The Library of Water, which had formerly been a library of books, was on a hill overlooking a harbor on a small peninsula jutting north off a big one extending west. Beyond the harbor was a vast bay or fjord, this one scattered with nearly three thousand islands from the size of a room to the size of a farm. On the other side of the Breiðafjörður archipelago were the mountains of the Westfjords, Iceland’s remotest reach, white with snow in those first days of May. Seabirds flew between the islands and nested on them in great groups, secure in this land in which the only native mammal is the rarely seen arctic fox, thought to have arrived on ice floes from Greenland. The small islands lack even foxes.
Writing about that archipelago now makes me think of my friend Ann’s last installation, her white plaster islands mounted on a white wall and connected by a network of red strings, though for that scatter of small Icelandic islands only bird flights and the occasional boat trip must have connected each to each. Ann’s piece made as she was dying was a map of everything, of connectedness itself, like the neurons of the brain and the veins of the body and the roads of the country. You can speak as though your life is a thread, a narrative unspooling in time, and a story is a thread, but each of us is an island from which countless threads extend out into the world.
I have pulled out one thread from the tangle or tapestry of that particular time, and nothing in my account is untrue, except perhaps the coherence of a story, when really there were many stories, or the heap of events and details and imperfect memories from which stories are spun. One thread led to New Orleans. One thread led to Iceland. One to a raft on the Grand Canyon a year later. Another led to Burma or at least to contemplating Burma. Five days after my breakup, the day I was invited to Iceland by Fríða’s phone call, I went home and called my friend Marisa. That evening, the two of us organized a demonstration in support of the uprising led by Buddhist monks in Burma.
Three days earlier more than ten thousand monks had marched through Rangoon and thousands more had walked through at least two dozen other Burmese cities, risking everything in that land of absolute repression. The photographs of long lines of bare-armed shaven-headed men in deep red robes flowing through their cities brought tears to my eyes, as did the later images of legions of citizens lining the streets to protect them. I think of them now as like the red threads that connected Ann’s plaster islands or as the new red blood cells that constantly flow forth from the white temples of our bones. They came out in defense of life and in doing so risked death, as did the smaller population of nuns in their pale rose-colored robes.
Most of us try to avoid trouble, danger, and death, and here was this unarmed multitude walking toward all three for the benefit of others and maybe for, as Buddhists like to say, the benefit of all beings. It was breathtaking, and it made you want to walk with them, made you breathe the air of those moments of emergency when the personal falls away and with it the usual fears and timidities. It made you wish to be brave and maybe it made you brave, since emotions are contagious. There were few risks for most of us elsewhere, but we could at least walk with them from afar and stand up for them.
In this isolated, devout nation that had been ruled by a military junta for almost half a century, there were said to be exactly the same number of monks and soldiers. The monks and nuns acted on behalf of the impoverished majority who had been racked by hardship when the government abruptly increased fuel prices that August, and on behalf of monks who had themselves been injured at a peaceful demonstration earlier in September. These were minor incidents in the major trouble that was life under a brutal dictatorship. They acted because it was time to act, because hope had arisen and change seemed possible, because they had a degree of immunity in that devout, superstitious country, because one of the core principles of Buddhism is the nonseparateness of all things.
But the monks had separated themselves from the military. They had at the height of the uprising performed the rare and extraordinary rite known in Pali as patam nikkujjana kamma, the overturning of the alms bowl so that nothing can be put in it. Early every morning Burmese monks circulated through the cities and towns, each carrying a dark bowl. They lived in the trust that the bowls would be filled, that they would manage to eat, and they tested it every morning. The test had mostly succeeded for millennia of South Asian monastic life. The daily rite proved you could live without certainty or money in a beautiful interdependence with the rest of society.
