Enlightenment for Idiots

by Anne Cushman

  From: HeyBaby.com

  To: Amandala@yahoo.com

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  OUR HOTEL TURNED out to be a New England–themed bed-and-breakfast with a view of the Ganges. I sat at a table with a checked, waxy tablecloth, pulled a cloth napkin out of a carved maple leaf ring, and ate French toast slathered with maple syrup. Just outside the window, I could see the silver curve of the river and an intermittent stream of traffic: a herd of water buffalo lumbering to the banks to drink; pilgrims with six-foot staffs on their shoulders, weighted at both ends with bundles of clothes and cookwear; sadhus with pitchfork-sized tridents.

  “Merry Christmas!” said the waiter, cheerfully, as he poured us coffee. Oh, right. I had forgotten. Tomorrow was Christmas Eve. I turned to Devi Das. “Remind me to call my mother.”

  “Are you going to tell her your big news?”

  “Not yet. I can’t face her reaction. Besides, I don’t want to wreck her holiday.” I pushed the thought away and looked out the window again. A beggar sat on the steps below next to a shiny motorcycle. A goat nibbled the marigold garlands off a Shiva shrine under a tree.

  “How old is this place, anyway?”

  “Varanasi is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on earth.” Devi Das stirred a packet of creamer into his coffee. “It was already ancient when the Buddha visited here, twenty-five hundred years ago. It’s even older than Athens or Rome.”

  “Yeah, but in Athens there aren’t Greek warriors walking by in loincloths with olive leaves in their hair. There aren’t priests at the Parthenon still sacrificing goats to Athena and Zeus.”

  “Too bad. We’d go there immediately.”

  Upstairs, the shower in our room was astonishingly hot; on the inside of the bathroom door hung matching robes in red plaid flannel. Devi Das and I flopped down side by side on a queen-sized bed covered with a flannel comforter printed with snowmen and sleds. Don’t worry about me, Mom; I’m spending Christmas in an L.L. Bean catalog! I picked up a hardcover book from the bedside table: Banaras, City of Light, by Diana Eck. Perfect. The real city of light was too intense, too overwhelming. All I wanted was to pull the curtains, get under the covers, and pretend I was in Vermont on a snowy day, reading about India. I skimmed the first page.

  Long flights of stone steps called ghats, reaching like roots into the river, bring thousands of worshippers down to the river to bathe at dawn. In the narrow lanes at the top of these steps moves the unceasing earthly drama of life and death, which Hindus call samsara. But here, from the perspective of the river, there is a vision of transcendence and liberation, which Hindus call moksha.

  I slid deeper under the covers and closed my eyes. This was Shiva’s hometown; I could feel its wild, primal energy. What was I doing, pregnant so far away from everything safe and familiar? I saw myself scurrying through the crowded, narrow lanes of my life, buildings pressing in on all sides. I was lost in the alleys of samsara. People waved at me from overhanging balconies: Mom. Maxine. Lori. Tom. Did a vision of liberation really wait for me in the river? How could I find my way down there?

  I AM PART of a funeral procession. I am beating on a drum. My belly is swollen huge: shouldn’t I be going to the hospital to give birth? Why am I marching to the burning grounds instead? In front of me sways the bamboo platform bearing the corpse. Everyone around me is weeping. “Ram Nam Satya He,” I chant. “The name of God is truth.” But who has died? Suddenly, the corpse sits up, peeling back its yellow shroud, and looks at me. Its face is pale, its head is shaved. “Hey, Amanda,” the corpse says. “Did you say something about truth?” It is Matt.

  I OPENED MY EYES, drenched in sweat. How long had I been asleep? Dim light filtered through the curtains—was it afternoon, or the next morning? Next to me, Devi Das was snoring—a low bubble with a whistle in the middle, like a malfunctioning teakettle. I got out of bed, pulled on my clothes, and headed to the guest computer I’d spotted just off the dining room. I logged on with a curious sense of inevitability, as if living out a dream whose conclusion I already knew.

