Dinner with Buddha (15 page)

“How much work does it take to see past the labels?” I asked him.

Another shrug. The slow chewing and swallowing of a piece of ravioli. “I think,” he said, “all a time,” he thumped his chest twice, “about the hearts going in people. The heart is like a, how you say it, one end of the line of the electric.”

“Electricity.”

“Yes. On the other end, a bigger consciousness, the true person you are. Here, all differences, but if you go to the other end, wery the same.”

“I had, at certain moments, when Jeannie was dying . . . I had a sense of that. There was Jeannie, my wife, her body, her personality, and then . . . then there was something larger than that. I don't mean the promise of an afterlife necessarily. I mean, and it was rare—most of the time I was too upset or afraid—but sometimes I would have this weird feeling that she already was keeping part of herself somewhere else, and it was a somewhere, or a someone, that had always been there. Since she's been gone I haven't felt that so much but sometimes—” I put my spoon in the dish so suddenly that it made a splash and a
tink.
The waiter looked over. “Huh,” I said. “I just remembered a piece of the dream I had last night.”

“The pie?”

“No, it was . . . I was . . . I just had . . . I was getting a tennis trophy but instead of being on the court I was in a room with no ceiling and part of me was inside the room, standing on my feet, and this other invisible part of me had been . . . the word I want to use is
vaporized
into the air above.”

“Good dream, Otto.”

“Right, but I don't want to end up living in that vapor. Maybe it's true, as you told me once, that
this
is actually the dream, and that other dimension is the reality, but I want to do justice to this dream, even if that's all it is. Maybe we're so insignificant that nothing really matters either way, but I still think it's important to do the dream right, to pay my bills, take care of my kids, do a little something for the world.”

“Most important thing,” Rinpoche agreed, and I was glad to hear it. He chewed, he swallowed, he took a sip of water. “The farmer in the next land to us, Martin.”

“Rangwohl,” I told him. What I didn't tell him was that my father had zero respect for the family, as farmers, as people. “Rangwohl sloppy” was his term for a job poorly done.

“Rangwohl. On his barn at the door he has the, how you say it?” He made a fist with his left hand and a loop with thumb and second finger above but touching it.

“Padlock.”

“The padlock. Being in this body, in this world, now,” he brought his fingers down lightly on the solid tabletop and tapped it twice, “this is like the padlock. You live good here is like the key. The key makes the lock go. The good living makes it go open. You let go of the body. Then the door on the other world can open. The ceiling come off like your dream. You live bad and that ceiling stay on, see? The lock stay on.”

“Makes sense. For a while there I was thinking it was all just meditation that mattered. That always seemed a little . . . suspect to me. There are plenty of good people who don't know meditation from—”

“Meditation is no good if you live wrong, Otto. But eat now. Now, this minute, the right thing is to eat. Enjoy the food. Pay attention on this minute, Otto. How is feeling the top on your head?”

“Good, fine. A little sore.”

“Good thing you bended down, yes?”

“I would have seen my wife in the next world.”

“Maybe you see her soon anyway,” he said, but I was thinking about the padlock idea, and Rangwohl, and what happened to a spirit after death, and I wasn't paying enough attention.

Eighteen

Rinpoche's friend was a young man named James, who frequented a Boulder coffee shop called the Laughing Goat Coffeehouse. We went there for dessert. There was a shrine near the door, a religious statue on a chest-high miniature altar with a candle burning in front of it. The ceramic figure bore a vague resemblance to the Virgin Mary but it was clearly not intended to be exclusively Christian. And clearly it wasn't the kind of thing you saw in a Manhattan Starbucks (or any Starbucks, for that matter).

“It's there to bless the space,” the barista told me as she served my latte and Rinpoche's green tea. Monica was her name, and she had a nice way about her, not at all a way that was centered in the vaporized other world. She put her hands together and made a bow to Rinpoche, but she did it with such good humor, and explained the shrine in such a happily matter-of-fact way that the most cynical of souls would also have stuffed a five-dollar-bill in the tip jar.

Most of the tables were occupied. It was the usual scene—young people peering at laptop screens, one or two with notebooks or textbooks in front of them, someone reading an actual book, friends chatting, couples sitting close and sharing a scone or a biscotti. These places are everywhere now, part of the American fabric, our version of the hookah houses of Central Asia, or the Irish pub scene, or the outdoor cafés of Old Cairo.

