Breakfast With Buddha (26 page)

“All the time?”

“Of course.”

“When you were in prison?”

“When I was in prison I prayed that the people hurting me there would know that pleasure.”

I glanced back and forth between the road and his calm face. A lie? Self-delusion? A sweet rewriting of history? I tried to recapture the mental landscape of the few minutes in the corpse pose, the few minutes on the hotel sofa. “Why is it so pleasurable?”

He pondered this question for a while, looking out at the unspectacular scenery. “Remember the painting on the wall in the restaurant?”

“The print of the eight-hundred-year-old painting with me in it? How could I forget?”

“Remember around the heads of the goddess and the gods was a circle, and in that circle a blue space with nothing inside?”

“Yes.”

“That is the blue space, what you felt.”

“All right. It’s a nice blue space. I liked it. In the picture it reminded me of the halos around Jesus and Mary and the saints in a lot of the Christian paintings I’ve seen.”

“Yes, exactly so. The people who made those paintings of Jesus and Mary could understand this, what I am saying. In that space there is no anger, no killing, no war, no wanting food or sex all the time. And no fear of dying.”

“How do you know?”

“Forget me!” he said, rather roughly. He had turned to face me now, and his voice held that note of pure authority in it and not so much kindness, not so much patience. “Many peoples have written about it. Catholics and Protestants and Sufis and Hindus and Buddhists and Jews and Muslims and Baha’is, many great teachers. Not my idea, Otto, not me, just a fact. Is the sky my idea?” He swung an arm up in the direction of the windshield. “If I say, there is the sky, do you ask me how I know? Do you think I’m the crazy man that thinks he invented the sky?”

“Well, I have only a few days, I want to learn as much as I can. . . . And I admit to a certain skepticism that—”

“You should underlearn,” he said.

“Underlearn? You mean unlearn?”

“Unlearn. You learned already too much. Don’t think so much now, just whenever you want to think so much take a nice breath, listen to the tires’ noise on the road, look at
the trees, look at the lake, look at the other cars, feel inside when you are breathing, feel the pain in your muscles. That is what yoga does for anyone, makes you to pay attention, not to think. Do not force information into your mind. You are smart now, you will always be smart, but if you think too much it pushes you from God.”

“All right. God here I come. Watch for my halo.”

He didn’t laugh. “Life is very fast, Otto.”

“I know that. I’ve seen that with my children—they were infants in diapers a couple days ago; now they’re ready to leave the house.”

“This is a way to make it slow.”

THIRTY-SIX

At one point,
I remember, we turned off Route 53 and wandered around in the sandy territory to the east, taking two-lane highways that ran along a lake and past plain-looking cottages. I thought, maybe, we could pull over and take a swim, or hike down a side road, but, in spite of three doses of anti-inflammatories, my muscles were as sore as if I’d just had my first week of high school football practice. Swimming would hurt. And I suspected that Rinpoche had seen enough trees and cornfields, so a dirt-road hike did not seem the wisest plan either. We passed a small town, then the Fisherman’s Hall of Fame, marked by a hundred-foot-long plastic pike or muskellunge suspended on stilts, but even that didn’t tempt me. I decided not to think about it, to just drive back to the big highway, observe, calm my mind, and let any American fun in the area come to us as a gift of the gods.

I had hoped to stay that night in downtown Duluth—a place I remembered well from half a dozen childhood trips—but a series of phone calls gave me to understand
that all the grand old waterfront hotels there were full up, so we had to settle for a motel on Barker’s Island, on the Wisconsin side of the lake. With the stretch breaks, semicircular detour, a stop for gas, and another stop for tea, it was late afternoon by the time we pulled onto Barker’s Island, the air hot but not particularly humid, my stomach clenching and muttering. Steak, I was thinking. A nice rare steak with garlic mashed potatoes and grilled asparagus, maybe just a salad beforehand, a couple of glasses of cabernet. Then cheesecake for dessert.

Our lodging on Barker’s Island was adequate, a sort of resort motel with an indoor pool. Rinpoche and I were given two rooms on the first floor at the far eastern end, just past the pool, which was filled with squealing, happy boys and girls, their parents sitting at nearby tables reading the newspaper or paging through magazines. There was a moldy smell to my room. I opened the window and looked out across the parking lot and lawn, to the edge of a body of water that seemed to be some kind of bay or inlet, not the huge lake itself.

