Dinner with Buddha (23 page)

“Dessert?”

“Later, maybe, we should probably get on the road.”

He was shaking his head.

“What? I like Crestone well enough. I've come to accept it as the six on the clock face, but I'm ready to move, show you some of the country, check out a national park or two. I was thinking Grand Canyon but you've seen that, so we could head to Utah and . . . don't you have a talk there?”

A nod, another quick grin.

“What?”

“Not finish with this place,” he said. “Big stupa here to great, great Rinpoche. Important for you now to do the meditation in that place. Maybe big surprise there for you, who knows?”

“Okay. It's close?”

“Wery close, I think. Woman, she tells us now.” He nodded in the direction of the owner/waitress, who was en route to collect our plates and to present us with a perfectly reasonable bill. I complimented her on the pasta; Rinpoche asked about the stupa; and on the blank bottom half of the receipt she drew us a map. The directions were all dirt roads, easily missed turns, landmarks that consisted of bits of shrubbery and certain kinds of trees, a house with solar panels, another house with two horses in the yard. It sounded sketchy to me, as if we might end up driving into the Sangre de Cristos and spending my birthday night in the cold there, sleeping in a car with a flat tire, holding phones with no service. I asked, half-jokingly, if we should take water and supplies.

She answered with a straight face, “No, it's not that far, really. You can't miss it.”

We became lost immediately. I must have turned left instead of right in front of Bliss, or she must have thought we'd parked facing the opposite direction (which would have made sense if we hadn't missed Bliss in the first place), but we became momentarily lost and wandered back through the town, where I saw a grown woman pushing a stroller that had a doll in it. She appeared to be talking to the doll. She reached down and adjusted the blanket that covered it. For one second then, an instant, a flash, I thought I saw my wife—not with this woman, but behind her, in the window of a store that sold patchouli brownies or something. I didn't see a face, but something in the swing of long brown hair, something in the hips beneath a blue dress. . . . Maybe the waitress had slipped some LSD into Frank's Mom's Pasta and I'd been hallucinating about the al dente, and was seeing things now
.

We returned to the front of the restaurant, rechecked the map, set off in the other direction, a right turn, then a left onto a dirt road. We bumped along this road, the mountains close behind us, and in front of us a long, slanting, dry plain lying in sunlight. More turns. The house with solar panels, but no house with horses. We were briefly on Ashram Street—not joking—and then in a kind of suburban wilderness where the homes, well spaced, were of a design that might be called American Funky. Some of them resembled the Alamo, others looked as though they'd been built one room at a time, with any available materials, by different carpenters or stonemasons, in different moods; still others appeared to have been the work of skilled architects, with second-floor patios, sunrooms, elegant porches.

At last, when the homes had fallen behind us and we were, after fifteen minutes of searching, still stupaless, I stopped in the middle of the gravel road and said, “We're lost.”

“Could be.”

“We'll retrace our steps and figure it out. There has to be a stupa here someplace. There has to be someone we can ask.”

Rinpoche pointed through the windshield. “A person.”

It wasn't a person, but it was a black Volvo station wagon a few hundred yards in the distance. From my vantage point, the car looked to have been pulled off the road, and I wondered, as we drove toward it, if we were about to interrupt a young hippie couple engaged in the act that sometimes results, after a period of months, in the birth of a human being. But no, thankfully, though the car was parked in a turn-out, there was only a single woman outside it. She was fully clothed. When we drew closer and stopped I saw that she was standing beside a small pool in a stream that ran beneath the road. She seemed completely unafraid of two men, one in a robe, one not, approaching her in the neowilderness of Crestone's sandy outskirts. “Hi,” she said, as if we had come in peace. Her hair was wet.

“Hi, sorry to bother you. We're looking for a stupa that's supposed to be near here. It's a Tibetan structure, sort of looks like a—”

“I know!” she said happily. “Just go back a mile or so and take the right turn there. You can't miss it!”

Believe me, we can,
I wanted to say. Rinpoche had walked a few steps to one side and was examining the pool. “You could swim here?” he asked.

“I just did. It's not deep but it's clean. I'm just leaving, so you guys go right ahead. Nobody will come down this road at this time of day, I'm pretty sure.”

We thanked her. She got into her Volvo and drove off. By then, Rinpoche was already lifting the robe off over his head. “Birthday swim, man!”

