The Broken Rules of Ten

by Gay Hendricks

  “What does it say?” I asked Yeshe, my voice barely audible. I took the penlight from him and pointed it at the writing. Yeshe began translating, his voice, too, hushed. “Hark! This rare and peerless legacy surpasses all others,” he whispered. “If you must know one thing, know this.” Yeshe’s voice faltered. “Taste . . . ? No, sorry. Savor this truth in your mind and carry it in your heart always. Women . . .” Yeshe looked up, his eyes wide. “Women hold the key to your Buddhahood.”

  Crack! My arm jerked at the noise, and I dropped the penlight. It rolled across the floor. All three of us had heard it—a snapping sound just outside the dormitory.

  “Someone’s coming. Quick,” Lobsang whispered. I stacked and tied the wooden slabs together and attempted to refold the silk around them.

  “Let me,” Lobsang whispered. “I wrap these things every day.” In no time at all he had the pecha perfectly bound.

  “Hide it under here.” I lifted my pallet.

  “No!” This time it was Yeshe. “That’s the first place they’ll look. I’ll take it.” He grabbed the wrapped pecha and ran to the other end of the dormitory as we heard another snapping sound outside, followed by a thump. For sure, an elder lama had heard something and was coming to inspect. We jumped into our beds, pulled our blankets up, and closed our eyes.

  A loud chattering split the night air.

  I almost wept with relief. I opened my eyes and turned to meet Lobsang’s matching grin, his eyes glinting in the dark. We mouthed the same word at the same time.

  “Monkey.”

  Within minutes, I was sound asleep.

  CHAPTER 5

  Four tiny padded feet marched up my spine. Something like whiskers tickled the nape of my neck.

  I lurched upright and glimpsed a mangy black streak, with a tail, race across a room ablaze with sunlight—a room that screamed, “You overslept!”—and out the door.

  “Thanks, Lhamo,” I croaked after her. A vague memory surfaced of Yeshe shaking my arm in the dark and me rolling over and tucking my head under my arm.

  “Great,” I said to the empty dormitory. I was beyond late. I had slept through kitchen duty, slept through morning chants and breakfast, and was about to sleep through my private meeting with my tutor, Lama Sonam.

  I threw on my robe, ran to the washhouse behind our quarters to splash water on my face and pee, and went straight to Lama Sonam’s teaching cottage to get my marching orders.

  He wasn’t there. I looked around at the familiar dishevelment, the stacks of pechas and piles of cushions, the dusty books and statues mingled with his prized collection of children’s toys and games from all over the world. I loved coming here and counted Lama Sonam as one of the main attractions to being a Buddhist. He didn’t teach compassion so much as be it, and just stepping into his cottage had the effect of softening the shell around my chest and opening my heart.

  I pulled out my favorite cushion and sat. I let my attention go to the in and out of my breath, the rising and falling of my ribs.

  The growling of my empty stomach.

  Back to the breath, Tenzing.

  I breathed in.

  A blur of arms and hands, light streaming from each dancing finger.

  I breathed out.

  What is the peerless wisdom on women going to be?

  In.

  Pema.

  Out.

  Nawang, touching the top of my head: Tock!

  “Tenzing?”

  Lama Sonam’s handsome face gazed down at me, his kind, bright eyes crinkled by a broad smile. He was in his early 30s, relatively young for a teaching lama, at least in this monastery. Originally from Bhutan, his route to the robe was unusual. Before he became a monk he had spent a few years as a sort of nanny to an English family, so his English accent was as good as any duke’s. This was the main reason I got to have him as my tutor; the first time I came back from a long stay at Dorje Yidam, I had acquired the singsong Indian English common to most of the boys, not to mention our teachers. Valerie put her foot down then and there.

  I noticed Lama Sonam wasn’t taking his usual seat across from me. Something was up.

  He bowed slightly. His lips pursed, as if his tongue tasted lemon. I translated that to mean he was bringing bad news.

