Rinpoche gently circled the spoon in his tea. The muscles of his face were working so that I thought he might burst out laughing any second. “Not so much fun as bohling,” he said, and I had the sense then that he was toying with me, that everything he said on that night was coming from the comic place in him, his leather-handled bag of spiritual tricks.
“There’s a bowling alley in the city near where I grew up. I’ll take you, if you want.”
Rinpoche grinned and nodded, tapping his spoon against the rim of the cup, and then took a long drink.
“All college professors aren’t like that, you know,” I said. “I taught in college once, met some good people.”
“They were good people, the professors at the golf.”
“She was nice, but I found him very hard to be around. That kind of humor, that . . . I don’t know.”
There was a small glass vase between us, three gladioli in a few ounces of water. One of the gladioli had dropped a petal—brushstroke of purple on fine white cloth. Rinpoche drank the last sip of his tea, then set the cup aside, took the petal with his thumb and second finger, placed it on the middle of the saucer in front of him, and turned the cup upside down to cover it.
“I feel a lesson coming on,” I said.
He waved his hands around a moment, the way he sometimes did, and his voice changed slightly, as if he were drawing words up from some deep well of confidence. “The flower is the good inside every person,” he said. “The cup is like a wall, to protect. Many people have that wall.”
“Armor,” I said.
He nodded.
“Why?”
“Because to live without the cup means you must feel the world as the world really is. People make the armor from their smartness, or their anger, or their quiet, or their fear, or their being busy, or their being nice. Some people make it from a big show, always talking. Some make it by being very important. Many people do not make it, though, and those people can begin to see the world as it is. You do not make it too much, Otto.”
“I’m flattered. It’s something Jeannie and I have consciously tried to do with our children—not make ourselves so authoritarian, so far above them, that we cut ourselves off. We’ve tried to do that with each other, as well. To live unarmored.”
“This is why you are a good man,” he said, with a twinkle.
“Right. . . . You’re coming at me sideways again, I suspect. I have just as many defenses as Matthew, is that it?”
“Not so many, no.”
“Good.”
“And your sister,” he said, “has none. An open soul. Why she is the special person.”
“Is she?”
He nodded. “Very much. Very, very much.”
At that moment, his rugged face, so pliable and unreadable, sent a particular signal. “You’re in love with Cecelia, aren’t you,” I said. “I just realized that.”
Instead of giving me a real answer, he lifted the cup off the petal again and I could see there how delicate and fragile it was, almost silken, finely painted and veined, already drying up in the heat of our harsh world.
RINPOCHE PAID FOR the meal in cash. We left the Boathouse and strolled back across the parking lot, past the scene of his miniature golf triumph, and along the road that led to our motel. We were moving through the very last of the daylight by then and it was as though, with the disappearance of the sun, a guerrilla army of scents had risen up and laid claim to the air. Lake water, flowers, fish. I even thought I could detect the fragrance of drying wheat from the grain elevators of Duluth somewhere out of sight behind us.
Just as we were about to turn in to our motel, the evening light underwent a subtle change. Rinpoche took hold of the sleeve of my shirt and tugged me at an angle away from the building and toward the shoreline of the inlet. He led me right up onto the bank, and there, beyond the light chop of purple water, we saw just the tip of a full moon break the horizon. We stood there while it rose, enormous and peach colored, the bluish marks like fresh bruises on its surface. It was a magnificent show, really, the incremental appearance of this other sphere 240,000 miles away; the subtle changes in the light and shadows around us. Even the water seemed to resonate in response to the huge lunar eye, whitening now, already starting to grow smaller as it climbed.
We watched until it had gone in size from silver dollar to dime, and then we turned and went toward our rooms.
“If a person could really see it,” Rinpoche said to me in a quiet voice, “really see the thing that we just saw as it is truly, without putting a name between his mind and the fact of what you call, in your language, the moon, then that person would have no cup over his good. Do you understand? No armor. That person would not be afraid. That person could love and that person could let another person give him love, and he could feel the ground he walks on like love, and the air he breathes like love.”
I said, “I feel the ground I walk on like dirt. So I guess I’m not there yet.”
He laughed his happy old laugh. An elderly couple going in the front entrance turned to look at him, at us, and frowned in tandem.
I asked Rinpoche if he’d consider taking a swim with me before his nightly meditation, but he had nothing to swim in, he said, and I said, “Niente, rien, nichevo,” and we went along the hallway laughing at that, too, almost like friends.
THIRTY-NINE
In the morning I was glad I’d made the massage appointment. The soreness wasn’t as sharp as it had been the day before, but I still felt as if I’d been beaten all over with a two-hundred-dollar putter. We checked out of the motel and drove across the bridge that links Wisconsin and Minnesota. To our right, sunlight glinted and sparkled on the greatest of the Great Lakes—it looked like an ocean from our vantage, and you could just make out the curve of the earth, an almost undetectable bend in the blue landscape.
