Dinner with Buddha (17 page)

He was looking at me in a friendly way, nodding. I was glad to hear that things would be all right, but the rest of it meant nothing to me, I have to say. If my intention in coming in to Joe John's lair had been to silence the mocking voice, that hadn't been the result. He was a nice guy. There was a settled, amicable, easy way about him, I'll say that. But the message he'd given me was what a friend in Manhattan used to refer to as “consummate bullshit.”

“I'm happy to pay something for it,” I said. “It was interesting.”

“You don't believe it for a second, do you. Was I way off, or something?”

“No, not way off. A few details were off. The general idea of it had some merit. Let me give you something for your time.”

“Wouldn't hear of it, man,” he said. We were walking toward the door and he clapped me on the shoulder in the friendliest of ways. It was as impossible to dislike him as it was to believe that what he'd just said had come from a genuine vision.

“It must be a tough way to make a living,” I said, at the door.

He laughed in what seemed a humble way. “You'd be surprised, man. Six figures last year.”

“Really?”

“I wouldn't lie. But it's not about the money for me. I live a simple life. I have all the money I need so I do a lot of freebies.”

“For lowlanders walking by.”

More kind laughter. “Yeah, and other people. A lot of people tell me how much I helped them. A lot.”

“You're doing good in the world, then.”

“Sure. And you will, also. I see it, man. I wish I could tell you something more specific, you know, but I see you clearing away some old, historical pain.”

On the porch I offered, again, to pay him, simply out of politeness, but he waved the offer away and shook my hand. “Just go forward with confidence and don't worry what people think” was the last thing Joe John said to me.

“Same to you. Thanks for the reading and let's hope the Yanks can do something next year. This one's a disaster.”

He laughed and said, “I see them buying talent!” The laugh dissolved into the big smile, and he stood there in the posture I'd seen earlier, filling his lungs with the thin mountain air, believing in himself and his fake magic.

I went back to the main road without looking over my shoulder at him or his sign.

I HARBOR THE STRANGE
notion that eating cures nausea and many other nonlethal maladies and so, when, on another side street at the south end of town, I came upon a small private home that housed an authentic-looking Mexican restaurant, I did not hesitate.

By the time I sat down I had all but erased Joe John from my consciousness. I ordered. I perused the news of the day. The sopaipilla there, served without delay on a very hot plate by a kindly Mexican woman, was superb. Delicious. Just the thing for a suffering man. We made a little conversation, and when I told her I was in town accompanying Volya Rinpoche, her face blossomed into a smile. “We're so anxious to hear him!”

“Think there will be a decent crowd?”

“Are you kidding? Huge crowd. You'll see. Leadville is really a special place.”

Feeling, despite the sopaipilla and the woman's friendly air, that I'd been run over by four buses, I made my way back to the Delaware, hoisted myself up the endless flights of stairs, went into the room once occupied by the notorious Doc Holliday, and somehow, through an exertion of will equal to that of the hundred-mile racers, did not permit myself to lie down on the bed. All was quiet in Rinpoche's room. My computer showed a message from Natasha:

DAD: YOU'RE NOT OLD! I HAD A DREAM LAST NIGHT THAT RINPOCHE WAS TALKING ABOUT COWS! GIVE HIM A HUG FROM ME. LOVE, TASH.

I heard a low steady sound in the other room—a sound I knew to be one of Rinpoche's chants—and I held myself back from writing a funny message to my daughter about it.
He's mooing in the next room right now! You're a psychic like your aunt!

When I tapped on the door between our rooms and opened it, I saw that my spiritual mentor had concluded his bovine yodeling and was modeling his cowboy hat in the mirror there, rosary beads still in place. I said, “It clashes.”

Rinpoche turned his eyes to me in the mirror and said, “Good town?”

“The best. Has a nice spirit. A woman I met said you'd have a big crowd.”