To give to them was to gain spiritual merit, so the act of giving went both ways in those transactions. Overturning the bowls banned the military and their families from giving alms, effectively excommunicating them and denying them other religious rites of passage. The monks marched through the streets holding their bowls upside down, a denunciation made scathingly public. To refuse to accept the gifts was to refuse to confer the reciprocal gifts, to break the threads that tied those secular people to monastic life and to the life of the spirit.
Whatever tiny contribution I may have made to that doomed uprising was more than recompensed by what it did for me. The monks in Burma and the supporters in my own city and all over the world constituted a community of dignity and principle that was a refuge for me at that particular moment. It was astonishingly beautiful, these unarmed people standing up to a dictatorship that would eventually spatter some of their blood on the walls of the monasteries, murder some, disappear some, drive others into exile or out of the temples, and silence many more. The ordinary people come to protect them in the streets in those hopeful days were braver yet.
Two days after Fríða had invited me to Iceland, Marisa and I managed to get a few hundred people to come to our city’s Chinese consulate, China being a major backer of the regime. Many were Buddhists, most were wearing red, or donned red fabric brought by the famous Vipassana Buddhist teacher who was a committed organizer during that crisis. He had lived among the monks of Thailand and Burma and everything happening in the latter country was vivid and personal for him. I asked my muralist friend Mona Caron to draw the eyes of the Buddha as an elegant elaboration on that old chant “the whole world is watching.” In pastel, on a piece of paper four feet high and eight feet wide, she made the eyes appear while Burmese émigré children watched, entranced, in front of the wall of the consulate.
They were huge, serene, sad, gorgeous, green, staring, and almost glaring, and where the third eye might be was a little image of the earth with Burma picked out in red. The curve of the earth hovered on the bottom edge, so that the eyes rose over the planet like burning green suns. The drawing, once I mounted it on heavier paper with sticks on either side, became the banner carried in the subsequent demonstrations. Marisa and I had moved faster than the established channels, and soon afterward the local Buddhist and Burmese communities began to organize together and we could draw back. But I never forgot that red river of monks circulating through the cities of Burma, and the connections that I made during that uprising lasted.
• • •
Mostly we tell the story of our lives, or mostly we’re taught to tell it, as a quest to avoid suffering, though if your goal is a search for meaning, honor, experience, the same events may be victories or necessary steps. Then the personal matters; it’s home; but you can travel in and out of it, rather than being marooned there. The leprosy specialist Paul Brand wrote, “Pain, along with its cousin touch, is distributed universally on the body, providing a sort of boundary of self,” but empathy, solidarity, allegiance—the nerves that run out into the world—expand the self beyond its physical bounds.
The familiar fairy tales map only limited possibilities in the end. After all, they’re mostly about getting—getting affluence, security, a spouse, offspring, the usual trappings. Even nowadays people who lack the full complement of these particular goods are reminded, subtly and not, that they should have them or that they have failed. The idea of a life lived by another pattern and measured by another standard remains out of reach in t
hese versions. What’s your story? The goals matter. The foundation stone of Buddhism, the life of the Buddha himself, is a fairy tale run backward.
Twenty-five centuries ago, a man was born to aristocratic parents and walked out one night to become a seeker, a monk, and eventually a teacher, but we know only so much about this historical figure. The facts of his life were embroidered and embellished into the most perfect of anti–fairy tales, and that story is still with us, taught and reflected upon and retold all over the world. One version of the legend his life became was written down six centuries after his birth by a North Indian poet named . His epic poem, The Buddhacarita, or Acts of the Buddha, contains most of the incidents in the versions told since.
A rendition of the poem copied out about eight hundred years ago on fifty-five palm leaves still existed in a Kathmandu library in the last century—it’s half of the original Sanskrit story. The rest only exists in Chinese and Tibetan translations. The book was literally a sutra, that word that first meant palm leaves sutured together and then meant the teachings of the Buddha. The words on that sutured, sundered book of leaves was translated into flowery English prose in 1894 and again in 1936.
