As we followed small highways into the greenery of the Badger State and toward the capital, I said, “You have a talk this afternoon, don’t you?”
He nodded. Rather somberly, I thought.
“Not looking forward to it?”
“I am thinking about the nice boat ride,” he said.
“Some remarkable buildings in that city.”
“Yes,” he nodded, looking out at the silos and fields. “They made the river go the other way.”
“Amazing, isn’t it?”
“People were getting sick, so they made the river go the other way. Why didn’t they just clean the river and make it go the same way?”
“Too hard, I guess.”
He nodded again, let out one of his judgmental ahs, and after a mile or two of silence I realized that he’d probably been using the redirecting of the river as a spiritual metaphor: Why not just alter your life instead of changing its direction 180 degrees? And then I wondered if everything he said and did was meant as spiritual metaphor, and I was already becoming vaguely uneasy when he said, “I would like you to be in the front row this afternoon, not at the back.”
“Okay. Sure. It’s just a talk, isn’t it?”
“A talk and something a little else.”
“What’s the something a little else? Group meditation?”
“Meditation makes you afraid,” he said flatly, and out of the side of my vision I could see him turn his big head and I could feel his eyes on me. “Doing nothing for half an hour scares Mr. Otto.”
I lied then. I said, “Not really.”
“Good,” he slapped the top of my leg. “First row, then. We will have more fun.”
“Can’t wait,” I told him. After sitting there quietly for a few minutes, he started chanting, the same kind of thing I’d heard in Seese’s back yard. It was a quiet chant, a low-octave mooing, almost as if he were singing to himself, mourning or celebrating I could not tell. It went on for nearly an hour and I did not feel it would be appropriate to turn on talk radio during that time. Later, when I asked, he told me the chant was the Ortyk way of praying for people who were in danger.
THIRTY-TWO
In downtown Madison they were having some kind of festival that included the placement of brightly painted, life-size ceramic cows on the sidewalks surrounding the white marble capitol building and along the adjoining streets. There were neon cows, art-deco cows, impressionist cows, and cows of no particular artistic style, around which small children stood and giggled. We followed a bovine trail of them along State Street, past a row of tourist shops, and into a district that seemed to offer every imaginable style of cuisine. It made me so happy, this World of Food, that I temporarily let go of my anxiety about Rinpoche’s talk and “something a little else.” We paused for a moment at a corner. Across the busy street I saw a maroon awning with the words HIMAL CHULI, AUTHENTIC NEPALI CUISINE on it.
“We have to try that.”
“Yes, yes,” Rinpoche said with one of his mysterious smiles. “I think this place is very good for you.”
Himal Chuli had eight or ten tables set too close together and exotic prints on the walls featuring gods and goddesses with many arms. We were near the college, and you could sense that from the other diners: bearded young men with laptops and somber faces, studious young women in hand-me-down shorts and small tattoos. The menu listed the vegetarian dishes first, and I decided to try one of them as a kind of gesture toward my adventuresome new interior life. True, to that point, the adventuresome new interior life was identical to the staid old interior life, but I felt I’d made some kind of commitment . . . for a few days at least, and I was proud of myself for doing so.
“Khichadi,” Rinpoche said, pointing to the first page of the menu. “We used to eat khichadi very much in our house when we were small children. Khichadi is a magic food, it makes your any sickness go away.”
The menu described khichadi as “a fresh and light mixture of mung beans, Jasmine rice, fresh ginger, cilantro, tomatoes, peas, and ajwan seeds, favored for its nourishing and healing properties,” and I decided it didn’t sound half bad. Our order was taken by a child-sized woman of seventy or so with raven black hair and that same beatific smile on her face that I’d seen on the features of the sleeping Rinpoche at Wrigley Field. Rinpoche spoke to her in what turned out to be Nepali; I don’t know why I should have been surprised.
“So how many languages do you speak?” I asked him when she’d headed off toward the kitchen.
“Eleven.”