  “Your father wishes to see you,” he said.

  An icicle of fear pierced straight into my belly.

  Apa knows. Somehow, he already knows.

  I trotted to the main monastery building, using the front entrance this time. I threaded through labyrinthine hallways until I reached my father’s office. I paused outside the door. My stomach hurt. I knocked once. I heard his gruff voice, “Come!”

  My father was seated on his round meditation cushion, papers spread out across the little rug in front of him. He made a flapping gesture with his hand. No cushion for me here. I sat cross-legged across from him on the bare floor.

  Just the other day, Lama Sonam had assigned me a new strategy for interacting with my father.

  “Try to think of what things you might appreciate about him,” Lama Sonam said, “and let them join those that scare or anger you.”

  So far, the strategy wasn’t working. There was something about the way my father looked at me—like I was a mistake he could never pay for—that kept my admiration muscle knotted up tight inside. I felt only resentment at the deep furrows of his brow and at the way he would reach up and pinch between his eyes whenever he talked to me. He had taken off his wire-rimmed glasses and was doing the pinch move right now.

  I searched for something, anything, I could appreciate about him. Okay, I inherited his sturdy constitution—that’s one. My mother and father were at opposite ends of the health spectrum, as they were on just about everything else. He never got sick; she never felt well. Valerie swallowed a daily array of pills, tinctures, homeopathic drops, vitamins, and minerals. Apa refused to take even one tiny aspirin that time he was almost crippled with pain from a bad toothache. He said he didn’t want to miss out on any potential suffering. I know he’s a Buddhist monk, but come on, what kind of misguided, masochistic person . . .

  Uh-oh. There went the appreciation.

  My father put his glasses back on and met my eyes.

  Here we go, I thought.

  He smiled at me, a broad, embracing smile.

  It was all I could do to keep my jaw from dropping open like a trap door.

  “So,” he said. “Lama Nawang tells me you were superb as a debating partner. He wishes to continue working with you. Congratulations.”

  I said nothing. I wanted this moment to last.

  “He is a born leader, and he has taken a special interest in you.” My father shook his head slightly. “I’m not sure why,” he added, and just like that, the furrow was back, and we were on firm, familiar ground.

  “You will be returning to France in a few months,” he continued. “One would think you would make some effort, so that your precious time here could be spent in learning, instead of breaking rules. It seems you, too, are a born leader, only in the wrong direction.”

  He knows after all. Heat bloomed throughout my body. My mind fragmented in a thousand pieces and directions. How am I going to keep Yeshe and Lobsang out of this?

  My father cleared his throat. “I understand you have been interacting with a young Tibetan woman, instead of doing your duty in the kitchen. And today I hear you missed this morning’s work obligations entirely. Are these things true?”

  Relief flooded through my limbs. Instead of keeping my mouth firmly closed, though, I found myself focusing on a fresh indignation.

  “Who told you that?” I asked. As soon as the words flew out of my mouth I wanted to suck them back in.

  “Wrong question!” he roared, smacking his thigh with one hand.

  He was winding up for a rant, I could tell by the bulging vein in his right temple. I decided to confess to save us both time. I let my shoulders slump, my favorite posture of surrender. “Please forgive me,” I said.
“Yes. Both things are true.”

  My father peered at me through his spectacles. He wasn’t used to getting instant confessions out of me. He actually looked mildly disappointed, like I was failing to play my role correctly.

  I decided to lay it on even thicker. “I’m sorry. I was caught up in the moment and forgot my vows. I now see that I was wrong and . . .”

  He held up his hand. “All right. That’s enough, Tenzing. If I didn’t know better, I might think your apology genuine.” Ouch. One of my “long-standing deficiencies,” according to my father, was that I did not maintain sufficient remorse when I got caught breaking rules. He wasn’t wrong. Remorse seemed pretty useless to me. I mean, once something already happened, why feel good or bad about it? I prepared for the familiar onslaught of my shortcomings as a son: “No matter how hard I try to teach you the right way to be, your essential unworthiness, combined with the persistent negative influences of your mother, defeat my every effort,” and so forth.