Rinpoche and I took a table. After a time James joined us. He told me he'd made two or three retreats with “the Rinpoche” and he talked about the Laughing Goat with so much passion that I wanted to invest. It was, he said, “a community place.” There was nightly music, all welcome. There were people—he indicated a young, dark-haired man against one wall—who wrote books here. (“That guy sold his house to write the story of his guru's life.”) When I remarked on the friendly barista he smiled proudly and said, “That's Monica. She's done yoga 128 days in a row.”

It was all spoken the way a café patron in the City would speak of the Knicks or the Giants or the Mets or the Yanks. In Boulder, it was gurus and shrines and yoga that sewed the social quilt together, not walk-off homeruns or fourth-quarter comebacks. I felt, yet again, that I stood astraddle two very distinct worlds, one measurable, one not; one in which conflict and violence were taken for granted, and one in which a great effort—sometimes a forced and artificial effort—was made toward peace.

“The first time I set foot in Boulder,” James said, “I knew this was my place. These were my people. I grew up in a Southern Baptist family in Missouri—we get along fine now—and when I came here it was like I found my place in the world.”

“And they make a great cup of coffee,” I said, and he seemed truly pleased.

AN HOUR LATER, DRIVING
out of Boulder toward the high peaks, past a billboard that read,
MOUNTAIN AIR RANCH—NUDIST RESORT. YOU WERE BORN NAKED!
and a plain, government-issue wooden sign announcing,
ROCKY FLATS CLOSURE PROJECT
, as if nothing of much import had ever happened there, Rinpoche broke one of his contemplative silences to tell me what a good man James was, what a diligent student.

“I know so many people like that,” I said, “people who seem to have been born into a family situation that's completely at odds with their own sensibilities. I count myself among them. The way he was talking about Boulder—that's the way I felt the second I saw New York City. I could no more have settled in Dickinson and taken over the family farm than I could have come out of my mother's body speaking Swahili. Do you know what I mean?”

“Maybe.”

“I'm talking about being born someplace and then, when you get to a certain age, realizing with absolute certainty that you don't belong there. You belong in a different culture entirely. I see that a lot in this country.”

He pondered for a while—the GPS had us cruising a small highway between fir-covered slopes to our right, and to our left, off in the lower eastern distance, the Denver skyline—then said, “You know how on a trip we can go over one state into the other?”

“Crossing the state line. Yes.”

“Is the same with these people. They have a little bit of karma left from another life. They have to live a little bit in Missouri for a while, in North Dakota. Then, finish. A new state. A new place for them, a new life. Nothing bad inside it.”

“No, but there's a strain, a kind of scar or wound or something. I used to feel it all the time. I grew up in a certain way, with certain rules, clothes, sense of humor, a certain belief system, and then I found myself in one that was so different I felt cut right in half on some days, like I didn't really belong in Manhattan and didn't really belong in the Dakotas. I still feel that on occasion, only now it's one foot in what I think of as the ordinary world and one foot in your world.”

“You sew up yourself,” he said, in a confident way he had, as if he were reciting a rule that everyone knew, or should know. “You can talk to all peoples now, my good friend. I see you do that. James can go and talk to the Baptist mother in Missouri, can love her. And he can talk to the Buddhist girl in Boulder, love her, too. You can know how to be in New York, how to be in North Dakota. You starting to see into the jelly inside peoples now, past the label. You making good progress this time, man!”

“You, too,” I said, and he laughed in an appreciative way, as if having me around was, if nothing else, good for comic relief.

Nineteen

Not far outside Boulder we merged onto the interstate and began our climb into the serious mountains, up onto the roof of the lower forty-eight. In that part of Colorado, I-70 is a winding alpine speedway crowded with tractor trailers and maniacal Coloradans in four-wheel-drive sedans and pickups, with emergency escape ramps for those truckers unlucky enough to lose their brakes, with signs for
CHAIN STATIONS AHEAD
and red-and-white barred gates that close the road in big snowstorms.

