I stared at Gina, trying to make sense of this.
“Let me get my camera.” Gina ran back to the car for her photo gear.
There was no path up the cliffside so we had to climb cautiously, slowly, giving Kencho time to explain what he considered to be a few key points.
“The goddess can manifest herself in many forms. She has chosen to manifest as a snake. This is very powerful.”
We topped out on a ledge and he pointed to indicate that we needed to walk toward a large flat rock the size of a dinner table.
“That is where she lives. Under that rock.”
He called us in for a huddle when we were just a few steps away from the rock.
“You must be very careful. Show respect. Do not upset the goddess.”
Never having met a goddess before, I had no idea how to show respect.
“I will go first,” Kencho offered, sensing my uncertainty.
He crept forward a few feet and, reverently I suppose, peeked under the rock.
I knew how this would unfold. He would come back and tell us that the goddess was gone, out for an early dinner or some such thing. Nothing was there, nothing could be there, and he would provide an excuse.
He quietly got up and walked back to us.
“She is there.”
That was unexpected. “Okay, then. Let’s go see a goddess,” Gina said.
She and I walked together up to the stone, bent over, and peered in.
Just a few inches away from us, uncoiled and indifferent, was one of the smallest snakes I have ever seen. It was about a quarter inch thick, maybe eight inches long at the most.
We stood up and looked back at Kencho.
“This little snake, is that the goddess?” I asked. Maybe this was a newborn and the goddess was nearby, thick and threatening, hunting for some food.
“Yes. Show respect.”
I showed respect by not bursting out laughing. As Gina snapped a couple pictures, I looked over the edge and down at the ravine. For the next half year dump trucks would be driving up to the edge, unloading dirt, filling in the hole inch by inch. All this because of a snake no bigger than a pencil.
“Gina, take a picture of the ravine, would you? No one is going to believe this story.”
“We are in a world of darkness, and people are sleeping through it,” Lama Kinle intones.
The words come slowly, thoughtfully. He isn’t reciting from a book; he is carefully formulating his thoughts. He has never met with Westerners before and he wants to make sure that he conveys his philosophy accurately.
He pauses, picks up a bowl, and spits in the juicy residue of the betel nut that he is chewing. As Kencho translates the words, the Lama looks back up at us and nods, smiling.
He’s a fiend for the nut. At least twice over the last two hours he’s reached into the pocket of his robes to remove his kit. He unscrews a small tin, picks out a betel nut, then extracts a bright green leaf. He drops the nut into the leaf, wads it up, and then pops it into his mouth. All that chewing has stained his teeth a deep shade of red.
We arrived in Dhorika the night before. The town is just a few miles from the border of Tibet, deep in the Himalayas. There is no electricity, no running water. We are the first Westerners to come here and we are a marvel to this farming village of about twenty houses and a hundred inquisitive eyes.
The Bhutanese have welcomed us like family, despite the fact that we couldn’t be more different. I’m an average height in America, but here, at just over six feet, I tower above the locals. Gina loves it; for the first time she is in a world where even the tallest people are at her eye level.
In this first discussion with the Lama, he is laying out some of the basics.
First, Buddhism is not a religion. The easiest way to demonstrate its nonreligious quality is to contrast it to Christianity’s Lord’s Prayer:
Lord’s Prayer
Buddhism
Our Father
does not promote a God, Buddha was a man
Who art in Heaven
does not propose a heaven or a hell
Hallowed be Thy Name
there is no supplication
Thy Kingdom come
there is no Armageddon
Thy will be done …
there is no plan for the universe
An immediate question, then, is: if Buddhism doesn’t promote a God, then why do the Bhutanese believe in a Snake Goddess?
Kinle explains that while Buddhism doesn’t promote a God, it doesn’t disallow one. It doesn’t propose a heaven or a hell, but you are free to believe in them. There is no Judgment Day, but you can count down to one if you so choose.
As a result, Buddhism can be pasted on top of any manner of religious belief. And it has been, particularly here in Bhutan. There is the Snake Goddess, of course. But there’s more. In the village of Dhorika, where we are staying, we’ve seen small shrines in the villagers’ homes honoring a Tree God and a Wind God.
So if it isn’t a religion, then what is it? At its core, Buddhism is a code of conduct, a path toward disciplined thinking and right action. And that, if I can ignore the pain in my back from sitting in a half lotus position for two hours, is what Lama Kinle is trying to get us to understand.
“Suffering comes from a preoccupation with yourself; happiness comes from thinking about others,” Kinle explains. A root cause of disappointment in life, he clarifies, is desire. The desire for material goods gets the Lama’s ire up. He urges us to master our desires, not give in to the interest in acquiring more and more goods. “Such craving will never be satisfied.”
He is not delivering a disinterested lecture. Inexplicably he seems to have taken a personal interest in us. As the words are translated he always nods, and smiles, encouraging us on to the next insight.
There is also an urgency, an insistence. He wants us to—he seems to need us to—take his philosophy to heart. He behaves as if he knows us, understands our lives, and is aware of precisely how we must behave to avoid some calamity in the future.