My father’s parents had liked to drive to Duluth once or twice a year—their idea of a big-city holiday—and they’d taken Cecelia and me a few times. Between the downtown area and the shore sprawled a jumble of railroad yards and grain elevators. “That’s where your morning cereal comes from,” my grandmother had told me, more than once, pointing at the grain elevators, and I remembered struggling to wrap my mind around the idea that the wheat we grew on our land went into trucks, and the semis made the long overland trip to a place like Duluth, and the grain was then sent by ship all over the world. It made Duluth seem, to my child’s mind, like the invisible heart of the American way of life, an exotic, bigger, more important place, far from our bland home territory. For a time in my late teens I’d even had a persistent fantasy of living there and writing novels about the men on the docks and on the freighters and the women who worked in the noisy diner my grandparents had liked on West Superior Street.
I’d joined Rinpoche for part of his morning meditation that day—nothing major to report, just a sort of general calming down—and so we got off to a bit of a late start. No time for anything but a quick coffee at the registration desk and then we were crossing the bridge and diving into city traffic. I found the address, just off Main Street, found a place to park, and told Rinpoche I’d meet him back there in an hour and fifteen minutes, and that I’d be a new man. “Why don’t you try to find a bathing suit for yourself,” I told him. “We’re going to be cutting across the top of Minnesota today and it’s supposed to be warm and there are lots of pretty lakes. I thought we might take a swim.”
“In Skovorodino we swim, you know . . .” he turned his hands in toward his body.
“Naked.”
“Yes.”
“Well, we do that here sometimes, too, but there are places where it’s better to have something on. Get a suit, we’ll have some fun.”
“Massage good,” he said.
“Thanks, I’ll try to.”
DUE TO BACK TROUBLES, tennis injuries, and my old football knee, I’ve had enough therapeutic massages over the years to know almost the instant I feel a pair of hands on my skin whet
her they are well trained or not. It’s like tennis, and writing, and lots of other things: If you’ve had some experience you can gauge a player’s ability almost before he or she actually strikes the ball; you can get a sense for the writer’s skill, or lack of it, from the first paragraph. Jane Aleski was the therapist’s name, in this case. She ran a small spalike operation on the second floor of a newly refurbished office building in downtown Duluth. From the first touch I knew she was a master. Lying on the table beneath a warm sheet, I gave her, in brief, the story of my yoga adventure, and she laughed in a way that made me comfortable. As she worked—neck, back, legs—I tried to do a kind of meditation, focusing on the idea of the cup over the petal and attempting to let her massage all my armor away. I knew there wasn’t much in the way of defenses between me and Jeannie, me and the kids. But I also knew that, at work, and with Cecelia, and with almost all of my friends, and with my parents before they died, there was a way in which I’d hardened myself just slightly. My personality had solidified. I’d learned to react by habit instead of really being present. With my parents, for instance, I’d taken to playing the role of college-educated son, the executive from back East, leaving Cecelia to take on the role of flake.
“Traveling with your family?” Jane asked, because I’d told her about the yoga class, but not about the limber Skovorodinan at the front of the room. By this time she’d turned me onto my back and was sitting at my head, massaging the knotted muscles between shoulder and neck.
“No. . . . I’m accompanying a monk, actually. A sort of spiritual teacher. Volya Rinpoche.”
“Volya Rinpoche! How wonderful! I’ve read all his books, every one of them. Are you, what would the word be . . . a disciple?”
To my complete surprise, I found myself pausing before answering her. And when I did answer, I found myself avoiding the question. “My sister is, I guess. I’m doing it as a favor to her. She couldn’t get away from her clients. But I did finish one of his books last night.”
“How is he in person?”
“Funny. Odd. Easygoing, except when he’s playing one of his tricks. He had me fasting for a whole day yesterday, and I’m not like that, believe me.”
“People say he’s actually the incarnation of the Buddha. Or some kind of Jesus-Buddha-Moses combination.”
“Who says that?”
“I don’t know. I subscribe to a Buddhist magazine, just out of curiosity. I have a regular meditation practice, that’s all. I’m not really so much of a Buddhist, I guess, just a person looking around for a belief system that makes sense. I probably read it in one of those issues someplace, or heard it at the meditation center. Your trapezius muscles are like granite, you know, and that is not a good thing.”
“It was the yoga. He tricked me into doing a yoga class. I’ve been in agony the last two days.”
“We’ll fix you up. I’m just curious, though, does it feel like he’s the Buddha?”
“He doesn’t even call himself a Buddhist.”
“Neither did Buddha.”
“Right. Jesus wasn’t a Christian, and so on. Funny how that works.”
“So he doesn’t, you know, recite sutras or anything?”
“Not really, no. It’s like he takes something from a bunch of different traditions and mixes in some of his own. It’s hard to put a finger on exactly what he believes or doesn’t believe. I’m a little bit of the smart-ass, skeptical type, but I have to admit I like being around him more and more as time goes by.”
“And he’s teaching you?”
“He’s offered to. I’ve started to meditate a bit, just to try it out.”
“Meditation saved my life.”
“Big statement.”
“Big but true. If I ever found a meditation teacher I thought was the real thing, I’d drop everything and follow anywhere.”
“Well, he’s thinking of starting a retreat center of some kind just west of Dickinson, North Dakota, so I suppose you could follow him there if you wanted to. It’s our family land, actually.”
