Dinner with Buddha (20 page)

Twenty-two

From a book I once edited I knew that the Arkansas River has its headwaters not far from Leadville, and from there tumbles and wanders almost fifteen hundred miles to its meeting with the Mississippi in the state of that same name. The Arkansas runs from cold to warm, fed at first by the snowmelt in the highest Coloradan peaks and spilling, eventually, after merging with its big sister, into the Gulf of Mexico just east of New Orleans. Along the way there is said to be marvelous trout fishing and excellent white-water rafting, and ongoing legal issues, too, between Kansas and Colorado about how much water can be taken from it. I knew that the river had been at the heart of the gold rush in these parts. The Arkansas's treasure was placer gold, which is gold that has broken off an exposed rock and been washed downstream (as opposed to gold that's mined in veins), and I supposed I was still under the influence of Rinpoche's Leadville talk because that seemed a clear spiritual metaphor to me. Placer gold is easy to harvest. You take a pie pan, or something called a classifier screen, and claim a spot along the bank, sifting the river bottom silt, where the gold—a particularly heavy metal—has settled. The miners who rushed into these parts upon its original discovery reaped a rich harvest at first and then found they had to do more and more work for a smaller and smaller return, a situation that caused almost all of them to leave.

Wasn't that something like my own spiritual predicament? At first, under Rinpoche's tutelage, I seemed to have made great progress in my meditations. The rush of thoughts I'd been vaguely aware of began to slow down; I encountered a type of interior calm I hadn't ever imagined. And then, after this rich first harvest, all my “abilities” seemed to go away. I blamed external circumstances, and I think I had a right to do that. Jeannie fell ill and died, I lost my job. The meditations became noisy sit sessions from which I stood up into a confusing and dispiriting world, so much so that I gave thought to abandoning them altogether.

For some reason, though, I didn't. Now, it seemed to me, if I was going to reap any more treasure I'd have to work harder for it, burrow down through my self-pity and sadness, the emptiness of my days, and find a vein there that I could drill in darkness, steadily, sweating, grunting, eventually coming up into the light with my mother lode.

Or maybe the history of that territory offered a different lesson. Because what ultimately chased away the prospectors was the fact that, once the easy money had been made, they found themselves searching for smaller specks and flakes in the Arkansas's heavy mud. Too much work for most of them. But then it was discovered that the mud contained silver ore, not as valuable but much more abundant. At that point Leadville's real boom began, larger mining settlements sprung up, the harvesting went on, not for a few years, but for decades. So maybe the lesson for me was not to seek exotic spiritual riches and experiences but to settle for the not-so-flashy benefits of the meditative life: less worry, more peace, less about me, more about someone else.

As we headed out of Leadville I didn't ask Rinpoche about any of this. I remembered the book
Food along the Arkansas,
and the author, one Peter Ray Greer. He'd started out with brown trout and the various ways of catching and cooking it and followed the river's course, and the different cuisines he found, until he ended up at one of the South's great barbecue joints, in Arkansas Delta country. Though it had somewhat of a spiritual feel, there was nothing about meditation in the book. In fact, in the hundred or so books I'd edited or been connected to in my professional life, I couldn't remember a single mention of meditation. Not so surprising, maybe; I was, after all, an editor of food books. But many of those books touched on American culture, and our culture was, in its religious manifestations, wholly exterior, a society of vocal prayer and services, of sermons and rites, the cross, the good deed, the Book, the bar and bat mitzvah. All good, it was, in many lives, but it seemed to me on that drive that the true golden weight of the spiritual life had settled to the bottom of the American consciousness. It tumbled along there, largely undiscovered, waiting for someone with a classifier screen to come along and sift it clear.

For me, that someone had been Volya Rinpoche. I saw that now. I understood it. Was grateful for it. On that morning there seemed little chance that I'd let myself abandon the claim again.

