Breakfast With Buddha (14 page)

Love,

Dad  

I thought of calling Jeannie, but we tried to keep to an every-other-night calling routine when I was on the road, and it was late by then in any case, so I just washed up, turned out the lights, and crawled into bed. Outside the window the air machine hummed and swooshed and I felt the same small irritation inside me that I’d felt listening to Rinpoche give his talk. Or a cousin of that feeling, at least. I suppose it came simply from the world not being exactly the way I wanted it to be—my sister’s quirks, my own moods and failings, the harsh laws of business, the sting of seeing real poverty and knowing I was not doing much to fix it. It occurred to me that, if I made it to old age, the chances were good that these kinds of irritations would assume a larger role in my life. The teeth, the joints, the prostate, the hardened bad habits, the behavior of those less experienced—wouldn’t the world disappoint me more and more often and more painfully? The sense pleasures would fade (not food, I hoped), as would the feeling of doing something productive.

I drifted toward sleep, telling myself it had just been a tiring, long day, that this was just pessimism, not objectivity, that there would likely be compensatory pleasures—invisible to me now—to balance out future troubles. Grandchildren, perhaps. A deeper peace of mind. Tomorrow we’d make a beeline for Rinpoche’s next talk, in South Bend, and maybe I’d buy a football jersey to send to Anthony, or have a nice meal, or a good talk with my wife. There was still so much to be grateful for, so much to look forward to, so much happiness waiting there in the bright American future, shelves and shelves of sugary treats in colorful wrapping.

SEVENTEEN

Next morning, after
Rinpoche and I had made our way quietly through an unsurprising morning meal, we decided to take a walk through the village as a way of preparing for the long day of driving.

Chagrin Falls was a quaint little place of clothing stores with cute dresses in the windows and coffee shops where trim young women sat at their morning leisure, a Mercedes, Volvo, or BMW at the curb, sporting a Protect Wildlife license plate. There was a Smith Barney office. A local theater group advertising its next production. The Little Monogram Shop.

It was a certain kind of place, a certain piece of Americana, a certain rung on the socioeconomic ladder. And it was all familiar to me, of course, Bronxville’s Ohio cousin. I wondered how my own parents had thought about my life when they visited: the lawn neatly mowed by someone else, the expensive and probably too large house, the downtown with its pricey shops, and the well-dressed neighbors cleaning up the defecation of their thoroughbred poodles. It is
easier, I suppose, to be born into comfort than climb up into it. And it is easy to judge people by the externals, the make of a car, the type of shops in the place where they live.

Chagrin Falls had a river running through it, with a waterfall just beneath a bridge not far from the coffee shop. Beyond the bridge the town had built a wooden stairway that zigzagged down the steep bank and ended at a platform where one could see the waterfall close up. Rinpoche and I went down there and stood looking at the brown river as it cascaded over stone, spray flinging itself into the air, the rushing, swirling water having about it the sense of some forceful inevitability, some draw from below, perhaps even some greater plan.

We watched for a while, then climbed back up and stood on the bridge, with the roar of the falls in front of us, and behind us the hum of Chagrin Falls’s minor-league traffic. “You did not ask to me your question at breakfast,” he said.

“And I haven’t yet answered the one you posed last night.”

“Not a test,” he said.

“I know. But intellectually, I guess, a challenge.”

He flexed the impressive muscles of his face, without looking at me. My sense was that he didn’t notice the “up-scale” nature of the town, didn’t care, didn’t concern himself with such things in much the same way that he hadn’t seemed to notice the hostess’s breasts at Alberini’s the night before. Maybe he just hadn’t been in America long enough to read the code, to understand what a Mercedes meant that a Chevrolet did not, to know what kinds of people went through the door of a Smith Barney office and what kinds of people did not, to judge a person by the size of her
wedding ring or the cost of her purse, or her license-plate frame or bumper sticker, or the newspaper she chose to read. Once you’d become aware of such things, whether they sent positive or negative signals running through you, how did you erase them from the thought process and see the world as it was, without labels and judgments?

