The Dalai Lama's Cat

by David Michie

  “This is exactly the kind of place I could see a bookstore doing well. Like you say, there is no competition. It doesn’t hurt that mobile reception is hit-and-miss around these parts, making it hard to download e-books—”

  “A lot of our customers already have a strong interest in mind/body/spirit books,” interjected Franc. “They’re in here reading them all the time.”

  “If they’re coming for the overall experience,” chimed in Sam, “you could broaden that experience to include buying new books, CDs, perhaps gifts.”

  “Buddhist and Indian novelty items.”

  “Only the better-quality stuff.”

  “Of course.”

  For a full three seconds, Sam held Franc’s gaze. The gleam in Franc’s eye had developed into full-blown excitement. Even Sam’s customary shyness seemed to have lifted.

  Then Franc asked, “Will you set it up for me?”

  “You mean—?”

  “And run it. As my bookstore manager.”

  The enthusiasm quickly drained from Sam’s face.

  “Well, that’s v-v-very nice of you to ask, but I couldn’t.” Deep furrows appeared on his forehead between his eyes. “I mean, I’m only here for a few weeks.”

  “You’ve no job to go back to,” Franc reminded him, somewhat brutally. “I’m offering you a job here.”

  “But my visa—”

  Franc waved dismissively. “I’ve got a guy who can take care of the paperwork.”

  “And ac-c-c-commodation—”

  “There’s an apartment upstairs,” said Franc. “I can make that part of the deal.”

  But instead of resolving Sam’s concerns, Franc seemed only to be compounding them. Sam lowered his face as a red blush appeared, first on his neck, then steadily, inexorably, bloomed on his cheeks.

  “I just couldn’t do it,” he told Franc. “Even if everything else was … ”

  Leaning forward in his chair, Franc eyeballed him. “Why not?”

  Sam stared miserably at the floor.

  “You can tell me,” Franc said, softening his tone.

  Sam shook his head slowly.

  After a pause, Franc tried a different tack. “Trust me—I’m a Buddhist.”

  Sam smiled sadly.

  “I’m not leaving here”—Franc managed to combine both sympathy and insistence in his tone—“until you tell me.”

  He sat back in his chair, as though preparing for a long wait. Sam’s blush deepened a shade. Then, after the lengthiest pause, eyes still fixed to the floor, Sam murmured, “When the store in Century City closed, I was laid off.”

  “You said.”

  “Thing is, not everyone was laid off. A few were kept on and redeployed.” Sam hung his head in shame.

  “And you’re thinking—?”

  “If I’d been any good at my job, I would have been kept on, too.”

  “They kept the top performers, did they?” Franc’s voice was tight. “What other reason? The cost of laying them off? Were they long-term employees?”

  Sam shrugged. “I guess. Most of them. But you can see how … bad I am with people. I’d be no good at it, Franc.” He finally managed the very briefest glance in Franc’s direction. “At school, I was always the last kid left when the others picked sports teams. At college, I could never get a date. I’m just not a people person. I’d be a disaster.”

  As Franc regarded the pitiable figure in front of him, a knowing, impish expression played on his lips. Silently, he gestured to Kusali to bring him an espresso.

  “Yeah, I agree,” he responded after a while. “Imagine how disastrous it would be having someone who knew the category backward doing all our ordering. Or if customers asked you about a subject, and you offered them half a dozen alternatives. That could be catastrophic!”

  “It’s not that—”

  “Say someone came in here wanting to pick a sports team and the first person they saw was you.”

  “You know I didn’t mean—”

  “Or, God help us, a single woman turned up on the prowl for a date!”

  “It’s about talking to people,” Sam retorted, almost fiercely. “I’m no good at it.”

  “You talk to me.”

  “You’re not a customer.”

  “I’ve never pressured anyone into ordering a cappuccino, and I wouldn’t expect you to lay on the hard sell, if that’s what you mean,” said Franc.

  The two of them looked at each other evenly before Franc said, “Either the bookstore idea is going to work, or it’s not. I believe you’re the right man for the job, even if you don’t believe it yourself.”