I wasn't quite as sure as the young woman that no one else would wander down the road. People would see the two of us naked and assume we were lovers. I had a whole busy line of worry going—they'd think we were gay, or nudists, or gay nudists, or old hippies flaunting the county's strict anti-exhibitionism laws. We'd be cited, arrested, fined, thrown in jail. And then—thank you again, meditation—I was able to let it go. Rinpoche was already immersed, splashing happily and looking up at the mountains. I joined him there. The water was cool but not icy, perfectly clean, the bottom sandy, a few tiny minnows darting this way and that. I ducked under, floated there, lounged, drifted. A baptism, it was. Fifty-two and I felt cleansed and alive, eternity stretching out in front of me, a big, true Self holding me in an invisible embrace.

Twenty-six

From that baptism we retraced our route, found the missed turn, and finally came upon the stupa. It was an impressive structure, probably fifty feet high, with a white square base and a tapering, pyramidal, gold-leafed tower, all set in a cleared area and looking down across the valley. I knew from Rinpoche's books that stupas were originally designed as repositories of the ashes of great Buddhist teachers but now primarily held a variety of religious relics. There were eight different kinds, each representing some important stage in Buddha's life, and it was thought that seeing a stupa, or merely being touched by the breezes that blew around it, was enough to bring the seeker closer to enlightenment. Building a stupa was an act that created excellent karma, led to a rebirth in a kind, loving family, or as a beautiful creature who gave joy to others simply by his or her presence. I got out of the SUV and approached the structure with all this in mind, with a certain amount of reverence but also traces of skepticism. I hadn't exactly been raised in a stupa culture. I hadn't exactly embraced the life of a true seeker. I felt, in a word, half-worthy of any blessings the structure might bestow.

But something strange and wonderful happened to me there, something I will remember all my days. I'm sure Rinpoche knew it would happen. We spent a minute walking around the stupa, admiring it and the view it looked out on, and then the Master suggested we sit and meditate together, as we'd done on the Great Sand Dunes and at Joyful Journey. It seemed to be happening more and more now, meditation filling spaces in the day that would previously have been filled by other things: eating, worrying, getting lost. I didn't mind.

There were terraced stone walls in front of the stupa, on the valley side. I followed Rinpoche's lead and sat on the highest of these, my back to the stupa, my legs hanging over the wall in a more-or-less comfortable fashion. As he'd done on the dunes, Rinpoche began to give instructions. “Listen now, Otto my friend,” he said, “in the order for you to go the next level now you have to believe it is right for you to go there. If you think, ‘I am failure,' ‘I am no good,' ‘I am not this, not that, too much this, too much that,' no good for you, okay? You have the same blessing inside you the Buddha had inside him. You were always the good father. This is your main work on this life, okay? You did this work with a wery special woman. So now, in this meditation, you think of that goodness inside you, of the goodness you and Jeannie passed on to Tasha and Anthony, and all the goodness they are now passing on in this world, okay? You start now with that. Eyes closed. Mind wery calm. All relaxed in every part of the body. You see the goodness in you. You see that you are father and mother to yourself for all time, you are the child here that is loved the way you love your childs, yes? Rest inside that love now, man, and we be quiet.”

It took a minute or two, but I could feel what I can only describe as a deep satisfaction enveloping me.
Satisfaction
is not quite the word, however. This was a state of being that I hadn't ever known, not in my best days as a father or husband or anything else, not in my quietest meditations. This was an absolute forgiveness for all that I was not, for all that I had not done right in this lifetime. A slate wiped clean. Not by some wishful thinking but in a way that felt like a physical fact as true as the sun's warmth on the back of my shoulders. I took in a long, slow breath and it was akin to breathing in golden vapor, not merely acceptance but a fundamental belonging, as if I held title to the very earth, as if my name were written on a document stating that fact, as if there was no possibility of my being denied my share of ownership. I'd heard someone say once that, when he first heard the term
self-loathing,
the Dalai Lama had been shocked. How, he wondered, could a person hate herself or himself? But it was almost a default setting in our society, where we were constantly being compared with some impossible ideal—judged worthy or not according to how we looked, what we owned, how much we had in our retirement account, and on and on. It fueled the beautiful, rich life we had . . . and, at the same time, encouraged us to feel perpetually insufficient.

At the stupa, I felt, for once, perfect in my imperfection.

