A Step Away from Paradise: A Tibetan Lama's Extraordinary Journey to a Land of Immortality

by Thomas Shor

  “A roamer, a rover, the whole world over,

  As happy as me, you’ll seldom see.

  At the Lord’s own boards each day I dine,

  From the Bearing Straits to Palestine.

  Each mile, a smile, from a man’s pure heart,

  Jump in that truck or bullock cart!

  This nook, that brook, will ring the bell,

  No need of dough, it’s God’s hotel.

  No pills, no bills, no therapy,

  Sun, air, and sea are ever free.

  There’s light and right in every code,

  And a heap of God on the open road.

  One shirt, no dough, was Christ’s motto,

  Then do the same: let heaven flow.

  A roamer, a rover, the whole world over,

  As happy as me, you’ll seldom see.”

  “Wonderful!” I exclaimed.

  He smiled.

  “What happened after that morning?” I asked, eager for more.

  “I continued down that dusty road, and then I went down another and another. I went through village after village and town after town. I was free. Giving up that last coin had set me free. And I was at peace.

  “I was filled to the brim, and the universe upheld me. Not that I didn’t lose what I’d gained that morning, not that I didn’t fall from those heights. Not that I wasn’t tested. I lived through incredible hardships. Nothing could sway me; I simply accepted whatever came my way.”

  His eyes took on a far away look. “I loved the very simple ones,” he said, “the ones with dancing love in their eyes and dirt on their hands. I joined them for a while, lived with them. It was so easy, so good. But only for a while, for no one was perfect. No one loved me. They loved me for themselves. Even the poor. Eventually the desire in them would surface and I would depart. I came to understand what the Bible says about Christ: he committed himself to no man because he knew what was in the heart of man.”

  First I had thought that Ed was one of those who couldn’t live up to society’s standards; I now knew it was society that couldn’t live up to his.

  “How long did you travel?” I asked.

  “About ten years,” he answered.

  “Without money? How did you eat?”

  “When you exchange food—or anything else—for money, you compromise both yourself and the person you’re dealing with. ‘I’ll give you this and no more if you give me that’: is that any way to live?

  “Christ said, ‘Love ye one another.’ Does money have anything to do with love, with the ideal? I was in search of Truth—at all costs. Though I didn’t really know what I was looking for, I had no choice but to live by the ideal. Anything less would have been a compromise. I had given up too much to compromise.”

  “But still,” I said, “how did you eat?”

  “Whatever I needed always came my way. Sometimes people gave me food. Sometimes I found it. Other times I had no food. The body craves food every day, but it isn’t necessary. I went days and sometimes weeks with little or no food. Once I lived on nothing but the leaves of the betel tree. They are rich in vitamin C. You don’t need money. You’re better off without it. Take the money out of your pocket and put yourself in the hands of the unknown.”

  “Perhaps in India you can travel like that,” I said. “There’s a tradition, isn’t there, of wandering holy men? But surely you couldn’t do that in the States.” I tried to picture him rambling past shopping malls, or on freeways, trying to catch a ride without a penny to his name, but always a police car came into the picture. Having no money in America is a crime.

  “I travel the same way everywhere I go,” he said, dismissing my question with a single unequivocal blow.

  I didn’t think he was lying, but it seemed fantastic. His story reminded me of a line from William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and I quoted it to him: “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.”

  Ed laughed. “I like that, though I wouldn’t say I’ve been excessive. I’ve merely done what I’ve had to. But Blake is right: how else are we to find wisdom?”

  “I’ve never been outside America and Europe,” I said, “though now that I’ve lived on Europe’s edge, I long to go farther. India—what another world altogether it must be.”

  Ed looked me straight in the eye. He took the toothpick from his mouth, and said, “I think you should come with me to India.”

  A rush surged through me, the type you might feel if someone opened an airplane’s hatch, revealing a mile of open space below. My stomach dropped. Immediately—as if ready made—fears welled up; they congealed and took form. One hears stories of people who go to India only to become so frightened by what they see that they jump on the next plane out. One hears about people who catch nasty diseases there, people who are never quite the same.

  But then there were those like Ed, whose lives India had transformed in some mysterious way. They were the ones I feared most, since something had happened to these people I couldn’t understand.

  Ed was still staring me in the eye, awaiting my response.

  “There are cheap flights from Athens,” he said. “That’s where I’m headed now. If we can get a flight to Bombay, I have friends there. When you’re a bit acclimated and your feet are back on the ground we could travel together, maybe to the south.”

  “Look,” I said, “I have to think it over.”

  “Yes,” he said, smiling, “you must consider it carefully.”

  “I need some air,” I said. “I need air to think this through.” I stood up. It was all so fast.

  Ed realized what a shock his sudden offer had caused me. He laughed. “Yes, you do that. Take your time.”

  I went to the boat’s stern and leaned over the rail and watched the sun sink into the sea. The sky was brushed with red. Italy was disappearing beneath the horizon. Seagulls rode gusts of wind behind the boat, gliding back and forth, first high against the fiery sky then dipping gracefully back to the ocean. They rode the air currents, making a passage across the sea to Greece. Did they know where this boat was leading them? Did they care? The gulls called to one another above the sounds of wind and wave. The sky took on deeper and deeper shades of red as the sun dipped beneath the horizon.