In Buddhacarita, all the legendary material is in full bloom: Siddhartha Gautama’s mother’s dream of a white elephant, his miraculous birth as his standing mother supported herself with a bough laden with flowers, his seven steps as he walked straight from his mother’s womb and proclaimed, “I am born for supreme knowledge, for the welfare of the world—this is my last birth.” That it’s a story a little like that of the Christ child is a reminder that both belong in the fairy-tale category of the remarkable birth, from Peach Boy to Thumbelina.
Like Sleeping Beauty’s parents, Siddhartha’s father attempts to thwart the fortune told for him at birth, or one version of that fortune. The Brahman told him that his son would become either a great king who would rule the world or a great spiritual teacher. The father tries to avert the latter destiny by confining the prince to a paradise of gardens, dancing girls, banquets, and other sensual pleasures in which nothing appears that would provoke questions or quests.
The prince is born into what the fairy-tale goose girls and beggar boys arrive at in the end, the luxury that in the Buddhacarita includes golden elephants, golden deer, real deer pulling golden carriages, and strings of gems like garlands of flowers. Grown up into a handsome young man, Siddhartha marries a lovely woman and has a son and heir he names, bitterly it seems, Rahula, or fetter. The child further entraps him in the palace and the life his father chose for him.
Then the legend relates the crux of the story, how he goes out on roads his father has carefully stripped of “afflicted common folk . . . those whose limbs were maimed or senses defective, the aged, sick and the like, and the wretched” to spare him from pain and questions. The gods intervene. They send the four sights that are the pivot of this story, and the sights lead to the four noble truths that are the foundation of Buddhism. The first is an old man, and the sheltered prince’s response is one of shocked dismay. He turns to his charioteer and friend for an explanation. This is old age, “the murderer of beauty, the ruin of vigor, the birthplace of sorrow, the grave of pleasure, the destroyer of memory,” replies the charioteer, and adds that it is the fate of all who live long enough.
And then they meet a sick man, panting, with bloated belly and emaciated limbs, crying in pain and leaning on a companion for support, or a god in the form of such a man. The prince “trembled like the reflection of the moon on rippling water.” They go out again on roads the king has cleared, and the gods send a corpse. The gods are impersonating the most dreaded and the least beautiful human conditions, with the clear premise that witnessing these states prompts us to wake up. The fourth sight doesn’t occur in Buddhacarita but does in many other versions: it’s a bhikku, or ascetic wanderer, devoted to finding and addressing the cause of human suffering. Siddhartha Gautama turns away from his pleasures and toward the life of a bhikku.
It’s hard to imagine a thoughtful person could remain literally oblivious of the facts of old age, sickness, and death, but most of us have a degree of obliviousness, willful or otherwise. We know the facts, but we don’t always realize them with that imaginative, emotional engagement that makes them vivid forces and deciding factors. And then they do realize, or we do, or you do, and everything changes. I felt a little that way that apricot season when the drama of my mother’s old-age illness was quickly followed by my own medical adventure, Ann’s slow dying, and Nellie’s daughter’s turbulent birth.
I’ve met privileged young people who were shocked when they discovered the destructive force of injustice in the lives of others around them. Some left their careers to work for human rights or to teach or to tend the damaged. Many lives have a moment of rupture that is an awakening and a change of direction. Another aristocratic firstborn son left his comfortable Buenos Aires life and a medical career because of one.
Ernesto “Che” Guevara was particularly affected by the unemployed miner and his wife shivering without blankets one night in the Chilean desert and by an old woman in Valparaiso dying of asthma and poverty. They were apparently not sent by the gods, but they woke him up and changed his life, and he took his own path, for better or worse, to end suffering. Siddhartha was twenty-nine when he left the palace to take up the life of a wandering ascetic, a seeker, a few years older than Che was when he got on the back of Granado’s motorcycle and began the encounters that would change his life.