“Eleven!”
“Some of them, like English, not so good.”
“You speak eleven languages?”
A professorial type at the next table looked over and smirked.
Rinpoche changed the subject: “Khichadi will heal a person if he is sick.”
“I wished I’d known about it a few years ago. I had this awful mysterious sickness where I slept only a few hours a night, burping constantly, twitching. It went on for eight years, actually. I couldn’t exercise much, had trouble digesting foods I’d eaten all my life. There were periods during the day when I was so exhausted I just wanted to sleep, and then when I tried to sleep I couldn’t. It was a kind of torture, and I don’t use that word lightly. I had every imaginable test and procedure and no doctor ever found anything. Even chronic fatigue syndrome didn’t fit the symptoms. Eventually it just went away, but for a while there, after all those bad nights and miserable days, I just wanted to die.”
“But you were strong,” Rinpoche said.
“Strong? I felt weaker than an infant.”
“You didn’t die.”
“I had thoughts of killing myself, to tell you the truth.”
“I know that,” he said, and I pretended not to hear him because I had never told anyone that particular secret, no one, not even Jeannie, and because, although I was now determined to be open to him and his ideas, mind reading was not yet on the list of things I was ready for.
“I don’t think I would ever do that, but I had the thoughts. Some nights I’d wake up and sit on the side of the bed and cry, or curse. It wasn’t easy on Jeannie and the kids.”
“You were strong,” he repeated. And then, after another waitress had brought us an appetizer of cucumbers in sour cream and soup for Rinpoche, he added, “All sickness comes from your spirit.”
“Yes, I’ve heard that. We published a book on the subject—it was the book you showed me in Indiana. But I have to say I’ve never really believed in that idea.”
“Good book.”
“Yes, and helpful to some people, I suppose, but I believe that most illnesses are purely physical.”
He was shaking his head and looking at me with some amusement. “All from the spirit. Past lives, this life, all from that. When you had that sickness, it meant that inside yourself you were trying to decide a very important thing. To go this way or to go that way . . . in your spiritual life. Big strain in you. And so, because of this strain—your sickness.”
“Really?”
“Of course. All from the spirit. Except sometimes people take for themself a bad sickness so another soul will not have to, or so people will find for it a cure. Those things can be very complicated, taking someone else’s karma.”
“Jesus dying for our sins,” I said.
“Yes, very much. Exactly. But, in the Bible there is no part about Jesus being sick. And Buddha was not ever sick until the very end of his life. Their minds were clean to the deepest level.”
Without really intending to, without really thinking about where it might lead, I said, “How does one get one’s mind that clean?”
“That is the very best question, my friend. The answer is a simple answer, but very hard also: Live a good life. Help people. Meditate. Live another good life. Meditate some more. Don’t hurt. Don’t hurt. Don’t hurt.” He chuckled and sampled his soup, smacking his lips loudly.
“You were going to teach me about, you know, that kind of thing.”
<
br /> “Yes, yes. Today lesson one.”
“Good. When?”
“Now, soon.”
The khichadi was bland to my taste, I’m sorry to say, a soupy stew of rice and vegetables. I ate half of it, tried the yogi tea, which was a milky concoction loaded with cinnamon, and then a delicious dessert called peda, made from ricotta cheese, pistachio nuts, coconut, honey, and cardamom seed.
Rinpoche finished his khichadi. He sat there savoring his tea and looking around at the wall decorations as if he’d been away in prison and had just returned to his parents’ cottage on the Ortyk River and his mother had made him his favorite lunch and he was seeing the ordinary household objects he’d grown up around, but with a grateful, fresh eye. “Let me show something,” he said, standing. He gestured for me to step with him into an alcove and he took hold of my upper arm and pulled me in close to one of the works on the wall there, a print of a bluish goddess with pointed breasts and dozens of arms. Her various hands were all holding something, vases, a flower, a skull, a serpent. As I looked closer I noticed that, floating above the head of the goddess, at the very top of the print, was another being, sitting cross-legged, its head surrounded by a blue halo. Other creatures, rather androgynous, occupied the bottom tier, below the goddess, against a background of plains and mountains, and these lesser souls did not have halos and were kneeling sideways rather than sitting in the lotus position. But they had similarly calm expressions on their faces, and they were wreathed in floating ribbons the color of the highest creature’s halo, robin’s-egg blue.
