The Dalai Lama's Cat and the Art of Purring

by David Michie

  Picture, if you will, the following scene. The distinguished guest arrived—handsome, charismatic, and towering over the Dalai Lama. As is Tibetan tradition in meeting a high lama, the guest bowed and presented His Holiness with a white scarf, called a kata, that His Holiness in turn draped around the VIP’s neck. Everything was smiles and serenity—the usual case when the Dalai Lama is involved. Then the VIP guest stepped beside his host for the official photograph.

  A fraction of a second before the photographer snapped the picture, my three sons launched what can only be described as a full frontal assault. Two of them burst out from behind an armchair and charged directly up the visitor’s legs. The third sank his claws and teeth into the visitor’s left ankle.

  The visitor doubled over with shock and pain. The photographer let out a screech of alarm. For a few stunned moments time seemed to stop. Then the first two kittens scampered back down the VIP’s legs while the third darted away without so much as an “Hasta la vista, baby.”

  His Holiness, the only one who seemed unsurprised by the feline security lapse, apologized profusely. Recovering his poise, the VIP guest seemed to find the whole thing quite amusing.

  I don’t think I will ever forget the sight of what happened next: the Dalai Lama was gesturing in the direction of the miscreant kittens, while one of the world’s most famous action heroes lay on his stomach, trying to scoop the little wretches from their hiding place under a sofa.

  Yes, it was agreed by everyone a short while later, more suitable homes had to be found for the male kittens. But the little one, delicate and docile, a miniature version of her Himalayan mother? In their hearts I don’t think anyone wanted to think about her leaving. For the moment, she was safe.

  Like many felines, I am a cat of many names. At the Himalaya Book Café, I had been named Rinpoche. In official circles at Jokhang, where His Holiness the Dalai Lama is referred to as HHDL, I acquired the formal title HHC for His Holiness’s Cat. My little girl was soon to follow, being given the official appellation HHK—His Holiness’s Kitten. But the name that mattered most to me was the one given to her by His Holiness himself. A day or two after the boys were gone he lifted my baby up in his hand and gazed into her eyes with that look of pure love that makes your whole being glow.

  “So beautiful, just like your mother!” he murmured, stroking her tiny face with his forefinger. “Aren’t you, little Snow Cub?”

  For the next few weeks it was just the three of us: His Holiness; me, his Snow Lion; and my daughter, Snow Cub. When I got up early in the morning to curl up next to His Holiness as he meditated, little Snow Cub got up as well, nestling in the warmth of my body. When I went through to the executive assistants’ office, she came with me, mewing until she was picked up and placed on their desks, where she loved nothing more than pawing their pens to the edge, then gleefully flicking them to the ground. On one occasion, Tenzin, who sat opposite Chogyal and was a firm advocate of green tea, left his desk and on it, his glass of tea. He returned to find HHK tentatively lapping from the glass. She didn’t stop as he got closer, or even when he sat in his chair, put his elbows on his desk, and observed her closely.

  “I don’t suppose there’s any chance of my having some of that, is there, HHK?” he asked dryly.

  HHK looked up with an expression of wide-eyed wonderment. Was not everything at Jokhang there specifically for her amusement?

  Then came the day that Lobsang, His Holiness’s translator, reminded the Dalai Lama of a commitment he had once made. “The queen of Bhutan has asked me to pass on her warm regards, Your Holiness,” he told the Dalai Lama one afternoon after they’d finished working on a transcript.

  His Holiness smiled. “Very good. I enjoyed her visit very much. Please send her my very best wishes.”

  Lobsang nodded. “She also asked after HHC.”

  “Oh, yes. I remember little Snow Lion sitting on her lap. Quite unusual.” He turned to look at where I was curled up with Snow Cub on the beige fleece blanket he had put on the sill after the arrival of the kittens.

  “You may remember, Your Holiness, her request to adopt a kitten if HHC ever had any,” Lobsang ventured.

  The Dalai Lama paused for a moment before meeting Lobsang’s eyes. “That’s right. I think she was hoping for a kitten with the right … how do you call it?”