Rinpoche was meditating. We’d agreed to meet up in an hour. I soaked my aching muscles in a hot bath, flicked through the television channels—golf, cooking, news, romance, celebrity fascination—and, for a moment at least, saw them the way I imagined Rinpoche saw them, as just more pleasures to think about, more information to crowd out the blue sphere, more distraction from some essential path. I supposed it was true that certain distractions were better than others. Looking at a great painting or reading a great book might turn your mind in the direction of the pleasurable emptiness; watching babysitters and jilted wives fighting on a TV show probably would not.

Drying off and dressing for dinner, I thought about my parents and wondered if they had, in fact, been living out a kind of meditative existence there on the vast plains west of Bismarck. When my mother swept snow off the boards of the front porch, with a bank of storm clouds speeding east and leaving a bare blue sky above her, when my dad spent all day in his tractor riding back and forth along the endless rows of soybean fields, could they have been sensing something like what I had sensed in my two brief glimpses on the yoga mat and on the GrandStay couch? Some sweet, charged emptiness they knew intimately but could not find words for? Was that why they urged me and Cecelia so persistently toward the farming life? It seemed possible but unlikely. It seemed to me that their spiritual urges were confined, by habit and a kind of Protestant peer pressure, to the plain church where we worshipped on Sunday mornings. Their contract with God was a simple and straightforward one: Don’t do anything evil during the week, go to church on Sunday, God will take care of the rest. Yoga classes optional.

It seemed to me that Rinpoche was making the opposite point: that I was in control of my spiritual situation, not God; that we had been given the tools for an expanded consciousness and it was up to us to use them, not simply wait around for death and salvation. I thought about this in my moldy motel room—just what Rinpoche had advised me not to do. Thought and considered and pondered and held the idea up to the light so I could examine it from several angles. I couldn’t stop myself from approaching the question this way because, after all, thinking and learning had been my path out of the unadorned monotony of Stark County, North Dakota. Once I turned eleven or so,
my father had started taking me with him to his regular Saturday lunches at Jack’s, in town. He and three or four other farmer friends would sit over their fried chicken, mashed potatoes, coffee, and pie, and their conversations would be about beans, wheat, soil, insects, weather, feed, the hundredweight price of Angus heifers at Stockman’s auction that week. Those conversations had frustrated me in a way I could not explain: My mind was already looping out into the wider world. Late at night I’d twist the dial on my transistor radio and find stations from Calgary, Montreal, Seattle, Saskatoon, Boise, St. Louis. The people on those radio shows were talking politics, art, the state of the world. They were really
thinking.
Meanwhile, my father and his pals were stuck in their overalls and hard-skinned hands, trapped in a way of life that seemed to me like a beautiful library with one book in it. I did not want to read that book over and over again forever. Rinpoche was telling me not to think, but it was my thinking, my thirst for learning, that had led me to break the mold of my parents’ expectations and go off to college in Grand Forks, then to graduate school in Chicago, then pack a suit and some city clothes and, with Jeannie, head east for New York City, capital of the thinking world.

Now, Rinpoche seemed to be encouraging me to go home, back to a calmer, slower world, and it was not an easy trip.

THIRTY-SEVEN

The odd pair
of us—I in my sportcoat and chinos and Rinpoche in his robe—walked through the motel parking lot and down the access road a few hundred yards to a restaurant I’d seen on the way in. The Boathouse, it was called. The warmth of the day had dissipated somewhat. We could feel, but not see, the cold mass of Superior off our right shoulders, north of the inlet. As we approached the Boathouse we saw an old freighter tied up there, some kind of museum, it appeared, and in its shadow, a miniature golf course with throngs of moms and dads and kids and young adults on dates out in the cooling lake air, hitting their putts and marking their scorecards and shouting in delight.

“A circus,” Rinpoche said.

“No, golf. Miniature golf. It’s for kids mostly.”

“I see the adults, too.”

“Yeah, some adults, but mostly for kids. We can try it after dinner if you want.”