“It’s interesting,” I said, and Rinpoche laughed. There were times when I suspected he was laughing at me, but this was not one of those times. This time I knew he was laughing at me.
“Here is the big world,” he said, as if it were the most obvious thing. “Here is all creation. And here,” he pointed to the goddess who occupied the large central circle, “is the god who watches over all of this part of creation, this earth.”
“Fascinating,” I tried. In fact, the print seemed odd to me. Odd, crowded, overly complicated, not particularly beautiful.
“This being is the greatest teacher of our age. She will soon come down to this earth and help us. She will soon be born.”
“We need help,” I said in a neutral, agreeable way, but now I was beginning to feel, again, something akin to that anxious twisting in the intestines that I’d felt with Jeannie in the room in the Knickerbocker Hotel so many years before. It was very strange to feel such a thing there, at that moment. It was deeply unsettling. And, really, it almost completely muted the old mocking voice in me that was trying to reassert itself.
Rinpoche said, “There is a prophecy that this goddess will come soon to save us from something very bad. Maybe she is your niece.”
“I don’t have any nieces, that I know of.”
“Maybe she will be. . . . See, there are symbols in this painting—to know them you have to study many years—but the symbols say it is so that she is coming now.”
“I’m glad,” I said. Like everyone else I knew, I’d had moments when the apocalypse seemed imminent—the start of another war, the arising of another nuclear-armed despot, the boiling over of yet another ethnic conflict—but these were always followed by something like the feeling I’d had at Wrigley Field: everything was going to be fine. This was America, we were going to move forward, always, toward some greater, richer, more pleasurable future. Things could shake us—wars, riots, demonstrations, assassinations, terrorist attacks—but the enormous momentum of our settled and well-fed middle class, and the enormous reservoir of our goodness, generosity, brains, and energy, these would pull us through.
“Very dangerous time now,” Rinpoche went on assuredly. “Not dangerous for our bodies, you know, to die, not that. Dangerous for us in the other way. Spiritual.”
You’ve been watching daytime TV, I almost said.
“But now, soon, it will be better.”
“Good, I’m glad.”
“Do you want me to show you where you are in this picture?”
“What?” It was suddenly difficult to be standing. It sounds foolish, I know, but I have promised to say what happened, foolish sounding or no, improbable or no. Rinpoche said what he said, and my legs started to shake.
He let out the small, mucusy chuckle I’d heard from him in the car in our first hour together. He was still gripping my arm. He moved me another inch closer to the print and pointed one thick finger at a being I had not noticed before, a berobed fellow perched on one of the blue hillsides to the right of the lower-tier types. It was difficult to be certain, but the fellow seemed to be reading, or writing, to be holding in his lap a book or a sheaf of papers. I looked at Rinpoche and he had the enormous lippy smile on his face, but there was something utterly somber behind it.
“Can’t be,” I said. “That person has black hair and my hair is brown.”
He threw back his head and laughed. His grip on my left tricep was like iron. “But he has a smile like you. Look!” he said when the laughter had subsided.
If the fellow was smiling it was the world’s smallest smile, all of a sixteenth of an inch.
“You don’t believe,” Rinpoche said.
“No, frankly.”
“Very bad, Otto!”
“Well, I’m just telling you the truth. The painting from which this print was made was probably painted a hundred years ago.”
“Eight hundred! Eight!” He let go of my arm and held up eight fingers.
“Even more so, then. I wasn’t around. How could that person have known about me?”