  From: offthematt@gmail.com

  To: Amandala@yahoo.com

  Subject: Don’t delete me

  Amanda, I know it hasn’t been a year yet. But this is too good a chance to pass up. I’m going to be in India this week, in Bodh Gaya. Just passing through for a few days on my way to Thailand. Are you going to be anywhere near there? If so maybe we could meet up. I miss you. Matt.

  “SO WHAT DO you think I should do?” I asked Devi Das. “Should I see him?”

  It was dawn the next morning. Devi Das and I were sitting in the back of a wooden rowboat, being paddled up the Ganges by a white-bearded boatman wrapped in a brown woolen shawl. He looked like a boatman in a children’s storybook, the kind who would grant you three wishes if you answered his riddles correctly. But I was the one who was asking the riddles.

  “Whatever you want to do, we will support,” said Devi Das. “But you should know that we’re just a few hours by train from Bodh Gaya. We could go there tomorrow, if that’s what you want.”

  “I don’t know what I want.” I dropped my hand over the edge of the boat, trailing it in the water, then jerked it back. Raw sewage, dead bodies, nuclear waste. I watched a clump of marigolds and coconut husks float by on the scummy surface, an offering to Shiva. “He’s the father of my baby. Maybe I should at least let him know that the baby exists.”

  “That is true.”

  “On the other hand, whenever I see him, my whole life falls apart.”

  “That is true, too.”

  The river was wide and gently curved. Along the banks, a jumble of buildings brooded in the pale dawn light, a muddle of past and present: decaying temples to Shiva and Kali, glass-fronted luxury hotels, an abandoned maharaja’s palace with a tree growing out of its roof. Temple bells clanged. Naked sadhus bent over glowing fires in riverside tents. “They’re naga babas, who never wear clothes. They’re burning the ash to smear on their bodies to keep them warm,” Devi Das told me.

  As the sun hit the water, the buildings lit up pale gold. We floated past three sadhus chanting mantras, in up to their necks, their eyes rolled back in ecstasy; then past two fat-bellied men perched on rocks, lathering their armpits with bars of soap.

  “Bathing in Mother Ganges at Varanasi washes away seven generations of bad karma,” Devi Das said.

  I peered at the scummy water again. “Suppose I just dip my fingers in? Will that buy me one generation?”

  “Don’t get caught in appearances. Think holy, not E. coli.”

  We floated past a man sitting on the prow of a fishing boat, mending his nets. Women beat wet laundry on rocks. A sadhu in an orange loincloth standing outside his tent answered a ringing cell phone. A group of girls squatted on the banks, brushing their teeth with twigs and swishing palmfuls of river water into their mouths.

  “I can’t believe they’re brushing their teeth in that water.”

  Devi Das nodded. “In America, we are used to maintaining the illusion that drinking is entirely separate from pissing, that life is entirely separate from death. It’s hard to get used to seeing them so close together.”

  Our boatman paddled downstream, toward a ghat where fires glowed red and plumes of smoke billowed. The acrid smell of smoke hit my nose, along with a darker, thicker stench that turned my stomach. As we drew closer, I saw that bamboo racks were stacked casually along the steps, each one bearing a silk-wrapped corpse. I closed my eyes for a moment, dizzy and disoriented. We were rowing back a thousand years, and into the underworld. I’d booked a hotel room with a balcony overlooking the portal to Hades.

  “In most places in India, the burning grounds are viewed a
s unclean, so they are outside the city limits,” Devi Das explained. “But here in Varanasi, death is sacred. It’s invited right into the heart of the city like an honored guest.” I opened my eyes, expecting our boatman to row on past. But instead he pulled in closer. Other boats jostled near us, crammed with tourists: German, Japanese, Italian, British, French. Five or six fires blazed, some roaring, some dying out. On the pyre closest to us, not yet lit, lay a body draped in silk and garlanded with red hibiscus flowers. A family circled it: an old man in a dhoti, a little boy in a red sweatshirt, two middle-aged men in Western suits. A couple of scrawny dogs sprawled casually in the dirt nearby. A goat nosed by the water, eating discarded hibiscus garlands. One of the men was carrying a flaming bundle of twigs. He bent and lit the pyre, and a cloud of sharp-smelling smoke billowed up.