Simplicity, generosity, compassion, these are at the core of right conduct. He sums up the day’s lessons with this: “Work for the benefit of others.”
On the second day, two monks again lead us to the monastery’s inner sanctum, the Lama’s personal prayer room. As before, Kinle sits in lotus position on a cushion, the rising sun sending shafts of light through slits in the wooden shutters.
Today, he says, we will focus on the need for clear thinking, for reasoned action. “Do not believe because it is written in a book. Do not believe because it has been handed down for generations. If after observation and analysis, if it agrees with reason and can benefit one and all, then accept it and live up to it.”
He goes on to explain the fundamentals of effective meditation. I had always thought of meditation as an emptying of the mind. Perhaps for some people, that is precisely what it is. But not for Kinle. He describes his meditation as an active process, deep rhythmic breaths setting the pace, the mind then syncing up and carrying out reflection. He describes the colors he sees and sounds that he hears while meditating. His senses are attentive. He doesn’t try to withdraw his body into a sensory deprivation tank.
As he nears the end of the day, he warns us of possible “shadows.” Because of the need to translate, he worries that phrases may be misinterpreted, that nuances will be lost. Or, perhaps, we will mistakenly try to reinterpret things to match our own needs or points of view and the true lesson will be lost, the critical point hidden from view, masked by a shadow.
“Do you understand his concern about the shadows?” Kencho asks.
“Yes.” Gina and I both nod.
“Then there is one more point he wants to make today and we must be absolutely sure that there are no shadows. You must understand it clearly.”
We are riveted as the Lama whispers the final thought of the day into Kencho’s ear. Kencho nods at the Lama, turns back to us, and provides this translation: “If y
ou get to the end of your life and you have regrets that you could have done better, then you blew it.”
On our final afternoon with Kinle, he clarifies who he isn’t: “I am not a reincarnate Lama.”
However, he explains, he does have “lineage.” By that he means he knows who his teacher was, and the teacher before him, and before him, and so on. His lineage is documented on scrolls and, he says, he can trace his back to Vajradhara.
I ask Kencho to write the name down in the journal I’ve been keeping. Weeks later, when we’ve left the country and I get access to a computer, I search the name to see if there is any listing. I find that Vajradhara is the name given to the enlightened Buddha, the ordinary man who achieved the ultimate Buddhist state of mind: personal desirelessness.
It may sound boastful that Kinle claimed to trace his lineage back to the Buddha. It might seem hypocritical given that for three days he’d been recommending humility as a path to right action. But this was no boast, just the reverse. He wanted to make it clear to us that he had not achieved enlightenment and that his own views would therefore be limited. The insights he was delivering were the wisdom of others, others who have listened and reflected and passed them along for the last 2,500 years.
With that final point made, his source of insights clarified, we stand up out of the knee-numbing half lotus position and shake out our legs.
We had experienced Bhutan in precisely the way I had hoped. The village had welcomed us. The Lama had patiently spoken to us, answering every question. He gave us three days of his time and then would work late into the night to complete the necessary chores of the monastery. And, most importantly, somehow, we had bypassed the government restriction on travel and come to this remote village that Westerners had never even seen before.
“Lama Kinle, thank you so much,” Gina said bowing with respect, speaking for the both of us.
Kinle laughed as if it were a joke. Then he and Kencho exchanged more whispers.
“Of course, he wishes to thank you,” Kencho explained as Kinle grinned broadly.
“Why would he thank us?”
Kencho looked shocked, genuinely surprised. The Lama noticed the expression and the two exchanged more words. Kencho then turned to us with a question of his own.
“Don’t you know?” Kencho asked.
“Know what?” I responded.
“The vision. The Lama had a vision the day you contacted me.”
A vision?
“You were his parents in his former life,” explained Kencho.
I was too baffled to respond. Once again, an unlikely event in my life had occurred halfway around the world. And this time, it presented a head-on collision with my worldview.
“So we aren’t just married in this life,” Gina said, smiling at me. “He says we were married in a past life. Sounds like destiny to me.”
So much of what Kinle said had resonated with me. I could relate to his comments on nonmaterialism: I didn’t have a BlackBerry, I was nearly thirty before I had a television, my closet was spare.
I appreciated the meditative path that he preached, a path away from my own self-absorption. But now, with his final words, he had dropped the r-bomb: reincarnation.
I had my fill of reincarnation on the ridgeline of Everest, while staring down at Ang Nima. Now it was back. But unlike Everest where it presented a problem, here it presented an opportunity.
The reason we were welcomed to Bhutan, allowed to travel to this remote village where Westerners had never been, and spend three days in personal audience with the Lama was because he thought I was his father and Gina his mother in his previous life.
The Lama’s belief had brought me here, and I welcomed that. I had no reason to complain or criticize, only thank him.
He never had the opportunity to immerse himself in science the way I had, but he had the same desire to explain his world and he was doing it in the only way he knew how, in a way that provided comfort, explanation, and meaning. I couldn’t fault that. Even if I couldn’t accept his beliefs, I could tolerate them.