Rinpoche’s face was only a few inches from mine. It was a frightening face at that moment, hard and honest, un-clothed by the usual social niceties. He seemed to be trying to tell me something about himself, about me, about life, but without using words. “You don’t see, do you?” he said finally.
“No.”
This seemed, momentarily, to sadden him. He nodded without breaking eye contact, and then, oddly, reached his arm around me and pulled me hard against him in a quick embrace.
Upon my release from this embrace, I was going to tell him that he had been overestimating me from the first. That I wasn’t a particularly good soul at all, that I wasn’t special, that it was exceedingly unlikely I would ever have an amazing niece or be chosen for any particular spiritual work, essential to the world’s salvation or otherwise. Perceptive as he was, he had the wrong man, that’s all. Maybe Cecelia had misinterpreted one of her visions, inserted me when, in fact, the Rinpoche should have been introduced to the man sweeping the sidewalk in Paterson, or the guy sitting near the gas station in Pennsylvania, the Popsicle seller outside the Mexican restaurant, the nut-brown woman who’d taken our order today. It was all a mistake, I was going to tell him, and it was time to stop the foolishness. I should pay and get him over to his lecture. Forget the lessons, I wanted to say. Now you know who I am. I’m just one of the yelling crowd at Wrigley Field. Ordinary. All-American and proud of it. Too rich and soft and flawed to make any spiritual mark on anyone other than my own dog and children . . . on a good day.
Just at that moment the nut-brown woman appeared at my left elbow, close to us in the small alcove where the print hung. I thought she’d come to ask why we were still taking up the table, why we hadn’t paid and moved on so other customers could sit there. But she had something in her hands, and I saw that it was an expensive-looking necklace of robin’s-egg blue beads. On her face rested the tiny, peaceful smile, but it was wavering as if she was excited, or nervous. She bowed deeply to Rinpoche and said something to him, and though I didn’t understand a single syllable, it was clear from her gestures that she was asking permission to place the necklace over his head, and that she revered him in much the same way my sister did. Rinpoche nodded. The woman went up on her tiptoes, he bowed his head, and she placed the necklace over him in a gesture of such reverence that, I tell you, I began to shake almost violently. Rinpoche took her tiny hands
in his large ones and spoke to her, and it was as if they were mother and son, or sister and brother, such was the intimacy. After another few words she turned and looked at me, searching my face with her chocolate eyes. She shifted the gaze to Rinpoche, who nodded, and then the woman bowed to me with that same reverence, that same otherworldly calm. No, no, I wanted to tell her. I wanted to take her by the shoulders and say, No! Wrong guy! This is Otto Ringling. Look, I can take out my wallet and show you my tennis club membership. I like sex. I like food very much, too much probably. I yell at my kids once in a while and I have opinions, very judgmental opinions, about everything on earth. This is a mistake. I don’t know what he said about me but it wasn’t true. It’s a mistake!
But—who knows why—I accepted her bow and nodded my head in return. And then Rinpoche had his arm around my shoulders and was leading me out—we never did pay—across State Street, through the door of a building. We went single-file up a narrow set of stairs to another door, which opened into a room that had no furniture in it, just mats and pillows, and fifty or sixty faces staring at us with a frightening expectation.
THIRTY-THREE
To my shock, to my dismay, it turned out that the “something a little else” Rinpoche had referred to was a yoga class. If I had felt like running away during the strange scene in the Nepali restaurant, now I felt like sprinting to the door, crashing through, and knocking over a dozen ceramic cows on my way to the car and freedom. Only the fear of embarrassment kept me from doing that. The fear of embarrassment and the fact that, as we stood around talking with the yoga instructor (a part-Asian woman who looked, it seemed to me, something like the supreme goddess in the print across the street), more and more people came through the door. This was a problem, the instructor said quietly, there was not going to be room for all of them, enough mats, enough floor space. “I’ll just stand in the back,” I volunteered. “Don’t worry about me.”
Breakfast With Buddha Page 18