  I could weigh forever the pros and cons of going to India with a man I hardly knew. There was no telling what might happen. I might get sick far from a hospital. I might be robbed and find myself halfway around the world without a penny to my name. I thought of myriad potential dangers that might take my money, health, or sanity.

  But the birds! How did they know this boat wasn’t going to sail out to sea and keep going farther and farther away from land till they dropped from the effort to keep up? How did they know? They didn’t know, yet they flew out to sea behind the boat anyway, playing in the eddying wind, calling joyfully back and forth to one another as the fading light of the passing day engulfed them in darkness. My boat was leaving now. The next leg of the journey had been announced and I realized that I hadn’t any choice. It was no mere chance that our paths had crossed—Ed Spencer’s and mine. I knew I had to go with him.

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  Sample ~ The Monk and the Sly Chickpea

  Preface

  In this book I will tell the story of a journey I took in 1981, in my early twenties, to the Greek island of Corfu and to the stone monastery atop the island’s highest mountain, a weather-beaten bare stone peak jutting out of the sea. I stayed there for a time with the old monk who had lived alone there for forty years.

  As with all good things in life, journeys tend to be round, they circle round to their beginnings. This journey was no exception. One goes off, one comes home again, and then one reflects. This journey began and ended in Vermont. During the two years following my return, I spent most of my time writing about my experiences. I wrote the story through from the beginning to the end without stopping to revise or correct what I had written. The resulting manus
cript of over six hundred typed and hand-written pages was the first draft of the pages that follow.

  Both traveling and writing are bugs for which I have never found a cure. Before I had time to edit the manuscript and shape it for others to read, I was stricken again with the travel bug and set off on other travels. I left the manuscript with my sister, who lives in Washington DC, for safekeeping. When I returned from that journey, I wrote of other things, and quite got on with my life.

  It was some years later that I started thinking about that old manuscript. I didn’t necessarily want to work on it; I was merely curious. I only wanted to take a look. Like the Indian shopkeeper garnering customers off the street with the call, “Looking only, no buying,” I thought I could simply take a peek. So I called my sister and asked her to send it.

  My sister had been carefully guarding the manuscript all those years, and she was not keen to give it up to the US Postal Service. She reminded me that it was the only copy in existence and insisted on sending it by overnight express delivery.

  I lived at the time at the end of a very long driveway off a dirt road that couriers often have difficulty finding. So, just to be safe, I had my sister send the manuscript in care of a friend, Kate Jones.

  When I gave my sister the address, she said, “Kate Jones, what an unfortunate name.”

  I asked her what she meant.

  “It’s like Jane Doe,” she said.

  I assured her that Kate received overnight mail regularly and told her not to worry.

  A week later Kate had received no package for me, so I called my sister again.

  My sister lives a busy life. She apologized for forgetting to send the manuscript and promised again to send it right away. I must have only half believed her, for a good month went by and I hardly gave the manuscript a thought. Then it was her birthday and we were talking on the phone. I reminded her again, and this time she swore she would find the manuscript the moment she got off the phone and would send it the very next day.

  It must have been nearly a week later that I called her again. I was beginning to grow tired of her promises and told her so. But she stopped me. She had sent it. It should have arrived four days earlier. She commented again on my friend’s unfortunate name.

  I called FedEx, and they tracked the package. The driver claimed he’d been unable to locate Kate’s residence, so he’d done what he always did when he had difficulty locating someone in our area: he went to Sam’s Septic Service. Since Sam emptied every septic tank in town, he knew precisely where everyone lived.

  Sam told the driver that there was a K. Jones living just around the corner. He pointed out the apartment building.

  The Kate Jones I know is my neighbor; she lives on a farm, miles away from the village.

  But I knew the building Sam had referred to. It had long ago been nicknamed—by its residents, no less—the ‘Brown Slum.’ It is known for its transient and more down-and-out residents.

  So the news couldn’t have been worse. And as if that wasn’t enough, he’d delivered it not to the K. Jones who lived there, but to a man loitering in front of the building that claimed to know her. He’d signed his name ‘J. Miller.’

  I was horrified.

  I rushed down to the Brown Slum and started knocking on doors. The first door on which I knocked was opened by a man who worked the graveyard shift, and he was decidedly not happy to be awakened at nine-thirty in the morning. He said he had neither seen the package, nor had he heard of the man who’d signed for it, but he told me that indeed a woman named Jones did live in the building, though her name was not Kate, it was Kay. He pointed to the door across the hall. “She lives there,” he said.

  Kay Jones herself answered my knock. She had the pallid look of someone who hadn’t seen the sun in years. The homemade tattoos that ran up and down her arms had a decidedly jailhouse look. She was haggard and tired, a woman worn to the bone by life’s vicissitudes.