  “Pedigree?” suggested Lobsang.

  His Holiness nodded. “We were never able to trace where HHC came from. The family in Delhi who owned her mother had moved away. As for the father of her kittens …” The two men exchanged a smile.

  “But,” continued His Holiness very softly, following Lobsang’s gaze to the tiny form beside me, “little Snow Cub does look very much like her mother. And a promise is a promise.”

  Snow Cub was gone within a week. Lobsang, traveling back to Bhutan on leave, took her himself. For me, the satisfaction of knowing she had gone to one of the best homes imaginable was far outweighed by the sadness of her departure, the reality of once again being alone on the sill.

  With his typical compassion, His Holiness moved the beige blanket to the floor underneath a chair in our bedroom so that I wouldn’t be constantly reminded of my loss every time I jumped onto the windowsill. But I could still curl up in it under the chair and inhale the smell of little Snow Cub and her brothers, and see wisps of their fur—tiny strands of white interlaced with brown. Some mornings instead of sitting beside His Holiness to meditate, I’d walk over to the fleece blanket and settle there instead, absorbed in my own reveries of the past. And there were other times of day when, with nothing more interesting to absorb me, I would return to the blanket and my memories, bittersweet as they were.

  Now, with the spring cleaning in full gear, even the blanket had been taken from me.

  Only a day or two after Chogyal’s spring cleaning of our apartment, I decided to follow Serena when she left the Himalaya Book Café. She repeated the same pattern every day. At 5:30 P.M., she would disappear into the manager’s office, a small room next to the kitchen, reemerging about ten minutes later in her yoga clothes—black, free-trade, organic cotton—with her hair pulled back in a ponytail. Instead of leaving by the front door of the restaurant, she would slip through the kitchen and out the back door, making her way along the lane behind the restaurant and up the winding street I knew all too well.

  From time to time Serena spoke about going to yoga in a reverential tone that revealed its great importance to her; her attendance each evening was nonnegotiable. Since arriving back in India she had set out to achieve greater balance in her life and in so doing had embarked on a journey of self-discovery that included not just Indian banquets but much bigger questions about what she wanted to do with her life and where she wanted to do it. Because I possessed the usual feline curiosity, not to mention plenty of free time in the evenings now that His Holiness was away, I wondered what it was about yoga that had such a powerful effect. Wasn’t yoga simply a name given by humans to the variety of bodily contortions they attempted in a manner vastly inferior to what was achieved quite effortlessly by us cats?

  Keeping up with Serena as she approached the summit of the hill wasn’t easy for a cat with wonky pins. But what I lacked in physical strength, I made up for in determination. A short while after she approached a modest-looking bungalow with faded Tibetan prayer flags looped under the eaves, I followed her inside.

  The front door was ajar, leading into a small hallway where there was a large shoe rack, mostly empty, and a heady perfume of shoe leather, perspiration, and Nag Champa incense.

  A beaded curtain separated the hall from the yoga studio. Above it was a sign that spelled out the name, The Downward Dog School of Yoga, in faded letters. Pushing my way through the strings of beads, I found myself in a very large room. At the far end a man was standing in what I later learned was Virabhadrasana II, Warrior II Pose. With his arms stretched wide at shoulder height, he cut a majestic figure, silhouetted against a panoramic vista of the Himalayas, visib
le through the open floor-to-ceiling doors. The icy summits reflected the setting sun, which crowned the peaks in gold.

  “We seem to have a visitor,” said the man in warrior pose, in a mellow voice with a faint German accent. His white hair was cropped close to his head, but despite his apparent age, there was a suppleness about him. His face was tanned and timeless, his eyes a vibrant blue. I wondered how he knew I was in the room, until I saw that one whole wall of the studio was mirrored, and I realized he had seen me coming through the beaded curtain.

  Out on the balcony, Serena turned and saw me. “Oh, Rinpoche, you followed me!” Walking toward me, she told the man in Warrior Pose, “This little one spends a lot of time at the café. I don’t suppose you let cats inside the studio, do you?”