  “They light the fire from a flame that’s been burning for three thousand years,” Devi Das said. “After the body burns, they throw the ashes in the river, along with some of the big bones that don’t burn all the way. You know, the pelvis. The rib cage.”

  The smoke stank of burning hair. Devi Das’s words seemed to be coming from a long way away.

  “They don’t burn children, though. Or pregnant women. They just tie stones around their bodies and sink them in the middle of the river.”

  I put my hands on my belly. I felt as if I were about to faint. The veil between dream and waking, unconscious and conscious, was dissolving. Gods and demons were everywhere. How many hundreds of thousands of bodies had burned in this spot?

  The men piled more wood on the fire. I stared at the burning body. Some mother had carried that dead man inside her as a baby. Did he have children? A woman who loved him more than life itself? What was I doing, watching someone else’s heartbreak as if it were a tourist attraction?

  “Our brother wanted to be cremated.” Devi Das didn’t look at me.

  “We’re sure of it. But our parents wanted him buried in the family plot. So when we first came here, five years ago, we brought a picture of him, and his old teddy bear. We burned them on the banks of the Ganges and scattered the ashes in the river.”

  I put my arm around him, not sure if I was comforting him or begging for comfort myself. His body felt brittle as kindling. But it was something to hold onto. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Amanda. We don’t want to tell you how to live your life. But when we hear you talk about Matt, we remember something we once heard the Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh say. ‘When you quarrel with your beloved, stop and look in his or her eyes. And then picture yourself and your beloved, one hundred years from now. Then I think you will know what to do.’”

  I didn’t say anything. The fire had engulfed the body. I could hear fat sizzle, joints pop. Two sadhus sat on the steps above, playing cards. Next to them, a teenage girl in a flowered sari sang bhajans to the syncopated beat of her silver handbells.

  I looked down at the river lapping at my feet. A blob of feces floated past in a swirl of marigold petals and cigarette butts. Was this holy water? A cesspool? Both? If there was anything I was learning from India, it was this: Nothing is the way it appears on the surface.

  In the pit of my belly, just below my belly button, I felt a flutter. It was slight but unmistakable, like the flapping of butterfly wings. It felt as if I were being caressed from the inside.

  “Hey, Devi Das,” I whispered. “Guess who I just felt?”

  Dancer Pose

  (Natarajasana)

  Stand on your right leg. Bend your left knee, reach your left hand behind you, and clasp your left foot. Draw the foot out behind you as you arch in a deep backbend. Stretch your right arm out in front of you, graceful as a ballerina on the lid of a child’s jewelry box. Feel how balance demands that you waver and catch yourself, over and over again.

  Nataraja is the dancing Shiva, the god of destruction. He dances in a ring of fire with a serpent twining around his waist, trampling your ego under his feet. He rips away everything you ever dreamed you could count on. If you let go of your foot and tumbled, what new life might be born among your scattered bones?

  Your worst enemy cannot harm you as much as your own thoughts, unguarded. But once mastered, no one can help you as much, not even your father or your mother.

  —The Buddha, Dhammapada, ca. 500 BC

  CHAPTER 15

  THE MORNING AFTER Devi Das and I arrived in Bodh Gaya, I stood in the courtyard of the Mahabodhi Temple, just footsteps away from the spot where the Buddha attained supreme enlightenment while meditating under a tree, and pondered an ancient Zen koan: What is the best way to tell your cheating ex-boyfriend, who doesn’t want kids, that you’re pregnant with his baby?

  It was a brilliant, chilly December morning. The temple loomed in front of us, a sandstone pyramid with spires reaching toward a cloudless sky. The courtyard was swirling with Buddhist monks and nuns, the wind whipping their robes around them: black-robed Japanese, maroon-robed Tibetans, saffron-robed Sri Lankans and Thais, gray-robed Vietnamese and Koreans.

  “So what time are you meeting him?” Devi Das asked.

  “Not until noon.” I watched two Tibetan monks pass in front of me. Every few steps they threw themselves on the ground in prostration, their elbows protected with pads against the force of their devotion.

  “More than two hours! So we have plenty of time to meditate under the Bodhi Tree.”

