Dinner with Buddha (11 page)

“Could I try it lying down in my bed?”

“No,” he said, rather roughly. He'd made his face hard, and it was a hardness that didn't admit joking of any kind. He broke eye contact and started for the living room, snapping off the stove light as he went. I want to say here,
I had no choice but to follow.
But of course I did have a choice. I could have said no, thank you, and headed back to my room and lay there beneath my quilt of worries and eventually fallen asleep.

But I went and sat on the couch.

Twelve

In one of the books Rinpoche had given me I read this statement: “Boredom is the start of the spiritual path.” It made no sense to me at the time. After thinking about it for a few years, though, I've come to believe that there can be no spiritual path if there's constant movement, constant stimulation, if we don't regularly set aside a little time to contemplate the world that lies beyond the frenzy. In older times that happened automatically: Try plowing a field with oxen or taking an all-day stage ride or sawing planks out of a felled chestnut tree. There were more opportunities to confront monotony, to ponder, to observe. Now every moment can be noisified—music, e-mails, video games, phone calls, Facebook, Instagram. I took Anthony to a Rangers game at the Garden and every stoppage of play was filled with loud music, cheering, announcements, ads. Now farmers plow in tractors with headphones on, connected to their iPod.

Meditation is the opposite of all that, a quiet space, a recess, a superb use of time. I knew that, I believed it, and yet, it was inevitably a struggle for me to stop what I was doing and sit still twice a day. Powerful anti-meditation arguments assailed me. I knew people who never meditated a day in their lives and they weren't plagued by any particular negativity. Jeannie's spiritual practice had seemed to consist of gardening, doing everything for everyone, and saying a silent prayer morning and night, and Rinpoche once referred to her as a “secret saint woman.” So why did I need to sit and watch my thoughts?

The
Times
didn't have any front-page articles on meditation. Yes, I saw one brief TV report—it might have been CNN—but I didn't like to consider myself in the same sector of society as the people who'd be shown sitting on cushions or in chairs. They looked foolish there with their eyes closed and their hands folded. Un-American. Soft. Goofy. Wasting a perfectly good half hour. Yes, Rinpoche was a wonderful man, and he meditated, but Rinpoche came from a very different culture, he'd grown up with meditation the way I'd grown up with baseball. Try getting a visiting Siberian friend interested in the Yanks-Sox playoffs.

That was the logic that took over, and a very powerful logic it was. That was my thought stream when it came to meditation.

But I'd never quite given it up and, for whatever reason, perhaps the moment of Rinpoche's apparent insolidity, perhaps simply my brother-in-law's charm, I decided to sit with him on the leather couch in Alton Smithson's house, at three-fifteen in the morning, with my new fake ID drying in the barn workshop and my daughter, sister, and niece asleep in their beds at home, with the security alarm activated and the
KILL THE MUSLIMS
graffiti still faintly visible on the retreat cabin. I suppose, in a certain way, I'd come to the end of logic. I suppose I felt I had little to lose. Or maybe, as Rinpoche suggested, I'd suffered enough and so I was ready for a new understanding about what was important on this earth and what was a waste of time.

In any case, I sat there with him, a few feet of space and leather between us, closed my eyes, and listened to him give these instructions: “The worries come, you watch. When you breathe out, let them out the open mouth they go. Then in the nose come the feeling of the love for the people you love in this whirl. You breathe that out, too. Again, again, again, again. Okay, Otto?”

“Got it.”

“A blessing on you, then, my friend.”

A blessing on me. I needed several hundred blessings because almost as soon as I'd closed my eyes, folded my hands, and tried to meditate in earnest, it was as if an entire tribe of ancient logicians were shooting poison-tipped thought arrows at me. Plus, my left knee ached, just under the kneecap, a new ailment as of that hour. Pulsing. Not excruciating. Just bad enough to notice.

For some bizarre reason I started thinking about the leather couch on which we perched. Where had the leather come from? Was it American leather? Wasn't Alton too sensitive to his karmic future to have the skin of a slaughtered animal beneath his ass? Why did it make a squeaking noise when I shifted my weight? What was the physics of that? I missed my leather chair at home. Jeannie had given it to me as a Christmas gift because, though I'd wanted a leather sofa, she'd been against it, and we'd ended up with something too sleek and modern for my tastes. But that was the way we worked things out. We each gave a bit. She got the sofa, I got the chair. Would Natasha work it out? Warren sounded like a decent sort, and she was wonderful, of course, but from the day of her birth she'd had a side to her that was utterly uncompromising. Where would they go if the meditation center closed? California? Would they be safe there? Probably if the Chinese man had wanted to hurt her—

At that point I caught myself. I was adrift on the thought stream, gliding along, blind to the scenery. I wasn't even worrying, which was what I was supposed to be doing, just thinking, musing, wandering the cerebral caverns with a flashlight, pointing it here and there.

