Lunch with Buddha

by Merullo, Roland

  Something like the same impulse must have been in operation after our meal at the Restaurant That Shall Not Be Named. Rinpoche understood the facts of life, of course, but I wasn’t sure he’d seen very much of America since moving to North Dakota and settling into the retreat center. Celia told me he rarely left the property, almost never watched TV. He insisted that my job in this life was to guide the miraculous incarnation we called “Shelsa,” but my own feeling was that, if I had any significant role to play in his family situation, it was to show him my great land, warts and all. The Coulee dam, the viewing platform at the Empire State Building, the plains, the Cascades, the Hershey chocolate factory, Wrigley Field, casinos, suburbia . . . and Sprague Street, Spokane.

  It wasn’t so bad, really. A few unsteady drunks meandering. A shirtless, pierced twenty-year-old riding his skateboard along and singing loudly. A ragged couple arguing at the mouth of one alley. A woman who looked homeless and high.

  Halfway up the block a small collection of souls had spilled out the front door of a brightly lit place called Irv’s. We’d passed it on the way down and seen several muscular, six-foot-tall women dressed in garish heels and an abundance of makeup. I’d decided to say nothing and see if Rinpoche noticed. He did.

  “What is?” he’d asked when we were safely past.

  “A transvestite bar, I think.”

  “What that is?”

  “People born in men’s bodies who feel feminine,” was the best I could come up with on short notice, though I realized after a moment that I could also have described it in reverse. “They like to dress up as women. ‘Transgendered’ means people who have their bodies changed surgically, chemically, to be more like women even though they were born men. Or vice versa.”

  I could sense that the subject intrigued him. There was a certain cast to his broad face when he was pondering. The mouth flattened and stretched. The eyes angled slightly down. Nothing like the excitement he’d shown at the sight of the Coulee dam, but I knew him well enough to feel his curiosity all the same, and it was part of the reason I chose Sprague Street again for our return trip. While we’d been having our meal, darkness had fallen and Irv’s had grown lively. Patrons were hugging each other affectionately on the sidewalk; the tables on the other side of the front window were full, music playing. Used to being stared at themselves, no doubt, two of the taller women there, beautifully dressed and coiffed, made a frank appraisal of the two of us as we walked toward them in the night. One of them, skin the color of milk chocolate and lips painted tropical-sunset red, offered a friendly greeting. Rinpoche stopped. “How are you boys tonight?” she’d asked, so, naturally, Rinpoche said, “Good,” and then put exactly the same question back to her.

  I thought she might take offense, but she angled her head back and laughed. She was wearing gold eyeliner.

  “What are you?”

  “Monk,” he said, and then, pinching the fabric of his robe and holding it toward her, “Transwestite, too.”

  Another uproarious laugh. The women called over a friend, more gorgeousness. While I stood by in a swirl of awkward air, the dark-skinned woman reached out and fingered Rinpoche’s robe. He seemed not to mind. “Is this the best you can do?”

  “This is what we dress, all the time.”

  “The color suits you, I have to say.”

  Thanks in part to the heels, she was five or six inches taller. He was smiling up at her. For a moment I thought he was actually sexually interested, or at least that her beautiful face had broken through what had always seemed a complete indifference, on his part, in the matter of good or not-so-good looks. My sister, as I might have mentioned, is a stunning woman, even in her sackcloth dresses and electrocuted hair, so perhaps I’d been mistaken about Rinpoche’s tastes. Maybe he was the manly man I’d told the Christians about, a player, a lover of female pulchritude. And, I thought, if he cheated on my sister I was going to thrash him.

  But of course these were my own sordid thoughts running without a leash. The famous smile lit his face. He reached out and put one hand on the woman’s bare shoulder and there was nothing remotely sexual in the touch. “I go now to give a talk. Otto, where is?”

  I gave the address, which I’d memorized. The woman looked me up and down and then returned her attention to the man with his hand on her shoulder.

  “You are extremely cute,” she said.

  “Thank you.”

  “And if I didn’t have friends coming in a little while I’d be sure to make a point of attending your talk.”

  “Come with your friends,” Rinpoche said. “Come late. Doesn’t matter.”

  “What do you talk about? Can we ask?” one of her companions said.

  “Ask, ask,” he said, “ask anything.”

  “She means the subject of your talk,” I said.

  “Subject is being your true self in this whirl,” Rinpoche told her. “To go there the complete way.” He was looking at all three of them now, shifting his eyes one to the next, standing there, as he always did, like some kind of stump or statue. Solid, still, exactly in his place on this earth.

  The women laughed as if this were the best of all topics.

  “He means it,” I said. “He’s a famous spiritual master. Volya Rinpoche. You should come. It’s free. Starts in fifteen minutes.”

  “We might, we might,” the first woman said. She leaned over and planted a kiss on Rinpoche’s left cheek and we walked on.

  “You have a smudge of lipstick there, boss,” I said as we approached the building where the talk was to be held. “I can wipe it off if you want.”