I rested there in that velvety warmth for what must have been half an hour or more. Little wisps of thought floated across the interior screen, as insignificant and untroubling as the quick beating of a gnat's wings. I felt a kind of existential praise, simply for being. I felt that I might be destined, not for greatness in the usual sense, but that I had a limitless capacity for generosity, for good deeds, for aiding others.

I heard Rinpoche stir and stand, but for another little while I sat there, believing that when I opened my eyes and stood it would be into a totally different world. It was sweet to breathe. I wanted to hold onto the feeling and, of course, that was what eventually chased it off. I blinked, looked up. Rinpoche was staring at me intently. “When I come for you on the last day of the alone retreat your face look almost like this.”

I nodded. “Feels different, though.”

“Don't pay too much attention now, Otto. Don't describe. You can't hold on of it.”

“Why not?”

“Because the part that wants to hold on is the part you letted go to have this feeling.”

I turned and looked at the stupa, which somehow made sense to me now, whereas before the meditation it had been an interesting structure, finely made, well cared for, but not particularly inspiring. Now, it seemed to me, it had been designed to represent the experience I'd just had, or something that was its cousin. I kept looking at it. Everything else was slightly different, too, the fold of the mountains in the clear desert air, the feel of my body. It required a supreme effort of will not to talk about all this with Rinpoche, not to ask him to explain. Clearly he knew where I'd gone. Clearly he'd led me there.

“Now we can go,” he said. “Natural parks! Rinpoche has to see America!”

Why would you bother,
I wanted to ask. If you can travel to a world like the one I just stepped out of, what on earth would make you want to go anywhere. “One question,” I said.

He held up one thick finger. “One. Then no more. Ask.”

“Has Natasha . . . has she had meditations like that?”

“Yes,” he said, and he gave me a fierce look that was a kind of warning:
No more now, man!

Twenty-seven

We headed south again, through the small city of Alamosa (in winter, the Long Island coffeemaker had told us, Alamosa was often the coldest spot in the lower forty-eight), and stopped at a place called Smoothy's for an outstanding cantaloupe-watermelon juice. After that refreshing snack we headed farther south, crossing greener land and wandering through a little Mexican-looking town called Antonito (where the instructions on the gas pumps were only in Spanish). Then began the spectacular climb through the Rio Grande National Forest toward a ten-thousand-foot pass. To either side lay splendid green pastures that reminded me so much of the high fields of Yellowstone that I half expected bison to come wandering out of the trees. Deer grazed near stands of Ponderosa Pine. Far below in the valley ran the winding Conejos River.

It was several hours of curving climbs and fast descents, tough driving, but there was something so
clean
about this land, so untrammeled, so unconnected to the rest of the West, that it seemed to fit in perfectly with my hour at the stupa. Here, too, was something I'd never encountered, something not quite of this world. Rinpoche stared out the window and said nothing. I had a strong urge to pull over and spend the night in the pine needles, wrapped in a blanket—and that, I can assure you, is not a thought that commonly crosses my mind.

Eventually it came to an end; we couldn't live there, just as one couldn't stay in the meditation; we had to let that beauty go. We crossed into New Mexico and glided down into a rough little town called Chama, a railroad town, it seemed, with a few poor shops, small knots of tough-faced young men who glared at the car from beneath lowered eyebrows. It was the dinner hour, already. Frank's Mom's Pasta had long since left my stomach, and because I didn't see any eating place that looked tempting, I stopped in an old-style convenience store to inquire. A Mexican American woman sat there in the semi-darkness, perched behind a counter piled high with every kind of snack—candy bars, beef jerky, nuts, chips. Behind the piles were signs for ice cream cones. Tiny and at peace, the woman was a figurine from a temple of another era, an Incan goddess granting an audience, perhaps Seese's mysterious female dream spirit leading us into the mountains. “People like the High Country for dinner,” she said, in thick, beautifully accented English.

We followed her directions and found the High Country, waited there for a table to open up, were served some very good chips and salsa and then a decent posole. Here, again, let me add a droplet of knowledge from my days as a food editor. Posole was no ordinary stew. Made of maize, meat, hominy, and chili peppers, it was served, in pre-Columbian times, only on special occasions. Feast days. Ex-editors' birthdays, things like that. Some anthropologists believe that, in those days, the meat used in posole was human.

