Dinner with Buddha (26 page)

Thirty-three

The organizers of the Conference on Psychology and Spirituality in the Western World had arranged for us to stay in Moab's Red Cliffs Lodge, in a completely comfortable two-bedroom cabin that backed onto the Colorado River. Rinpoche and I arrived very late, bade each other good-night, and, in my case at least, fell into a dreamless sleep.

I began the next day with a meditation, a quiet, unspectacular hour sitting out on the cabin's secluded back porch and listening to the river run. When I opened my eyes I saw a large raft drifting past—like one pleasant thought—filled with life-jacketed tourists, and then, across the way, two children and a father fishing from the bank. The kids' apparent pleasure, the dry, hot morning, the river muttering over rocks, the afterglow of the quiet hour—it was a good way to begin a morning.

We'd brought food for breakfast—yogurt, fruit, bread—and I brewed myself a cup of tea to go with it and tried to eat with as much focus as I could, paying attention to the textures and tastes, taking my time. Conscious without being self-conscious, aware without making a fuss of my awareness. Judging from the somewhat less urgent press of my body against my belt, I'd shed another pound or two on my low-sugar, high-focus, slow-eating diet, and after e-mailing back and forth with my daughter for a while (“Dad, I had a dream last night that you sold our house! It should have been sad but it wasn't!”) and my son (“Man, they're working us this year, Dad. I get home from practice and shower and eat and all I want to do is hit the sack.”) I went out and swam a dozen laps in the resort's outdoor pool. I half expected to see Rinpoche come striding up in his Speedo, but he was AWOL that morning, off for a walk preparing his speech, I supposed, or floating downriver after an incautious dip, drifting between the rocks, approaching a set of rapids, looking up at the sky and laughing away the last few seconds of this incarnation. He'd told me once that he existed in a near-continuous state of the meditative mind and for a little while then, while I was breathing hard at the edge of the pool, looking up into the pale blue, that actually seemed a statement that could be taken literally.

At quarter to noon I wandered over to the conference room. I mingled, more or less, with a bunch of talkative psychologists, sipping coffee and spearing at pineapple chunks with a red plastic toothpick. They were an eclectic tribe, ranging from men in expensive-looking suits to men in sandals and dreadlocks, women in short skirts and lots of makeup to women who bought their clothing where my sister bought hers, in Crestone, perhaps, or out of a Nature-Hemp catalog. I could smile at my own judgments and labels, at least; that was a start. I refilled my coffee, sat in the back row, and waited.

11:55.

Noon.

12:05.

12:15.

No Rinpoche.

Upon arrival we'd been given a list of the day's presenters and panels and I knew the schedule was tight. Volya Rinpoche was listed as speaking from noon to one, and then there was lunch from one to two and then several panel discussions (Reconciling Western Materialism and Traditional Christianity; Work and the Human Brain; The Sex-Money Link; The Eye of the Beholder; The Influence of Weather on Mood). My understanding was that Rinpoche had been paid handsomely for this talk, and I could sense, both in the restlessness of the hundred or so attendees and the facial expressions of the organizers, that his tardiness was not much appreciated.

It was unlike him, too. In all the years of our acquaintance I'd known him to be late only a handful of times, by only a minute or two, and I'd never known him to miss an appointment.

One of the conference organizers—a tall, gaunt man with a silvery goatee—looked over in my direction and raised his hands, palms up. I shrugged. He was walking toward me and I was wondering what kind of explanation I might offer when we heard footfalls on the gravel outside. The door opened, Rinpoche strode in. He was wearing his robe, his cowboy-hat-and-rosary headgear, and an absolutely unapologetic look on his face. The introduction was shortened and, in its brevity and tone, clearly reflected the gaunt man's disapproval. I suppose he had every reason to be bothered, but at the same time there was something of the stern father in his voice and manner, a bit too strong of a rebuke to his speaker, almost the sense that he was encouraging his audience to start the Q and A with complaint.

Unbothered, unperturbed, unapologetic, Rinpoche took his place at the front of the room, in the center of a long, unoccupied table, set his hat gently to his right side, adjusted the rosary beads with some reverence, and then, smiling broadly, swung his head from side to side, taking in the gaggle of shrinks.

“I am late, yes,” he said pleasantly.

Nods all around. One emphatic, “You sure are!”

His smile shrank half an inch. “I am walking,” he said, swinging his arm in a circle, “all around this beautiful place. I am thinking: Where anger come from in this whirl? What you say?”

“From others being inconsiderate.” It was the same voice. Far-right section of the audience. A man's voice, but I couldn't see the source.

“
You
are angry now,” Rinpoche said, pointing at him.

“You bet I am. We're on a tight schedule here, and you breeze in twenty minutes late without explanation or apology. If I did that to a client, she'd get a refund, and deservedly so.”

“I give you refund,” Rinpoche said.

“That won't be necessary. An explanation would be nice, however.”

Rinpoche nodded as if one might be forthcoming, but it wasn't. “Why other people here not as angry as you?”

“I have no idea. I'm not concerned with others' emotions. Perhaps they're just as angry and simply unwilling to say so. Punctuality is valued in our culture, sir. The society runs well because of it. And now we have, what, only thirty minutes or so before lunch!”

“I will keep you late,” Rinpoche said. “Maybe no lunch for you today.” He laughed. No one joined him.

“Please let's end this,” the man went on. “Please just speak and allow us to leave if we do want to enjoy our midday meal.”

