Breakfast With Buddha (21 page)

“But if some people believe one thing, and you don’t, then what they’ll do is tell you you’re wrong. They’ll try to change you, judge you. Maybe kill you, in extreme cases. So what you believe and what you do are connected, aren’t they?’

“Do not worry so much all the time, my friend, about the other people, what they say. And do not have so many strong opinions, so many strong judgments. What
you
do matters. And what you think matters. . . . Here is Buddhist prayer,” he said, and he rolled off a few sentences in what must have been Ortyk, then struggling just a bit, translated them. “All that we are is the result of what we have thought: It is built on our thoughts, it is made from our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with evil thought, pain follows him, just like the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws
the . . . cart. . . . If a person speaks or acts with pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves.”

“So you can control your fate, then, to some extent.”

“To every extent.”

“So is there a life after death, then, in your belief system?”

“Not a system,” he said.

“But there is what we call an afterlife?”

“After this, yes,” he said. “How could there not be?”

“Well, plenty of people think it’s obvious how there could not be. You die, your body rots, end of story. Couldn’t that be the way it’s set up?”

“Of course.”

“You’ve just contradicted yourself. You’re playing Zen games with me. I hate that.”

“When your mind is clear you see it, that’s all. You know what is and what is not, what will be and what will not be.”

“You sound like my sister.”

“I like very much your sister,” he said. “Very, very much.”

“But she claims to see the future.”

“In some way she does see it. In some way you see it.”

“But you see it differently than I do.”

“Little bit different,” he said.

“But you talk as if you are sure, and the people on the radio talk as if they are sure, and how can you both be right when your ideas of how things work don’t match at all.”

“They match. Of course they match.”

“Oh, man, this is the worst conversation we’ve had, do you know that? Do you know how much I hate this kind of going around in circles?”

“Maybe you hate it because you like very much your thinking mind, one plus one is two. Always one plus one. Always B after A and then C after B. Dostoevsky—you know Dostoevsky? My father in Russian liked to read to me Dostoevsky. Then I read it, too, later.”

“Of course I’ve heard of Dostoevsky. In college we—”

“In one book Dostoevsky said two plus two makes five, not four. What does this mean? My father asked me this question for many years until I get the answer right. What if you had another mind, maybe even for a few seconds? What if you knew how to make it so your mind did not think for a few seconds, or for a minute? What would happen then to your ideas and your opinions and your judgments?”

“I have not the slightest urge to make my mind stop working.”

“Not your mind, your ordinary mind that thinks so much all the time for no usefulness. What then? Then maybe you see something new. But you cannot do that because all the time you are thinking about food, about sex, about worries, about who is saying something in this radio, about who is rich and poor, who is smart, who is good, who is right. Good, think like that. Very good. Not bad. You do that all the day and even when you are at sleep. But what about a few seconds or a minute or a few minutes of not thinking? Then what happens? Then what do you see? But you don’t do that, my friend. You are afraid to do that, my good friend.”

“Who on earth
could
do that? Even if they wanted to.”

“Many, many peoples.”

“Who? You? How? What does it feel like? How do you learn to do it?”

“I will show it to you if you want,” he said.

I very nearly said,
Okay, we have a deal
. I wasn’t ready to start taking not-thinking lessons, but I didn’t hate the conversation so much anymore. I didn’t resist him so much anymore, down in a deep part of me. It wasn’t as if I’d suddenly turned gullible in western Indiana, but the raspy hard edges of my suspicion had been worn down, and I have to admit that it frightened me. This was not a physical fear but something else, a shakiness at the base of who I thought I was.

TWENTY-EIGHT

We let the
conversation die there and soon we were leaving the corn-carpeted countryside of the heart of the Midwest and being drawn into the windy steel tangle of its greatest city. The first sign of that approach was the huge factories near Gary. I pointed through the passenger-side window and passed on a tidbit of Americana: “There’s an important place in the history of American industry, that city right there. It was founded by the U.S. Steel Company and named after the chairman.”

