Lunch with Buddha

by Merullo, Roland

  “Sometimes,” Rinpoche said after he’d considered that for a moment, “peoples think crooked.”

  After he’d kept us waiting a suitable amount of time, the bison king decided he’d take two steps forward. He was still commander of the road, still standing proudly upon the killing fields of his fellows, but at least now the slimmer vehicles could slip past his rear end. We did that, coming within a few yards of the majestic beast, so close we could almost reach out and touch the patches of mange on his coat, and then we headed on toward the Boiling River.

  “What do you think the Divine Intelligence has in mind when he or she arranges for people to think crooked? On the big scale, I mean. Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, the buffalo slaughterers and Indian killers—what spiritual purpose does that serve?”

  “Don’t know,” Rinpoche said.

  “Right, nobody knows, but if you had to hazard a guess as to why . . . I mean, it’s one of the great philosophical questions. If there is a kind and loving God, why would he permit such things to happen?”

  I’d asked Rinpoche this same question on our earlier trip, but now the monk had gone mute. He was looking out the window at a rock formation that resembled a mound of whipped cream that had frozen in place, gotten dirty, then been rained on.

  “Care to offer a theory?”

  Rinpoche swiveled his head on his thick neck and looked at me for a minute, then said, “No idea, Otto.”

  “Doesn’t it shake your faith from time to time?”

  “Means what, this shake your faith?”

  “It means you have doubts. The doubts make you wonder if your philosophy, your spiritual position, your ideas about the world might be formed only by wishful thinking, you know: you want life to be a certain way, so you form a theory that’s consistent with what you want but maybe not in accordance with reality.”

  “These doubts are thoughts, yes?” he asked.

  “I suppose so.”

  “Rinpoche has many thoughts.”

  “And you’ve learned to ignore the ones you don’t want, I know. You taught me that, and it’s been very helpful. But some thoughts represent the truth, don’t they? For example, if I think I love my children, that’s not a thought I want to ignore, because it’s true.”

  “Yes,” Rinpoche said.

  We were past the rock formation now, the road winding downhill in big loops. Just where the Boiling River was supposed to be, I saw a line of cars parked along the shoulder and pulled in behind them.

  “I think this is the place. I’ll grab the towels and we’ll walk down to the water and see what’s up.”

  We got out and sauntered along the weedy gravel shoulder toward a ten-car parking area that was completely full. I didn’t want to let the subject slip away. “So you make a decision as to which thoughts to ignore and which thoughts to embrace, correct?”

  “Sometime.”

  “But you could be fooling yourself then, couldn’t you?”

  “You fooling yourself about loving Anthony and Natasha?”

  “I’m acknowledging an actual feeling. I’m naming it.”

  “What is actual feeling? What makes?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just sure of it.”

  “Maybe wishful thinking,” Rinpoche said. We’d gone past the parked cars and turned onto a narrow path that ran beside a river. A quarter mile ahead I could see people who seemed to be in the water.

  “Wishful thinking that I love my kids?”

  He shrugged. “Some things you know,” he said. He smacked himself in the middle of his chest. “When I give you spirchal wessons, I know, that’s all. Like you know you love your children. When they make you upset, do you doubt that you love them?”

  “Sometimes. For an hour. In our worst moments.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then life goes back to normal and the mood passes and I know I love them.”

  He took hold of my arm and held me from going forward. We waited for a father and his two teenage kids to squeeze past. Close beside us was a stone outcropping, a miniature cliff face, shoulder height. Rinpoche slapped one hand against it, then took my hand and slapped it against it the same way. “Explain,” he said.

  “Explain what?”

  “Explain this.”

  “It’s a stone. A rock formation. Basalt, maybe. Granite, I don’t know.”

  “That is names. Stone, rock, granite. Names doesn’t explain.”

  “Well, I can’t then. I don’t know what you mean.”

  “This is, yes?”

  “Of course.”

  He slapped me, only a bit more gently, on the sternum. “Otto is, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who made?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Something made this is, though, yes?”

  “Science. The Big Bang.”

  “What made that the Big Bang is?”

  “Even the greatest scientists don’t know that yet.”

  “Listen me. If you understand this is, if you put your mind to that level and not the level where names are, where thoughts are, then you know the spirchal life. You know something bigger is, bigger and good, and you know it just the same way like you know you love Anthony and Natasha.”

  “I don’t quite follow.”

  “When you meditate you touch the top of the is.”

  “The wordless,” I suggested.

  “Maybe.”

  “I’m still not quite there.”

  He let out a breath through his nose. “You pushing my buttons,” he said. “When we get to the center you make a retreat.” He held up three fingers. “Three days. Not eating too much. No phone. Now, no more question. We swim, you and me. Maybe in the water your mind will go a little better.”