I liked that image. If an author had used it I would have put a check mark next to it on the page proofs. I missed work. But not that much, really. Work had had its moments, for many years, but—

Caught myself again. I needed to worry. I started to think about Alton. He didn't look like a rational man. Smart, yes, but not rational in my definition. What if he sent us all to jail?

Okay, a worry. Out the little-bit-open mouth with it. In with love. I pictured my son, imagined him fast asleep in a Maine dormitory, girlfriend by his side perhaps. A blessing for them. I wondered if they'd get married before or after Natasha and Warren, or if marriage was passé for their generation, a relic, a foolish dream—

Caught myself. I opened my eyes and saw that the digital clock on the DVD player on the other side of the room read 3:21, which meant that I'd been meditating for six minutes. Six minutes was one-thirtieth of three hours. My knee hurt. I closed my eyes. What if it was an ACL tear? Would I ever be able to play tennis again?

Boring, useless, pointless,
a tiny voice said.
Sleep is what you need, not this.
Rinpoche was still as a stone. I willed myself not to look at him. I found new worries to latch on to. The knee, my daughter, my son, Shelsa.

And so on. Three hours of it. After two hours and some—I couldn't keep myself from occasionally looking at the clock, but I was determined to prove I could stick it out—I began to have moments of either peace or complete exhaustion. A small space began to appear between thoughts. I could watch the worries float away. The words and images would inevitably return but I seemed to have reached that part of the stream where the current wasn't as fast. A thought—how good would the IDs be?—and then a nice stretch of space, just presence, and then I saw another thought riding in from the left side . . . and then . . . I fell asleep. During this sleep I had a dream of being in a Greek breakfast place on Ninth Avenue, waiting for the owner to cook me an omelet with spinach and feta cheese. I was standing there holding my tray and watching the eggs sizzle on the grill. I was waiting for them to be cooked. I was about to say something to the owner. In Greek. Which, mysteriously, I could now speak.

Rinpoche woke me with a gentle shake. The clock read 6:08. The first gray light of dawn was seeping into the room. “Now take the nap, Otto, little bit,” he said, kindly. “Eight o'clock maybe we eat and go, okay?”

“Fine,” I said. “I must have just dozed off at the end there.”

“Today when the worries come,” he put his right thumb and index finger to his lips and pushed them open half an inch. “Okay?”

“Absolutely.”

“Always in your life there can be worries, you see? If you have enough of the money you can worry about being sick. If you have the money and the good health you can worry about family, the politics, how you play tennis, how you gonna get old, how you gonna die, you see? Worries are like noise in the world, always there. Don't listen too much, okay? Now sleep.”

I padded quietly back to my room and for two hours slept the sleep of the blessed.

Thirteen

I woke to the fragrance of bacon being fried and coffee being brewed. Really, in this life, are there two smells that bring the non-vegetarian adult American more joy? For a few minutes I lay there in the unfamiliar bed and simply allowed that sweetness to fill my mind. I was strangely at peace. I heard a cabinet door open. Another minute of peace and I saw a wave of worry rising up like a breaker off Nauset Beach. I saw that it was a reflex with me. Habitual. Almost an addiction. A default setting. My mind turned to worry in very much the way certain flowers turn toward the sun, automatically. I let my mouth fall open and exhaled slowly. I breathed in thoughts of my children, one near each side of the massive continent in the center of which their old father had spent the night. Rinpoche was right, of course: No amount of worrying about them would have any positive effect. They would breathe in and out through their own day, with its own joys and challenges. I worried about them because it made me feel guilty not to. Which must mean that worry was a completely selfish activity, a mechanism designed to salve my own sense that I wasn't doing enough, to bolster the illusion that I was in control of their destiny . . . or even my own. For a moment then, a time oasis that lasted four or five breaths, I could sense what it must feel like to be a human being who trusted completely in his fate, who let things be, who dealt with Rinpoche's famous
now,
the actual moment, and not some imaginary horror-plagued future. No wonder Rinpoche seemed so relaxed and happy, and Alton so abjectly miserable.

I showered and shaved, wandered out to the kitchen, and found Rinpoche and Alton waiting for me, cups of tea in their hands and the same dynamic between them: Alton anxious to please, Rinpoche knocked a slight bit off his center by Alton's desperate neediness.

“Pancakes be okay?” Alton asked.

“Excellent.”

