by Jaimal Yogis
At the center of town, attached to a monastery adorned with paintings of Buddhas birthing from lotus flowers, I soon came upon a row of red and gold cylindrical prayer wheels. Each wheel was inscribed with the Sanskrit mantra Om Mani Padme Hum. I had nowhere to be. So I found myself pacing, spinning the wheels, and reciting the sacred phrase.
In Sanskrit, mantra means “mind protection” because it keeps the untamed mind from slipping into heedlessness. But Om Mani Padme Hum is special. It’s an homage to Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion. Known as Guan Yin in China, Chenrezig in Tibet, Kannon in Japan, and Lokesvara in Cambodia, the bodhisattva is depicted as both male and female, God and Buddha, depending on which tradition you follow. But all these traditions agree that Avalokiteshvara is the embodiment of limitless compassion that runs through—even composes—reality like omniscient electricity. Tibetans often repeat the mantra 108 million times at a stretch, a task that takes several months and is believed to purify the chanter’s karma while accessing an infinite well of love in the heart.
“That compassion for all beings is what makes us achieve peerless happiness up to enlightenment,” wrote Lama Yeshe, “to be able to do perfect works for others.”
All beings have the potential to tap this compassion, the texts say, to awaken here and now. Our Buddha nature is said to be our most basic state, obscured only by our own hardened hearts and narrow thinking. But Tibetans are practical people. Not everyone has months to sit around chanting, which is why these prayer wheels come in handy.
At the core of each wheel stands a small wooden cylinder, or “life tree,” inscribed with thousands, even millions, of mantras. A single turning of the wheel is thought to shine millions of these sacred syllables out into the darkness—a sort of flashlight of grace for suffering beings scattered, many Buddhists say, through universes as numberless as sands of the Ganges.
As a college senior who had recently swapped a marine biology major for philosophy and religion (but was currently focused on a minor in journalism in hopes of one day working), I didn’t know if I believed that. But as I recited, paced, and spun the prayer wheels, I thought I felt some of the love. Perhaps it was the sleep deprivation, but these mountains seemed on their own space-time curve. Hours seemed to pass like minutes. And before long, the sky was becoming deep purple, then silver blue. Maroon-robed monks and nuns began bustling about the streets, buying cheese and vegetables, and I felt glad there were so few Indians about. Not that I had anything against Indians. I just loved one Indian far too much.
Sati—my girlfriend of three years with whom I’d first planned this trip—had left me for someone else just a month before the departure date. Currently Sati was a three-day train ride south in Bangalore. She was teaching poor village women about hygiene. But any flash of a young woman in a sari could make me think she’d returned, magically, for me. The perfect ending to our Bollywood film.
Sati’s parents had disliked me—at least as the guy their daughter was sleeping with. I suspected this was because I wasn’t Indian or Hindu. So it made things worse that the man Sati was trading me in for was both. It irked me even more that his name, Jyanth, sounded a lot like “giant.”
But it was also poetic justice. In the beginning of our three-year relationship, I’d broken Sati’s heart when I decided to go to the University of Hawaii to focus on the important things (surfing, surfing, more surfing) instead of staying in Berkeley, going to antiwar protests, and discussing Edward Said far more than is healthy.
Sati was fervent about fighting for the poor and oppressed, a quality that had helped me fall for her in the first place. But her focus on the external often clashed with my passion for the meditative—not to mention my obsession with spending all my nonmeditating free time chasing surf. Sometimes it felt as though we would forever be circling opposite ends of a yin-yang symbol.
Which was ironic. The only spiritual center my family had attended with any regularity was an ashram in the Sierra Nevada foothills founded by Yogananda, the man often credited with bringing yoga to the United States. With shiny-eyed vegans freshly back from pilgrimages along the Ganges, I remember singing “I am a bubble, make me the sea” over harmonium and tabla. My parents’ participation at the ashram waxed and waned through their divorce. But the feeling of the place—particularly that chant—ingrained itself in me. I grew up believing that enlightenment was individual consciousness merging with universal. A ripple experiencing itself as sea.
