The Dalai Lama's Cat

by David Michie

Sashi shook his head. “We were paid all that money, but the kitten probably died.”

  The brothers looked at His Holiness nervously, bracing for a wrathful condemnation of their selfishness.

  Only, the condemnation didn’t come.

  Instead, the Dalai Lama told them seriously, “In the Dharma, there is no place for guilt. Guilt is useless. It is pointless to feel bad about something in the past that we can’t change. But regret? Yes. This is more useful. Do you both feel sincere regret for what you did?”

  “Yes, Your Holiness,” they chorused.

  “You are committed to never harming a living being again in that way?”

  “Yes, Your Holiness!”

  “When you practice compassion in meditation, think about those small kittens and the countless other weak and vulnerable beings who need your protection and love.”

  His Holiness’s features lightened. “As for that very weak kitten you thought might have died, I believe you will discover that she grew into a beautiful being.” He gestured toward where I was sitting on the sill.

  As they turned to look at me, Tashi exclaimed, “His Holiness’s Cat?”

  “It was one of my staff who paid you the $2. We had just returned from America, and he didn’t have any rupees.”

  Approaching me, they stroked the back of my head and my back.

  “It is very fortunate that we all now enjoy such a good home here at Namgyal Monastery,” said His Holiness.

  “Yes,” agreed Sashi. “But it is very strange karma how we have spent the past three days looking after the same cat we once sold.”

  Perhaps that part wasn’t so strange. The Dalai Lama is believed to be clairvoyant. I guessed that the reason he had chosen the two novices to perform their particular task had been precisely because of their past actions. He was giving them an opportunity to make amends.

  “Yes, karma propels us into all kinds of unexpected situations,” His Holiness said. “This is another reason we should behave with love and compassion toward all living beings. We never know in what circumstances we will meet up with them again. Sometimes even in this same lifetime.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Have you ever been paralyzed by indecision, dear reader? Found yourself in a situation where if, on the one hand, you do this, that, or the next, a certain result may occur, but if, on the other hand, you do something different, another better result may occur—only the chances of it happening are less likely, so perhaps you’d be better off sticking with the first course of action?

  You may have imagined that we cats never get caught up in such cognitive complexity. Maybe you believed that existential overload is the unique preserve of Homo sapiens.

  As it happens, nothing could be further from the truth. Felis catus—the domestic cat—may not have a career to build, a commercial endeavor to attend to, or any of the whirling carousel of activities that make humans such relentlessly busy beings. But there is one area in which we are startlingly similar.

  I am talking, of course, about matters of the heart.

  Humans may wait in desperation for a particular text message, e-mail, or phone call. We cats have different ways of communicating. The form is unimportant. All that matters is the confirmation we so desperately seek.

  I was in just such a position when it came to my tabby friend. My attraction was instant, from the first moment I saw him under the green light. When we actually met, during my stay at Chogyal’s, there had been an unmistakable and, I thought, mutual frisson. But now that I was no longer staying with Chogyal, did he know where I lived? Should I make more of an effort—say, by crossing the temple courtyard one night and exploring the shadowy netherworld beyond? Or should I remain coolly enigmatic, a feline of great mystery, and rely on him to come looking?

  It was Lobsang, His Holiness’s translator, who brought much-needed clarity to my situation. And, as is so often the case with these things, in the least expected way. A tall, slim Tibetan Buddhist monk in his mid-30s, Lobsang was originally from Bhutan, where he was a distant relative of the royal family. He had received a thoroughly Western education in America, graduating from Yale with a degree in Philosophy of Language and Semiotics. As well as his height and a radiant intelligence, there was something else you became aware of the moment that Lobsang stepped into a room. It was an aura of calm. He was suffused with serenity. A deep, abiding tranquility seemed to emanate from every cell of his body, affecting everyone around him.

