Lunch with Buddha

by Merullo, Roland

  “Dinner good last night?” Rinpoche asked as we headed south from Ennis toward the Wyoming border.

  I gave him the rough outline, made one remark about the life Gilligan led, a charmed life, it seemed to me.

  “Heaven realm,” Rinpoche said as we cruised down between the Madison and Gravelly ranges, headed for West Yellowstone. I thought, for a moment, that he was referring to the three-dimensional postcard view. But then he added, “If you are hurtful to people you can be born in hell realm next time. Very bad suffering. Feels like no hope. And other time, maybe after a life of big wanting, you go to heaven realm, and you are like a god there. Everything is fine, everything almost perfect. Nice face,” he circled one hand around his face. “Strong. Smart. Much money. Everything good and good.”

  “Sounds okay to me.”

  “Sure. Okay.” He watched the scenery go by for a while and then, “Okay and okay and okay and then, all in a sudden, not so okay. Like this truck.” He reached out and slapped the dashboard so hard that a swarm of dust motes rose into view. “Goes, goes, goes, and then one day, stops.”

  “No day soon, we hope.”

  He laughed. “The man who gave this truck for a gift is in heaven realm now, this life. Jarvis. Good man. Rinpoche tries to help him escape.”

  “How? Repeatedly pinning him to the ground in wrestling matches? Taking away his marijuana?”

  “Three-day retreats,” Rinpoche said. “No eating too much food. Nothing to do, nobody to tell you what a nice face you are having. Jarvis become wery wery upset. Then we talk. Then I tell him, Go home, enjoy. Eat and eat, have women, play the golf, the fish, the out in your boat. Come back, though, I say. Three months, come back.”

  “Little by little you’ll pull him out of heaven.”

  “I try.”

  “Sometimes life does it on its own,” I said. “Without any three-day retreats.”

  “Always times.”

  “So, what then? We should be suspicious of all pleasure? If we have a great life, that should worry us?”

  Rinpoche shook his head. “Enjoy pleasure, Otto. Enjoy, enjoy. Only remember the people who don’t have, and sometimes say a thank you.”

  “Thank you to whom? To what?”

  “Your mother,” he said, as if it were the most obvious thing on earth. “For borning you.”

  “And what? The father doesn’t count for anything?”

  “Counts. Sure it counts,” he said, lightly now, enjoying my company it seemed, enjoying the ride. “But in the Bible which person from Jesus takes the lineage?”

  “You mean, whose lineage was Jesus part of? I don’t know. If I ever knew, I don’t remember.”

  “The Mary,” he said. “I read it last night, in the place.”

  25

  Yellowstone is, in my opinion, an American heaven realm, Eden’s back forty. We entered through the town of West Yellowstone, where it’s possible to buy any kind of T-shirt, hat, bumper sticker, or sofa-sized oil painting of the old Wild West. It’s a harmless enough place as tourist traps go, set in serene country south of the mountains, east of a weekly rodeo, and west of an absolutely sublime two million acres of preserved Americana.

  “A lot of families come here on summer vacation,” I told Rinpoche after we’d paid at the entrance and gotten pamphlets and directions. But he would have seen that soon enough on his own. The two-lane roads were a festival of SUVs and Winnebagos, with kids looking through the windows, mom and dad jumping out to take pictures of a herd of elk, retired couples motoring happily along gazing this way and that and pointing. One of the things that makes the park so special is the unmatched variety of its landscape: pristine lakes, steep mountains, hot springs surrounded by rock formations that look like something imported from the moon for a planetarium exhibit, cold rivers, hot rivers, alpine fields edged with fir trees and spotted with spouts of steam. It’s a place that even hordes of tourists can’t spoil. We could be boorish and stupid and petty and wasteful, and somehow, against Yellowstone’s beautiful bulk, all that was just a flea nipping at a horse’s ankle. From the guy showing off for his kids by chasing an eight-hundred-pound bull elk into the forest with a Nikon held out in front of him, to the Winnebago driver towing a gas-guzzling car loaded with mountain bikes, Jet Skis, two tons of suitcases, and an ultralight airplane, to the sometimes cranky Bronxville editor and his probably trustworthy Siberian friend, Yellowstone spoke to everyone. A prickle of regret came over me as we headed for Old Faithful: I wished we’d brought the kids there while Jeannie was still alive.