“Ah. Very good place,” Rinpoche said.

Soon we could see the lake spreading northward like a blue sea, and then the skyscrapers of downtown Chicago. And then, on I-90 after we’d paid our toll, we became embedded in one of the most stupendous traffic jams in recorded human history, worse, even, than the one in Pennsylvania. The radio said the White Sox were playing that afternoon, that was the reason, and when I mentioned that to Rinpoche, he said he’d heard about baseball, and was it possible to go see the men play?

At last we crept into the city proper and parked in a lot on Harrison and Clarke streets not far outside the Loop.

Walking north from the parking lot we were presented with the magnificent variety of the American metropolis: a man sitting in a doorway with a fistful of scratch lottery tickets, checking them one after the next as if his happy future lay hidden there beneath a thin silvery layer; the imposing public library; the overhead trains on their rusty steel supports; people jaywalking; five muscular boys drumming on upside-down plastic buckets and accepting money from passersby; businessmen in suits and businesswomen in black shoes; lovers holding hands. There was every sort of life here—people who looked rich and people who looked poor, who seemed happy and who seemed miserable; mothers and fathers walking contentedly with their children; and men and women who appeared to be addicted to drugs, or to be suffering from mental problems, or who were ill, or whose lives were a walking nightmare.

As we moved along the west side of State Street with a warm, wet breeze stirring off the lake a few blocks to our right, I saw a billboard for the Cystic Fibrosis Foundation, with pictures of the two biggest individual fund-raisers in the area. Jeannie and I had friends who had two children with that illness, and over the years of knowing them we’d watched the children struggle and fight against it, and their parents worry about it, and we’d sent thousands of dollars in donations. “From the time I was a boy,” I told Rinpoche, “I’ve always been obsessed with the way lives can be so different. I mean, even if you just take the people we’ve seen in the past ten minutes, a tiny sampling of the spectrum of good and bad fortune on this earth, look at how different they are. Some of them are so miserable and some so happy.
Some people seem to have an enormous burden set upon them at birth, and others seem to cruise right through with very little pain. I’ve always wondered why it’s set up that way.”

“Yes, yes,” he said, fixing his brown-gold eyes on me as if he were seeing not my face and features but something buried beneath that, beneath the personality. It had been unnerving, at first; now I was almost used to it.

“‘Yes, yes,’ isn’t much of a reply to such a profound question,” I said.

He smiled. “It was a question?”

“All right. In your belief system, is there an explanation for that?”

He kept smiling. He said, “Yes.”

“All right. Cut it out. What is it? What is the theory of the Ortyk non-Buddhists, or Sufi-Christians, or whatever it is you call yourselves?”

He laughed. By this time we had reached Marshall Field’s, the wonderful old department store where Jeannie and I had gone for lunch on our first real road-trip-adventure, the start of our love affair. Rinpoche and I suspended the conversation temporarily and walked through the revolving doors, through the perfume and makeup department, and into an elevator that carried us up to the Walnut Room on the seventh floor. It was exactly as I remembered it: a sea of white tablecloths, large windows looking out on the city, the elegant walnut paneling with its brown and black swirls. The hostess led us to a table by the window and we were greeted immediately by a waiter carrying a pitcher of water, menus tucked under his arm.

When the waiter left us, Rinpoche said, “If you want to know why this life is like it is, you should know that it is
because of your last life. If you want to know what your future life will be, you should look at the way you are living in this life.”

“So it’s a punishment, then. If you’re straggling down State Street addicted to heroin, and you have AIDS, and you’re poor as dirt and squatting in a doorway scratching lottery tickets you bought with a few dollars someone put in your hat, that means you were a bad person in your last life.”

“Absolutely not,” he said, and for once he was not smiling. “It means you are given that for your practice in this life.”

“Practice for what?”

“For your next life,” he said.

“You’re playing the Zen game with me again. You know I hate it.”