  In addition to his responsibilities as translator, Lobsang was also the unofficial head of information technology at Jokhang. Whenever computers were uncooperative, printers turned surly, or satellite receiver boxes switched to passive-aggressive mode, it was Lobsang who was called upon to apply his calm, incisive logic to the problem.

  So when the main modem at Jokhang went on the blink one afternoon, it didn’t take five minutes for Tenzin to summon Lobsang from his office down the corridor. After a few simple checks, Lobsang concluded that a fault in the line was the problem. Help from the phone company was summoned forthwith.

  Which is how Raj Goel, technical support services representative of Dharamsala Telecom, came to be at Jokhang late that afternoon. A slight man in his mid-20s with a wiry frame and thick mop of hair, he seemed extremely disgruntled at having to provide technical support services to a customer. The cheek of it! The nerve!

  Face set to a scowl, his manner brusque, he demanded to be shown the modem and the telephone lines coming into Jokhang. These were located in a small room down the corridor. Slamming his metal briefcase on a shelving unit with an angry crash, he flicked open the clasps, extracted a flashlight and a screwdriver, and was soon poking and prodding a tangle of cables, while Lobsang stood a few feet away, calmly attentive.

  “Mess, this place,” Raj Goel growled under his breath.

  Lobsang gave the impression of not having heard the remark.

  Grunting as he got to his knees and followed a particular cable to the back of the modem, the technician muttered darkly about systems integrity, interference, and other arcane matters before seizing the modem angrily, tugging a number of cables at the back, and turning it over in his hands.

  As Raj Goel was venting his spleen, Tenzin happened to walk past. He met Lobsang’s eyes with an expression of dry amusement.

  “I’m going to have to open this,” the technician told Lobsang in an accusatory tone.

  His Holiness’s translator nodded. “Okay.”

  Rummaging in his briefcase for a smaller screwdriver, Raj Goel began working on the case of the offending modem.

  “No time for religion.”

  Was he speaking to himself? His voice seemed too bold for that.

  “Superstitious nonsense,” he complained a few moments later, even louder.

  Lobsang was untroubled by the remarks. If anything, a smile seemed to have appeared on his lips.

  But Raj Goel was spoiling for a fight. Battling with an unyielding screw as he leaned over the modem, this time he spoke in a tone that demanded a response. “What’s the point of filling people’s heads with silly beliefs?”

  “I agree,” Lobsang replied. “No point at all.”

  “Huh!” the other exclaimed some time later, triumphing over the obdurate screw. “But you’re religious.” This time he shot Lobsang a hard-eyed glance. “You’re a Believer.”

  “I don’t think of it that way at all.” Lobsang emanated profound calm. After a pause, he continued. “One of the last things Buddha said to his followers was that anyone who believed a word he had taught them was a fool—unless they had tested it against their own experience.”

  Patches of sweat began appearing on the technician’s polyester shirt. Lobsang’s reaction was not the one he was after. “Sneaky words,” he groused. “I see people bowing down to Buddhas in temples. Chanting prayers. What’s that if it isn’t blind faith?”

  “Before I answer that, let me ask you something.” Lobsang leaned against the door frame. “You’re at Dharamsala Teleco
m. Two calls come in during the morning: one from a customer who accidently overturned a filing cabinet onto his modem, the other from a customer who got so angry with his wife for shopping online that he smashed their modem with a hammer. In both cases, the modems are broken and need to be repaired or replaced. Do you treat both customers the same?”

  “Of course not!” scowled Raj Goel. “What has that got to do with bowing and scraping to Buddhas?”

  “Quite a lot.” Lobsang’s easy poise couldn’t have contrasted more starkly with Raj Goel’s prickliness. “I’ll explain why. But those two customers—”

  “The one was an accident,” the technician interjected, his voice rising. “The other was a deliberate act of vandalism.”

  “What you’re saying is that intention is more important that an action itself?”

  “Of course.”

  “So when a person bows down to a Buddha, what really matters is the intention, not the bowing?”