The meat, in this case, was pork. I was there and not there. The quality of the food—good without being great—mattered and didn't matter. The fact that it was my birthday was pleasant enough, but the usual birthday shine had given way to something else, something Rinpoche said I shouldn't talk about, shouldn't even be thinking about. Which was impossible. He was sitting across from me, his rosary-adorned cowboy hat set beside him on the table, and he was munching on a corn chip as if it were the last such thing ever to be created in this land. “Sometimes Cecelia she makes the bread,” he said.

“I know. I've had her bread. It's like eating compressed sawdust.”

He laughed merrily and didn't disagree. “I watch how she makes, you know. First she puts in the dust.”

“Flour.”

“White. Then other things, the water, the salt. With her hands she mixes. I like watching.”

“If you put a lot of butter on it's not that bad. Honey or molasses or something. Needs moisture. Fiber is all well and good, but we aren't horses, we have to—”

He ignored my little riff. “Then you have to knee it.”

“
Knead,
not
knee.
It's a funny word. K-n-e-a-d.”

“She knees it. Hard. Like punching. In the summer it makes the sweat on her face. She makes sure everything mixed up good, yes? Then in the stove she puts and watches for it to get big.”

“I'm with you. Jeannie would make bread from time to time. There's something wonderful about it. Primal. It's like watching a mason build a—”

“Wery exciting to see it go big, yes?”

“All of a sudden I'm feeling a lesson here.”

“Wery exciting, Otto. But you can't eat it yet, see?”

“I see. I think if you'd used another bread maker, a different end product, the lesson would have hit me harder, but I get the message. The bread of my meditative life has risen, maybe, and that part was exciting, but I shouldn't think about eating it quite yet.”

My spiritual guide reached across the table and squeezed me hard on the upper arm. “Wery good, my friend.”

“Still, it's a nice feeling.”

“Nice, nice, sure. Wery nice. But important to remember one thing when you eat it: The bread gives you strength not for you, but so you can make a help for somebody else. See?”

“I believe I do, yes. One shouldn't wallow in the pleasure of it.”

“Yes. At the minute you die you say: Let me to help people in the next life. Okay?”

“Got it.”

“Good. Now we talk about something else, my friend.”

“Well, how about this for a something else: I realized today that I'm getting used to not having my job. I do miss the routine of it—I think that routine kept me sane in a certain way, especially through Jeannie's illness—and I miss the people I worked with, and the paycheck, and the excuse to be in Manhattan most days. But I'm getting accustomed to it. One thing I liked was learning so much from the authors I worked with, not just about food but about the world. Most of the books we published incorporated some aspect of culture or history, because food is always connected to those things. That's what a lot of people don't realize, I think, and it was kind of a crusade of mine, making that connection between what people eat, how and when they eat, and all the other parts of life that go with the place they inhabit—history, climate, culture; even the religion sometimes plays a role in what people eat.”

“Lot of times,” Rinpoche said, but I wondered if I might be rambling again, or if he was actually interested.

“You know a lot about geology,” I went on, “which is one of the reasons I want to show you some of the parks while we're out West. And I know a little bit about the history of places. Take New Mexico, for instance. There were native peoples living here thousands of years ago and they had a well-developed civilization with a mix of agriculture and hunting. They had living spaces that were underground, or mostly underground, because the climate here can be so hot in summer and so cold in winter. They had what were essentially apartment complexes. And then the Spanish came, and this one guy called Oñate, especially, was determined to convert the natives to Catholicism and make them subjects of the Spanish king. The stuff that was done to them in the name of God! Unbelievable! Cutting off the left foot of every man over twenty-five, for one example. There were these people called the
Hee car ee ya.
J-i-c-a-r-i-l-l-a is how you spell it. The Spanish did a number on them. Then, later, the U.S. government did another number on them, moved them onto one chunk of land, then they took that land away and moved them someplace else, then they moved them back again. One broken promise after the next.”

“A sin,” Rinpoche said.

“The very definition. We're going right through their land later on today.”

“Should stay there then, Otto,” Rinpoche said. “Spend some money.”

“We'll see what the options are. But, here's where I'm going with all this: The life to which you've been introducing me all these years, whatever we call it—the meditative life, the interior life, the contemplative life—it seems to be something that stands at the center of your culture. I mean, you and your father were famous in Skovorodino the way movie stars, athletes, and musicians are famous in America now, right?”

A nod. His full attention.