  Rinpoche was having a bit of trouble grasping the idea of preserved land, of a national park. In the place he came from—an unimaginably vast and almost wholly unpeopled stretch of Russia twenty miles north of the Chinese border—there was little need for preservation. Preservation from what? For what? Those steppes and dry mountains were in no danger from the creeping fingers of development. A hundred years from now you’d still be able to ride the Trans-Siberian for an entire day through that part of the world without seeing a house or a human being.

  I decided not to say a word about Old Faithful or the other park attraction I planned on showing him. I wanted him to experience it without preconception, free of any filters.

  We found it easily enough, parked the pickup in a giant lot and followed a loose parade of other parkgoers along a path. Rinpoche liked the unexpected—thrived on it, I almost want to say. When we were driving south on 287 I told him where we were going and that I had a couple of surprises in mind for him. “Pure American fun,” I said and he looked at me and smiled and patted me too hard on the shoulder as if I’d just run my personal best in the hundred-meter hurdles. For the remainder of the drive he only gazed out the window, asking once “where came from the word Yellowstone”, and then holding to his customary silence. Now, he hurried along the path beside me, the disciplined man, shining with anticipation, asking nothing.

  I knew the geyser spouted every hour and a half or so, but there were no signs saying when we could expect the next eruption. We came into an open area with a half circle of wooden benches facing a spout of steam on bare stone, and judging by the assembled crowd, I guessed we were fairly close. “What is?” I expected to hear from my right shoulder, but Rinpoche stayed quiet and attentive, facing the wisps of steam along with a few hundred other marvelers, studying the quick squirts of moisture that enlivened it from time to time—false starts, unfulfilled promises.

  After fifteen minutes of waiting we saw these spurts grow more energetic and more frequent. It was a kid playing with an underground garden hose, lifting his thumb away from the nozzle and putting it back again. Perhaps it was only because of the spouting, but I had the same feeling I’d had on the one whale-watching expedition Jeannie and the kids and I had taken (she’d grown so seasick she swore off boat travel forever): then, it was the sense that the giant creature beneath the surface of the sea was aware of our presence and putting on a show for our benefit, appearing and disappearing unexpectedly but in a predictable place, a place humans could find when they wanted to. Here, the same. The geyser-spirit kept us waiting, teased us with these vaporous puffs, holding off until a crowd of sufficient size had gathered, and then raising the curtain.

  The show began. Some larger spurts, ten, twenty, thirty feet into the air, and then the full-fledged eruption to a chorus of cheers and exclamations. The wind was blowing—from the west, I believe—and it carried the smaller drops across the safety zone and into one section of the crowd. A few adventurous teenagers ran over there to get wet, to have the full experience, and when I looked away from the spectacle for a moment I saw that Rinpoche had joined them, trotting behind the benches in sandals and robe, surrounded by a cluster of high schoolers and one tattooed dad who was showing off, face turned toward the spray, tongue out. For a moment I didn’t know which show to watch.

  It was soon over. Old Faithful offered a couple of last ejaculations, a hiss or two as if signaling the end of the performance, and the
crowd broke up. I found Rinpoche and led him toward the adjacent lodge. There were droplets of water on his shaved scalp and a smile on his face for the viewing of which we could have charged admission. “Fun?” I asked.

  He hugged me hard, radiantly happy. “Old Faceful smells,” he said. He squeezed up his cheeks and went into one of his high, drawn-out chuckles.

  “That’s the sulfur. They call it Old Faithful because for probably half a million years it’s been doing that every ninety minutes or so. People come from all over the world to see it.”

  “We should stay for next time, too.”