At first, as we followed the Arkansas south, a low, fat range of puckered dry hills rose to our left, but the scenery changed by the minute. With each turn in the winding road there was something new to look at. Now the hills resembled rows of bad teeth. Now there were round humps with what looked like dry open scars cut into them, surgical cuts that would never heal. Now, sharp rock outcroppings. This was, a sign informed us, the
COLLEGIATE SCENIC BYWAY,
and the peaks just to our west—some over fourteen thousand feet—were named Yale, Harvard, and Princeton, an Ivy League of metamorphic stone. Just east of the road and slightly below it the river cut and tumbled, only about thirty feet wide, its rocky banks resembling gobs of beach sand piled one on top of the other. There were kayak and rafting businesses, signs for fishing guides, a
POINT OF INTEREST
billboard that talked about this being a stage route, then a mail route, then a route plied by a narrow-gauge railroad. Now we were leaving the San Isabel National Forest (I didn't know we'd entered it), and approaching Chaffee City, in the shadow of 14,420-foot Mount Harvard. Wide vistas here, with rocky hills, a flat open plain for a while, and then the mountains closer in.

Yours truly was, of course, hungry. It seemed to me that the elimination of sugar from my diet was having three consequences: I was losing weight; I was tasting food more vividly; and I wanted to eat almost constantly. “Mind if we stop for a bite?” I asked my companion, worried that, as he sometimes did, Rinpoche would suggest I skip a meal or two, fast, make myself more aware of the constant interior clamoring. But this time I was in luck.

“Sure, man,” he said. He'd taken the rosary beads from his hat and was fingering them. “Can you show me the prayers?”

“Love to, but those are Catholic beads and I'm a Protestant boy.”

“Catholic is the pope, yes?”

Rinpoche, I was quite sure, along with the other seven billion people on earth, knew the answer to that question. I nodded, glanced at him, watching for a trick.

“The Catholic wery much like the Buddhist.”

“A lot of people would disagree. Catholics have commandments, Buddhists have suggestions. Catholics have sins, Buddhists have hindrances.”

“Pope is just like Dalai Lama,” he said, ignoring me.

“The Dalai Lama laughs more.”

“Catholic has the hell, Buddhist has the hell realm. Catholic has the beads. Buddhist has the beads, too. Buddha didn't eat sometimes, Jesus sometimes, too.”

“I think the Catholics have more rules,” I said, trying to nudge the conversation away from not eating.

“Catholic has Mary, Buddhist has many, many Rinpoches that are women. Famous ones. Wery, wery important in my lineage.”

“Catholic women can't be priests, though.”

“That's gonna change,” he said confidently.

“When?”

“Sometime now pretty soon.”

I pondered that. Catholics had a new pope, Francis by name, who was in the news every week that summer, hinting at changes in the Church, talking about the poor. Though it might seem an improper comparison, I wondered if he was a Gorbachevian figure—someone who'd risen up through an old and calcified system, then reached the top and turned the whole thing upside down. He seemed a decent, kind man. I wished him well.

We rolled into Buena Vista, a pleasant town, geared toward fishing and rafting, it seemed, judging by the types of stores and signs we saw. We stopped at a place called Punky's, unimposing enough, with framed photos of high school athletes on the walls. At Punky's the food was served on paper plates, something I've never liked, but the barbecued brisket there had to rate among the very best I've ever eaten. Rinpoche sipped from a cup of water and watched me slice and chew. Two local policemen came and sat in the booth behind ours and Rinpoche took the opportunity to turn around and ask if either of them understood “the Catholic prayers on the beads and how to do it.”

The female officer did know. Rinpoche got up and stood beside her and she went through the beads with him. “These are for Hail Mary's,” I heard her say. “These ones here are for contemplation of the sacred mysteries.”

The officers wolfed their pulled pork and went out to their cruiser. Rinpoche returned to the table absolutely aglow. “The sacred mysteries!” he exclaimed. Two elderly men at a table on the other side of the room looked over at him and frowned. Another weirdo tourist in BV. Then, more quietly, Rinpoche said, “The sacred mysteries, Otto! All these things that happen, nobody understands!”

