Killing the Buddha

by Peter Manseau

  Unlike the massacre of the Hebrew baby boys, which Pharaoh arranges rather casually, almost capriciously, the massacre orchestrated by God is carefully prepared. “And all the firstborn in the land of Egypt shall die, from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sitteth upon his throne, even unto the firstborn of the maidservant that is behind the mill; and all the firstborn of beasts. And there shall be a great cry throughout the land of Egypt, such as there was none like it, nor shall be like it any more.”

  It is genocide without apology. And at the end of this dire prophecy comes the most important sentence of all, the real beginning of what the rest of Exodus will so ferociously and zealously continue: the demarcation of difference, the establishment of a separation between Israel and the other peoples and tribes, the forging of an identity, the birth of a nation, and all the exclusiveness that it will require: “But against any of the children of Israel shall not a dog move his tongue, against man or beast; that ye may know how the Lord doth put a difference between the Egyptians and Israel.”

  The killing of the firstborn is preceded by the first of the numerous series of almost obsessive, almost compulsively meticulous instructions that appear throughout Exodus—detailed protocols that, again, will form the identity, the tradition, and the history that will forever distinguish the Hebrews from their neighbors. The time and the manner of the animal sacrifice is ordained. It must be not just any beast but a lamb “without blemish,” a year-old male. Present and future feasts—the celebration we now know as Passover—will be observed by eating unleavened bread, though, it should be noted, uncircumcised foreigners should not be permitted to partake of the ritual meal. And the blood of the lambs is to be used to mark the doors of the homes that the angel of death will spare in the otherwise merciless search for the children who die in order that God’s chosen people can win their freedom.

  And it came to pass exactly as the Lord predicted, or warned: “At midnight the Lord smote all the firstborn in the Land of Egypt, from the firstborn of Pharaoh that sat on his throne unto the firstborn of the captive that was in the dungeon: and all the firstborn of cattle. And Pharaoh rose up in the night, he and all his servants, and all the Egyptians; and there was a great cry in Egypt; for there was not a house where there was not one dead.”

  For there was not a house where there was not one dead.

  Search “Ten Plagues” on the Internet. The first site that comes up contains a series of suggestions for “fun activities” connected with the plagues. For example, the plague of blood might be represented by putting red food coloring in the water glasses, the bathroom sinks, even the dog’s water bowl. Cut out frogs from green construction paper (“bend the legs to make the frogs look as if they were jumping”), and put them everywhere—in the drawers, the cereal boxes, the shower. White dots punched from paper and Scotch-taped to the skin will eventually approximate the itching and irritation of lice. Do the same with red dots, and you’ve got your boils. Putting ice cubes around the house will remind you of hail. Cover the windows and turn out the lights and presto! the plague of darkness.

  I’m hardly breathing as I scroll down to find out how we will reenact the killing of the firstborn. The answer, it seems, is obvious. Red ribbon tacked to the front door will warn the avenging angel to move past without stopping. “When the neighbors”—who doubtless will be curious by now—“ask what the ribbon is for, you can witness to them!”

  One assumes that those most likely to engage in this fun activity are religious folk, people of faith. Yet nowhere is it suggested that they pray for the souls of the murdered Egyptian children. That would seem excessive, I suppose, and besides, it’s not what religion does. In theory, perhaps, we’re advised to love our enemies, but in practice faith has provided a host of reasons to hate those who don’t believe in the same God we do.

  To read Exodus is to watch the dawning of those rancors and divisions. God promises the Hebrews liberation and protection, but ultimately it’s a setup. The actual consequences could hardly involve more strife, more danger and risk: thousands of years of warfare, of attack and defense, of suffering and bloodshed brought about by the way that belief so readily translates into the desire for the wealth and territory of those who practice another religion, into prayers that God will kill their children.

  This was what I celebrated as I dipped my finger into my cup and watched the little puddle of wine in my saucer grow. How ironic that I, a child, should have rejoiced in this evidence that the lives and deaths of children meant nothing, that they were merely tools and pawns to be used or eliminated because of political exigencies. First the Hebrew children, then the Egyptian children. And thousands of years later, an American child dipped her finger in her wine and learned—without being told—that the suffering of the innocent, the murder of children, was not merely pardonable but a holy thing when the freedom of our group was at stake.