Sati’s parents, being Hindu, were raised with this perspective too. But they’d left India largely to make money. Her father’s idea of bliss seemed to be a whiskey and a seven-hour cricket match. Sati’s folks seemed to want less talk of inner peace and more of Sati’s future 401(k).
My parents, both from East Coast families, had turned to Indian mysticism for freedom from the rat race. Then they scrambled to find practical jobs when macrobiotic restaurants and ashram hopping couldn’t support my sister and me. Not surprisingly, Sati’s family was now quite a bit wealthier than mine (we still considered Sizzler pretty fancy). But Sati often said she felt a spiritual void and even wondered aloud if she’d fallen for me to fill it.
There were many things to love about Sati. Too many. But one of them was that I needed her practicality to make it to graduation—a task I was finally nearing the end of here in India.
The smells of cardamom and rickshaw diesel began to fill the streets. I went to the first breakfast café open, and after a bowl of tsampa, Tibetan barley meal, fatigue set in. Down the street, a gray motel with a distinct Soviet-bloc aesthetic offered rooms for two US dollars per night. I was so tired I didn’t care about decor. I paid the clerk, a Kashmiri boy who looked not much older than eleven, wandered into my eight-by-eight cube, and fell into a deep sleep.
The nap became a nonsensical dream. All emotion and no plot. Flashes of Sati’s face mixed with twisted lights, shouts, sadness, anger. I woke exhausted, unable to remember details except for a single comment in my dad’s voice: “Sati is stuck at a red light.” Whatever peace I’d found under last night’s stars was gone. My chest was tight. I felt like screaming, crying, and fighting at once.
I knew the dream was right. Sati was stuck. She couldn’t make a decision between Jyanth and me. She’d told me as much at the start of this trip when I visited her gated apartment complex in Bangalore. But there seemed to be a deeper stuckness too. Sati’s parents were jovial and kind. They loved her as dearly as any good parents. But having themselves been arranged into marriage, they held more traditional views about love and career. Sati had an open dialogue with them in her quest to be a modern, independent Indian American twenty-four-year-old. This was a woman who’d proudly studied feminist theory at Berkeley. Still, Sati often told me that her parents’ ideas—who she should marry, what job she should pursue—clouded her ability to discern what she really wanted for herself.
I was, of course, trapped in many ways by my own family history. But it’s easier to see flaws in others. I’d seen Sati’s parents hovering over her decision making from our first date. Frustrated as I was with her not choosing me, I was more frustrated with the fact that I couldn’t trust my gut and let go.
There was a steep switchback above town that led to a trekking trail, and I shot up it without caring where it led. After about twenty minutes, I was above the tree line, and the sparsity up here—gray rock, snow, sky—made me feel a tinge more like a mountain goat than a weighty human. I walked for another mile or so, panting from the elevation. But the trail soon ended and I found myself sweating and buckled over at the edge of a precipice. I’d heard there were Tibetan hermits and sadhus meditating in the nearby caves. But none were visible. So I decided to do what I’d been wanting to do for months. I screamed from the edge. I growled, wailed, grunted. I even jumped up and down, cursing at my heart for being unable to unhinge itself from the shackles of romantic love.
“Let fucking go!” I shouted. “Let fucking go, you fucking bastard!”
> It felt good to be angry. Angry was honest. And alone up here, it felt as though these mountains and sky could absorb anger and transform it all into thunderclouds that would moisten the crops. It seemed these peaks could absorb the whole universe and that was why people came here year after year—to clear out. See what remained.
There was a flat granite rock near the edge of the cliff. I climbed on top of it, crossing my legs and straightening up. My heart was still shut. I still felt like sending Sati a video of me weeping—let her see what she’d done. But I also felt a glimmer of hope. There might still be a lifeline here.