  He’d suddenly gone deadly serious, pondering, musing. Preparing his speech, I thought. Or marveling at the variety of American street life. Or something else.

  He shook his head no, and—one of us with a ruby-red imprint on his cheek—we went through the doorway of a three-story stone building and into a room that was crowded and abuzz and set up with a dozen rows of folding chairs, every seat taken.

  17

  On my previous road trip with Rinpoche, I had three times accompanied him to his presentations, once in a rented storefront in Youngstown, Ohio, once at a more formal conference, at Notre Dame, and a final memorable time in a yoga class in Madison. Though this setting—another vacant storefront—was similar to the one in Ohio, the crowd was much larger and, I was glad to see, not in yoga attire. His reputation seemed to have spread in the intervening years; the place was packed, electric with anticipation.

  Since there were no unoccupied chairs, I stood against the back wall and examined the assembly. It was the usual motley crew, a range of humanity that went from scruffy twenty-somethings with pimply faces and worshipful looks, to neatly dressed seniors and middle-aged types like myself. Men and women, black, white, brown, yellow, red, assorted hair colors. Fat and thin, handsome and plain, tall and short. And then, just as the event’s coordinator stood up to make the introduction . . . one rather spectacular transvestite came through the door. A portly middle-aged man in the back row stood up and gave her his seat.

  I won’t go into the whole presentation here—Rinpoche’s books are widely available and the gist of his remarks can be found there, especially in one called The Genuine Self. But I want to give a sense of the evening. First of all, as he took his place on the slightly raised stage and sat, settling the fabric of his robe around him, Rinpoche assumed a very different air. It wasn’t a matter of trying to be something he was not, of putting on a face to meet the faces that he met. It was more like a baseball player donning his uniform, a miner his steel hat, a surgeon her scrubs and sneakers. There was a job to do—that’s what his body language conveyed. This is serious business, man. Listen to what I have to say. There would always be his throaty laugh, giggles, facial contortions—I’d never seen him give a presentation without those—but the underlying sense was of important information being made available. Audience members would ignore it at their peril.

  A small table had been set bes
ide him, and a glass (not a cup) of hot green tea was standing on it. Before he began, Rinpoche took his collection of small stones from a pocket in his robe. There were twenty-four in all, four neat rows of six, various colors and shapes but all of them roughly the size of a robin’s egg. He set them out with great care, then ignored them. For the first half hour he spoke about authenticity and the myriad ways “the whirl,” as he pronounced it, conspired to blind us to our truest self. “We have the two ways,” he said, “same way and different way. When we are born we look around us to figure off how the other people are living, and then we live like that, too. Or, we look and we try to be just different from what the other people are. If our mother believed in God very much, we make a big life of believing in no God. If our father yelled at us, we make the same yelling at our little boy or girl. If the person in the house next door has a new car, we get one. Not bad, this is. None of it is bad, see? But maybe is it bad if we do these things without thinking on them ever. And maybe is it bad if we think everybody should be the same like us. And maybe, maybe,” he said, his voice rising into a squeak that made him chuckle, “maybe even past the car and the yelling and the God there could be some part, wery true part of ourselves, that we don’t want to work on in this life. A new part, a part that we could make in our own way inside ourselves, if we didn’t always go same or different.”

  He paused for an uncomfortably long run of seconds and swung his eyes around the room to see if he’d been understood. Some of the younger people were reverently nodding. One or two of the older, back-row crowd sat stoically, waiting to be convinced. The woman we’d met at Irv’s was holding her eyes steady on him.

  “There is not one level but many levels to this true self,” he went on. “Many levels! Let me show.” He turned to the grid of stones and took one from the row closest to him. He held it up in the air between the second and third fingers of his right hand. “You look in yourself and you see one truth,” he said. “Maybe from meditating, maybe from just from living your life on a day and day. You see: my mother used to yell at me like this, or my father used to yell. I’m now stopping yelling. You make a change inside you, a new feeling . . . Good.” He put the stone into his robe and brought the empty hand out with a flourish, like a magician. “Wery simple, yes? “Could be,” he said with a sly smile, “could be Rinpoche too simple for you, not so smart!” At this thought he went off into a riff of laughter, high and happy and as unselfconscious as a drunken dancer.

  Then he held up the hand that had been empty and there was a different stone in it, and a few people in the crowd let out a gasp because we hadn’t seen him pick it up from the table. This was a new trick. He’d been prestidigitating in Dickinson all these years, working his show. The cheeks squeezed up, the big smile lit the room as if powered by a day’s worth of Coulee dam electricity. “But maybe something else is inside this new feeling, yes? What could it be?” He looked around for a suggestion. “Maybe, in the meditation one day you see something, or you feel something that you before never did. All in a sudden the world now looks little bit different. You feel like you touch God maybe. You touch the big, big intelligence that makes the stars hang in the sky and the blood go in your heart. Good, wery good! But now maybe you start to see somebody else, a transwestite maybe. Or maybe a woman with a rich car. Or maybe a gay. Or maybe a Christian on the radio, yelling. And you think in yourself: Ha! They never touched God like me!”