  It all puts a peculiar slant on the Ten Commandments, which Moses receives a little later in the book. Is it just coincidence, just literary parallelism, that the number of commandments is the same as the number of the plagues? Somehow, I think not. The rules of conduct, the rules of life, are meant to remind us of the tidy progression that brought death to the Egyptians. First we learn about the punishment, about God’s ability to wreak havoc and mayhem on the transgressor; then we learn the ways by which that punishment can be avoided. And what exactly does “Thou Shalt Not Kill” mean in the context of all those slain children, those drowned Egyptian soldiers? The image of Charlton Heston coming down from the mountain proudly bearing the holy Commandments has become, for me, impossible to distinguish from that of the NRA spokesman brandishing a rifle in the air above his head and warning us that we will have to pry it from his cold, dead fingers.

  What bothers me most about Exodus is what should make me admire it most—that is, it tells us a truth about how people behave, something I would rather not hear or know. Humans clump together in arbitrary, tightly knit groups that want to kill other groups and occupy their territory. Other people’s children are merely bodies. Hebrew, Egyptian, Palestinian, Afghan, Tutsi, Kurd. It hardly matters who they are, as long as they are not our own.

  This is as true now as it was when Moses was in Egypt. Though I am willing to admit it, I don’t have to celebrate it, I don’t have to dip my finger in my wineglass and extract sweet drops for the time when my group, my nation, triumphed at a terrible cost, when it was our turn to show another group who was boss. Nor do I have to thank God for making this point by killing the Egyptian children, just as God first presumably inspires the Egyptians to attempt to do to the Jews.

  I no longer go to Passover Seders. I plead a prior engagement. Nor is my desire to attend rekindled when I hear, from time to time, about well-intentioned attempts to execute end runs around the problem of celebrating the killing of the firstborn. Years ago, someone told me about attending a Seder in which the names of Nazi concentration camps were substituted for the list of plagues. Dachau. Drop. Buchenwald. Drop. Auschwitz. A drop of wine for each camp. And somehow that seemed worse than the original, a betrayal of the text and of the true meaning of the Exodus, of even the hope of liberation.

  I miss the warmth, the food, the ceremony, the comfort and fellowship of family. But I just can’t do it. I can’t sit at the table and dip my finger in the wine and celebrate—deify, in fact—this early, terrible instance of genocide without apology.

  Poolesville, Maryland

  The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord…

  PSALM 37:23

  WE were on the road less than a week when we learned a friend of ours had been killed in a car crash on his way home from a conference. He had been a seat-belt man, a family man, just days shy of a paternity leave to look after his second son. He used to say he owned three types of shoes—shoes for work, shoes for home, shoes for in between—and he never wore a pair for a task for which it wasn’t intended. His life had been that ordered. He had been a conservative man—because, he
would say, conservatives understand consequences—but after the 2000 election he had wandered around for days unshaven, his blond hair uncombed. He had been unable to reconcile his candidate’s tactics with the principles he had thought they shared. Then the Supreme Court had handed down its decision, and our friend had suddenly seemed reborn. “There’s a new sheriff in town,” he would say. “There are rules. We must play by them.”

  After his memorial service in Washington, we drove through the night and woke up in one of those Appalachian mountain villages visited by the sun for just a short time after it creeps over the eastern hills, before it sinks behind the ridge on the other side of town.

  “Where you headed?” the clerk asked us when we checked out of our motel.

  We shrugged. The city shoes on our feet were caked in West Virginia mud; that’s how ordered our lives were.

  “Don’t really know yet,” we said.

  “I know what you mean.”