“Pancakes with raspberries coming up. Rinpoche says you like coffee so I made you a fresh pot. I've learned to replace that with green tea, though I have to admit it took a while.”

He went to the stove, leaving in his wake the sense that tea drinkers were spiritually superior to coffee drinkers and that perhaps one day, if I spent enough time with Rinpoche and meditated with heroic discipline, I'd come around. I let it go. I had slept in his home. He was making me pancakes. There was no competition here, no need for comparison. Alton was Alton. I let it go. Rinpoche nodded at me and asked how I'd slept.

“Like a baby.”

“Babies not sleep so good, Otto!” he said, and he went off on one of his drawn-out reels of laughter.

I heard the sound of pancake batter being poured into a sizzling pan. “Where do you get raspberries out here?” I said to Alton's back.

“Connections.”

“Are there farmers' markets?”

“Not here. I drove to North Platte when I knew Rinpoche was coming, if you must know.”

I gave up. I said I needed to step outside for a moment to get some fresh air.

“Nowhere fresher,” Alton said.

On the front porch I leaned both hands on the railing and looked out across the sandhills. I'd seen a lot of the country, a bit of the world. Few places were prettier. An elegant silence—so perfect it was almost visible—had draped itself over the hills and shallow valleys, and it seemed to echo what was inside me, quiet to quiet. A small hawk flew across the yard, miraculous.

The pancakes were outstanding, simply superb, some kind of whole wheat flour set off nicely by the fresh raspberries. True, in place of the real Vermont maple syrup I was used to, Alton put on the table some sugar-water mix. But there was a bottle of honey there, and plenty of butter, and the coffee was strong and rich, with real cream from a Nebraska cow. Six or seven times as I ate I felt compliments rise to my lips but I held them down, nodded, hummed my praise, tried to eat the way Rinpoche was eating, slowly, one bite at a time, with full attention.

When we were finished, Alton immediately removed the dishes and put them in the sink to soak, and then came and carefully sponged off the tabletop and dried it with a red-striped dish towel. From a side table he took a manila folder. “This you should probably look at on the road,” he said. “There's a lot to digest.”

“What is it?”

“A little research I worked up last night on the Chinese. I think you'll appreciate it. I was up at 6:30 while you were snoozing away. Didn't take long, an hour or so. That's my meditation time, usually, but I have nothing going on for the rest of the day so I'll sit later. The IDs are in there, too.”

“Many thanks,” I said. “And thanks for the hospitality. It's been nice to take a break from hotels.”

“Hotels can be fine, too,” he said. “All comparisons are odious.”

“Cervantes, isn't that?”

He didn't seem to hear. He wanted something from Rinpoche, that was clear enough, though what exactly it was I couldn't know. We offered to wash the dishes again; he declined. I asked him if he wanted me to strip the bed; he didn't. Once he'd handed me the folder he seemed at a loss, standing there mid-kitchen like a man who had important work waiting in the barn and wanted us to leave but felt bad about saying so. “Rinpoche,” he said at last, glancing at me in a way that made me want to excuse myself and give them a private moment. Some spiteful interior voice convinced me to stay put. “Can I ask you one thing before you depart?”

“Anything, man.”

“Do you think I'm ready for stream entry?”

One spark of irritation flashed across Rinpoche's features. I didn't know if Alton saw it, but I saw it clearly enough. Rinpoche took hold of his chin in one hand, a gesture of thoughtfulness I'd never seen him make, and one which looked completely insincere to my eye. He held his hand there, looking up at his student as if considering the question. Alton waited for the answer, still as a cell tower but leaning slightly forward.

“I think, maybe,” Rinpoche said, “could be. . . . But if you really ready, you don't know the stream is there. See? When you don't know if the stream is there, when even you don't care if it's there, then maybe you ready, okay?”

“A kind of koan,” Alton said, his face lit with joy. “I'll meditate on that.”

“Good, good,” Rinpoche said kindly. He reached out and squeezed Alton tight against him and held him there for at least half a minute, the taller man's arms pinned and hanging straight down, his chin on the top of Rinpoche's shoulder, eyes closed.

When they separated I held out my hand and Alton shook it warmly. “I wish you well,” was all I could think to say.

“You too. Practice hard and you'll see some amazing results. Rinpoche is offering you the kingdom of heaven.”

I thanked him. We went out and loaded our bags into the back seat. Before I could open the driver's side door Rinpoche said, “I'm drivin' now, man. You rest.” And I raised no objection.

I saw Alton in the side mirror, partly obscured by a cloud of dust. He'd put his hands together and was bent over from the waist. I couldn't imagine why my sister had wanted me to meet him.