“I want to do both,” I said, over the noise of the cascading water. “I want to try to answer the question you asked me last night, and I want to ask a question that seems connected to it.”

“Good,” he said. “Okay.”

“As to why one does good instead of doing bad, I guess it must have to do, partly, with wanting to be liked, to be approved of by the people around you. We all crave social acceptance, don’t we? So I think it just makes life easier for most of us to act that way. And there might be a natural conscience at work—in good people, at least. Even in bad people in their better moments, there might be some inherent sense of right and wrong that urges them toward kindness or honesty or nonviolence, at least most of the time. Strange that there’s such a wide spectrum—from Hitler to Gandhi—but I suppose you’ll find that spectrum in nature to some extent, in weather extremes, in the sizes and shapes of animals within a species. Even some dogs seem so much kinder than others.”

“Yes, yes,” Rinpoche said, but he wasn’t looking at me and did not seem particularly interested in what I was saying. I’d given the question a good deal of thought and formulated what I believed to be a logical answer, but my careful theories didn’t appear to impress him in the slightest. I might have been reciting the table of chemical elements, or describing the rules of bridge.

“And I guess what I was after, in my questions last night, was very personal. I have an excellent life, a superb life. I’ve worked hard to achieve that kind of success, so has Jeannie, but, still, we’ve been so lucky. I mean, we have everything, really. We’ve had our problems: Jeannie’s parents divorced when she was young. Her mom was alcoholic, abusive to her and not very nice to me. I had a horrible weird illness for six or seven years—insomnia, strange pains all day, not being able to eat much. No doctor could figure it out. But compared to almost everyone on earth, we are very, very lucky and we know it and we appreciate it and we try hard to be good parents, good citizens of the community. Maybe you think I’m not as kind to my sister as I might be, but we invite her over all the time, we’ve helped her financially. I try to be patient with her odd habits and kooky. . . . Anyway, the point is, it seems to me that we’re already living the way we should live, and when I hear you talk, it sounds like you’re challenging that, saying we have to do better. It’s intrusive, for one thing, especially in the arena of religion, which, in this society at least, is a very personal matter. For another, why would we want to change what seems already almost perfect?”

Rinpoche was silent.

I was silent, too. A full minute, at least. I hadn’t expected to give such a long answer, to ask such a long question, and, as his silence stretched on, it began to seem that he was provoking me.

“Have you seen any person die?” he said at last.

“My parents died recently. An uncle and three aunts. Two friends from high school and one from college. The man who takes care of, took care of, our lawn.”

He turned and looked at me, “You saw them die?”

“Not at the moment of death, no. I feel the loss just as strongly, though, in my parents’ case especially.”

“I have seen many people die,” he said.

“In the prison camp?”

He shook his head. “Only two there. Other places. In Europe we have one retreat center where main practice is caring for those persons who are dying.”

“I didn’t know that. That’s fine work.”

“Some people die calm and others not so calm. Why is that?”

“The lottery of life. Different personality types, different amounts of pain. Some people drive calmly, and eat calmly, are calm with their children. Others are not.”

“Yes, yes, but this is dying. This is losing everything—body, family, house, job, cars, food, every pleasure, everything. How can they be calm in the moment of that?”

“That’s not something we spend a lot of time dwelling on in this society,” I said, in a tone I hoped would lighten the moment. “We are a people of business, an active, industrious people. We believe life is for the enjoying. We know we’ll die, but dwelling on that seems like so much negativity, speaking for most Americans I know.”

“Ah. And speaking for you?”

“The same.”

“Ah.”

“You’re the only person I know who can
ah
in a way that feels like a judgment.”

He laughed at that, put his hand on my back and tapped lightly three times. “My friend,” he said. “My good friend . . . what means
industrious
?”