THE CROWD WAS BIGGER
than big. Someone had rented the main room of a downtown social club—the Fraternal Order of Retired Mining and Road Engineers or something like that. Chairs had been set up on what appeared to be a dance floor. There was a bar at one end of the room, unmanned at that hour, with bottles of whiskey filling shelves and four beer taps standing unattended like the lifted tails of very thin brass peacocks. At the other end of the room, opposite the bar, the event's organizers had set, on a slightly raised platform that looked like a stage a band would use, a comfortable chair and a table with a teacup and teapot on it. Between bar and stage stood fifteen rows of folding chairs, probably 150 in all.

I should confess here that part of me did not understand. I mean, I knew, in an abstract way, that my brother-in-law was famous. His books had been translated into sixteen languages. He was the nominal head of three meditation/retreat centers from North Dakota to the Italian Alps. There was a waiting list of people who wanted to attend his workshops on my family farm, and I'd been to several other events at which he was the featured speaker—in Youngstown, Ohio, at Notre Dame, in a Madison, Wisconsin, yoga studio and a Spokane, Washington, storefront. And yet, there was a way in which I half expected to walk into the room and find that three bearded alternative types were the only attendees. It was a kind of conceit on my part, a kind of pride, perhaps, an unwillingness to acknowledge a successful way of life outside the free-market mainstream. If he'd been praised by the media—as an ingenious CEO, a Pulitzer – Prize winning author of literary fiction, a movie star—the overfilled room wouldn't have surprised me for one instant. But he was a spiritual man, a master, a meditation teacher, a berobed and married monk who believed in reincarnation and the ability to change one's thought stream. That was just not the kind of figure I expected our society would value.

I stood against the back wall, not far from the whiskey bottles, and ran my eyes over an eclectic assembly of Leadville citizens, aged fourteen to eighty-eight. Big-shouldered men in work shirts and jeans, young women who looked like they might be Anthony's classmates at Bowdoin, the old, the young, the fat, the thin, the ones who appeared to be in training for the hundred-mile running race and the ones who looked like they'd been smoking cigarettes and working the mines and, at fifty-five, might have, with decent medical care, another two or three years of life ahead of them. Rinpoche walked up onto the low stage without any fuss, almost as if he were alone in the room, as relaxed as if he were about to sit down to watch the first game of the American League Division Series with a beer and a plate of nachos. He arranged the robe around his backside and sat, good-postured but calm as ever, gazing around him at the expectant faces as if someone else were the star and about to perform. Another man climbed up onto the stage with him.

“Our speaker does not need any introduction,” the introducer said. He was wearing sandals and white socks, had some kind of amulet around his neck and a tattoo on one muscular forearm. I pictured him practicing his golf swing at the molybdenum mine then slipping off to meditate on his lunch hour. He arranged a lavalier microphone on the lapel of Rinpoche's robe, showed him how to turn it on, and stepped away. There was polite applause. Rinpoche sipped his tea and ran his eyes over the room, then began to speak, as he often did, without preliminaries.

“I am thinking today,” he said, and then he took another sip of tea before adding, “about this madaphor.”

It seemed to me that the crowd stirred uneasily. I thought:
No! No, Rinpoche, bad idea! This is not a metaphor-type group. Talk about the mountains, the crisp air, the hundred-mile race, something earthy, wholesome, something having to do with the body, the environment, drug-enhanced cycling trophies, the fact that, all over the world, monasteries were traditionally set in places like this, beautiful, rugged, far from the maddening crowd. Metaphor is a subject for New York City or Boston, a college setting with Ph.D.s in attendance and a bevy of undergrads assigned to write a report. It's too intellectual, too mental.

“I am in the road trip today with my good brother-and-waw, Otto.”

At this point, to my great embarrassment, he pointed to me. Half the people in the audience turned around to look. I raised one hand in a weak greeting, sinking deeper into my embarrassment as Rinpoche said, “who is going to be soon the enlightened man. I know this. Is going to help us with one wery big project not too long now.”

A few people in the audience clapped and there was one faint cheer—from a person who seemed to me to have been using the bar just prior to the event. At that moment I wanted nothing more than to turn into a mosquito and fly out through a crack in a screen.