  It was a funny thing to say, because there were moments after a bracing swim at the Cape Cod National Seashore when my mind did seem to change for a while. We’d be there in late afternoon, the waves pounding, the freezing ocean licking a sunbaked shore, and after a certain amount of cajoling, taunting, and daring, the kids would convince Jeannie and me that we had to go in. So we did. We’d stand for a minute, knee deep, letting our feet and ankles turn numb, and then we’d move gingerly forward, our skin splashed with particles of ice, until we reached the point where it was either dive in or be soaked anyway in the tenderest of places. In we’d go. We’d surface with a shout, take a few hard strokes to get the heart moving again. Another dive, a very short swim. Maybe we’d ride a wave toward shore or, if the water was unseasonably warm that summer, say thirty-four degrees Fahrenheit instead of thirty-three, we’d stay in and splash around with the kids for a while. It inevitably struck me as an illogical thing to do; before the swim my rational mind counseled against it. But every time, after I’d come out and toweled off and was standing in the shallows with the sun beating down on my cold skin, there would be a little stretch of—what would the words be? Inner peace? Sense of another world? Existential gratitude? A better mind.

  I’d always written it off to merely a physiological reaction to the cold. Or to relief at having survived the icy plunge. But as Rinpoche and I walked farther down the path, I found myself wondering. The Native Americans had lived such a physical life, in the elements, working with their hands, hunting, giving birth, making war, living and dying in the open air. And then along came the Thinkers, the white tribes that had figured out how to make iron and write symphonies and kill seven million buffalo. I wasn’t one of these people who idealized the Native American way of life. They made war, too, even before the white man came, and who knew what kinds of narrow-mindedness they might have suffered from? And who’d want to live in a world without the things the Europeans and their descendants had contributed—from Novocain to Cezanne to the internal combustion engine? You couldn’t say these things in polite, educated society, of course. You’d be accused of condoning genocide on the one hand or of a soft-brained liberalism on the other. Whole libraries of subjects were off limits now, at least in m
y circles.

  But I found myself wondering if, in gaining automobiles and radiation treatments and disinfectant and five hundred species of cheese, we might have lost something we couldn’t even imagine. Maybe the development of that part of the brain—logical, scientific, discriminatory, comparative, analytical—left another part to atrophy, and that other part had something to do with this is-ness, this wordless appreciation for the miracle of a piece of stone or a human body. Maybe the native people, who went into the mountains to fast and pray, and Rinpoche’s people, who spent large portions of the day simply sitting and trying to duck beneath the curtain of their thoughts, maybe they knew one or two important things we didn’t know, and it was a kind of first-world hubris that made us believe otherwise. Maybe Rinpoche’s whole purpose in life, his true work, was to awaken us to at least the possibility of that atrophied consciousness. And maybe we could hold on to our Novocain and Chevy Corvettes and Rachmaninoff and reach out for that wordless understanding, too.

  Maybe a dip in the Boiling River would show me.

  A few dozen others had taken the plunge. About ten feet of dirt slope separated us from the river and their happy faces. Below where we stood, these brave people lay in the water as if beached. It was a shallow, stony river, probably seventy-five feet wide, with a rushing current and strange puffs of steam near one shore. We left our clothes and towels on the bank and climbed carefully down to the water’s edge. I put a foot in—freezing cold. Then another foot, a short distance upstream—hot-tub warm. I began to get the picture: the river was snowmelt, so frigid in most seasons it would make the National Seashore seem like a bathtub. But upstream from us on the right-hand side there must have been a hot spring pouring in. Hence the steam that made the Boiling River appear to be boiling. I crouched down and then flattened myself in the current, holding my body against the strong flow with the soles of both feet against a boulder, and I discovered that, by moving a little this way or that, I could be refreshed or scalded, depending. In certain spots, just this side of a large rock, say, you could have one cold leg and one warm. People were laughing, creeping a little ways out into the surprisingly swift current, getting cold, then moving back near shore and warming up again. Rinpoche was giggling uncontrollably. The other bathers looked at him and smiled. We stayed there for over an hour.

  We got out, finally, and let the air dry us. My mind was clear; the great questions had faded; I was thinking of my kids. So I took out my phone and sent texts to both of them, telling them where we were and what we were doing, and how soon they might expect us at the farm. Rinpoche must have seen me working the magical device a hundred times already on our short trip. I was as bad as any tenth grader, compulsively checking e-mails to see if there was anything important happening at the office, watching for news from the kids, studying headlines and Olympic results, making hotel reservations. He’d always ignored me. But now, as if after our recent conversation about spiritual matters it was my turn to pay him back with some knowledge of the modern world, he asked me to show him how the phone worked, how to send a text. We stood there for probably ten minutes while I explained the system to him, and when we started back, he asked if he could hold on to the phone and try to write something that Cecelia could show Shelsa.

  About halfway to the parking area I saw that a few elk had crossed the river—we’d noticed them grazing on the other side—and were now munching away close beside the path. They were huge creatures, docile it seemed, though the literature we’d been handed at the gate said it was important to keep a safe distance. Rinpoche was watching the phone, poking at the buttons. He walked up to within a few feet of the rump of a particularly large elk and I thought for a second he’d be kicked, or worse. But apparently elk have an issue with gold-trimmed maroon, because Rinpoche had his robe thrown over one shoulder and the big beast glanced back at him and sidled away. Two seconds later a ranger came hurrying down toward us, waving an orange swatch of cloth, telling us to move away, move away. “They will come at you if they feel crowded,” he said.

