Breakfast With Buddha (31 page)

“What makes them
run,
you mean. Makes them
work.
Or
exist.
”

He took a drink of water and nodded energetically, as I had seen him do during his talks, but there was something different in the way he was looking at me. His eyes were more intense, the gaze more intimate. He put just the last inch or so of the fingers of both hands on the table to either side of his plate and said, “Love makes them run. That is not my lineage, my
idea.
That is a fact just like when water gets cold it ices. Like that. Some people cannot see this is a fact, but this is. They are blind in different ways but this is a fact: Love makes the atoms go where they go and stick where they stick. Everybody when they see a baby, a small boy or girl, they smile? Why? Because inside themself they know this fact. They know love made this baby, this boy, this girl. They feel this natural rising up of love in themself. Okay, yes? Before, I said to you about God’s music that is playing all the time, for everyone. God’s music is this love.
And this love that runs our world, sometimes it means that there is help coming from that love, from that . . .
source
you would say, yes? See in your life, in Otto’s life, how many times every day you help. Me, you help. Your wife, your children, people you don’t know that you see walking by, you help them. And every day maybe somebody helps you. What is this help? It is love. Okay?”

“I’m with you.”

“Good. And so, now, bigger idea . . .” He made a large circle with his hands. “Sometimes, many times, the strongness of love in this universe—”

“The strength of love.”

“Yes, the strength of love in this universe, it comes very much all at once into some bodies on this planet, the way air comes sometimes very much into a wind. And those bodies, they are a saint, a great teacher, what we call a god. Really it is a piece of God, the way you can have a big wind be a piece of the air on the earth but by itself it is not really separate.” He considered this a moment, then went on. “The way you can have light in a line coming through a window,” he pointed to his left where a ray of sunlight was angling in and splashing on the pale wood of a table. “
Piece
of the sun, yes, but not the sun really, you see?”

“Okay.”

“But what runs the world is that source. Sometimes when a country, when a place on the earth, needs help, or when the whole of the earth needs help, then this love becomes into a human body like a Buddha, a Krishna, a Muhammad, a Mary, a Jesus, a Moses, and so like that. Why at that time, why in that place, that culture, even my father says, ‘Don’t know.’ Why only some of the peoples there see that these saints are pieces of God and others do not see,
don’t know. But if you look with a clear mind, you know that the world works like this. If you listen very careful to your heart going, if you meditate just on that, you can see that it runs because of this love.”

Rinpoche finished and sat back, watching me intently the whole time in much the same way a professor of physics might look at a favored student after chalking a theory onto the board in his office. Do you see? Is it clear? Has the light gone on in you the way it went on in me, years ago?

I must confess then that any urge I had to make a joke had been extinguished. I know I am not conveying this little bratwurst-and-beer encounter with anything like the power it actually had; I’m an editor, not a writer, after all. But at that moment, surrounded by a German-Americana of smells and sights that had been as familiar to me as the quilt on my childhood bed, I felt a physical sensation of another world having been opened up to me. A thick layer peeled away. An obvious truth revealed. Strangely enough, the feeling was vaguely familiar, and after a few seconds’ consideration I realized it was a cousin to the feeling I’d known when I had watched my children being born. There was the physical, of course, the blood and mucus, the tissue, the smells and sounds, the cries, the small body making its way out of the larger one. And then, behind or beyond or on top of all that, was something else, some brief glimpse into an enormous, almost an alien truth, momentarily irrefutable. Some essence of love or generosity was infusing the physical event, it was so obvious. And now here it was again, that same mysterious feeling.