“We are in this road trip, yes? And we are today talking about this madaphor. ‘What is?' I ask my smart brother-and-waw. What means this word? He explain it to me and I think now maybe I understand. Rinpoche understand it now, yes, maybe. Tell me if I know. Madaphor is when you say, like, ‘When she comes into the room the sun shines.' Or maybe, ‘The moon is in the sky a wafer.' Or ‘The wind was the whisper across the mountains.' Yes? I'm right?”

After a few seconds it became apparent that he really did want to know, and several of the less bashful members of the audience assured him that he was on the right track. On target. He'd hit the nail on the head.

Another sip of tea. The large smile. “Seem to me then that this madaphor is a small thing that means the big. Yes? She is small but the sun is big. Wafer is small but the moon is big. Whisper wery small but the wind so big.” He spread his arms wide as if to encompass the wind. “Yes?”

“Yes!” someone yelled in the crowd. It was not a sedate group.

Rinpoche smiled again as if he liked the lack of sedateness.

“Why is?” A pause. No suggestions. “I don't be sure but I think maybe is because the big is too big to understand! This spirit in the girl who comes into the room, this spirit keeps a mystery in it, yes? Is something you can't maybe take and put inside one word. Same with the moon. What is this moon? What is doing up there all the time?” He giggled and moved his head backward and forward almost like a horse neighing. “The wind!” he exclaimed loudly. “What a big it is! What a mystery! ‘Breath from the angels' one person say to me one time and I like that madaphor wery much!

“This conversation with my brother-and-waw, this idea on the madaphor, it makes me think about these wery big mysteries in life, makes me think how maybe every word can be madaphor. I know some languages, you see? Ortyk my first language, but I know some Russian, too, some Italian and German, maybe a little English, and a couple other ones, too. See this table? He tapped the table beside him three times. In Ortyk we say
laht.
In Russian
stoll.
In Italian
tavola.
In German
Tisch.
In English
table.
But is the same. The
thing
is the same, only the words different. Yes? The thing is a mystery and maybe too big for our minds. So we call it a
laht,
and then it's smaller. More easy for our minds. We can understand it. I can say
table
and you can say
table
and I understand you and you understand me. But I am thinking maybe there are word madaphors and thing madaphors, too. I am thinking about in the Bible they say, ‘In the beginning was the Word' and ‘The Word was made flesh.' A word is a thought, sometimes, yes? You close the eyes and think
table
and you have a thought about it, you see it, yes? Maybe in the beginning God have a thought, a word, and that thought is made to flesh, to a thing. So maybe what we see around us, the mountain, the tree, the person, the table, maybe all of it can be God's thoughts, the energy of God's mind, or what the Buddhists call it ‘Divine Intelligence.' I think sometimes this is why we meditate, because when we meditate we can make the thoughts slow, and in between the thoughts is becomes a space, and in this space you have maybe something like the emptiness, the not-any-word. Maybe then we start, just a little bit
start,
not finish, to see the mystery without the clothes on. The naked mystery of life. We start to see the world a little bit that it is not separate one thing from the other, one person from the other, that it is maybe all the energy of the mind of the Divine Engineer, everything connected.”

To this point the crowd had been silent, either rapt or confused, I couldn't tell, but at the word
engineer
there was a small burst of relieved laughter, a smattering of applause, a cheer from one rowdy corner of the room.

“When the person does something bad,” Rinpoche went on, “maybe is because he and she sees the world separate. They think: This other person is different from me so I can kill this person, hurt this person, laugh on this person in a mean way. This mountain is separate from me so I can put poison in this mountain or in this river or in this dirt, yes? But if we can know that all this might be the madaphor, that if we go past all the words that make the things separate, then we can start to see the flesh, the things, all like a part of God's energy, all connected. If I look at you—he pointed to a very old woman who seemed to be teetering in her chair on the far left-hand end of the first row—and I see not
woman,
not
person,
but piece of the energy of God, the same energy that is inside me, how can I hurt you? How can I able to think bad on you? No. You see?”