Rinpoche held his gaze on the man for a long moment and then closed his eyes and sat there quietly, in what I thought of as a posture of meditation
.
There wasn't any particular posture involved. He didn't cross his legs or sit up straighter, though he did clasp his hands calmly in front of him on the table. A minute went by, two minutes, four minutes. Someone—not the man who'd been so upset—got up and left. We heard the door close hard, then the angry crunch of footsteps on the gravel outside. I sat there, watching him. Six minutes. Seven minutes. There was less than half an hour left in the session and all around the room I could hear muttering and the scraping of chair legs. A susurrus of exasperation.

At last Rinpoche let out a long breath. He opened his eyes, ran them over the room. “Now inside you,” he said, “I want that you feel this anger.” He took and released another breath. “Maybe good reason for this, but now I don't want that you think about the reason. I want that you feel the anger in you, that you see him there, inside. What he feels like, this anger?”

“A hot sphere,” a woman said from the row in front of me. “A prickly ball, hot, thorns on it. It's moving restlessly.”

“An electric line between my ears,” another woman said.

“A voice babbling very quickly, snapping out words.”

“Fear,” a man sitting just in front of me called out.

“Afraid for what?” Rinpoche asked him.

The man leaned his head down a bit and I had the sense he'd closed his eyes and was trying hard to look into the anger inside him. After a short pause he said, “Of my own powerlessness. Of my having so little control over the world. . . . Possibly . . . of my own death.”

“Ah,” Rinpoche said, but it was a noncommittal “ah,” neither approving nor disapproving, curious perhaps, interested, turning the idea over in his mind as if to examine it for truth or falsehood.

My own situation was complicated. Over the course of our married life, Jeannie had kept me waiting on at least five hundred occasions. Even in our dating days she'd done it, and there had been times when I'd been furious, and times when I'd been bothered, and other times when I was able, for one reason or another, to let it go. So I was sitting there in my customary spot at the back of the room, stewing in a pot of small confusions, a mix of my love for her, the pain of her absence, the remnants and memories of my irritation and her lack of consideration. In my own life, work and personal, I was extraordinarily punctual, early more often than not. If I happened to be on the road and a bit late for anything as simple as a date for coffee with an old friend, I'd be overcome with a restless nervousness, an anxiety out of all proportion to the situation. I'd been known to risk a speeding ticket or run along a city sidewalk just in order to be there at 10:30 as I'd promised, rather than 10:32. I was so proud of my punctuality. It made me good, better, utterly considerate. It was one of the pillars of my self-esteem.

“Sometimes maybe,” Rinpoche said, touching his hat with two fingers and turning it a quarter inch, “you have the clients—clients, yes?” He looked over the rows of heads at me. I nodded. “Clients that feel for you the anger. Why is? Maybe not getting what for they paid you. Or maybe they want to talk and you say time to stop. Or maybe you tell them something they can't like. About themself. About life. You can see the angry in them, yes? You can feel. Or maybe with the children this happen. Or with the wife, or the husband, or the sister or brother or the friend, yes? Or the person you don't know. Maybe the person who drives bad in front of you, yes? Sometimes when you are the angry person you think: Good now that I'm angry so I can teach this other person not to be wrong. Teach my children not to run around. Push on the, how you say,” he pressed the heel of his hand forward and someone in the audience figured it out and said, “the horn!” “Horns, yes! You push the horns to teach this other person about driving bad. Wery good! But why sometimes you are angry when the person drive bad, when the boy or girl act bad, and sometimes not so angry? Why is?”

“Depends on your mood,” someone called out.

Rinpoche nodded at her. “So you can control, little bit, yes?” He went into a riff of high chuckling, solitary mirth. “So you are angry because the whirl is not controlled by you, and then you don't control what part you can control—you—and so the anger comes out even more big. Funny, yes?”

Not many in the audience seemed to think so.

“Maybe questions now.”

Immediately a man on the right side of the audience snapped to his feet and when he spoke I recognized his voice from the earlier comments. “I'm not angry now,” he said, “I'm quite furious and I plan to lodge a complaint. First, you keep us waiting for twenty minutes, and then you feed us this pablum. We're an intelligent group, Rinpoche. Educated. Well experienced. Sophisticated in the psychological sense. We came, many of us, hundreds or even thousands of miles, and we spent a good sum of money and took time away from our professions and families because we hoped to learn something from these panel discussions. I, for one, feel like you're mocking us, mocking this whole conference, making light of it. And I am not pleased.”

Rinpoche listened attentively, unruffled. “What is this ‘making light'?” he asked. “How can you make it?”

“Making fun of something,” I called out from the back of the room. “Not taking it seriously.”

“Ah.” He looked down at his hands and then up at the angry man. “When you help people, when you are with the clients, they pay you to talk, yes?”

“To talk and to listen, yes.”

“Helps them, this talking?”

“Of course it helps them! You have a hundred or so people in this room who get paid, some of us very well, for helping people.”

“Good,” Rinpoche said. “But maybe some people you don't help?”

“Obviously, sir. There are always going to be some for whom the therapy isn't successful. For a wide variety of reasons.”

“Maybe for some people, there is another way to help instead of talking. Another therapy. Maybe works better for some people.”

“Maybe so, but that isn't the point.”

“Maybe it's exactly the point,” a woman called over to him from the left side.

“I'm speaking to the speaker, thank you.”

“But maybe you're wrong, and, excuse me, but I have as much right to speak my mind as you do. You're monopolizing here. Yes, he kept us waiting. I'm not especially pleased about that. But maybe he's trying to show us something in ourselves that's valuable, and he thought this was the best way.”

“So now you're going to start arriving late for your sessions?”

“Not at all. But maybe I'll understand a client's anger in a different way.”

“I can easily see how your clients would be angry at you.”