“And many don't believe.”

He was nodding as if I hadn't spoken. I could see the material forming for a new talk. I savored the brisket, a forkful of beans, some coleslaw. This was the way to eat. I offered it to Rinpoche, but he shook his head.

“The sacred mysteries,” he said again, under his breath this time.

I finished my meal, looked at him. “Why do they make you so happy?”

“Because one day I want that there's no more fights about religion.”

“A tall order.”

“Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, Moses, Mary—all sacred mysteries, man! All pieces of God. If they were here all now together they wouldn't fight. I want that people see it.”

Good luck with that one, pal,
I thought. I let Rinpoche have his dreams and I cleared the table and we went out into the sun.

South of Buena Vista the road was, depending on your definition, bereft of sacred mysteries; it was all gas stations, pawnshops, storage units, places to fish. We saw an old man with a beard and a backpack hitching in the other direction. We watched heavy purple clouds roll in over Poncha Springs, and then we were climbing through stands of what appeared to be white birch or aspen. Up and up we went, over a pass. Suddenly the blue mountains were all to the east of us, with a flat sunlit plain ahead, and a smattering of rain on the windshield. We passed a sign for a town named Bonanza and then, sooner than I'd expected, one for the Joyful Journey Hot Springs Spa—the place my sister had suggested we stay if we found ourselves in southern Colorado.

Joyful Journey. The name seemed to fit Seese's kindly worldview perfectly. And, at first, I worried that the place itself would better fit her notion of comfort than my own. It was set well back from the road, at the edge of a dusty plain with the Sangre de Cristo Mountains running north to south about ten miles in the eastern distance. At first glance there appeared to be a couple of teepees and yurts set off to one side. There was a blue strip of a building with rooms that opened onto a small lawn, a green oasis amid the dust. In one of the smaller buildings we were greeted by an attractive young woman, a few years older than my Natasha, who seemed to me—I was reading auras now—to be in the midst of overcoming some great difficulty in her life. There were all kinds of essences and beads for sale in the office, wholesome snack foods, and as I was writing down the license plate and handing over my credit card, and so on, the young woman filled us in on the healing pools, three of them, ranging in temperature from 98 to 110 degrees. Rinpoche and I walked over to our lodging, the air filled with the scent of lavender. From the outside it resembled a motel. There were thick pine posts holding up a metal roof, but inside an unexpectedly nice room, huge beds with big headboards made of pine logs and saplings. Tile floor. Even—the essence of thoughtfulness—a small black towel in the bathroom with a sign saying it should be used to remove makeup.

Rinpoche and I wasted no time changing into our suits and strolling back over to the healing pools. They were small, surrounded by fencing, and covered by fiberglass roofs, but, one after the next, they did seem to have some healing powers. Relaxing powers, at least. In the hottest of the three I told Rinpoche that I'd done a little research on the area. “Those are the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, ‘Blood of Christ' it means in Spanish. An hour or so south of here there's supposed to be one of the most amazing of the American National Parks. That's my surprise for you.”

“What is?”

“The Great Sand Dunes National Park. Enormous dunes—piles of sand—and nothing else, miles of them. Tonight's the full moon. I thought we could drive down there and hike up the dunes and wait for the moon to rise over the Sangre de Cristos. What do you say?”

“Show me America, man!” he said, so loudly that a woman in the next pool over, enjoying a contemplative moment, shot us a nasty look.

I'm showing him America,
I wanted to tell her.
You and I are used to it. We take it for granted. The millions of square miles of some of the most fertile farmland on earth, the spectacular coastlines with their golden beaches, the mountain ranges—newer and sharper out west and older and rounder in the east; the parched desert of places like this, the rainforest outside Seattle. The rivers, the bays, the islands and harbors, the great cities—I want to show him all of it. I want to see it through his eyes. I want to scrape the jadedness from my soul and experience it the way Walt Whitman seemed to, as if seeing it all for the first time.