  That conversation took place late last week, and despite Franc’s best efforts, it had ended without Sam committing to anything. He had been in the café every day since, but nothing more on the subject was said. I wondered how long Franc would be able to hold off. Because I had no doubt he would be bringing up the subject again.

  Since the conversation with Sam, Franc had called in several tradesmen to measure the space he was considering for a bookshop and to discuss shelving and display options. But could he get Sam to budge?

  As it happened, Franc’s powers of persuasion were irrelevant. Not long after I arrived that morning and found Sam engrossed on the subject of cellular biology and epigenetics, who should appear in the café but Geshe Wangpo.

  As Franc had quickly discovered, having a teacher was a double-edged sword. The benefits were extraordinary, but so were the demands. And when your teacher was as uncompromising a lama as Geshe Wangpo, the edges of that sword were razor sharp. Every Tuesday evening, Franc attended classes on the Path to Enlightenment up at the temple, but at other moments, Geshe Wangpo would burst into his world unexpectedly, with life-changing results.

  On one occasion, serious problems with his waitstaff had left Franc bamboozled and despairing. Geshe Wangpo phoned him, unprecedented and unprompted, ordering him, in the shortest of calls, to recite Green Tara mantras for two hours every day. By the end of that week, Franc’s human resource problems had mysteriously resolved themselves.

  On a different occasion, Franc had just put the phone down from talking to his father, who had made a long-distance call from his sickbed in San Francisco. Franc had spent the previous ten minutes explaining why he couldn’t possibly go home to visit when he turned and discovered his lama standing right behind him. Geshe Wangpo had ordered him, in no uncertain terms, to make visiting his father a priority. What sort of son did he think he was, telling a frail and elderly old man that he was too busy to see him? Who did he think he owed his life to? What kind of parents did he want in future lifetimes—those as offhanded and disregarding as Franc was planning to be, or parents who would genuinely care about his well-being? And, by the way, he should make sure to buy his father good-quality gifts from Duty Free.

  Half an hour later, Franc had booked his ticket home.

  Today, when Geshe Wangpo arrived at the café during the midmorning lull, he glanced around at the sea of unoccupied tables before making his way directly toward where Sam Goldberg sat alone reading. There was a powerful energy in the way he moved across the room, as though he weren’t a maroon-clad monk making an appearance but an altogether more commanding being—a large, blue-black, fire-breathing monster like the ones portrayed in the temple thangkas, perhaps.

  “May I sit here?” he asked, pulling out the chair opposite Sam.

  “Y-yes. Sure.” Almost all of the tables around them were unoccupied, but if Sam found the request strange, he betrayed no sign of it. Instead, he returned to his book.

  Having made himself comfortable, Geshe Wangpo had no intention of keeping to himself. “What are you reading?”

  Sam looked up. “A book on, er, epigenetics.”

  The lama glanced at three paperbacks stacked beside Sam’s empty coffee cup. “You like to read?”

  Sam nodded.

  I wondered if Franc had spoken to Geshe Wangpo about his bookstore idea after class that week, but it seemed unli
kely. Geshe Wangpo encouraged self-sufficiency in his students. As for Sam, he had no idea who Geshe Wangpo was, apart from an unusually forward monk.

  “It is most useful,” Geshe Wangpo told Sam, “to share one’s knowledge with others. Otherwise, what is the point in having it?”

  Sam looked up at the lama—and held his eye. This was not his usual darting glance but contact that continued for an improbable length of time. What was it in the lama’s face that held his gaze? Was it something that reassured him, perhaps, conveying a sense of the safety and profound compassion that resided beneath the Tibetan’s stern exterior? Was Geshe Wangpo holding Sam’s gaze simply through the force of personality for which he was well known? Or was a different connection being made—one less easy to explain?

  Whichever it was, when Sam finally replied, it was without any of his customary shyness. “Strange that you should say that. The owner here asked if I would run a bookstore for him.” He gestured toward the unused area Franc had in mind.