Perhaps, I even envied them. I envied the beliefs of a man who preached desirelessness.
That’s right: envy. His narrative of the world was filled with texture and warmth and humor; my scientific worldview was a sterile narrative, often reduced to colorless noninteracting components. But that view of mine was about to undergo a change, starting on a rooftop in Delhi.
There are moments when curiosity gets the better of scientists, and that can be when they produce the best work of their lives. In one case, a group of scientists decided to train the eye of the Hubble Space Telescope on an empty region of space. The region they focused on was devoid of anything known to man; it was simply an empty black void. They did it because they were curious, and the influential scientists who could make it happen were tolerant. Still, it seemed like an utter waste of time—what could be learned from looking at nothing?
For ten straight days the telescope stared intently at that blank region of space, despite the criticisms of scientists who wanted to use the scope for productive purposes. On that last day, the astronomers ended the experiment and processed the photograph. What they saw emerge in that frame was astounding, one of the single most revealing photographs ever taken.
Rather than a stark black frame, the photograph instead revealed galaxies, tens of thousands of them, where none had been expected. And each of those galaxies in turn had perhaps tens of thousands of solar systems each filled with its own sun, planets, and atmospheres. It was a startling revelation; there was more out there in the universe than scientists had ever imagined.
Any belief that our solar system occupied a unique place in the universe was shattered the moment that frame came into focus. Reveling in the discovery, the astronomers gave the photograph a wonderfully appropriate name: Deep Field.
I felt that revelatory moment myself. I felt it the day we left Bhutan and arrived in Delhi.
I had been to Delhi before, but I had never seen it the way I did that day, a result, I believe, of the newfound perspective Lama Kinle had inspired in me. When I stood on the rooftop of a hotel we’d stayed in a half dozen times before in Paharganj, overlooking Old Delhi, I saw the human equivalent of Deep Field. So much became visible.
It was a wonderful rush on my senses. The sky was speckled purple and red with kites; the air filled with the aroma of curry. As the women walked along the streets their saris created vibrant streams of blue and orange. The merchants, shoulder to shoulder, peddled cloth, juice, a haircut. I felt the press and shuffle of the city even though I stood six floors above it.
Every square foot of the scene was alive with activity—no darkness, no voids. This wasn’t a sterile frame of noninteracting parts; this was vibrant, luminous humanity. I was immersed in the human Deep Field.
That is the full richness of the world. I could finally see it.
Our flight to Colombo, the former capital of the island nation of Sri Lanka, had a suspiciously light load. We’ve come here from Delhi so that I can surf in Arugam Bay and tick off another box on the To Do List.
As we walked down the aisle to our seats, I did a head count. There were a couple hundred seats; most of them were empty.
“There are only about twenty people on this plane,” I said to Gina.
“There’s no way they’re making money on this. They could have canceled this flight and rolled us onto the next one. Something’s not right.” Her words were prophetic.
Gina was a flight attendant for American Airlines and a perk is that for years we had been flying around the world at a discount. Our plans would always be loose, hopping available flights at the last minute, not always where we intended but always heading in the right direction. Being nonrevenue fliers, we were always the last to board, typically taking the two remaining seats on a crowded flight. Not this time.
We had anticipated that this would be a packed flight, but we walked up to the gate a half hour before the flight and they
had given us seats on the spot. No one was flying to Sri Lanka. When the plane landed, we learned why. Once again, we would be navigating a country that had local insurgents battling for autonomy.
The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, or Tamil Tigers, were a militia group formed in 1976 with the goal of establishing an independent state in the northeast region of Sri Lanka. Outnumbered and outgunned by the Sri Lanka military, they created a bloody tactic that has now become the signature attack of terrorist organizations around the globe: the suicide bomber. The Tamil Tigers developed vests packed with explosives, nails, screws, bearings, and bolts. Armed with a handheld detonator, the Tamil Tigers used the suicide vests with gruesome and destructive effect across Sri Lanka for decades.
When we had planned the trip out here, the conflict had subsided and a peace process was under way. The process was an effort in balancing the autonomy demands of the Tamil ethnic minority against the desire of the governing majority Sinhalese to have the guerrilla troops disarm.
Of course, there were other places I could have chosen to surf the Indian Ocean. But A-Bay has a reputation for excellent and reliable waves and the guerrilla situation seemed manageable. The civil war was being waged hundreds of miles north of A-Bay, safely distant. The peace process had produced a lull in conflict. Those were plenty of good reasons to pick Sri Lanka.
When our plane landed in Colombo we learned that the peace process had collapsed.
A few days earlier, the Tamil Tigers had bombed a fuel depot at the airport. The government was now saying it would abandon the peace effort and engage in full-scale war to defeat the Tamil Tigers. Being unplugged from the news for weeks, we had no idea any of this was going on. Until now. As we exited the plane, airport security began shutting down the lights on the landing strip.
I walked up to a military officer who was standing nearby. “Why is the airport shutting down so early?”
“We can’t guard the sky at night,” he explained. “Welcome to Sri Lanka.”
To the Last Breath Page 19
