Dinner with Buddha (18 page)

The woman nodded. A murmur went through the crowd, the kind of sound one heard after the conclusion of a poem read aloud by its author at a literary gathering. Some people, at least, had understood. I was one of them, more or less. I grasped the general idea of what he was saying, but felt I'd need to sit down and ponder it for a few months in order to see things as he saw them. It was like reading a dense stanza of verse, like seeing a film with multiple layers of meaning, like looking at a painting that showed you something new with every visit to the museum.

Rinpoche sipped his tea in a satisfied way and ran his eyes over us, as if trying to see if we were with him. “Now,” he said, “now with the words you can ask me question or say anything.” He laughed, hard.

There was a stretch of awkward silence, more tea sipping, a cough, a scraping of chair legs, and then, at last, a hand raised from a man in one of the middle rows. “First, Rinpoche, thank you for coming to Leadville. It's a special night for us, a special thing to have you here.”

“You welcome. For me special, too.”

“What I don't understand, I guess, is that, if we go around seeing the world as just God's energy, seeing everything as the same, or at least fundamentally connected, then why would we do anything? You seem to be saying that we're living in some kind of grand illusion, that words are unnecessary or at least deceiving. But how are we supposed to function without them? Without making distinctions between this and that, me and another person. This town was built, as you may know, partly on the discovery of silver in the stone and soil here. Silver is silver. It's not quartz. It's not shale. There's a difference. I'm sorry, I'm a bit confused and maybe not expressing myself well, but do you know what I mean?”

The man sat down. Rinpoche smiled. “Wery good question!” he said. “Buddha talked about absolute and relative, you know that? You are now talking relative and Rinpoche was talking absolute. And you are wery right! If you want to live on this plane of life you have to know the relative, you have to know what is silver and what is mud, you have to say, ‘I am Rinpoche,' and you are—what is your name?”

“Morris.”

“And you are the Morris! Rinpoche and the Morris not same!”

“Not even close,” Morris said, and people laughed politely.

“Mud and silver not the same, too. Wery impossible to go to the bank with mud in your hand and get the money for it, yes? But, inside the mud and the silver what is there? The atoms, yes? Same in Rinpoche and Morris. Scientists know this. But Buddha know, also. Jesus know. The great teachers they all know. The silver is a madaphor. Okay, you take the silver to the bank and get money, no problem, man! But the money stand for something else, for your work maybe. Your mining or your talking or your driving in the truck. A madaphor. That work is your energy, that energy come from someplace else, from the divine mystery. Yes, sure, Morris works and gets money and takes the money and gets food and puts the food in his mouth and he lives. If you don't work or you don't have money you don't live, yes, sure. This is the relative part of life. Not bad, this part. Important, sure. But we think all the time about this part—the part you can see, you can put a word on, you can measure. We look at the other person,” he gestured to the old woman again, “and we can say, with the relative part, that she is a little bit old, maybe, yes? That she is woman. That she has a skin this color, that she did this kind of work or maybe has the children, or her age has a number. All this is okay. But maybe we don't pay enough time to the absolute part, the mystery part. She is a miracle, this woman, a piece of Divine! Sometimes we close down the mind with the words.

“Listen,” he said, more animated now, gaining momentum. “Last few days we drive in the places in the country where they have the cows. How you say? Ranches, yes? The ranches. We see these cows. They are in the wery big field, the big land, lot of space there, yes? And then sometimes we see, how you say it, the little cows that live in the little white boxes with one open part for a door?”

“Veal,” someone in the crowd shouted. “Veal calves.”

“Weal, yes. Rinpoche doesn't eat weal because these cows they stay all day in this box, never go out, yes? Makes the muscles wery soft, the meat wery, how you say. . . .”

“Tender,” the same person called out.

“This is like our mind sometimes. We live in this little box. The relative world. We have all these words around us like a wall. Okay, maybe not so bad. Maybe warm in there, safe. No one hurt us, we think. But when you meditate, when you go past the words, when you see that everything in words is madaphor for something bigger, then you have the whole big space to go around. Then you can be ranching, man!”