I tried to let that truth sink in, tried to meditate on my heartbeat for a moment, on the heartbeats of the people I loved. I tried, with a bit of success, I must say, to contemplate
the source behind the movements of the atoms in stone and air and water. It was strangely, eerily frightening. Rinpoche did not seem to feel the need to say anything more. I excused myself, got up and went to the bathroom, trying to give myself time to come back to my ordinary way of thinking about the world. But that way, safe and familiar and protected by a thick armor of intellectual acuity, seemed almost criminally superficial all of a sudden. There was the familiar
DAMEN
and
HERREN
on the bathroom doors, there was the water coming out of the faucet, and cells and atoms within that water, and ordinarily that was as far as I would have gone with it. As if those cells and atoms had simply materialized one fine day, out of nothing. As if my children had. As if a college chemistry text was all the explanation anyone needed for the fact of human awareness.

Back at the table, a young sister and brother combo—three and four years old, I guessed—had climbed up into the booth with Rinpoche. Blond, fine-featured, dressed in jeans and a NASCAR T-shirt, the boy was sitting on my friend’s knee, and the little girl was standing and leaning against his shoulder. Their mother looked on uneasily from the aisle, telling them it was time to leave, that they should give the man some peace, and so on. I stood a few feet away and watched. Rinpoche had a hand on the boy’s head and was looking at the girl and making faces, then put a hand on the girl’s head and made faces at the boy. They were squealing, hugging him, and their mother, all apologies, had to peel them away and shoo them out the door one by one.

I sat and took refuge in the last of my Spaten, in the familiar motions of taking out the wallet, pinching the credit card, handing it over. But something was turning upside
down inside me; something in the conversation, in the spin of the past few hours, something was making me breathe differently, think differently. I paid for our dinner, but Rinpoche, who was getting the hang of the American way of eating, insisted on adding the tip. He reached into the folds of his robe, brought out half a dozen dollar tokens from the casino up the road, and, with a wonderfully impish expression on his workingman’s face, set them in a neat stack on the paper place mat.

FORTY-THREE

It is about 300 miles
from Park Rapids to Bismarck. I guessed the trip would take us five hours or so and called the Bismarck Radisson to hold two rooms for late arrival.

By the time we got back to the car and rejoined Route 200, we had, by my calculations, an hour and a half of daylight left. I was glad of that. From other trips, I knew the landscape would change dramatically when we reached the westernmost part of Minnesota and then crossed the border to my home state, and I wanted to point that out to Rinpoche and say,
Look at how flat it gets here. This was all a glacial lake a million years ago. If we turn south we could drive probably five hundred miles—through South Dakota, and then all the way across Nebraska and Kansas and most of Oklahoma—and you’d barely see a hill. It’s where most of the wheat is grown in America now, and a lot of the corn, and where most of our beef cattle come from. But 150 years ago these plains were black with buffalo for as far as the eye could see, millions of them grazing
together in huge herds. The native people here depended on the buffalo for everything from food to clothing to skins for their tepees. They used to kill them with bows and arrows, if you can imagine that—they’d ride up beside a two-thousand-pound galloping beast and kill it with an arrow. But the U.S. government wanted to settle this land with white people, so they paid men to come out here and slaughter the buffalo because they knew that would make the Indians move away. Sometimes one man would kill as many as 150 in a day, and by about 1900 the buffalo were close to extinction, and the Indians had mostly been chased away, and people like my great-grandparents had been given huge tracts of land—a thousand, two thousand, three thousand acres—on which to build houses and grow crops.

I’d prepared a whole lecture for him on the history of the Great Plains, the blood and slaughter and hardship and sacrifice lying beneath the placid landscape like karma in a soul—unseen, nearly forgotten, but echoing quietly in every modern minute. It had been a holocaust, some people said. Others claimed it was just the juggernaut of history, the price of progress, the same old story that had been played out all over the globe: the more advanced technology—rifles, ironclad ships, fighter jets, nuclear weapons—always winning out over the tools and rituals of the past.

But shortly after we left Park Rapids, Rinpoche leaned the seat back a few inches and closed his eyes. I was alone with my thoughts and the gradual approach of darkness across flat fields of corn, sunflowers, and soybeans. For a little while I tried to listen to the talk shows. One of the hosts was saying that the solution to the terrorist problem was to drop a nuclear bomb on Mecca. Someone on another
station claimed that Christ the Lord was coming soon to cast sinners into eternal fire. Someone else said that all our troubles could be traced to immorality—drugs and drink, abortion, homosexuality (how they loved to talk about homosexuality, these people), high school students coupling without benefit of the blessing of the church or their elders. It was all the fault of the liberals. It was all the fault of the people who insisted on owning guns. It was all a righteous punishment for the bad things someone else had done. Always someone else.