  It was at this point that the technical support services representative began to realize he had blustered his way into a corner. Not that he was about to back out. “The intention is obvious,” he argued.

  Lobsang shrugged. “You tell me.”

  “The intention is that you are begging Buddha for forgiveness. You are hoping for salvation.”

  Lobsang burst out laughing. His manner was so gentle, however, that for the first time Raj Goel’s indignation seemed to wane.

  “I think, perhaps, you are thinking of something else,” Lobsang said after a while. “Enlightened beings cannot take away your suffering or give you happiness. If they could do this, wouldn’t they have done so already?”

  “Then why do you bother?” The technician was shaking his head as he fiddled with the modem.

  “As you have already said, the intention is important. The statue of Buddha represents a state of enlightenment. Buddhas don’t need people to bow down to them. Why should they care? When we bow, we are reminding ourselves that our own natural potential is one of enlightenment.”

  By now, Raj Goel had the modem cover off, and he was fiddling with connections to the circuitry inside. “If you don’t worship Buddha”—he tried to retain the edge to his voice, though it seemed to be becoming an effort—“what is Buddhism about?”

  By now Lobsang had sufficient measure of his visitor to provide an answer to which he could relate. “The science of the mind,” he said.

  “Science?”

  “What if someone conducted tens of thousands of hours of rigorous investigation to discover truths about the nature of consciousness? Suppose other people replicated the research over hundreds of years. How amazing would it be not just to have an intellectual understanding of the mind’s potential but also to establish the most rapid and direct way to realize it? That is the science of Buddhism.”

  Having fiddled with the innards of the modem, Raj Goel was replacing its cover. After a while he said, “I am interested in quantum science.” Then, after a moment’s pause, he announced, “The modem is working, but I have to reset it, to be on the safe side. The line fault has been reported. It should be up and running within twelve hours.”

  Perhaps Lobsang’s immensely calming presence had begun to affect him. Or maybe it was the translator’s explanations that had stopped him in his tracks. But there was no further grunting or moaning as the visitor completed his work and replaced his tools.

  On the way back down the corridor, as they passed Lobsang’s office, the translator said, “I have something here that may be of interest.” He ducked inside and took a book from one of the bookshelves lining the walls.

  “The Quantum and the Lotus.” Raj Goel read the title before flicking the book open.

  “You can borrow it if you like.”

  There was an inscription on the title page from one of the book’s authors, Matthieu Ricard.

  “It’s signed,” noted the visitor.

  “Matthieu is a friend of mine.”

  “He has visited Jokhang?”

  “I first met him in America,” said Lobsang. “I lived there for ten years.”

  For the first time, Raj Goel looked at Lobsang closely. That revelation was of far greater interest to him than anything else the translator had said. Realizing your natural potential. Achieving enlightenment. Yada, yada, yada. But lived in America for ten years?!

  “Thank you,” said the visitor, slipping the book into his briefcase. “I will return it.”

  The following Monday afternoon I heard Raj Goel’s voice coming down the corridor. As extraordinarily rude visitors to Jokhang are very rare, my curiosity drew me away from my afternoon siesta to Lobsang’s visitor, who was being shown to his office.

  Had the technician come to pick another fight?

  But the Raj Goel who had just arrived was a changed person from the snapping and snarling technical support representative of the previous week. Without all that energizing hostility, he cut a somewhat forlorn figure, with his faded shirt and battered briefcase.

  “No further problems with the phone lines?” he was confirming, as I padded into Lobsang’s office behind him.

  “Working perfectly, thank you.” Lobsang was behind his desk.

  His visitor produced the borrowed book from inside his briefcase. “This has provided an interesting perspective,” he said. What he meant was, “Sorry I was so obnoxious last week.”

  As a graduate in semiotics, Lobsang understood this. “Good,” he nodded. “I hoped you would find it stimulating.” By which he meant, “Apology accepted. We all have our days.”