  “Or to change our minds and run for the train.”

  “So much transformation can take place in a couple of hours! Look at what happened to the Buddha.”

  “Yeah, well, the Buddha didn’t have a lover to distract him.”

  “Didn’t Mara, the Lord of Delusion, send fleets of beautiful women to tempt him?”

  “Were any of them pregnant with his babies? That might have helped.” My feet were throbbing and swollen. I sat down on a stone bench facing the temple and began to massage them through my sandals. Wonderful. Even my feet are getting fat. What’s next? My nose? Under a nearby tree, a Tibetan monk was doing prostrations on a polished board, with a plastic water bottle next to him. I pulled my notebook out of my daypack and flipped through my scribbled entry from that morning.

  * * *

  Enlightenment for Idiots: Sample Chapter Draft

  If there’s one place a seeker should visit in India, it’s got to be Bodh Gaya, the site of the Buddha’s enlightenment! 2500 years ago, a few years after leaving his wife, his family, and his princedom to study with the greatest yogis of India, the wandering ascetic Siddhartha Gautama moved into a cave in the hills on the outskirt of this little town, and spent a few years torturing and starving himself in an attempt to beat his body into submission (for a taste of something similar, you might drop in on certain yoga studios in Manhattan). Finally, on the verge of death, he decided that self-mortification was not the way to enlightenment. He left his cave, and disgusted his fellow ascetic yogis by accepting a bowl of rice from a village girl. Then he sat down under a pipal tree on a cushion made of grass, vowing not to get up until he broke free of the chains of delusion and attachment that bound his mind. The next morning at dawn, he succeeded, and became the Buddha, or “Awakened One.”

  Today, pilgrims come from all over the world to visit the site of the Buddha’s triumph, where an ancient pipal—now known as the Bodhi Tree, or tree of awakening—still marks the spot where he sat. Some come seeking relief from their own personal suffering

  2,500 years later, the human condition is still

  Matt, I have some wonderful news

  Matt, I know this isn’t exactly what you want, but I hope you’ll

  [WHOLE SHEET TORN OUT, CRUMPLED UP, THEN SMOOTHED OUT AND STUCK BACK IN NOTEBOOK WITH DAB OF CHEWING GUM.]

  * * *

  I CLOSED MY notebook with a snap. Two Tibetan boys in maroon robes ran by, holding plastic airplanes and making motor noises with their mouths. “Look at those kids. They can’t be more than eight years old. How can they be monks already?”

  “For Tibeta
n families, it’s common to send one child to the monastery to pray for the whole family.” Devi Das sat down on the bench next to me. “Sometimes a child is even recognized at birth as an incarnation of a high lama.”

  “Wow. I wonder how they can tell?” I pictured a posse of lamas arriving at my door in San Francisco: Amanda, we have good news! Your child is the next Dalai Lama! I could pack him off to a monastery and get back to hooking up with guys in yoga class. I wouldn’t have to worry about getting him into preschool. He’d visit me on vacations and I’d take him to the park. He’d be the only kid on the monkey bars in robes. I looked at the young monks again. Did they ever cry for their mothers at night? Did their mothers ever cry for them?

  We walked toward the temple, pausing outside its massive walls. I looked up at a frieze of Buddhas and saints, garlanded with marigolds, butter lamps flickering on a ledge below them. Their serene faces gazed back at me. I could practically see them shaking their heads in despair. The temple, I’d read, had been abandoned for centuries when Buddhism died out in India—swallowed in forest, buried in silt. When British archaelogists had stumbled on it in the nineteenth century, local farmers were using it as a place to keep pigs.

  We walked around the end of the temple and there—suddenly, unmistakably—was the Bodhi Tree. I had been wanting to come here ever since Matt showed me one of its leaves, the night we first slept together. Its massive, papery white trunk was surrounded by a stone fence with a locked iron gate. Over the fence spread a canopy of delicate, heart-shaped green leaves. Seated in the courtyard below, several dozen Tibetan monks chanted in a sonorous rumble, punctuated by the clang of cymbals and the steady beat of a drum. A pack of Sri Lankan women recited devotional texts in a high, nasal singsong.