  “Sure, if you want to. Right now, let’s go eat something.”

  The lodge was huge, clean, airy, with giant timbers holding up the ceiling, and a crew of young workers—both home-grown and international—that seemed well trained. Rinpoche and I found the cafeteria and asked for bowls of chili—one meatless, one not—then went and sat at one of the long tables with families sprinkled about.

  “Wery good surprise, thank you, my friend,” he said.

  “There’s something else here, too, that I want you to see, but we’ll have to change into our bathing suits.”

  “Not a problem, man.”

  “You sound like Anthony. I just sent them a text, letting them know what we’re up to.”

  “Good father,” he said between spoonfuls. “This is why you are ready now, in this life, for the spirchal teachings.”

  “You said that to me at Cave B, do you remember, about fatherhood?”

  He shook his head. I had the sense he was fibbing.

  “There are probably ten thousand good fathers—and mothers—in this park today, so I guess they’re all of them ready for the spiritual teachings.”

  He nodded vigorously, mouth full. “All,” he said confidently. “But Otto needs now not to think about other people maybe so much, okay?”

  “Sure, fine.”

  “If you have to ride a train, like we rode to go to Seattle, then you maybe don’t need so much to worry are the other people there for the train on time? Are they in the traffic? Did they left the house too late? Maybe is the baby sick and the train leaves without them? You need to make it on the train. You, you.”

  “Okay.”

  But he wasn’t finished. “You look on the Olympets now, yes? Some of the people they can swim wery fast. Some can run wery fast. Some can jump in the air and spin upside down.” He made a fluttering motion with one hand, in imitation, I suppose, of a Romanian gymnast in flight. “This is the way God, she makes everything. Some people they have spirchal lesson from meditating. Some from the sports, from the study, from loving their husband wery much. The man who runs, he shouldn’t worry all the time about the woman who swims, see?”

  “Yes, I do see. I also see that you’re using the term ‘God’ lately, which is not something Buddhists are exactly famous for. And today God is a she.”

  He laughed, wiped his mouth with the paper napkin, took a long draught of water from a bubbling bottle. “Now, the next learning for you is to go past words.”

  “I’m a man of words, I’m afraid. Always have been.”

  “Sure,” he said, “wery good. I like your work wery much. Cecelia gives me your books and I read them. About lunch in Africa, about growing food in clean dirt, about avocados. Wery good! But I’m now not talking about that. Now you must go past putting words on people. Who can care if I call me Buddhist or not Buddhist? If I say ‘God’? What difference? Who can care if you say ‘Old Faceful’ or ‘Blue Rabbit.’ What matters is that you see it, that it is, the earth speaking up at us.”

  “I had that same feeling.”

  “Sure you do. And with people now, do that, what you did with Anthony and Tasha. With them you see beyond the names, past ‘boy’ and ‘girl’. You see past the troubles they make for you, yes? Into your love for them. Go down deep there, Otto my friend. Go down now in your life into the deeper. You know the om mani prayer?”

  “Of course.”

  “Means there is a, how you say?”

  “A jewel in the lotus.”

  “A jewel inside you, yes. Inside you, inside Anthony and Tasha. You see it there, yes, in them?”

  “Always.”

  “Always from the first minute, yes? Like I see in Shelsa. So now you must learn to see that jewel in every other person, every one! And in Old Faceful, in the mountain, in the . . . what is the animal? Big? The man yesterday shoots them.”

  “Elk.”

  “The jewel in the elk!” he almost shouted. A couple at the end of the table turned to stare. “You being the father is the perfect wesson! You see how to love the children, and you do it wery, wery well, Otto. Now you only have to move the love for the jewel in them to the other people, the animal, the tree. And for Otto himself!”

  “I’ll try,” I said. “Not easy.”

  “What is that jewel? God, it is! The name for that jewel in everywhere is God. But you can use any other name you want. Jesus, you can use. Buddha-nature you can say. Anything you want, doesn’t matter, man!”