The moment when mortality, ephemerality, uncertainty, suffering, or the possibility of change arrives can split a life in two. Facts and ideas we might have heard a thousand times assume a vivid, urgent, felt reality. We knew them then, but they matter now. They are like guests that suddenly speak up and make demands upon us; sometimes they appear as guides, sometimes they just wreck what came before or shove us out the door. We answer them, when we answer, with how we lead our lives. Sometimes what begins as bad news prompts the true path of a life, a disruptive visitor that might be thanked only later. Most of us don’t change until we have to, and crisis is often what obliges us to do so. Crises are often resolved only through a new identity and new purpose, whether it’s that of a nation or a single human being.
I’ve envied the people whose lives suddenly rupture and afterward dedicate themselves wholeheartedly to a cause or a community. The new life seems the product of an urgent certainty that clears most of the ambiguities and ambivalences away. It was not, however, so simple for the prince. In one account he shaved his head and donned the robes of an ascetic as his family wept in the palace, but in the Buddhacarita he stole away in the night on his horse, cut off his long hair in the forest with his sword, and sent sword, hair, and horse back to the people he left behind without a farewell or an explanation. For the reader of fairy tales and Genesis, the startling thing is that he walks out of paradise of his own accord. Adam and Eve are driven out of paradise as punishment.
Buddhism takes change as a given and suffering as the inevitable consequence of attachment and then asks what you are going to do about it. Suffering, though, is not the most accurate translation of the Pali word dukkha. Dukkha means sky, ether, or hole, particularly an axle hole. Sukkha was a good axle hole for a wheel, while dukkha was a poor one, one that made the wheel wobble and bump, jolting the load. It could be translated as discord or disturbance, the antithesis of harmony or serenity. Everyone knows well that feeling of being out of tune, at odds, dissatisfied, anxious, full of dread, heartsore. Siddhartha said in his first sutra, the Dhammacakkappavattana, “Birth is dukkha, aging is dukkha, death is dukkha; sorrow, lamentation, pain, grief, and despair are dukkha; association with the unbeloved is dukkha; separation from the loved is dukkha; not getting what is wanted is dukkha. In short, the five clinging-aggregates are dukkha.”
Though many are drawn to Buddhism as a way to address their own suffering, the teachings emphasize care for others, comp
assion for all beings, as well as transforming the self who experiences pain, rather than extirpating the external causes of pain. These are ways of overcoming the attachment to self that is the experience of separateness. The Burmese monks were doing this work. They were doing it by performing the basic act of Buddhism, sitting still and paying attention to their breath, and by going out into the streets on behalf of the people of Burma.
Paying attention to your breath is about being present in the moment—I heard a formerly homeless woman who became a Buddhist priest say you do it so that you can be present enough to be compassionate toward others and not so caught up in your own drama. You sit still, count your breaths, watch the stories your mind makes arise, let them go, and maybe learn a little about your propensity to spin stories and the fact that you yourself make them. Even the absolute sufferings of the body can be regarded from various perspectives, though, for example, hunger or injury cannot be dismissed. Many of our emotional pains are yet more malleable, yet more responsive to perspective.
Zen priests and Burmese exiles and Buddhist teachers who’d spent time with the forest monks of Thailand and Burma were good company while I was thinking about stories, pain, and empathy. So was the photographer Subhankar Banerjee, whose work I knew well before he wrote to me a few days before I left for Iceland. I wrote back, we corresponded, and we met a little less than a year later, at his house made of windows in New Mexico while it was snowing outside and steamily fragrant with Indian cooking inside, as if we were in two places at once, and perhaps he always was. An enthusiast with a head of unruly, wavy black hair who punctuated his narratives with laughs and with “Oh my God” when he exclaimed about how awful, wonderful, unexpected, or extreme something was, he was one of those people whose lives had ruptured and who had walked away from what was easy, safe, and lucrative. His empathy, however, was with a broader community than the human.
The Faraway Nearby Page 12