  The clerk was a slight young man with a Caesar haircut, a silver loop earring, and a rainbow of woven bracelets on his wrists. Perfectly respectable anywhere but there, where the kindest locals probably called him “artistic.” He looked like he might have preferred “trapped.” He wore a “Free Tibet” button pinned to his uniform and brown wooden mala beads tucked under his collar. He was a Buddhist, he said, though only a bit of one. To him, Tibet was not so much his adopted faith’s promised land as it was an idea, and freeing it was a catchall for fixing most of what was wrong with the world: Free those who mind their own business from those who don’t. Free small-town queers like him from Bible thumpers and fence-post crucifixion. Free our friend David from drunk drivers and SUVs sliding on ice, crashing through highway dividers. Free everyone from the karma they don’t deserve.

  “Where did you get your button?” we asked.

  “Well…” The clerk glanced behind him. “There’s only one God around here,” he said. “And despite all the talk, he’s not always forgiving.” The clerk had to travel if he wanted to find a religion that wanted him. Which was how he ended up at Kunzang Palyul Choling, “The Dharma Continent of Infinite Light”—a few hours east in Poolesville, Maryland. Kunzang, as he called it, was a Tibetan Buddhist monastery. More important, it was the first “church” he’d found that allowed him to pray or to sit or just to be without the usual demands and complications.

  “I’d like to go back sometime,” he said, leaning in on the counter so his manager wouldn’t hear. “But I work days.”

  His hand skimmed across his shirt, brushing two fingers over his Free Tibet button the way a Catholic might touch his St. Christopher’s medal. Maybe it was enough just to have a reminder of the place where he’d finally felt liberated. All he knew was that what Kunzang had, he wanted: a way out of suffering that didn’t threaten suffering in return. “There’s no hell in Buddhism,” someone had told him—which isn’t precisely true, but give him a few chants about compassion for all sentient beings and the clerk wasn’t going to ask too many questions about doctrine.

  “They’ve got this monument,” he said. “They call it a stupa. It’s like two stories high. And buried beneath it they put everything that, you know, oppresses people, guns and knives and things, they’ve even got AIDS down there. It’s supposed to be this giant Buddha, and he’s just sitting on all that negative energy, holding it down.”

  We followed the clerk’s directions two hundred miles back east, through a town that was nothing more than a gas station and down a bumpy backwoods road, past a pig farm, over the Potomac River on a ferry named for Jubal A. Early, one of Lee’s generals, to arrive at Kunzang just in time for the “Shower of Blessings,” a ceremony revolving around a sacrifice. Behind the white pillars of the monastery’s plantation-style mansion, burgundy-robed monks and nuns scuffed across cherry red carpets, bowing to 1,008 tiny blue-haired Buddhas sitting in perfect rows on nine long shelves. Other devotees, in khakis, in denim, in floral skirts, arrived from their day jobs and padded through the monastery in wool socks, their shoes neatly lined up at the door.

  A woman in a cable-knit sweater checked the backlighting on two dozen hulking crystals that studded the prayer room like a giant necklace, glossy black crystals with edges like knives, lumpy yellow crystals that looked soft as velvet. They stood in a ring around the room, positioned to “accumulate” prayer and “radiate” it to the world. “Our crystals work like radios,” the cable-knit woman told us. “They broadcast.”

  Within the circle two dozen practitioners sat before shin-high, fire engine red tables that stretched the length of the room like pews for five-year-olds. Many of the practitioners had not been working at their faith much longer than that. Lapsed Catholics, secular Jews, recovering addicts, computer programmers, whatever varieties of spiritual refugees they had been, they were all Buddhists now. Each one sat as close to full lotus as American joints would allow, grounded on two knees plus two cheeks like four noble truths, a foundation steady as a barstool or a Christmas tree stand.

  In the center of the room a wiry, middle-aged nun called Ani Rinchen, born Janice Newmark, sat before a bright red drum that looked like it might have been stolen from a high school marching band. She wore her black hair shaved close to the skin, but her sharp widow’s peak was still visible above her eyes. They were black and brilliant, like the eyes of a mare, and they seemed to fall naturally on the finest features, physical or otherwise, of whomever she spoke to. She lived in the monastery but worked in the world, leaving her robes behind and donning a hooded sweatshirt when she headed off in the evenings to area prisons, where she taught Buddhist principles—“Last week it was cause and effect; tonight it’s karma”—to men serving life sentences.