“I'm thinking something like that was important in the American Indian cultures. The medicine men, the shamans, and so on. They'd be the ones getting forty million a year in this society. I know just a little about them, but I think they had spiritual traditions that weren't so different from what you have. They weren't as focused on material goods or competition. They had fasting, prayer, something closely akin to meditation. They also had human sacrifice, which I'm pretty sure your people did not. . . . And then the Spanish came, and their religion was more external. They wanted to, needed to,
convert
people, even if it meant using violence. And yet, at the same time, they were so much more . . .
advanced
probably isn't the correct word, but they knew how to do all these things the native people didn't know how to do—from making rifles to riding horses to drawing maps of the world to not eating human flesh to doing surgery to writing books.” I stopped and looked at him.

“What is question?” he said.

“I don't know, exactly, but it seems to me there
is
a question. Our people, my people, are excellent at using the world, maybe better than any other group that's ever existed. Digging out ore to make silver objects, sending up spaceships, you name it. But there's something we're missing, isn't there? We're missing it and we don't even know it's there. I wouldn't have known if I hadn't met you. Maybe that's the source of all our addiction and violence and mental illness.”

“What is question, Otto?”

“I'm not sure. It's just that, traveling this land, where you can still feel the Indian presence, which you can't feel where I live, not at all, maybe it's just the right thing for me and you right now. For me, anyway. Maybe what we're supposed to do on this land—I'm talking in the very long run here—maybe our only hope is to blend those two ways of being. Maybe we can have all this scientific and practical knowledge—vaccines, medicines, space stations, computers, great roads—and maybe we could also have the other side of the coin, the contemplative, meditative, the interior aspect of living. I was thinking about this on the drive we just took, and after the . . . the thing I'm not supposed to talk about. It all fits somehow, in my mind at least. Did you and Seese arrange this on purpose?”

The question had finally materialized out of my rambling. He ignored it. “Like what the Chinese do in Tibet,” he said.

After a second I understood. “Yes. Similar genocide. Similar clash of a more ‘advanced' society, militarily at least, technologically, and a more contemplative one. You're right. I hadn't thought of that.”

“Long, long times ago in the mountains there, in Tibet, there was somebody who, how you say, predicts this. Like the acorn, you know the acorn? Unless she breaks open, the acorn can't make a tree. The acorn of Buddhism, the meditation ideas, the inside life, this will be broken open, he said. The Chinese broken that open. Otherwise the Dalai Lama still there in Lhasa. Rinpoche still in Russia. Then the Chinese come, the Russians come, smash us open so we go to the other parts of the world, the West parts, and teach. See?”

“I do see. It's almost as if there's some grand plan.”

“Maybe.” He wiped his mouth with his napkin and bowed his head toward the empty plate the way I'd seen him do a hundred times, giving thanks for the meal. There was no big show about it, no loud prayers or gestures, just this quick nod of gratitude. “Maybe,” he said, “you don't listen enough on your sister.”

“I'm sure I don't.”

“She been telling you the same thing you just said to me, many times she telling you.”

“You mean, why Shelsa has been born and that sort of thing.”

“Shelsa, Cecelia, me, you, Natasha, Jeannie. Lot of people in this big plan, not just our family.
Lot
of people, man! Many years it takes but now is one time.”

“Why?”

“Just is.”

“What's going to happen?”

A big shrug. “Little bit, how you say, change.”

“Good change?”

He lifted his hands, palms facing inward, fingers spread, then brought the fingers together and squeezed. “Maybe West and East like this. Maybe Shelsa and somebody else do this now. Maybe this new pope, he's helping. Not sure yet.”

“I think that's the first time I've ever heard you say you're not sure.”

“Things have to happen. Nobody sees these things all the way. Celia doesn't, Rinpoche doesn't. Nobody. Maybe nothing change. Maybe bad guys win, nobody knows.”

“Chinese bad guys?”

“Lot of bad guys now, Otto. Same as always.”

On that note, with the familiar shiver running along the outside of my arms, with Rinpoche looking as calm as I was worried, with me glancing around the High Country for Chinese operatives, Somalian terrorists, and crazed militiamen from the Bakken field, we paid for our chips and posole and went out into the New Mexico evening. I found myself, at that moment, giving silent thanks for having been born. I thanked my mother for enduring labor and my father for his work, and I thanked, too, the mysterious
something
that stood beyond them, beyond the realm of image and thought.