  There was a pause. Having put the book on Lobsang’s desk, Raj Goel took a step back. He didn’t look at Lobsang directly but glanced around the office for a few moments as though trying to find the right words.

  “So … you lived in America?” he asked eventually.

  “Yes.”

  “For ten years?”

  “That’s right.”

  Another long pause. Then, “What is it like?”

  Lobsang pushed back from his desk and waited till his visitor finally looked him in the eye. “Why do you want to know?”

  “Because I want to go live there for a while, but my family wants me to marry,” Raj Goel began.

  It seemed that Lobsang’s question had dislodged a blockage of some kind. Once Raj Goel started, there was no stopping him. “I have friends in New York saying ‘Come and stay with us,’ and I am very keen to do so, because all my life I’ve wanted to visit the Big Apple and earn real dollars and maybe even meet a movie star. But my parents have chosen this girl, you see, and her parents also want us to marry, and they are saying, ‘America will always be there.’ Also, my boss is pressuring me to go into management development training, but the loan will tie me to the company for six years and I’m feeling trapped. As it is, work pressure is already overwhelming.”

  After this sudden outpouring, the stillness of Lobsang’s office was palpable. Lobsang gestured toward a pair of chairs in the corner. “Would you like a cup of tea?”

  A short while later, the two of them were sitting together. As Lobsang sipped his tea, Raj Goel spared no detail about the conflicting pressures—pressures that were, no doubt, the real source of his disagreeable behavior the week before. He told Lobsang about the agonies of following his friends on Facebook and YouTube as they traveled around America. How his parents thought that a middle-management position with Dharamsala Telecom was the most he could ever aspire to, but he had his own, more entrepreneurial ideas. How his instincts to spread his wings were in constant tension with the loyalty he felt toward his parents, who had made great sacrifices to give him a good education.

  The past few weeks in particular had been a time of great anxiety and sleepless nights. He told Lobsang how he had tried to be rational, looking at the advantages and disadvantages of each course of action.

  It was at this point that my casual interest in the conversation became suddenly personal. Trying to weigh one course of action against another
—that sounded familiar! Raj Goel and I were the same in this respect.

  Finally, the visitor confessed the real purpose of his visit that morning: “I am hoping you can give me some advice to help me reach a decision.”

  Making my way toward a spare armchair, I hopped up on it and fixed Lobsang with an expression of blue clarity. I was most interested in hearing what he had to say.

  “I don’t have any special wisdom,” said Lobsang, in the way that especially wise practitioners always do. “I have no qualities or realizations. I don’t know why you think I can advise.”

  “But you lived in America for ten years.” Raj Goel was vehement. “And … ” Lobsang waited for him to finish. “You know about things.” Raj Goel lowered his gaze as though embarrassed to be admitting this, especially to a man whose mental capacity he had questioned only a week earlier.

  Lobsang simply asked him, “Do you love the girl?”

  Raj Goel seemed surprised by the question. He shrugged. “I have seen a photograph of her only once.”

  His reply remained suspended in space for a while, like a rising wisp of smoke. “I’m told she wants children, and my parents want us to have children.”

  “Your friends in America. How long will they be there?”

  “They have two-year visas. They plan on traveling coast to coast.”

  “If you want to join them, you must go—?”

  “Soon.”

  Lobsang nodded. “What is holding you back?”

  “My parents,” Raj Goel retorted somewhat sharply, as though Lobsang hadn’t grasped any of what he’d been saying. “The arranged marriage. My boss who wants me to—”

  “Yes, yes, the management training.” Lobsang’s tone was skeptical.

  “Why do you say it like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like you don’t really believe me.”

  “Because I don’t really believe you.” Lobsang’s smile was so compassionate, so gentle, that it was impossible to take offense.

  “I can show you the forms,” his visitor told him. “They must be handed in.”

  “Oh, I believe all you say about the training and the parents and the marriage. I just don’t believe those are the real reasons you feel trapped.”