  He chuckled briefly and happily, amused at our human foibles, then sighed and took a long drink of tea. There was, when he spoke like this, a tangible certainty about him. Not a conceited certainty, but something as simple and straightforward as a high school language teacher telling her students how to say “I saw them yesterday at the beach” in French. She’d studied for years. She’d lived in Paris on a Fulbright. She had a French husband or French parents or a Ph.D. You were there to learn the language, and she knew the language, and she was passing on her learning to you. That’s how little egotism there was in Rinpoche’s words, and how much confidence. His tone was contagious. The only immunity one could have to this particular contagion, it seemed to me, was the belief that one knew French better than the teacher did.

  Yet that is an imperfect comparison, because he was talking not about a rule of unfamiliar grammar, but about the whole point and purpose of being alive, nothing less than that. And while all of us don’t speak French, all of us have our convictions about how to live in this world and why we are here, even if we don’t spend a lot of time verbalizing it. We believe that Jesus Christ was the one and only Lord, and our task is to worship him all our days. Or we believe there’s no God and couldn’t possibly be, that our individual existence is only another random spin of the molecular wheel without any greater meaning. Or, possibly, we believe that the point of it all is to earn as much money and grab as much pleasure as we can in our allotted stretch of years. Each of us is perfectly entitled to these opinions, that goes without saying. Underlying Rinpoche’s talks—in public and private—was that humility. You could be right, he seemed to infer. Or, at least, no one else should be too sure you’re wrong.

  But here’s what I’m getting at: the word faith is often used in these kinds of discussions. A person has faith or lacks it. In my brother-in-law, however, this tone, this essence I’m trying to describe, did not feel like faith; it felt, if you will forgive me, like fact. If you asked him how he knew there was a God, or a “Divine Intelligence” as he usually preferred to put it, he’d touch the ground or point to a tree or a cup or a blade of grass, as if challenging you to come up with another explanation for the simple fact of its existence. Or the simple fact of yours. If you asked him what God was like, he would always answer, “Don’t know.”

  Simplistic, maybe. My more sophisticated friends would surely say so. They wanted elaborate philosophical arguments they could deftly counter, citing logic, history, science or psychological illusion. But that urge to argue and win, Rinpoche said, was merely the egotism of the intellect, another kind of false god, and these were people with whom he refused to engage. They took this refusal as a sign that his point of view was weak and indefensible . . . and he was perfectly at peace with that.

  “Buddha,” he went on, “after he taught his disciples for many many years, he held up for them one leaf from a tree.” The second stone was aloft now, captured, in that odd way, between his second and third fingers. “This one leaf here, this is how much I taught you all these years,” he said to them. “And the billions leaves in the forest are the other of what you could learn.”

  He had another sip of tea. “When you think you really know,” he said, “when you touch the skin of God, maybe, then sometimes you become little bit in love with your own thinking stream. You have a good education and so you know more than everyone about how you should live. Or you are special to God and different from other people, yes? You meditate, you have speriences in meditation. Makes you special, yes?” A short laugh. “This part is not so good.”

  Another pause, another bit of shifting around in the audience.

  “So,” he inquired, “what to do with this not so good, all these speriences and all this special knowing?” He looked around the room for a suggestion, and when none was forthcoming he suddenly hitched up his right sleeve and swept his arm across the tabletop, knocking the other stones onto the floor in a clatter. People in the front row jumped back, or let out a yelp, or sat frowning at the disorder of it all. An almost ferocious look had come across Rinpoche’s face. I suddenly remembered his wrestling match with Anthony. I remembered him talking about being in jail in Russia, and the people he’d had to deal with there. I thought: there’s something else beyond the softness and kindness, another Rinpoche.

  He sat back in the chair, holding an expression that said “I’m sure you understand, yes?”

  But no one understood. Or at least for the time being, the youthful nodding had ceased. A curtain of perplexity had fallen over us, and I felt a swarm of small inse
cts, the beetles of irritation, cynicism, and doubt, scampering between my ears. I couldn’t keep from casting a sideways glance at the beautiful transvestite in the back row. She’d closed her eyes, making two golden gibbous moons, and it was impossible to tell what she might be thinking.

  Again, Rinpoche solicited questions. This time, after a silence of half a minute, a young woman who might have been, with her reverent politeness, my sister twenty-five years earlier, raised her hand and stood and said, “From your books, Rinpoche, I thought the idea was that we should feel good about ourselves. I was raised in a tradition where we were constantly being told we were sinners, and what I liked about what you wrote was that it made me feel we should start the spiritual search from a place of self-acceptance. We should assume that we are, not perfect, exactly, but loveable. And now, tonight, it seems like you’re saying when we get to a place where we feel, I don’t know, right in the world, we should forget all about it and start over.”

  She sat down, not far from tears, it seemed to me. Around her the room pulsed with unspoken agreement.

  Rinpoche pondered a response for a moment, gazing at her in a tender way. “When you read a book that’s a good book,” he said, “that you like, you read the one page, you read the one chapter. Do you stop?”