The scenery was nice enough—deep green mountainsides with changing views of valleys and peaks, slopes of rocky scree, and the occasional cold lake—but I couldn't appreciate it because I had to concentrate so intently on the driving, on keeping us alive and whole, on getting the Master to his talk that night. It might have been Switzerland, and not the White River National Forest—the GPS showed an altitude of 9,163, then 10,366, and the temperature dropped like a stone in a pond from near ninety down into the lower seventies by the time we made Silverthorne. On the radio we heard a story about a ballot referendum that, if passed, would result in Colorado's secession from the United States. Why? Because the massacre in the movie theater in Aurora had given rise to stricter gun laws. It seemed to me so typical of the current political climate. More careful background checks were somehow translated into: The government is coming to take away your guns. And that led to secession, or at least the hope of secession in some quarters. It was the mentality of a child. You're making me go to bed early! Next you'll be taking my stuffed animals! I'm running away!

Fine, I thought. Secede all you want. Start your own little country where everyone carries a gun. Who cares? I had no problem with guns. Hunting, shooting. Not the smallest problem. But could no distinction be made between that pleasure and the idiocy of shooting at deer with an assault rifle? Or allowing the mentally ill to fire away in a crowd? Had we grown into simpletons?

At last, tired from focusing on the drive, the radio, the nuts, I took an exit that led us past a golf course, a condominium village, a ski area, men fishing in a small lake, and onto a two-lane highway, Colorado 91. There we wound along in quieter fashion. According to the dashboard thermometer, the temperature had dropped another sixteen degrees in ten minutes. By the time we'd gone a few miles it was fifty-five; I half expected to see snowflakes. Just then we passed a series of dams and levees and Rinpoche asked if I would stop. This was another of my companion's odd fascinations. Rinpoche asserted that he was particularly knowledgeable about geology, and there were moments when I believed him. He seemed to understand—either because he'd studied it or because of some peculiar intuition—the history of the stone outcroppings we passed. On other trips, when we'd gone by a dam, he'd become as excited as a child and begged me to stop so he could get out and admire the engineering. Our visit to the Coulee Dam in east-central Washington state had been a special moment for him: Since that road trip, one summer earlier, he must have mentioned it a dozen times in my presence, cited statistics, history, praised the architects and engineers, while at the same time expressing compassion for the lives that had been ruined in the building of it.

I pulled into a viewing area and let Rinpoche walk to the edge of the drop-off and stand and stare. Now it was forty-four degrees. August 19. A wind that would have sent the Inuit into shelter was ruffling his robe.

In case it isn't already obvious, I'm a big fan of roadside information boards. When we traveled as a family I used to drive the kids crazy by stopping at every historical landmark and reading the story of what had happened there, however inconsequential it might be. “Oh, wow, Dad,” Anthony would say in his early teenage years, “there was a courthouse built here in 1798. Amazing! Man, I'm going to tell all my friends the second we get back.” Jeannie would shush him, make a case to him and to Tasha about the importance of the past, cite the famous adage that those ignorant of history are condemned to repeat it. And I'd add something like, “Those who wise-mouth their father are condemned to go without lunch.”

This particular turnoff had a placard with the story of two towns that no longer existed. Recen and Kokomo had been mining camps, swelling to ten thousand citizens in the late nineteenth century when the frenzy of the gold rush was at its peak. A fire destroyed Kokomo. The people rebuilt it and clung to their cold existence here, pawing at the earth in the hope of turning metal into food. It worked, too, for a while, at least for a certain lucky group. But then the veins ran dry and the treasure-seekers moved out as quickly as they'd moved in. By 1965, according to the historical board, Kokomo's nine remaining citizens voted to abandon the town, which lay buried now beneath the dammed up river on the gravel plain. I suppose it was the image of those nine souls that interested me. I would have liked to have been present at that vote, would have liked to have heard the stories, asked about their feelings as they walked away from the places they had lived. It wouldn't have been a question of selling—who would buy? Just a walking away. From a home, a place, a life. I tried to put myself in their shoes because of late the thought—only the quickest, tiniest notion—of selling the Bronxville house had been popping up in my mind like those awful Internet ads that appear when you're trying to read the news or get the weather. I pushed away the idea, but I could feel it lingering there, a sparrow chirping at the edges of my consciousness.

Rinpoche was silent for a long time, perhaps imagining those same folk. “I remember you telling me once that you see dams as a metaphor. We were driving across the Cascades, do you remember?”

“What is this madaphor?”

