one else in the room seemed even slightly amused.

“And that’s all?”

“That’s all? That is very much, isn’t it?”

The nun frowned. “He’s not God?”

“Yes, yes, of course. God. Yes, he is. You are God, too. I think Jesus Christ said that you are God. He said that his father is your father, yes? That makes you his sister, yes? I think Jesus Christ wanted not so much that you worship him but that you act like him, that you be like him inside. I think he came here to save us by showing us what we could be like inside. He said, ‘The kingdom of heaven is within you,’ so we should ask the question to ourselves what this means.”

A few people in the room were nodding thoughtfully, but the good nun was holding her ground against this onslaught of heretical wishy-washiness. “Another question,” she said. “You used the word
enlightenment
during your talk. I, personally, do not like this word. What exactly do
you mean by it? Is it a kind of supposed heaven on earth? A kind of null, or sensual bliss? Help us to understand, please.”

“I will help you,” Rinpoche said, and then he laughed again, as if either she was beyond help or he was not the right guy for the job. “I will try. And thank you for the questions. I like these questions. . . . I think it is maybe that you are correct to not like the word. I think it is possibly not a very good word because it implies . . . implies, yes?” He was looking at me now, I was nodding vigorously. “Implies, what did you call it,
null.
” He laughed. “I do not know what this
null
exactly is, but maybe it means not changing. The end. I do not think heaven means the end. I do not believe enlightenment means the end. How can there be this end? What would the end be? What would God do after the end, he would be bored, yes? He would have to start over and make the worlds again. No, no end, I think. End would be no more hearts going. All right, maybe so. But no more sun? No more trees growing? All right. But no more universes? No more dust, no more light, no more atomic particles? How could this be? This would be
null,
I think. Yes?

“We are humans, and we have human minds, and we try, with those minds, to understand something that is very beyond us. Like trying to swim like a fish underwater without breathing, or flying like a bird with our arms. Or seeing in the darkness without a flashlight. Or . . .”

I watched him struggle. Metaphors were, it seemed to me, not his strongest suit.

“Or like knocking down bohling pins with a small marble. No, to me, enlightenment is a big shift inside your eyes, a different way to use your mind so you can understand some of God, some of Jesus. But it is maybe not one shift,
but many small shifts. You change your spiritual condition—by prayer, by meditation, by the way you live, the way you decide to think, by the lessons you learn in living this life with a good intention—and then, when this happens, after a long times or a short times, the way you see the world changes. Physically. I think that if you are a bad person, maybe a thief, then the way you see the world is
What can I steal?
You see everything that can be stealed. And that changes the way your mind works, and makes you blind to see what is really there, all the good things you cannot steal—the sun, the hearts—and so on.” He paused and laughed, as if he was about to make a fine little joke. “And if you are a person who loves sex very much, then you are always seeing sex in the world, always looking at bodies and thinking about sex. There is a shop here in the city near the bohling house that sells sex things, sex pictures. You would know where this shop is if you were a person like that. You see . . . I know where it is!”

A few people laughed, but not many, and the nun continued to stand at rigid attention before the microphone, fixing the visitor with a look that would have sliced an ordinary man in two.

“And if you are a person who has had bad things happen with you, and who is angry,” Rinpoche went on, resting his eyes on her, “then you are always seeing in the world reasons for you to be angry about. You see? Even, you get angry at yourself when you are not perfect.

“But if you can clear this out of your mind a little bit—that you want to steal, that you want sex all the time, that you want to eat very much all the time, that you want to sleep many hours, that you so much want money, that you want to win the argument with someone to show that you
are right, or be angry at someone because you know they are wrong, or that you are a bad person because you are not perfect—then your mind clears like a clear, clear water. When that happens, you have a small waking-up. You start to see the world as the world really is. And after many small waking-ups we begin to see the world a little bit, some little bit, the way Jesus sees it. You see? That is the ‘kingdom of heaven.’ You see? This, I think, is what he wanted and why he came to us here on this planet, to teach us this.”

He was addressing the nun in her own spiritual language now, individually, personally, even intimately, and she was narrowing her eyes further and looking like she was ready to scream. For a few seconds, there was this awful standoff: Rinpoche watching her with a patient look, waiting for her to have a small waking-up, and the nun pressing her lips together, about to explode. But before she could get out another word, Marie Desjardins stood up and said, with a graceful forcefulness, that Rinpoche would take one more question from someone who had not yet asked a question, and then there would be a reception in the adjacent room.

The last question was not a question at all, it turned out, but a comment from the elderly priest who’d organized the whole conference and who was sitting in the back row not far from me. This man was close to eighty, I guessed, but trim and alert. It seemed to me that the best word to describe him was
happy.
He was a happy man, at ease with himself, at peace, with a certain, mildly amused expression on his face that planted in me a small seed of envy. The old priest thanked Rinpoche for coming and said that he was obviously a man of God. And the Rinpoche thanked him in return and bowed with his hands pressed together, and there was polite applause.

I turned my back on the sweets and coffee and went outside and stood there, in the heat of the midwestern day, looking around at the lawns and buildings, the billowing clouds, the smattering of people strolling the paths, professors, young lovers, other conference-goers, other beating hearts. I found myself remembering the expression on the old priest’s face, and then, for some reason, thinking about the day Jeannie had given birth to Natasha. It had been a long and difficult labor, and at one point in the midst of it, the fetal heart monitor had made a sudden change. It had been going along for ten or twelve hours by then, the consistent
beep-beep-beep-beep,
with the numbers of beats per minute showing on a digital monitor: 168, 181, 176, 177. And then something happened, and the beeps weren’t coming so close together, and the numbers on the monitor had crept down: 183, 159, 140, 122, 107, 88, 71, 51. The nurses literally leapt into action, rushing up to my wife’s bed and turning her to another position, putting an oxygen mask on her, calling the doctor, alerting the operating room. I wanted to lift up the hospital on my shoulders and shake the whole building to get that beeping sound back to where it had been, to get those numbers—49, 41—to change.

But then the heartbeat began to climb steadily back to the proper level. The nurses relaxed. I sat down and held Jeannie’s hand, but for the rest of her labor—another eight hours—even when I went out into the hallway for a bathroom break, I thought I could hear that beeping sound, as if it measured the pulse of the universe and was as fragile as a single thread. We learned, later, that the umbilical cord had wrapped itself around Natasha’s neck and nearly choked the life out of her.

I had forgotten the feeling of that day.

TWENTY-SIX

As a parting gift,
Marie Desjardins presented Rinpoche with a Bible, and as we walked to the car in the steaming Indiana heat, he held it reverently against his chest. I was thinking about his presentation, and I was thinking about the previous night’s conversation with my wife, and I was starting to feel there might be something I had been missing all along, some primary color of the interior world that had simply been—and still was—just outside the spectrum visible to my inner eye.