  There was a pause before he answered. “Not as a rule. But I have a sense that your friend is rather special.”

  I had no idea exactly why he sensed this, but I was happy to take it as permission to stay. Without further ado, I hopped onto a low wooden stool near a rack of blankets at the back of the room. It was the perfect place from which to observe without being observed.

  Looking around, I noticed a small, framed black-and-white photograph of a dog hanging on the wall. It was a Lhasa Apso, the same breed as Kyi Kyi. Popular among Tibetans, Lhasa Apsos traditionally served as monastery sentinels, alerting monks to the presence of intruders. Was this particular Lhasa Apso the dog after which the Downward Dog School of Yoga was named?

  Other people began arriving for class. Mostly expatriates, with a sprinkling of Indians, the mix of men and women seemed to range in age from the 30s on up. They carried themselves with a certain awareness, an indefinable poise. Spreading out yoga mats, bolsters, and blankets, they lay on their backs with their eyes shut and their legs strapped together as though impersonating the rows of trussed chickens I used to see in the market.

  After a while, the instructor, whom people were calling Ludo, stood at the front and addressed the 20 or so students, his voice gentle but clear. “Yoga is vidya,” he said, “which is Sanskrit for being with life as it is, not life as I would like it to be. Not life if only this was different, or if only I could do that.

  “So, how do we begin yoga? By getting out of our heads and into the present moment. The only moment that actually exists is the here and now.”

  Through the open studio doors came the shrill cries of swifts, soaring and swooping in the late afternoon. Stray chords of Hindi music and the clatter of cooking pots rose from the houses down the hill, along with the aromas of evening meals being prepared.

  “Abiding in the here and now,” Ludo continued, “we recognize that in each unfolding moment, everything is complete. Everything is interconnected. But we cannot experience this directly until we let go of thought and simply relax, until we acknowledge that we have come to this moment, here and now, only because everything else is the way it is.

  “Relax in open awareness,” Ludo told the students. “The unification of life. This is yoga.”

  Ludo then led the class through a sequence of asanas, or postures, some standing, some seated, some dynamic, some resting.

  Yoga, I realized, was not just about developing flexibility of the body. It went beyond that.

  Along with his instructions on how to bend and stretch, Ludo gave out gems of wisdom that pointed to a much broader purpose. “We cannot work on the body unless we also work on the mind. When we come across constrictions—obstacles in our physical practice—we discover that physiology is a mirror of psychology. Mind and body can get stuck in grooves that cause discomfort, stress, and tightness.”

  When one of the men mentioned that he couldn’t bend over and place his palms on the floor because his hamstrings were too tight, Ludo remarked, “Hamstrings, yes. For some that is the challenge. For others it is being able to turn. Or simply to sit cross-legged comfortably. The dissatisfactions of life manifest in many different forms. Exactly how they are expressed is unique to each one of us. But yoga provides us with the space to become free.” As he walked along the rows of students, making subtle adjustments to their postures, he continued. “Instead of going round and round, deepening the same subconscious habits of body and mind, use your awareness. Don’t try to avoid tightness by getting into a compromised posture; instead breathe through it! Not with force but with wisdom. Use your breath to create openness. Breath by breath, subtle change is possible. Each breath is a step to transformation.”

  I followed the class with keen interest from my stool at the back, pleased to have remained unobserved. But when Ludo instructed the students to perform a seated twist, suddenly 20 heads turned and faced me. Instantly there were smiles and a few chuckles.

  “Ah, yes—today’s special guest,” said Ludo.

  “All that white hair!” someone exclaimed.

  “Blue eyes,” said another.

  Then, as all 20 pairs of eyes were trained on me, a man remarked, “Must be Swami.”

  This provoked laughter as people were reminded of the local sage whose image appeared on posters all over town.

  I was relieved when the twist ended but immediately found myself being observed once again, when everyone turned toward me in the opposite direction.