“You can
graze,
” someone in the crowd corrected him.

“Sure, but you see? You have to have the relative world to live, to work, to make the silver, to buy the food. Have to have it. But if you have only that part, then maybe your body lives, maybe you make it eighty year, ninety, one hundred year! But then what happens? So maybe, when you are here working and eating and riding the bicycle and making sex and hearing music, maybe remember some times the absolute part. Maybe think: This music or this making love with my wife, this is madaphor, stands for something big, stands for the energy in God's mind, maybe. Because when you die, if you know this other part, this absolute, this energy, then it is not so scary, dying. Maybe you understand the bigger you then, and when the little you dies it will be not so hard, okay?”

There was a longer silence. I looked around the audience and saw that some people were nodding, some had struck pensive poses, a few were shaking their heads as if they were disappointed, confused, or simply unimpressed. After a moment, one of these people—a middle-aged woman with a bun of gray-blond hair tied up at the back of her head—stood up and said, “This seems like hocus-pocus to me. Flimflam. The world, sir, is very real. There is a very real difference between good and bad, between the holy ones and the sinners. They go to very different places after their very real death. There's nothing metaphorical at all about heaven and hell.”

Rinpoche looked at the woman with his eyebrows slightly raised, as if he found her remarks—or the intensity with which they were delivered—interesting, amusing, mildly surprising. When she sat down he said, “You think when the bad person dies he burns? His body burns up all the time forever.”

“Absolutely!” the woman called from her seat.

Rinpoche nodded. “How old is the person's body? The same age they are when they die? Always like that?”

“It's their soul that's burning,” the woman called out.

“What looks like?”

“That's one of the good Lord's mysteries. But the person feels the pain of the fire as if they have a body.”

“Why they burning like that?” Rinpoche asked her.

“Because they sinned, that's why.”

“What is this sin? What did they do?”

“They killed, they raped, they stole, they committed adultery, they cheated. Surely you know what sins are as well as I do.”

“Maybe in my mind a little bit different,” Rinpoche said. He was looking at the woman—sympathetically I would say—as if she were the only person in the room. “If you kill, you rape, you steal, you commit the other sins, I think you make the pain in the energy of this other person.”

“You hurt them,” the woman corrected.

“I think,” Rinpoche went on, “inside the big power that God has, the power to make the moon, the wind, the breath going in and out of you, people have a small power. You can make the choose to hurt the other person or not to hurt, to hurt the mountain or not, to put poison in the river or not to, yes?”

“Free will,” the woman nearly shouted.

“Good! Rinpoche thinks like the same as you. When you choice to hurt a person, the animal, the river, I think afterward the energy inside your own mind is not calm then. You feel a suffering from it.”

“I disagree,” the woman said. “There are plenty of people who do awful things in the world who don't seem bothered by it one iota.”

“Yes,” Rinpoche said, “but I think, what my people believe, is that those people stay, many lifetimes, stuck in that little box like the weal. Mind is wery fast there, wery mixed up, scary, wery much words, and when those words are made flesh again—in a person, an animal, in those atoms, the person has a lot of suffering. You,” he pointed at the woman, “think they are in a fire, burning. I think the fire could be the madaphor for this suffering, this box of bad thinking. We believe almost the same, you see? If you hurt a person then you will have the suffering, only you think it's the fire and I think it's maybe something else. You think it goes for all time, and I think only lots of time. After lots of time maybe one million lifetimes, this person who hurt the other people so much or hurt this world, he starts to have a little space in the suffering. In that space, maybe he see God's energy, that the Big Engineer has love there for him, too. And in that life he starts to makes a change.”

“Like the Christian purgatory,” someone called out.

“Could be,” Rinpoche said. “We find out, yes?” and he laughed.