“Try it now,” he said.

I was very hungry. My shoulders and thighs ached. “It’s really crowded now,” I said. “Look at the line of people waiting on the first hole.”

“Now we should try it,” he said, and he put a hand on my shoulder and looked into my eyes as if spying out the little whining man there who’d been imagining his steak and asparagus for two hundred miles and had to have it NOW! “What you say?”

“I say: After is better. But if you want to play now, well, let’s give it a shot.”

“Shot,” he said, with a big smile. Even with the hungry voice calling out its interior complaints, chastising me, lecturing me, mocking me, upset at the Rinpoche for his games, even with all that, it was impossible not to like the man.

Once we’d paid our small tariff (Rinpoche’s treat) and joined the line waiting to tee off, we found ourselves standing next to a middle-aged couple dressed in casual summer clothes.

“Aha, we have the possibility of making a foursome with a man of the cloth,” the male half of this couple remarked to his wife as we took our place just behind them. “Would you join us? Do you mind?”

“Happy to,” I said. “I’m Otto Ringling, and this is my friend, Volya Rinpoche.”

“Ah, Ringling,” the man joked. “And Volya Trapeze, how are you? This is my better half, Eveline, and I’m Matthew Fritton. We’re caught here in line like the rest of the proletariat and would be happy to have your company. Monks, are you? Tibetans?”

“Rinpoche’s the monk. I’m just chauffeuring him around.”

“Giving a talk at the university on the hill, is he?” Matthew asked.

“Not that I know of.”

Matthew and his wife turned to see how the line was moving. We were two or three groups from the first hole. They shuffled up another yard or so and turned back to us.

“We’re both professors,” Eveline said. “English,” she pointed to herself. “And philosophy,” to Matthew.

Rinpoche was smiling and nodding at them, as was his custom. When there was a break in the introductions he said, “Is furniture golf American fun?”

“Beg pardon?”

“Miniature,” I said. “Miniature golf, not furniture golf.”

“A lot of fun,” Eveline said. “Matthew takes it a tad overly seriously—look, he’s brought his own two-hundred-dollar putter—but for the rest of us, it’s fun.”

“Ah, marriage,” Matthew countered, putting his arm around his wife’s shoulders and giving her an ironic squeeze. He bent down and kissed the top of her head. “And what religion do you profess, sir, if I might ask? Buddhism, is it? The philosophy of the great Gotama? Many lives that lead us to the blessed nothingness, is that right?”

Rinpoche was smiling up at him, a small smile, a curious smile. “Almost,” he said. “Almost right. I am a Rinpoche. I sit. Sometimes I talk. And what is your work?”

“Well, Eveline has just told you, so this must be a Zen question. If you work at the university and you fall over in your office and no one is there to actually hear you, do you make a sound?”

Eveline made a small laugh at this, a nervous giggle. But the joke struck me as slightly off key, almost as if Matthew was assuming a defensive posture without realizing it, and
then trying to coat his defenses in clever humor. I caught a whiff of gunpowder from the academic battlefields. A few years earlier, I had been asked to teach a course at Columbia University, just one course, one term, as an adjunct, as someone who knew the world of publishing firsthand. I’d made some friends there and liked the students quite well. But I’d also encountered people like this uneasy fellow in the Hawaiian shirt and toothy smile. In the faculty lounge over coffee you’d greet them with some pleasant, innocuous remark like, “Nice day.” And it would be as if you’d sent a lob over the net. Instead of volleying it back, they’d smash it, or spin it, or slice it, say something like, “Well,
‘nice,’
I don’t know, not
nice,
exactly, more like
decent,
or
cosi-cosi, mezza-mezza. Seminice
would actually be more accurate, wouldn’t you say?” It was all a joke of sorts, but the joke had nails and pins and poison in it.

“No, I didn’t understand,” Rinpoche said. “Sorry. For me, you talk very fast.”

“We teach,” Eveline told him. “There is a large university here, in Duluth, actually. I teach English and Matthew teaches philosophy.”

“Ah, very good. English I need a teacher for. And philosophy, very good. Many ideas about living, yes?”

“Thousands.”

“And it helps you live, yes?”