  “Do you want to?” asked the lama.

  Sam grimaced. “I don’t think I’d be any good at it.”

  Geshe Wangpo’s expression was unchanged. He tried again. “Do you want to?”

  “I couldn’t let him down. He’d have to invest a lot of money in stock and display units. If it all went wrong because of me … ”

  “I hear, I hear.” Geshe Wangpo leaned forward. “But do you want to?”

  A small, rueful, but irresistible smile appeared at the corners of Sam’s mouth.

  Before he could say a word, Geshe Wangpo told him, “Then you must do it!”

  Sam’s smile broadened. “I have been thinking about it. A lot. It could be a … stimulating fresh start. But I have reservations.”

  “What are ‘reservations’?” The lama’s eyebrows crinkled theatrically.

  “Reservations?” Sam consulted the thesaurus in his mind. “Doubts. Concerns. Uncertainties.”

  “That is normal,” the other told him. Then, to emphasize, he said it again, deeper, louder, and slower: “Normal.”

  “I was analyzing the opportunity—” Sam started to explain.

  But Geshe Wangpo cut him short. “Too much thinking is not necessary.”

  Sam stared at him, taken aback to hear cognitive inquiry so casually dismissed. “You haven’t seen me with people,” he continued. “Ordinary people.”

  Hands on his hips, the lama sat forward in his seat. “There is a problem?”

  Sam shrugged. “You could probably say a self-esteem issue.”

  “Self-esteem?”

  “When you don’t think you’re up to it.”

  Geshe Wangpo was unconvinced. “But you read many books. You have the knowledge.”

  “It’s not that.”

  “In Buddhism”—the lama tilted his head back challengingly—“we would say that you are lazy.”

  Sam’s reaction was the opposite of his usual. Color drained from his face.

  “Despising yourself, thinking you are no good, saying ‘I can’t do this.’ This is the mind of weakness. You must work to overcome it.”

  “It’s not through choice,” Sam protested faintly.

  “Then you must choose to overcome. What happens if you keep giving in to a weak mind? You feed weakness. The result is an even weaker mind in the future. Instead, you must cultivate confidence!” Geshe Wangpo sat erect in his chair and clenched his fist on the table. Power seemed to emanate from him in all directions.

  “You think I can?”

  “You must!” the lama told him forcefully. “When you talk to people, you must speak to them with big eyes and a strong voice.”

  Sam was shifting to a straighter posture in his chair.

  “You have read A Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life?”

  Sam was nodding.

  “It says self-confidence should be applied to wholesome actions. That is what you would do here, yes—wholesome actions? You must decide ‘I alone shall do it.’ This is the self-confidence of action.”

  “Big eyes and a strong voice?” Sam asked, noticeably louder.

  The lama nodded. “Like this.”

  In response to Geshe Wangpo’s power, a new feeling seemed to be coming over Sam. He was sitting more upright. Holding himself more assertively. Instead of staring downward, he looked directly into Geshe Wangpo’s eyes. Nothing was being said out loud, but in the silence a different, more intuitive form of communication seemed to be occurring. As though Sam were realizing that all his self-esteem issues were nothing more than ideas he had about himself, ideas that had all the substance of tissue paper. Ideas that were temporary and, like any other, would arise, abide, and pass. Ideas that, in the presence of this monk, were being replaced by different, more life-affirming ones.

  He spoke after the longest while. “I don’t know your name,” he said.

  “Geshe Acharya Trijang Wangpo.”

  “Not the author of Path to the Union of No More Learning, translated by Stephanie Spinster?”

  The lama sat back in his chair, folded his arms across his chest, and threw Sam a look of glowering challenge. “You know plenty,” he said.

  As I padded back to Jokhang later that day, I was lost in my own thoughts about what Geshe Wangpo had said. I’d been as startled as Sam to hear that a lack of self-confidence was considered, in Buddhism, to be a form of laziness, a weak mind that had to be overcome. I couldn’t avoid remembering my own feelings of inadequacy when it came to Dharma practice in general and meditation in particular. And how, living at Jokhang and being frequently reminded of the transcendent realizations that were possible, my own meditation practice was so limited that it seemed hardly worth continuing.