“It's a figure of speech. It's when you use a word to express something but it doesn't literally mean that thing. If I say, ‘money worries are a weight on my back,' it doesn't mean there's a literal weight on my back. Let me think of a better example. . . . Okay, here: When Shelsa comes into a room it's like the sun coming up. Something like that. A symbol. The cross on your rosary beads has become a metaphor. People say, ‘That's your cross to bear.' Your trouble to carry in life.”

He pursed his lips and nodded thoughtfully, looking down across the land—all scraped and shoveled, the dirt that had been sifted for ore now thrown up into levees and the wall of a dam, with a puddle of water behind it.

“Everything is madaphor then,” he said.

“Really?”

“Your body is madaphor.”

“I'm not sure I explained it correctly. I—”

“Is not literal.”

“It feels very literal,” I said. “In fact, I don't know if it was the mussels in the bouillabaisse or the altitude, but I'm starting to feel . . .
off.
Maybe I have a flu coming on. It's very real, I can assure you.”

He laughed and looked over at me—the shining face, all warmth, forgiveness, approval. “All a madaphor,” he said, stern again, despite the glow.

“I don't follow.”

“You know science, yes?”

“Sure. A little bit. . . . Not that much, actually.”

“You know atoms?”

“I know they exist.”

“Never seen them, though.”

“Never.”

“You trusting the science, yes?”

“Yes, I suppose. I don't think there are many people who challenge the existence of atoms these days. Global warming is highly in doubt in certain lunatic circles. Evolution can't be taught in parts of some states. But I think we all agree on atoms.”

Another laugh. Not mocking. Not even critical. Simply amused at the way my mind worked. He reached down and picked up a tennis-ball-sized stone. “Solid,” he said, “yes?”

“Rock solid.”

“But the scientist say no. Atoms moving around inside.”

“Right. I've always had trouble with that.”

He put his hand on my shoulder and squeezed. “Solid, yes. This is Otto, yes?”

“Ringling,” I said, “in the flesh.”

“But tomorrow different cells. Scientist say so. Still Otto?”

“Same old.”

“The lake,” he waved his arm out toward the dam, “when it ewaporate, makes a cloud, yes? Or makes a river that goes in the ocean, yes?”

“I don't see the connection to metaphor.”

“Otto, my friend,” he said patiently, tossing the rock down the hill, where it bounced and rolled for hundreds of feet before coming to rest among a crowd of its cousins. “Shelsa is not the sun.”

“I know that. It's an expression. A comparison.”

“Worry is not a weight on your brain.”

“Not literally, no. We use words approximately, to create an image, express what we can't express literally, or what we want to say more poetically: Shelsa is like sun in the room.”

“Good,” he said. “In the beginning was the word. What means?”

“I haven't the faintest. I'm still half-lost.”

“Maybe for God, everything is making madaphor. Otto's body is a thought in God's mind, but to make the thought to be understood you have the word, you have the body, the heart, the brain. The gold in a rock is a thought in God's mind. The symbol. If you take too literal, you suffer.”

“But we have to eat. In order to eat we have to work. It has to be real on some level.”

“Yes, good,” Rinpoche said.

I watched a gust of wind fluff and die, lifted my shoulders against the cold. “Man, you can really make me crazy sometimes.”

“West America,” he said, “is like Siberia. Big spaces.”

“Yes.”

“Mind madaphor. Let your mind go in the big spaces now.”

“I'll try,” I said, but the conversation was pure confusion to me, and it was one of those times when I believed that there were two possibilities: Either Rinpoche was, not a fraud, exactly, but what Anthony would have called “a spaceshot.” So far out beyond the mainstream thinking process that he lived in a world of his own, a world that was utterly impractical, that had little bearing on my own life. Either that, or his mind was, in the spiritual realm, the way Einstein's had been in the scientific. He simply saw things most of the rest of us didn't see, so we considered him, for a while at least, crazy, eccentric, impractical, an amusing entertainment or a pest, depending. Einstein envisioned black holes before they could be proven. His understanding of relativity was purely theoretical . . . until it came time to launch satellites into space, at which point it became as concrete as the stone Rinpoche had been holding.

I said, “Even if you
are
nuts, even if what you say makes no sense to me sometimes, you're still a good brother-in-law.”

“Good madaphor for brother-and-waw,” he said, and laughed merrily, and we left it at that and headed for Leadville.