Miss Buddha (67 page)

There, where I had expected to find them,
were Ananda, Melissa, Clare, and our industrious Agent Roth. I
smiled at them, and all but Roth smiled back—still busy matching
patterns and sensing whether all indeed was well. Still looking out
for me. He is a good man.

The rustle of the crowd died down, and I set
out to wake some sleepers and steer some seekers.

“There are some nine million different
species of life here on earth, most of them beetles, as it
happens—some 350,000 species of them. Don’t ask me why they are so
popular. And don’t ask me who counted them all.

“Life, in a word, is everywhere, from the
seventy or eighty trillion cells that make up our human bodies and
the one hundred trillion or so microbes that make our stomachs
(yes, for each and every one of us) their home—and without which we
would not be able to digest food—to the 12,000 different species of
round worms, to the 4,000 or so different species of mammals: life
is everywhere. In water, on land, in air.

“This home planet of ours is literally
teeming with life.

“Much can be, and has been, said about all
this life, about its many similarities and its many
differences.

“The one thing, however,
that is rarely pointed out, is the one thing that all life has in
common, apart from being
life
, of course: life eats. All life
here on earth, to survive, has to eat. And the sad thing is that
for all but the most basic life forms—including most plants—life
eats itself.

“We call this
hunger
—a whip so much
stronger than sex ever was or ever will be. For while the sexual
urge is all focused on tomorrow, a new colony of cells and microbes
to declare a homestead when the one we’re occupying gives out,
hunger cares little about tomorrow, it cares only about
now.

“Hunger. Sufficiently severe, it will drive
even the most tranquil relationship into a feeding frenzy. It will
kill anything that opposes it, for death is never, not for any
living thing, a viable option (and I guess that pun is
intended).

“The truth is that this Earth of ours—and
any other world where this tragic equation is in play—would be a
peaceful place if we did not have to eat each other.

“This absolute necessity to eat—for there
really is no other option, you either eat or die—is the root of
defense, protection, hatred, wars, killing.

“Seeing as our physical shells are not what
we in truth are, eating is an obscene need that embroils every
living thing on the planet, at least every alive thing beyond plant
life, which survives just fine on sunlight, water, carbon dioxide
and minerals, thank you—mainly nitrogen,” she added as a
clarification, “for carbon dioxide and water combine to sugar,
which plants love.

“Happy, indeed, is the algae who simply
needs carbon dioxide and sunlight. Why was life not satisfied with
that? What was life’s need to evolve?

“I don’t really know, but evolve it did, and
as life forms grew more complex, as larger and larger cell colonies
networked into larger and larger bodies—all the way from the
tiniest insect to the blue whale—we could no longer make due with
sunlight, water, carbon dioxide, and minerals. We needed, and
looked for, a shortcut, and the best shortcut available was either
the plants, which in their eagerness to grow, built a pretty hearty
diet for us mammals—ask the cow, or the deer, or the gorilla for
that matter, they all do very well on plant food—either plants or
other living creatures.

“Perhaps we should have settled with plants
as food. That makes for a nice progression, logical—beautiful,
even. No one gets hurt, no one has to fear for his or her life.
But, alas, this was not to be.

“I don’t know that anyone
has discovered precisely how and where, but at some point some life
form or another discovered that an even shorter shortcut to getting
at
food
, was to
eat another of your own (or similar) kind. Why eat plants, which
you then have to laboriously digest and reconstitute or reassemble
to those proteins and other building blocks that go to make up your
body? Why not eat the already constituted proteins in some living
thing smaller (albeit most often quicker) than you? Why not chase
it down and consume already prepared—why not call it pre-digested
plant food in the form of these smaller animals. So much better, so
much easier to digest and absorb, so much easier to
assimilate.

“I don’t know where and when this happened,
but I do know that today this has become the norm: only the more
tranquil of our species (or any species for that matter) eat
plants: the rest eat each other.

“And here, at this uncomfortable truth, at
this very junction of not having a choice but to kill you because
it’s either you or me, spring all immediate ills of this world. For
it is either your body or mine that will survive, and from my view
I so much prefer it if the surviving body was mine. Therefore, sit
still now and let me eat you.

“And if it won’t sit still, you’ll chase it,
you’ll chase it even with your last breath, because you have to,
have to, have to catch it and eat it, or you are the one who will
die.

“There is no more horrible an equation in
the world, at least none that I know of.

“Perhaps an answer would be for everyone to
go vegan. Yes, that would solve some of the problem, but it’s much
too late for such a simple solution: too many species other than
man resort to the same shortcut, eating their smaller—or
dumber—cousins.

“Kill or get killed. Dog eat dog. Survival
of the fittest. Kill to eat. Kill or starve. Kill or starve.

“Pick your motto, it will serve for this,
yes, this terrible circumstance.

“Compared to hunger, sex is as nothing. You
can defy sex as an urge—and many do—it will not kill you. Defy
hunger as an urge, and it will.

“Kill you.”

I pause here to measure the impact of my
words. To perceive whether the outrageous truth of what I am saying
is actually reaching these people, reaching them all the way.
Touching their hearts.

And in the silence that now seems to thicken
I perceive that it does, that the paradoxical ugliness of
nutrition, of life having to eat itself, is finding fertile soil in
these people.

Then I break the silenced to convey to them
one of the most disturbing photographs I have ever seen. It was of
a Russian peasant couple during the Stalin era, so close to death
by starvation that they ate their children, remaining parts of whom
could be seen in the black and white picture. But that was not the
most terrifying thing about it. The most terrifying thing about the
image was their eyes, four dark windows to the deepest guilt humans
can feel. So deep that they must not, could not allow themselves to
feel it, rendering their eyes as dead as stones. Two bodies, still
alive, side by side, facing the old camera as statues of the
deepest desperation.