  He shooed them into the water. We walked back to the car, chastened, refreshed, and set off through that brilliant Yellowstone now, north toward Livingston.

  Herd of Bison

  Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming

  Swimmers at the Boiling River

  Yellowstone National Park

  27

  It was a beautiful drive from Wyoming back into Montana, up through the aptly-named Paradise Valley. Nine-thousand-foot mountains ran to our right in a green-gray parade, and closer by, a blue river wound through pastures that seemed made of sun-basted silk. I tried to imagine what it must have been like when the first non-natives saw this. No roads or electric wires then, no cabins with signs advertising fishing lures or float rides, no couples in rubber boats, slathered with sunscreen and drifting along. Paradise Valley. Arduous as the pioneer lives were, this scenery must have matched a vision of heaven they carried around inside themselves. The land must have whispered the promise of some Dzogchen of the American wilderness, some real-life Great Perfection.

  Almost a full hour of it we had before we stopped for dinner in the small city of Livingston, Montana. This was my kind of place, a half dozen square blocks of brick buildings and colorful storefronts, a community completely lacking in the T-shirt-and-souvenir fluffery of West Yellowstone, Wyoming. We strolled around for a while, browsing in a bookstore, stretching our legs, and I realized that one of Livingston’s charms was the absence of chain stores. Every shop and restaurant had the stamp of individuality on it—exactly the opposite of what you saw in so many other places now. Driving south on 95, for instance, heading for a February school vacation at Miami Beach, we’d pull off into old southern towns with block upon block of vacant storefronts. “What happened?” Jeannie would always ask. “What in God’s name happened here?”

  A mile or so away we’d discover what had happened—a mall with every store a chain, every employee in uniform, paychecks signed by an absentee owner or, more likely, a holding company or “Group,” with headquarters in some office building a thousand miles away. There were efficiencies to this system, of course, but everything else had been sacrificed on the altar of convenience and low price. Dignity, pride of ownership, commerce on a human scale—everything.

  I’d read or heard somewhere that Moses and Buddha and Jesus and Mohammed had all appeared on earth at a time and place when the spiritual traditions of the day had either mutated into poisonous forms or grown stale. Some of the religious rites that preceded Buddha, for instance, had devolved into a world of ritual sacrifice and castes. In Jesus’ time there had been the absurd Pharisaical dictums—Thou shalt not heal on the Sabbath, and so on. Moses, Mohammed—those great, fresh spirits came precisely to break up and water the hard dry earth and plant some new hybrid that would bear better fruit.

  Looking for a good place to eat in Livingston, I wondered if we had reached that point now in America, if Christianity and capitalism both had ossified. Enormous corporations and megachurches, each with their rules and propaganda, their need to eliminate competition, eccentricity, otherness. Wasn’t it time for some brave new spirit to speak a fresh truth? Could these really be, as the radio preachers insisted, the “end times”? Maybe just the end of their times, I thought, and the beginning of better.

  I was hungry again.

  Hoping for something other than a burger or steak, and wanting to wash the Italian meal in Spokane from my consciousness, I led us to a humble eatery called Allegro in the middle of downtown Livingston. On the wall was a photo of the Trevi Fountain (an almost exact copy of which hung in Jeannie’s study). The salad greens were fresh, the pasta al pomodoro properly cooked, and I couldn’t keep my eyes from going to the photo. When we’d finished the meal—his treat—Rinpoche and I made a quick trip upstairs to a two-room bookstore where the owner, a young man named David, greeted us with palms pressed together and a short bow. He’d heard of Rinpoche, carried every one of his books, seemed
absolutely thrilled to have the great teacher in his shop, and asked him to sign all copies. Rinpoche did so, graciously, attentively, then gave David the famous squeeze on the shoulder as a kind of blessing. In return, as we were leaving, the young man pressed upon me a copy of a book called The Lost Years of Jesus.

  “Wery nice man,” Rinpoche said when we were in the pickup again and heading for the interstate. He was turning the book over in his hands.

  “What do you think of this idea that Jesus spent a lot of time in India and Tibet?”

  “Not an idea,” he said.

  “A fact? Certifiable?”

  “What else does he do all that time?”

  “I don’t know. No one knows. There’s no mention of those years in the Bible. If I remember it right, he yells at his mother when he’s twelve or thirteen; next thing you know he’s coming into Jerusalem, a famous preacher, age thirty.”

  “He traveled,” Rinpoche said.

  He was in one of those moods of absolute confidence, one of those areas he seemed to have pondered and studied for years. All doubt had been banished from the right side of Uma’s interior.

  “Learning or teaching, or both?”

  “Already inside him the learning was.”

  “Why would he bother traveling to the East, then? They already had their great teachers.”

  “Pure spirits, on this earth, want to see other pure spirits sometimes, Otto. They have a loneliness inside them, too. Like you for Jeannie now. Like me for Cecelia. The pure want to touch other pure, the good want to touch other good. The bad, same thing. The people who speak Russian, some of the times, want to find the other people who speak Russian.”

  “To practice.”

  “No,” he said. “To not forget who they are. To remember the real self inside them.”