Please?
God?
Buddha?
Anyone?
2
When we were just old enough to sort of understand what meditation was—pretending to be a Buddha statue, right?—probably six or so, my sister, Ciel, and I, dressed in our panda bear pajamas, used to meditate with my parents occasionally. Usually this meant giggling so much we’d get kicked out of our little spare room, which functioned as a study and yoga room. That early introduction never turned into habit. Ciel’s and my youth was focused on water polo, parties, snowboarding, and The Goonies.
When the average popularity contest of high school failed to bring lasting happiness, I tried a variety of plans to escape suffering: drugs, sex, running away to Hawaii, spending my senior year in France to live like a Syrah-swilling existentialist. When none of these worked terribly well, after graduation, I went to live in an orthodox Buddhist monastery to give this whole end-suffering-in-the-mind stuff a go.
I thought I’d gotten a slight head start with meditation. Even if I’d never put any work into it, I must’ve absorbed some skills by being named after a yogi. Or, you know, through osmosis.
Instead, I could barely sit still for ten minutes without feeling as if someone had my knee in a vise grip. I still remember finishing my first intensive meditation retreat when I was about nineteen. At the close, a group of my friends, all college age, joined a senior monk from Vietnam to decompress from the week of silence. Before we could ask any questions, the monk, Heng Da Shr, looked at each of us as if giving a psychic reading and told us something we needed to work on.
“You’re getting lost in planning about school,” he told Max, a sophomore who had a couple years’ experience with Zen. “Bring your focus back to the belly. Hold the w’a tou”—meaning koan.
“Focus on compassion,” he told Stella. “You’re worrying a lot about your family.”
Everyone seemed to have something cool to work on in their practice. Then Heng Da got to me. “You’re just in a lot of pain,” he said. “Stretch out more.”
He was right. Peaceful was not the word for my meditations. It took months to be able to sit remotely comfortably. And once I’d spent hours a day stretching and had the sitting part kind of covered, keeping the body still was a million times easier than dealing with my internal world.
You think when you start meditating you’re going to be dealing with something epic—the dissolution of ego, an out-of-body experience perhaps. I found myself having to rewatch every episode of Mork and Mindy and The Cosby Show and every game of the entire Joe Montana–Steve Young 49ers era. Even during subsequent winter zen sessions when the TV memories began fading to static, my mind never stilled. In the most blissful, quiet moments—the breath so soft it almost wasn’t there—faint ripples of thought and desire still appeared and passed away. The state is called savichara samapattih in the Yoga Sutras, meaning “with subtle thought.”
Had I stayed on retreat longer, the next level would have been nirvichara samapattih, “without subtle thought,” and then further absorptions into completely objectless concentrations, samadhis, states that are beginning to be measured neurologically, and in which meditators say they become so clear, so absorbed in now, they are not aware of any separation from infinity.
Attaching to these pleasant states can become another pitfall on the path, the texts warn. I was just trying to make it through retreat with fully functioning knees. Still, I cherished the glimpses. Needed them. Those moments of relative calm brought a new contentment. A sort that wasn’t dependent on the weather, popularity, or report cards. It just was.
But that was when I lived in a monastery, protected from the heroin-laced razors of young love. And there is a maintenance aspect to mindfulness. Now that I was here in the utopia of meditation—sitting in lotus on a Himalayan slab—that unaffected peace seemed like something I’d invented. After I had spent most of the last three months trying to rustle up journalism stories in religious war zones (not the best way, it turns out, to recover from a breakup), meditation seemed anachronistic, even futile. Thoughts of despair cascading down like relentless dominoes.
But I needed to do something. I was broken. And I had a thread of faith left from those old days. So I forced myself to keep still. I pretended my mind was the sky. And after being carried away dozens of times into the same old cyclones and thunderheads—what I should have done to keep Sati, what I might do to get her back, what a miserable ass I was for leaving her at the start—I kept reeling my focus back to what was here. Stone cliffs, thin air, breath.