  Maybe he was as tired of the speech as I was. He reached for his leather-bound book of punishments. “You will forgo afternoon tea today, as well as tomorrow.” He entered the decree and closed the book firmly. I stood up and bowed. My father just offered a final flick of the eyes.

  I stood outside the front entrance, chewing on a wad of irritation. I should have felt relief that my greater crime remained undetected, but my mind had instead made a beeline into blame. I was already starving, having missed breakfast, and now probably lunch as well. The more I thought about it, the more contorted I felt. I had planned on heading back to Lama Sonam’s cottage, but I did a U-turn and aimed for the kitchen instead. I was already in trouble, so why not blow off my tutoring session, too? I could probably cadge something to eat and maybe enjoy another Pema-sighting, as well.

  Lama Dorje scowled when I walked into the kitchen—nothing new there. He said, “Why you here now?”

  “Lama Sonam is doing something else,” I said, trying on a useful new communication tool I’d recently discovered, called “lying and telling the truth at the same time.” He grunted and pointed toward a pile of utensils that needed to be washed.

  I checked around. Pema and Dawa were nowhere to be seen.

  But the kitchen was humming like a hive. Obviously more lamas had been added to the usual crew, in preparation for the prayer hall ceremony. There was an assembly line for creating three different categories of sacrificial cakes, offering gtormas, food gtormas, and deity gtormas. One row of monks was kneading barley flour, butter, and water into dough; another group was adding various ingredients to the dough, depending on the type of cake. A third line formed the dough into various conical, heart, or triangular shapes to be baked, glazed, and decorated into wrathful or peaceful offerings.

  I stared. Back in the cooling area stood our oldest lama, way older than Old Lama Tupten, even. Lama Jamyang was bent like a branch, and his arms and scalp were spotted with age. But he was known to be a wizard with his hands. A cluster of young novices stood in a semicircle watching, eyes fixed, as he dipped his hands in a vat of ice water to press and shape a block of butter on a wooden frame, and used a wooden sculpting tool to delicately scallop circular designs into the tall sculpture.

  I attacked the pile of utensils, scouring the irritation out of my body. Lama Dorje actually gave me a slight eyebrow-raise of approval from his perch, as if I were finally achieving the dishwashing potential he’d always suspected I had.

  Another gold star. Two for two, today, Tenzing. Lama Nawang for sure was rubbing off on me.

  Then Lama Dorje stepped out for his snuff break, and the forces of unconsciousness rolled right over me. I dried my hands and did a quick ransack, stuffing down two big barley crackers in rapid succession, followed by a scrawny last-season apple and a handful of chickpeas. By the time Lama Dorje returned from his sneeze-and-hock break, my snack-and-swallow binge had landed in my gut like a bucket of rocks. I’d gotten so deep into my pout about not getting afternoon tea that I’d stuffed myself to get even. Who was the stupid one now? I had to get out of there.

  I brushed past Lama Dorje. “Sorry,” I muttered. But I wasn’t.

  I found Lama Sonam running his finger along a line of text. “I’m sorry,” I said, for the third time today. This time, I meant it. “I’m very late.”

  He gestured for me to sit. “I hope your punishment was not too severe,” he said.

  “No tea for two days,” I said, trying to be nonchalant.

  “From the tone of your voice, you are sipping on bitter tea even now,” he said.

  Lama Sonam was a master at picking up body language and tone of voice. There was no use pretending anything.

  “You’re right,” I said. “And there’s nothing I can do about it.” I should have known better than to say something like that. Complaint was like catnip to Lama Sonam.

  “It’s not in the doing,” he smiled, “it’s in the being. Just feel the bitterness and claim it as your own.”