The waiter was back. Since it was my second lunch of the day, I decided to have something light—scallops on a salad, decaf coffee. Rinpoche asked for mint tea.

“They have the smallest banana splits in the world here,” I told him, trying to simultaneously find a conciliatory note and change the subject. But Rinpoche was having none of that.

“My good friend,” he said. “You want A-B-C like the alphabet, and two plus two make four. But you are asking about something so far past ordinary human thinking mind. How can I put together those two things in an answer?”

“I don’t know.”

“I can’t make those things be sense in words, in the logic way of thinking, so I play Zen game. But it is not a game. It is the only way to begin—begin—to understand. I am
trying to teach you, but you don’t want to accept the teaching. You are very proud. You have a good life, you have worked hard for that life, you are very intelligent man, and in this society, intelligence like yours gets a good job, a good house, a good life for you and your family.

“There is nothing wrong with that. But you should try now to stop using so much that kind of intelligence, and stop thinking about punishment and sin and good and evil. I am telling you that your kind of intelligence makes you have a good job, but your kind of intelligence does not make you able to answer these questions. For that, you need a different kind of mind. And I am telling you there are people—maybe like that man in the doorway, maybe like that man sweeping the street in the city where your sister lives, or that man sitting outside the gas station the other day, or a woman we will meet soon—who can answer these questions better than you can, though maybe they do not have the fancy words. I am trying to tell you this, but you are proud of your intelligence, and your good job, and you will not let me teach you, so I play games.” He sat back. “Is that answer better to you, my friend?”

The food arrived. For a little while, I buried myself in the pleasure of it, not answering the good Rinpoche. In truth, all during the main course, my mind was running frantically this way and that, trying to find a logical refutation. I finished the salad and ordered one of the World’s Smallest Banana Splits and an extra spoon for Rinpoche, who tried two bites and smiled politely.

“Is that answer more pleaseful to you, my friend?” he asked, when the meal was finished.

“Yes,” I said. “Somewhat more pleaseful, and massively confusing.”

He reached out and touched my forearm in a kind way. Against a background of the rich brown paneling of that room, waiters and waitresses swirled and hurried, balancing trays at their shoulders, leaning in to take orders from elderly matrons whose eyes wandered out the floor-to-ceiling windows and down the length of State Street, where the traffic clogged and loosened like blood in an artery, and the world of business, of endless busyness, hurtled on. That busyness holds such an appeal, their eyes seemed to be saying. Such a strong appeal.

The light of the city of Chicago has a certain quality to it—because of the proximity of the lake, probably—and I was pondering that quality, and pondering the world of busyness, and thinking about my family, and feeling, just below the place where the meal I’d eaten was now at rest in its acidy bath, a kind of tearing open. The feeling reminded me, in a visceral manner beyond thought, of the way I’d felt in the moment I realized Jeannie and I were about to make love for the first time, an event that had occurred only a few miles from where the good Rinpoche and I then sat. In that hotel room there was the sexual excitement, of course (absent now, naturally enough, in the Walnut Room), but there was also something else surrounding it, a kind of terror-ecstasy balance, as if I were stepping off the sill of a tenth-floor window with the smallest of parachutes strapped to my back, a young man making a severe break with the familiar comforts of his past.

Exactly at that moment, as I was lost in that improbable comparison, Rinpoche said, “Ask any question now.”

I looked up and for an instant the image of him seemed to flicker. For a second or two he seemed about to morph
into someone or something else. Just nervousness, I decided, just a twitch in the optical nerve. Too many hours on the road. I looked at him more closely and he stabilized, if that is the word, and I hesitated for a moment and then hesitated some more and then said, “All right, my question is this: Assuming I wanted to find out about the greatest pleasure, as you call it . . . assuming I was open to that . . . what would the next step be?”

A smile the size of Lake Michigan. The no-longer-wavering Rinpoche saying, “How many days do we have now, you and me together driving?”