And after a time, the dominoes sort of, kind of, began to find space, until some of them maybe didn’t always touch. There were—yes, I could sense them ever so faintly—slight breaks in the sequence. And each break felt like a sweet drop of rain in a parched desert.
Slowly. Slowly. Muscles and chest and jaw unwound. And when I opened my eyes, this Himalayan valley looked a little different. It had always been beautiful. But now it also looked as it did the night before under the moon. A place to start over.
Icicles began forming on the granite, and I wandered back down the switchbacks into the village. More tourists were arriving for the Dalai Lama’s upcoming teaching, and as I had been annoyed by the T-shirt store, I would have normally been annoyed by all these white people with designer yoga mats. They were another reminder that I was one of them rather than an epic explorer in Peter Matthiessen’s Snow Leopard.
But tonight, the fellow lost souls were kind of comforting too. Several passersby looked far worse off than me (tough times often drive folks to the Himalayas). But also the sheer number of travelers—so many looking desperate, in some sense, for real love, real anything—sent me into fantasies of falling in love here all over again. The ultimate distraction.
I was not, however, about to fall in love again. I was about to meet a heartbroken monk who wanted to sing.
3
We asked the captain what course
of action he proposed to take toward
a beast so large, terrible, and
unpredictable. He hesitated to
answer, and then said judiciously:
“I think I shall praise it.”
—Robert Hass
For the first thirty-eight hundred thousand years after the Big Bang, scientists say, light could not shine. The universe was too hot and violent—atoms smashing with such fury they formed a plasma-like soup. A subatomic sea.
As the universe expanded, matter cooled. Atoms collided, bonded, exploded, mixed. But all was still dark for about four hundred million years, according to NASA, until great gaseous clouds birthed the first stars. It would take another nine billion years of universal expansion—more turbulence than is fathomable—before our galaxy, with its hundred billion suns and at least eight billion earthlike worlds, began to shine.
Our sea has a savage birthing method too. At their origin, inside a tempest, waves are barely recognizable. They crash one on top of the other. No order. No respite. But these tempests send waves expanding in all directions. And as they gain distance from their raging origin, they sort themselves into organized patterns that will eventually break on sunny shores—perfect peeling lines that humans, dolphins, and seals love to ride.
Thus far in India, I’d felt I was in the most ferocious part of the storm. Scams, sickness, religious riots, heartache. But over the coming weeks
in the Himalayas, I had the feeling that each day I was sailing farther from the hurricane. That all that pent-up, messy power was finding a tinge of order.
My first goal was to get out of my motel. But I had no money to upgrade, and the only alternative at the same price point doubled as a brothel. A few days later, however, while hiking again in the fields above town, I met Radhika, a mother out gathering wild herbs with her five-year-old twins, Bipham and Mehta.
There were no other people up in these highlands, and the twins sprinted toward me as if they knew me. As they got closer, they began leaping up to show me a small carved elephant statue they’d found buried in the grass. Radhika apologized for their pawing, but the twins were so cute, I didn’t mind.
Radhika reminded me a bit of my own mother—skinny and short, a gypsy head scarf wrapped around her wavy black hair like the scarves Mom used to wear when I was little. I thought of the Tibetan teaching that all beings, through beginningless time, have been our mother at one point or another.
Radhika spoke little English, but she managed to ask me where I was staying. I pointed to the cement block down the mountain and she muttered something to the twins in Hindi that made them chuckle.
“Come, come,” she said. “You come my home. Please.”
My first instinct was to make an excuse why I couldn’t. But I was hoping to get away from the tourists so I could pretend I wasn’t one. It can’t hurt to have a look, I thought, and followed Radhika and the twins—who giggled the whole way—about a half mile down the trail to a wooden shack with a metal roof.