  At the end of the class, as they lay on their mats in Shavasana, the pose of the corpse, Ludo told the students, “In some ways this is the most challenging pose of all. Calm body and calm mind. Try not to engage with every thought. Simply acknowledge the thought, accept it, and let it go. We can discover far more in the space between thoughts than when we become absorbed in conceptual elaboration. In the stillness we discover that there are other ways of knowing things than through the intellect.”

  After class, as the students were putting away their blankets and blocks and bolsters, a few paused to speak to me. While some returned to the hallway to put on their shoes and leave, most congregated on the balcony beyond the sliding doors. An assortment of chairs with brightly colored cushions and a few beanbag chairs were ranged along a faded Indian carpet that ran the length of the balcony. At a table stacked with mugs and glasses, someone was pouring water and green tea as the students settled into what was evidently a comfortable postclass routine.

  We cats are not fond of too much noise or movement, so I waited until they were all seated before slipping silently from the stool and making my way out to the balcony next to Serena. The final rays of the setting sun had turned the mountains a gleaming coral red.

  “Trying to breathe through discomfort when we’re doing yoga is one thing,” a gravel-voiced woman called Merrilee was saying. She had joined the class almost at the end, as though she had really come only for the social part of the evening. And was it my imagination, or had she surreptitiously slipped something from a hip flask into her glass? “But what about when we’re not doing yoga and we have to deal with problems?” she asked.

  “All is yoga,’” Ludo told her. “Usually we react to challenges in a habitual way, with anger or avoidance. By breathing through a challenge, we can arrive at a more useful response.”

  “Isn’t anger or avoidance sometimes a useful reaction?” asked Ewing, an older American who was a longtime resident of McLeod Ganj. Occasionally he visited the Himalaya Book Café, where it was said that he had fled to India after some sort of tragedy back home. For many years he had played piano in the lobby of New Delhi’s Grand Hotel.

  “A reaction is automatic, habitual,” Ludo said. “A response is considered. That’s the difference. What’s important is to create space, to open ourselves up to possibilities beyond the habitual, which rarely serve us well. Anger is never an enlightened response. We may be wrathful—speaking in mock-angry tones to stop a child who is about to step near a fire, for example—but that’s very different from real anger.”

  “The problem,” observed a tall Indian man sitting next to Serena, “is that we get stuck in our comfort zone, even when it isn’t very comfortable.”

  “Clinging to the familiar,” Seren
a agreed. “To things that used to give us such happiness but don’t anymore.”

  I looked up at her, startled, when she said this. I was thinking of the beige fleece blanket in the bedroom and how memories of the many happy times I had spent on it with my little Snow Cub were now laced with sadness.

  “Shantideva, the Indian Buddhist sage, talks about licking honey off the edge of a blade,” said Ludo. “No matter how sweet, the price we pay is much higher.”

  “So how do we know,” asked Serena, “when something that has been positive in the past has outlived its usefulness?”

  Ludo looked over at her with eyes so clear they seemed almost silver. “When it causes us to suffer,” he replied simply. “Suffer comes from a Latin word meaning to carry. And while pain is sometimes unavoidable, suffering is not. For instance, we may have a very happy relationship with someone, and then we lose the person. We feel pain, of course: that’s natural. But when we continue to carry that pain, feeling constantly bereft, that’s suffering.”

  There was a pause while everyone absorbed this. In the deepening twilight, the mountains loomed in the distance, brooding shadows skimmed with vivid pink like the frosting on Mrs. Trinci’s cupcakes.

  “I sometimes think the past is a dangerous place to go looking for happiness,” said the Indian man sitting next to Serena.

  “You’re right, Sid,” agreed Ludo. “The only time we can experience happiness is in this moment, here and now.”

  Later, the students began to drift away. Serena left with several others, and I followed her into the hall.

  “I see little Swami is with you,” observed one of the women, slipping on her shoes.

  “Yes. We know each other well. She spends a lot of time at the café. I’m giving her a lift back there now,” Serena said, picking me up.

  “What’s her real name?” another woman asked.

  “Oh, she’s a cat of many names. Everywhere she goes she seems to acquire another one.”