“Busy. Hardworking. We get a lot done. We work hard and accomplish things—invent medicines, build businesses,
make books, roads, missiles to send into outer space, and so on. Are you calling all that into question? Are you saying it is bad?”

“Good!” he exclaimed. “Very good! Missiles into space! As far as the moon! Past the moon, yes?”

“Yes, sure.”

He was laughing and chuckling and then suddenly he stopped and said, “And then you die!” and chuckled some more. I had the fleeting thought then that he was really not quite sane.

“Right. I’ve thought about that. And after you die, what then?”

“Don’t know,” he said.

“But you’ve lived many lives, died many times. Isn’t that what you believe?”

“Of course,” he said. “Obvious to me that we live many times.”

“So . . . what happens afterward?”

“Don’t remember,” he said, and he laughed uproariously, the sound mingling with the loud swish and splash below us.

“Now you’re playing games.”

“No games. Tell me, why are you so good if you don’t know what will happen after, if you don’t believe that to be good will make a difference in what kind of thing happens in you after you die?”

“I do what makes me feel good, I suppose. If it made me feel bad I wouldn’t do it.”

“Exactly!” he said, as if I’d just solved the Hodge conjecture—or some other baffling mathematical puzzle. “What makes you move through this life is going for pleasure, yes? And going away from pain?”

“Of course. I’ve had that thought many times. It’s hardly surprising.”

“But I can show you a pleasure to make all the other pleasures be too temporary. Be like the little breaths that some person takes from a cigarette. Little bit of pleasures,
puff.
Little bit of
puffs
then throw away.”

“Everything is temporary.”

“Yes, yes. Everything but this.”

“How do you know? How can you say that if you just told me you don’t know what happens after we die?”

“Because people explained it to me. My father. Other great teachers. And I believed them because of the way they were, the way they lived and especially the way they died. In their faces, in their, how do you say—being?—in their being, in the way they act in certain times, you could feel that they knew.”

“And I should believe you for the same reason.”

“Of course yes, my friend,” he said. “Of course.”

Show me, then,
I almost said. Show me a thing like that, a pleasure to count on when the other pleasures fade, when the candle goes out. But I couldn’t. To begin with, what educated person would actually believe such an offer? It sounded too much like the advertisements on talk radio—for investments in gold, arthritis creams, jobs that paid you eight thousand dollars a month for working a few hours a day at home. Second, I could not open myself to him at that point, to anyone in that way. I paid him back then for his silences and just studied the water rushing below us, muddied in its frenzy: powerful, constant, even beautiful, but carrying a good load of dirt as it went along its preordained route.

But then I could not hold the silence, could not harden
myself to him in that way. I don’t know why. There was nothing for me to lose, maybe that was it. Another few days and I’d never see him again. So I said, “I suppose I believe in heaven.”

“Me also,” he said. And then, “I have felt that heaven, here, before dying. As real as you feel the sound of this water. I can show you.”

“Without drugs?” I said, and the Rinpoche took it as I’d intended, and laughed with his head thrown back, and then put his powerful arms around me and hugged me hard, laughing like a child, like a crazy person, there on the bridge over Chagrin Falls, with the women in the coffee shop looking out the window at us. I imagined them there with their decaf cappuccinos, smirking, superior, knowing flakiness when they saw it. Just like I did.

EIGHTEEN

Back at the inn,
Rinpoche announced that, instead of getting on the road right away, he needed to do two hours of meditation. It was, apparently, a special day, the anniversary of the reincarnation of some great teacher in his lineage, Maha-Baba-somebody-ji or other, the name escapes me. He told me this with the oversized, overjoyed smile on his face and a hand on my arm, and he asked, when he was done passing along the happy news, if I would like to “sit” with him. He said he’d already set up a small shrine in his room, with pillows to sit on, and there were even enough pillows for me because it was such a nice hotel, the nicest one he’d ever stayed in, with an abundance of pillows and such a large, spotlessly clean shower.