  She bopped the drum with a padded mallet, her thin wrist flexing in four-four time, faster and faster, chanting in Tibetan. Others traced the words in their prayer books, racing to keep up with Ani Rinchen’s singsong: OM BEN ZAR SA TO SA MA YA. Rhythm in a strange tongue, a bebop-a-lula of prayer, numbing them and even us as it sped everyone along. The motel clerk had visited Kunzang only briefly but had still felt connected; maybe this was why. Ani Rinchen was like one of the crystals, beaming prayer into the cold winter night: SA MA YA MAN NU PA LA. From her mouth to the clerk’s ear. Radio Free Tibet.

  The Shower of Blessings was a puja, a weekly event offering prayers and a sacrifice to the Buddhas—plural. Forget the beatnik emptiness of Zen; Tibetan Buddhism is a cast-of-thousands production, a technically atheist religion that worships an infinity of Buddhas, deities, and not-far-from-divine teachers such as Guru Rinpoche. He was a holy man of the ninth century pictured throughout the monastery with wicked eyes and a curlicue mustachio, holding in one hand a skullcap filled with nectar, in the other a half-circle blade said to be convenient for obliterating enemies. That’s Tibetan Buddhism in a nutshell: great bliss or great suffering. With every thought and action of this life and the countless lives you’ve lived before, you choose. The hope is to gather enough points through good deeds to be reborn as a karmic high roller, who can buy oneself free from samsara, the cycle of life and death, and retire to sunny Nirvana.

  Around the prayer room Kunzang’s members smiled at the apparent freshness of it all, the spiritual distance they had traveled, from their angry Jewish God and their hypocritical Christian one to this prayer room sweetened with incense and adorned with paintings of deities in the midst of sex (“very spiritual sex,” a woman called Yesshe told us). They kept the beat of the prayer—BENZAR SATO TE NO PA—on their knees, and we joined in too, the rhythm pulling us like an undertow. Out to a sea of nectar, forget about the blade. Forget about suffering, too, forget an eye for an eye and good men dying for no apparent reason. Last week it was cause-and-effect, tonight it was karma; don’t ask what anyone did to get there, to wind up in a prayer room or a prison, behind a check-in desk or on a coroner’s table.

  TISHTRA DRI DO ME BHA WA. Ani Rinchen’s head nodded with the drumbeats from atop a long, thin neck it was hard to imagine
had once been shrouded by wavy hair. She had been at the monastery since the beginning, some twenty years now, but before that she was Jewish and orthodox from Albany, New York. Her path to Poolesville had started there, walking home from temple one night with her father.

  “It was a holiday, Sukkuth maybe,” she told us later. “I asked him, ‘If God made us in his image, why do we suffer?’ He told me not to ask such questions, there were things in life we weren’t meant to understand.” Then he walked faster in front of her, like he was trying to get away.

  Ani Rinchen rocked on her knees, still working the drum. She thumped out a beat for the rest of us to follow, and chanted louder as other voices grew tired and slow around her: MA HA SA MA YA SATO AH. She understood suffering now. There are rules, you break them, you pay. Karma. It wasn’t what she’d expected when she’d first come to Buddhism, a disillusioned veteran of half a dozen enlightenment schemes, but at least it was an answer.

  When she’d told her father that she was becoming a Buddhist nun, he’d acted as if she had died. And then he’d died, too, without a word passed between them from the time she’d first prayed in Tibetan, DRO WA DRAL WAR DAM CHA. I commit myself to liberate all sentient beings.

  It was time for the sacrifice. A lean young man named Rodrigo rose from the floor and approached the offering, which was actually just a table weighed down with stale Fig Newtons, warm cold cuts, and chocolate oranges. He tied a pink bandanna around his face, Zapatista style, to make sure he didn’t contaminate the food but also to protect himself from spiritual vapors. SA TO SA MA YA. He’d once heard about a yogi who retreated to a cave and tried to perform a Shower of Blessings sacrifice on his own, his concentration so complete that when it came time to offer the sacrifice, instead of presenting the fruit he’d laid out for the occasion, he took a knife and began carving chunks out of his thigh.