  But as Franc’s lama had said, what would happen if I kept giving in to a weak mind? What result could there possibly be except future weakness? There was an unavoidable, if disconcerting logic, but along with it, a strangely compelling feeling of empowerment.

  That evening, as I took up my meditation position on the windowsill, my paws neatly tucked beneath me, eyes half-closed and whiskers alert, before I focused on my breathing, I recalled Geshe Wangpo’s words.

  I reminded myself that I lived with the perfect role model, that I was surrounded by those who supported my practice. There were no better circumstances than mine in which to evolve into a true bodhicatva.

  I alone must do this!

  Did I arise from that meditation session as a fully enlightened being? Was my change of attitude the cause of instant nirvana? Dear reader, I would be lying if I told you so. My meditation showed no sign of instant improvement, but perhaps more importantly, my feelings about it did.

  Starting then, I decided that I wasn’t going to think of every bad session as a reason to give up. I wouldn’t judge my own experience according to the Olympian heights achieved by His Holiness’s visitors. I was HHC, with my own failings and weaknesses, but, like Sam, my own strengths, too. I would meditate, metaphorically speaking, with big eyes and a strong voice. I might not have all the instructions about meditative concentration down pat, but I knew plenty.

  There is a postscript to this story, dear reader. Of course there is—that’s the best bit, don’t you think? The unexpected bonbon. The balletic pirouette. When it comes to sudden shifts in gear, I am that kind of cat.

  This is just such a book.

  And, having come this far with me, like it or not, my friend, you are most certainly that type of reader!

  First, a confession.

  I had been unsettled the day I had listened to Sam’s spiraling self-doubt, as he explained his feelings of inadequacy to Franc. How being laid off from the bookstore had underlined the rejection he had felt at being the last boy standing at sports-team selections. How his failure to find love at college only reinforced the saga of a woeful misfit. The fact that many highly capable professionals had no sporting prowess, or that some of the most gorgeous women happily partnered with the geekiest of men, somehow didn’t deflect his self-destructive b
eliefs. Considering how intelligent he was, his explanation was bizarre and would even have been laughable were it not for the pain it so obviously caused him.

  And yet when I had listened to how he combined an assortment of disconnected experiences to produce an elaborately depressing narrative about himself, I couldn’t avoid a painful recognition: I was just like that.

  Didn’t I allow one negative thought to spark off a quite unrelated one? No sooner was I reflecting on my poor meditation skills than I would turn to my lack of discipline at the food bowl. Contemplating my physical form, I’d dwell on the absurd way I walked because of the injury to my legs. Which led, with depressing inevitability, to my earliest memories and the matter of my pedigree.

  After the jolt delivered by Geshe Wangpo, I came to discover the opposite dynamic: that positive thoughts also multiply—and produce the most unexpectedly wonderful effects.

  There is a quotation attributed to Goethe, much loved by the manufacturers of fridge magnets, greeting cards, and other inspirational trinkets. It runs: “Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it.” Although Tenzin told me that Goethe never wrote any such thing, the words have a compelling resonance to them.

  Once I began to be more self-confident about my meditation practice, I found it affected a lot of other things. I wouldn’t eat every last scrap of Mrs. Trinci’s diced chicken liver just because it was there. I would walk, tail high, into meetings with the most distinguished of His Holiness’s visitors. Why shouldn’t I?

  And the most curious of things: Tashi and Sashi, the street-urchins-turned-novices whom His Holiness had instructed to take particular care of me, continued to visit me in the Jokhang visitors’ room from time to time. Usually they’d sit on the floor for five minutes and scratch my neck. Sometimes they’d recite mantras.

  One afternoon, a few days after my change in attitude, they happened to visit. Following the usual format, I rolled onto an elaborate rug, arms and legs splayed, to allow them to run their fingers up and down my tummy.

  It was at this point that Chogyal came into the room.