  I pictured this woman opening my package on the off chance that it contained something of value, discovering only pages and pages of my barely legible scribbling, certainly worthless to her, and hiding it under a bed, or throwing it out so as not to be caught having opened someone else’s mail.

  She stood with the door half open, her hand clutching the doorknob, blocking entrance to her apartment. I explained why I was there.

  “I never seen a package,” she said, eyeing me closely.

  I told her about J. Miller, who had signed for it.

  “I never heard of no J. Miller,” she said.

  I had to think fast. If I assumed that she was lying, then my best chance was to make her sympathetic to my cause. So I launched into a long plea, explaining how the missing package contained the only copy of a manuscript I had spent years writing, and how it had no worth to anyone but me. She relaxed a bit and stepped back from the door, allowing me to enter her apartment.

  Taking her into my confidence, I told her how I would understand if one of her neighbors had taken the package—just to see what was in it. I even said I might have done the same myself. I stressed that no questions would be asked. I even suggested that an anonymous phone call telling me the manuscript was sitting in a hall would suit me fine.

  All I wanted was to have the manuscript back.

  The entire time I was making my plea for help, I was moving around the room, trying to pick up some clue amidst piles of dirty clothes and overflowing bags of garbage. I was looking for the corner of a FedEx envelope, or a box of the right dimensions.

  At first she was rather cold. I was, after all, barging into her apartment and basically accusing her of stealing my mail.

  But how could anyone feel bad toward someone in my predicament?

  Soon she was looking worried for me, especially when I told her that if it was truly gone I’d probably go mad and start banging my head against the closest wall.

  What else could I say?

  It was the truth.

  Before the manuscript had been lost I was merely curious to see it. I had pictured myself flipping through the pages, cringing the whole while at my abuse of the English language, and perhaps recalling a few details of a journey that the years had swept from my mind.

  But when I first heard the manuscript had not been delivered, its stock had risen a notch. And as the situation became more hopeless, I had even begun to see myself working on it again. Now that it was probably gone forever, I felt the full tragedy of its loss.

  So I made a promise, a solemn vow. I vowed that if I could find the manuscript, I would complete it. I even believed the manuscript had become lost only to extract such a promise from me. I felt destiny at work.

  I left my name and phone number with Kay Jones. That was all I could do. She promised to call if she heard anything.

  Then I proceeded to knock on doors up and down the halls of the Brown Slum. At every door I repeated the entire story, left my phone number if they’d let me, and grew more desperate as the word gone rose like a lump in my throat.

  By the time I reached the last door, and delivered my story for the umpteenth time, this time to a middle-aged woman dressed in an old coffee-stained bathrobe, I was entirely discouraged and thoroughly depressed. Still I tried to remain upbeat.

  But it was no use. Halfway through my impassioned plea the phone rang. The woman answered it and started arguing with a man from a collection agency. He was threatening her with court and jail and worse if she didn’t come up with a certain sum in short order. “I have no money,” she said, “especially none to give you!” She argued desperately for a good ten minutes while I stood in the doorway. Finally I gave up.

  I went back outside and started walking away. None of the people to whom I’d made my plea seemed likely to go out of their way to help.

  I went over again what must have happened. Someone must have gotten their hands on the package, (most likely Kay Jones but there was no telling), and thrown it away.

  Then it hit me: if so, it would probably have e
nded up in the tenement’s dumpster.

  I went to the parking lot, lifted the dumpster’s lid, and was almost blown off my feet by the stench of death. Holding my nose, afraid of what I might find, I looked inside.

  There on top of dozens of plastic bags of trash were the remains of a slaughtered pig. Huge ball joints—the cartilage still white and glistening—leg bones, and whole sides of fat—from which, under happier circumstances, bacon would be cut—were all draped over the shiny black bags, slowly decaying beneath a thick cloud of flies that rose when I opened the lid, then settled again on their quarry.

  Holding both my breath and my nose, I looked beneath the carnage for something resembling a box of paper. But I saw no such box. I thought of ripping the bags open, but the festering pig flesh and the flies turned my stomach.

  I could not endure it.

  So I closed the dumpster and walked away, riling against the fate of having lost the manuscript at precisely the moment I realized its importance. I tried to get used to the fact that I would never see the manuscript again.

  I couldn’t.

  That dumpster was my only chance.

  I found a broken broom handle lying underneath a bush and returned to the scene of the carnage. I opened the dumpster again, held my breath, and started poking the bags of trash, ripping them open, and trying to see what lay beneath.

  I worked my way systematically through the dumpster, from one side to the other. When I reached the farthest corner and moved the very last bag of garbage I spied a plastic grocery bag tied shut around something the size of a ream of paper. Catching the handle with the stick, I moved the bag to the side. Then I held my breath, leaned deep into the dumpster, and snatched it out.

  I opened the bag and there it was, hundreds of typed and handwritten pages that I hadn’t seen in a decade. Someone had ripped open the box, taken the pages out, shuffled through them, and then stuffed the whole mess into the bag. Every single page was there.

  Having literally saved the manuscript from the jaws of death, I walked away from that dumpster clutching the plastic bag to my breast.