  I said nothing. Felt nothing but resistance.

  “Where did it come from, this bitterness?” he said after a moment.

  Okay, that one I could answer easily. “It came from talking to my father.”

  “Ah,” he said.

  “I went into his office feeling okay and came out feeling mad. It never fails.”

  “Ah,” he said again, “so you are absolutely certain the source of your anger is your father? That he is to blame?”

  Translation? I was on the wrong track.

  He smiled. “If I had been in the room with you and your father, would I, too, have felt bitter?”

  I went mute, every part of me rebelling, but I knew from experience there was no getting or going anywhere else until I responded. Finally I said, “No. You probably would not have felt bitter.”

  Dread awakened deep in my gut, as if my body knew where this conversation was going even before my head did. Lama Sonam spoke directly to it.

  “Your stomach is already telling you, the source of bitterness must actually not be your father—otherwise I would have felt it, too. As the Buddha teaches, you must look within yourself for the cause.”

  Now a gust of heat swept upward, from my chest to my jaws.

  Lama Sonam’s voice was gentle. “Breathe. Just breathe.” I realized I was, in fact, holding hostage whatever tiny amount of oxygen there was. I took a deep inhale, all the way down to my pelvis.

  Descending into murk. My father, yelling. My mother, drinking.

  My throat constricted. I felt like I was gagging.

  “Breathe,” Lama Sonam said again. “Here, with me.”

  He put one hand over his heart. He leaned forward and rested his other hand lightly on my chest. He took easy, relaxed breaths, all the way in and all the way out. I matched his slow pace. We sat together in silence, taking one long, slow breath after another. It felt so good to be connected to another human being.

  Angry stomps approached from outside.

  No. Please, not yet.

  Lama Dorje pushed inside the cottage, his face flushed red.

  Lama Sonam continued to breathe with me for several seconds while Lama Dorje stood, radiating anger. Finally Lama Sonam looked up at him. “Yes?”

  Dorje pointed at me. “He left kitchen chore half-done!”

  Lama Sonam said, “He will return after this. Isn’t that right, Lama Tenzing?”

  I nodded.

  “Please. Let us finish, Lama Dorje,” Lama Sonam said. Dorje worked his jaws before stalking away. A wave of gratitude for Lama Sonam swept through me, and I suddenly remembered my dream. I smiled.

  “What is it?” he said.

  “A dream,” I said. “You were in it.” I described it—the soaring and dropping vehicle. My monkey-hatted father. The arms.

  He listened intently. When I finished, he asked me to tell it again. This time he wrote on a piece of paper.

  He handed the paper to me. I read:

  Vehicle moving through space

  You ca
n steer it with your thoughts

  Your father

  You’re trying to get away from something

  You’re not sure where you’re going

  Pema and Dawa

  The more you let go the easier you fly

  Nawang

  Lama Sonam said, “According to the Buddha, all parts of the dream are parts of the dreamer.”

  “Okay. So . . .”

  “So, I want you to take each element and find out what part of you it is. Consider this your work today.”

  I stared at him.

  “Go ahead,” he said. “Say something like, ‘Part of me is a vehicle moving through space,’ or ‘My father is the part of me that . . .’”

  Lama Sonam registered my flinch. He smiled. “I didn’t say it would be easy.” He gestured for me to start.

  “Part of me is a vehicle moving through space,” I said. “Part of me can steer things with my thoughts.” A bolt of pure energy rushed up my body.

  “Whoa.”

  Lama Sonam nodded. “Yes, like that.”

  “My father is the part of me that . . . that . . .” I couldn’t think of any way I was like him.

  “Let things come—don’t censor.”

  I blurted out, “My father is the part of me that always thinks I’m doing something wrong.”

  Lama Sonam laughed, and I couldn’t help laughing with him. He again gestured for me to continue. I looked at the list.

  “Part of me is trying to get away from something, and part of me doesn’t know where I’m going.”