  “Okay. I get it. Intellectually at least.”

  “Do you love Anthony intellectually?”

  “No.”

  “Natasha?”

  “No.”

  “Then why the rest of the world?”

  “Because I’m an idiot,” I said.

  The joke passed him by completely, or perhaps not. “Yes, wery good.” He said. “Wery good, my brother-and-law. Now you have one eye little bit open like this.” He squinted and put one hand to his right eye, as if pushing the lids apart an eighth of an inch.

  And then the lesson was finished. As was his chili. He put his hands together and made a small bow in the direction of the Styrofoam bowl, placed his used napkin and spoon into it like a priest at the altar, with a certain reverence. Then he looked up at me, expecting me to be something I was not, hoping for a silver or bronze medal from the guy who had run in the middle of the pack all his life. He said, “Now please show me surprise the number two.”

  26

  Surprise the number two came courtesy of a bit of travel advice from a friend I call Arlo the Arkansan. Here was his text: If you’re anywhere near Yellowstone, you have to go and take a dip in the Boiling River. It’s one of my favorite places on earth!

  Had I not trusted this particular friend so completely I would have deleted the message and gone on my way. In the first place, if there’s anything I’ve learned in years of traveling it’s that one man’s meat is another man’s poison. Key West, for instance, held little appeal for Jeannie and me beyond the tour of Hemingway’s house, yet friends of ours adore it. And in the second place, I might be alone in this opinion, but “a dip in the Boiling River,” especially on a hot July day, sounded vaguely unattractive.

  Still, Arlo had traveled widely, and if the Boiling River was one of his favorite places on earth, then it was worth a look. Taking a dip would be optional. From the lodge near Old Faithful (we did, in fact, stay for a second eruption, eerily similar to the first) it was roughly an hour’s drive to the second surprise. The day was hot and clear, traffic not too onerous, and this little Boiling River detour gave us a chance to see more of the park. Halfway there, after we’d passed a series of spectacular alpine fields with smaller geysers puffing away like the chimneys of underground homes, we encountered a small delay. A miniature herd of bison, half a dozen or so, had decided they had more rights to this land—including the paved roadway—than the visiting humans, and they were stubbornly blocking the flow of Winnebagos. Most of them dispersed in a couple of minutes, having discovered that eating grass was preferable to licking tar. But one of their number, a massive bull, must have liked the feeling of warm asphalt against his hooves. There he stood, head and shoulders in one lane, butt end in the other, all hairy two thousand pounds of him. I was imagining it, I’m sure, but he seemed to be giving the nearest drivers a malevolent look, daring them to try to sneak by on the horn or tail end.

  Nobody sn
eaked by. A few brave—or foolish—souls slipped out of their vehicles and moved two steps closer with cameras raised. The rest of us waited, transfixed. While I watched—this is how the magnificent computer of the mind works—I suddenly remembered a moment on our earlier road trip when I’d wanted to tell Rinpoche about the buffalo. It was more American than the eagle, apple pie, quilting, and pro football combined, I’d wanted to say; it was the perfect symbol for everything that was right and wrong about us as a people—our great land, our strength, our murderous beginnings. I had a whole spiel all ready . . . but he’d fallen asleep, and I’d never gotten around to it.

  “You know what it is?” I asked him.

  “Buffalo.”

  “Right.”

  “This one, I think, is king.”

  “The Native Americans in these parts believed the buffalo had a particularly powerful spirit. They lived off them—meat, hide, horns—and when the U.S. government decided the Indians were a nuisance, one of the things they did, besides slaughtering them outright, was invite hunters here and pay them to kill as many buffalo as they could. General Custer was a big fan of this idea. It relieved the troops’ monotony, he said, taught them to shoot better. Sometimes one man killed as many as a hundred and fifty in a day, a macho rite of passage. Seven million killed just between 1872 and 1874. Whoever came up with this brilliant idea figured that if there were no buffalo the Indians would starve, and then the land would be theirs for the taking.”