“Really? Do you know what kind of blessing you’ll get for letting him use your land? If he is the Buddha, or some great being like that, I mean? You’ll be set for eternity.”
Jane laughed when she said it, and I laughed, too. But I have to say I felt a small chill along the sides of my arms. She might have been touching the nerves that ran there, I don’t know. But I know I felt a chill, or a sense of . . . I don’t know exactly what to call it. Three or four times now in the past few days I’d felt it. Seese would have called it a premonition, or an “energy message.” But I did not deal in energy messages, and so it was strange to me, a sort of intermittent knocking at the door of my house of belief.
When Jane had finished and I was paying and thanking her, she handed me a business card on the back of which was written the name of another therapist, this one in Bismarck. “If you need a massage while you’re there, this is the woman to see. An old friend. If you don’t mind, I’ll call and tell her about the retreat center, okay? She’d be interested. I might be interested, myself. It’s not every day you get a chance to sit with the Buddha.”
“Or play miniature golf with him,” I said.
She gave me a strange look, eyes squinting, little smile.
I thanked her again, and went back out onto Duluth’s cobbled main street a new man.
FORTY
Before leaving Duluth, and my pleasant childhood memories of its old-style downtown, Rinpoche and I passed an hour at a breakfast place Jane had recommended, the Chester Creek Café, up on the hill, not far from the university. I thought we might run into Matthew and Eveline Fritton there because it was a college crowd: graduate students and profs, a few moms with young babies in the watery morning light, twelve kinds of coffee, a BRING THE TROOPS HOME sign in the window. Someone had left a copy of USA Today on the table, and between spoonfuls of granola and sips of Italian dark roast I took in the news about the terrorist investigation in Great Britain, the new restrictions, the stories from Iraq, all death and trouble on that day. For me, for most Americans, the war stood as merely a dark background to our comfortable everyday lives. American men and women were dying there, and having their arms and legs blown off there, and Iraqis were perishing by the tens of thousands, yet there was a way in which most of us seemed able to keep those facts at arm’s length. It was not that we didn’t care; of course we cared. But if we’d had a child there it would have been a different kind of caring, more intense, more immediate, more than just ink on a page and sorrowful thoughts in the workday’s open spaces. But Jeannie and I didn’t have a child there, and would never have a child there as long as the military was composed of volunteers, and there was something about the whole thing that felt dishonest and wrong to me, some kind of national puzzle we were not even close to working out, some kind of perfect balance we were being asked to strike between too little armor, as a nation, and too much. Iraq had been on my mind since the start of the trip—how could it not be with the radio hosts ranting and the newspaper headlines writ large—but I had not broached the subject with Rinpoche even once.
We took the expressway south from Duluth a short ways and then switched to Route 2 West, a classic old American highway that runs across the northern tier of the Lower 48, from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula to northern Idaho. Ten minutes outside the city we entered in the Great North Woods, and it was there that I began to feel we were leaving the Midwest behind and rolling out into yet another of America’s subcultures. Whereas most of Wisconsin and Illinois had been tame and fertile, we had moved into the great West now, wild and mostly unpeopled (gray wolves still lived here), and I wondered if Rinpoche could feel the difference. The two-lane strip of tar was busy with logging trucks, eighteen-wheelers, and Winnebagos and cut across a landscape of swamp and small ponds, with stunted birch and fir trees standing like lace on a green, ragged wilderness. There was something free about it, untrammeled. It worked a little magic on the eastern soul.
“
I’m curious,” I said to Rinpoche, after I’d been running the question through my mind for an hour, “what you think about the war, terrorism, September 11, and so on. I finished your book last night, I liked it, I learned from it, but you don’t really address specific issues there, so I’m wondering what your stance is on all this.”
“All this is the world,” he said after a moment. “This has always been the world. I feel this world as a sadness in my own body.”
“Right. Me, too. But what I meant was, from your perspective, from a spiritual perspective, what is the right response to something like the terrorist attacks? Is it ever right to go to war? In self-defense? In others’ defense?”
Another long moment of silence, and then, “Jesus let people nail him in his hands and feet. He did not fight them.”
“Right, okay. But that was Jesus. What if you don’t have the courage or spiritual advancement to do that? What if your children are being attacked and you don’t think it’s right to allow it to happen?”
“You should protect your children.”
“All right. So what is the correct moral stance on the war, is what I’m asking.”
“There are people,” he said, “who are past being hurt, beyond being hurt. You should know this is true. You should try to become one of those people, to make an understanding with yourself that you are not your body, that you are something bigger. That is your work on this earth, do you see? Every experience here is to teach you to do that. Living, dying, every experience.”
“And if that’s beyond you at this point? I mean, if you are someone who still identifies with his body, then what?”
“You should try not to war.”
“And if you try and can’t avoid it? If you think it might prevent further killing in the future?”
“You should try not to kill to stop killing. Try. It is very hard. Sometimes I think it is not possible for many people. Only to try is important. Even not to have violence in your thoughts is important.”
Breakfast With Buddha Page 22