We crossed the North Dakota line just as the very last light of the day disappeared. Tired by then from the long hours of driving, I merged onto Interstate 94, a fast, mostly empty road that slices the state neatly in two: a larger northern piece and a smaller southern piece. Thirty or forty miles west of Fargo I pulled off into a rest area. Rinpoche had not moved. I got out and stretched, still feeling the harsh reminders of my yoga adventure. The moon had not yet risen and the sky was as I remembered it, black, immense, and pocked with points of light, the air sweetened with the fragrance of just-harvested hayfields.

Set beside the mandala of meaning that Rinpoche had laid out for me in the German restaurant, the ideas of the radio talkers seemed like nothing more than the clack and bubble of bickering hens, the oink and push of hogs. I looked at the stars. The world had not changed, not really. With all our impressive technological achievements—the book, the automobile, the airplane, the computer, the looping satellites bouncing TV shows into dry, well-heated homes—we were still the species described in the first parts of the Bible. Some of us murdered and stole and raped; some of us spent our lives chasing money or distraction or the so-called sense
pleasures. The family, the village, the tribe, the nation—we still formed ourselves into units in the hope of escaping or softening or denying a kind of ultimate loneliness. And then, conversely, we still seemed to need to divide ourselves into “us” and “them,” liberal and conservative, black and white, native and immigrant, man and woman, believer and nonbeliever, Jew and Christian and Muslim and Buddhist and Hindu. We still laughed. We still faced death on a field of interior solitariness.

What if the secret architecture of it all was just as Rinpoche claimed: some cosmic unity there beyond our false identification with the individual body? a love beyond imagining that hid in the molecules of a trillion shapes, causing hearts to beat and rivers to run and lovers to find each other? What if the plain old Protestants had it partly right—that you could have direct access to that breath and pulse of love without the official intervention of the church fathers? More than that, what if, throughout history, there had been people—grand spirits in human form—sent to show us the route out of this mess, a way to embody that love, or merge with it, rather than simply touching it once in a while, with a handful of close souls, in our best moments? What if earth was just a violent stopping place on the highway to some saner, sweeter home, and there were teachers who saw that and had come to help us on the journey? And if there really were such people, what would be the consequence of ignoring them?

Through the open window I heard Rinpoche burp in his sleep.

My cell phone vibrated in my pocket, then rang. When I opened it and said hello, the voice I heard belonged to our daughter, Natasha, named for the Russian-émigré doctor
who had guided her so skillfully along the dangerous passage from darkness to light.

“Dad?”

“Hey, honey! It makes me happy to hear your voice.”

“Where are you? You sound different.”

“Just into North Dakota. Where are you?”

“Home, Dad. It’s, like, late. Anthony’s passed out on the couch and Mom’s right here. She said you were supposed to call and when you didn’t we got worried.”

“I tried to, right after supper. There was no service where we were.”

“How’s Aunt Seese?”

“She stayed home, didn’t Mom tell you?”

Natasha didn’t answer for a moment and I could picture her standing in the kitchen, receiver held against her shoulder in a pose she’d struck from her earliest phone days, her pretty, freckled face turned toward her mother.

“Oh, right, sorry. I, like, spaced. So you’re driving with some kind of guru or something, or is Mom making that up? She says you’re, like, going to shave your head or something when you get home? She’s joking, right?”

“Sure she is. He’s a good guy, though, a monk. Volya Rinpoche is his name. Google him and see what you get.”

“Okay. . . . Dad?”

“What, honey?”

“Mom says if I come up with the money for the car maybe you guys could cover the insurance, you know, until I get a little older?”