A young woman only a few feet in front of me stood up. Trim and calm, she looked as if she'd been doing yoga for the past 128 days. “Rinpoche,” she said in a reverent tone, “on a slightly different subject, could you talk a little bit about the self-immolations in Tibet? Just this week there was a report of another young man burning himself to death. Is it right to do something like that? Even for a good cause? Isn't he taking life by taking his own life, and isn't that against the Buddha's teachings?”

“Wery sad, this,” Rinpoche answered her. “Long, long time ago my people come from Tibet to Siberia, to Skovorodino. These are wery gentle people, wery kind, hurt nobody. Dalai Lama hurt nobody, yes? But now some people, in China maybe, want that there is no Dalai Lama, no Tibet. Those people they live in the relative world a hundred percentage. They don't think about living afterward. They don't have any even a little space in the thoughts. They want the walls to be solid, they never want to go outside, they think that's the safest way, to be the weal is safe! These people wery, wery afraid so they want to make other people afraid, too. And the man maybe burn himself to show you can't make me afraid, to show this life is not the only one. But, I think, maybe, we can find in the future a better way to do it.”

“What's going to happen when the Dalai Lama dies?” the woman asked.

“I hope, maybe, in one hundred more year he dies. But then other spirits be there, like the Dalai Lama. Somebody else coming. Maybe one person next time, maybe two. Maybe man, maybe woman, maybe the man and the woman. Maybe in Tibet, maybe in India, maybe Leadwill. We have to see.”

While he was saying this I felt a sudden gust of cold wind swirling around me, brushing across the bare skin of my neck and hands. This is not a typical reaction for me, not something I'm making up or exaggerating. I felt the cold air and actually turned to see if someone had opened a window behind me. No open window. I shook my head, hard, once. I couldn't keep myself from thinking about Alton, couldn't stop my eyes from roaming the room to see if any Chinese spies had been planted there, any assassins, any gun-toting Coloradans with a fiery hatred for the ideas of the open range. At that precise moment, in the midst of my own miniature hurricane of fear, my phone, which I'd silenced but forgotten to turn off, vibrated in my pocket. I sneaked a look at it, saw my daughter's name on the caller ID, and after a moment of temptation, decided to wait and call her back when the event finished.

“In the meantime what should we do?” the woman asked.

Rinpoche pondered his answer for longer than I would have expected. I supposed then he was going to say that we should meditate, do good works, give to the poor. “The most important thing,” he said, after a long moment, “is to try, in your own life, to see things—people, mountains, rivers, birds, the deers, the stars—as madaphor. Something that stand for something else, bigger. You should still work, yes. Still eat, still run the races, still pick up the dirty paper when you see it on the ground, still buy medicine for the person you know who is sick, still wash your face and brushing your teeth, but same time, try if you can to not stay in the small box of old thinking. Try to see, in any day, when you are in that box. Maybe you see your father as a bad man. Bad, bad, bad, bad. Okay. But maybe try one time to see beyond the bad, beyond the old, beyond the sick, beyond the man or the woman or the black or the white. Try. Let the words go away a little bit. Rest in the empty place a little bit if you can. See what feels like. Thank you.”

There was enthusiastic applause. The introducer announced that Rinpoche would be kind enough to stay around for a while and sign books, and I slipped out into the air—very cool at that hour—and hit my speed dial.

“Dad?” Natasha said, “Everything okay? You usually answer right away when I call.”

“Fine, honey. We're in Leadville. Colorado. Rinpoche's signing books. You called in the middle of his talk.”

“Good one?”

“Pretty good. I think he can be a little abstract for some people. For me, at times. He was talking about metaphor tonight, about seeing everything as a symbol of something else.”

“I feel that.”

“You do?”

“Uh-huh. Lately, especially. It's like I'm surprised to be alive in a body or something. Like I don't take it so much for granted. All kinds of weird things have been happening lately.”

“Trouble?”

I heard her delicate laugh. “My worrisome Dad,” she said lovingly. I watched a drunk staggering along the sidewalk, stooped over, then lurching sideways, limbs half obeying him. “No trouble, just . . . dreams that make no sense, new things happening in meditation. Rinpoche's advice is just to ignore it all and keep going.”