I hear several gasps as I manage to express
the image, even a short shriek. Yes, I get it across well. The
silence now not only thickens further but darkens.

Then I say, “Yet this physical hunger is as
nothing compared to the mental hunger of our minds.”

I pause again to let these words sink in.
Then I repeat, “This physical hunger is as nothing compared to the
mental hunger of our minds.”

Then I quote myself, “We are what we think.
All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make
the world. Speak or act with an impure mind and trouble will follow
you as the wheel follows the ox that draws the cart. Speak or act
with a pure mind and happiness will follow you as your shadow,
unshakable.

“Mistaking the false for the true, and the
true for the false, you overlook the heart and fill yourself with
desire.

“A very wise man said this about twenty-five
hundred years ago, give or take. You can find them in
Dhammapada.

“The truth is that our hunger for world is
deeper than our hunger for food. Our hunger for sensation is deeper
by far than our hunger for sustenance.

“But while we cannot still our hunger for
food by anything short of food—physical hunger is not stillable by
any other means, such is its nature—we can still our hunger for
world by meditation, seeing in that deeper stillness that we intend
our hunger, that we indeed choose that craving, that we make this
world, and all sensations it offers, as food for our minds.

“You never give yourself anywhere close to
enough credit. You are in fact as powerful as any god, but you do
an admirable job of hiding this not only from others but also, and
mainly, from yourself.

“Only the stillness of meditation offers you
a view deep enough to see and experience this.”

I look over at Ananda who nods in agreement,
eyes closed. A faint smile, not quite as self-deprecating as I
recall from the old days, but still quite humble. He knows the
hungers, and knows their quenching.

“Our physical hunger cannot be un-hungered,
lest the body dies. The body will hunger, increasingly severely all
the way to death. No matter how much we will it not to hunger, it
will hunger, for we hunger the world to foster this physical
hunger—it is part of our blueprint.

“To un-hunger the body, we must un-hunger
the world, for that is one hunger that we can master, the one
intention we can retract, that we can un-intend or, more correctly,
simply cease intending.

“Ceasing the hunger for world is the essence
of letting go. As long as we continue to crave and love our forms
and feelings the world will maintain, for that is how we maintain
the world.

“Am I recommending the destruction of the
world? Perhaps so. Why not? For when all is said and done, what has
the world—and your hunger for it—given you in return but suffering
(perhaps interrupted now and then by the pleasantly fleeting).”

Then I decide to point at this craving from
another angle.

“They say that the heroin addict spends all
of his remaining days chasing the tsunami of his first heroin high.
He apparently never finds it, for all subsequent sensations are
just degrees of the shadow cast by that one, first thrill.

“Still, though experience constantly tells
him he never will, he hopes to find its match and never ends this
quest, he never lets go this thirst, this craving for that initial
geyser of euphoria.

“Our hunger for world, for existence, seems
not unlike this. Our first taste of this created world of sensation
must have been so inconceivably—and unmatchably—pleasant that we
must find it again. So alluring that we to this day refuse to stop
chasing.

“And to this day we constantly fool
ourselves into believing that we have no hand in this. We accept
that we are born into it, that we for better or for worse survive
through it, to then depart from it. End of story.”

Here I pause again, if only to stress my
next four words.

“We are not victims.”

I pause again, then repeat the words. Then
elaborate.

“We are not victims of this world, of our
genes, of circumstance. We are the authors of our lives. Each of us
is a physical fiction lived.

“Someone said that dreams seem real as long
as they last, and then pointed out that no more could be said of
life.

“This world is dreamed by us, this hunger is
dreamed by us, this suffering is dreamed by us, and we have willed
ourselves to forget how to stop dreaming.

“It takes the deepest silence to see the
source of this dream, but once seen, and fully owned, we again
become knowing authors of our lives, and will then, finally, be
able to cease our compulsive dreaming.

“Not knowing that we are the authors of our
lives is the true meaning of ignorance. Seeing that we are is the
true meaning of enlightenment.

“It takes the stillness of meditation to see
this. Seeing this is the purpose of meditation. There is no other
purpose.”

The only sound in the hall is that of a
distant air circulation system, the humming of some subterranean
fan. There is also the almost un-hearable disturbance of the high
up fluorescent lights. But that is all. The rest is a deep human
silence.

For a moment I consider whether to go on
talking, or whether I have said enough. The silence tells me I have
said enough. So I bow to the audience, turn, and leave the
stage.

:

On their flight back from Paris to Los
Angeles, Melissa demanded Ruth’s solemn promise that she would no
longer lecture. Or appear in public.

Ruth agreed in part: she would stop
lecturing overseas, or at other US campuses or venues for that
matter. She would not cease lecturing at USC, she made that quite
clear. This, after all, was her job. And they would step up
security. Agent Roth promised to see to that.

Melissa was none too happy with this, but in
the end saw that this was the only promise she would be able to
extract from her daughter.

At this time.

:

About an hour out from Los Angeles Ruth
looked up from her in-flight magazine and leaned across a dozing
Melissa to her left and said to Ananda who had the aisle seat, “Did
you know that they named the body’s own THC after you?”

Ananda, half awake, surfaced, “What?”

“The body apparently can manufacture its own
THC, and they named that after you.”

“What is THC?” said Ananda.

“It’s the active ingredient in cannabis. It
is what causes the marijuana euphoria.”

“And it’s called THC?”

“Yes.”

“What does that have to do with me?”

“The body can produce its
own THC—well, the compounds are not identical, but near enough to
serve the same function—and they named the body compound
Anandamide
.”