Breakfast With Buddha (25 page)

Another nod. More attentive stillness. At last he spoke, “Is Otto finished being angry now?”

“Pretty much, yes.”

Nod number four. “Are you ready to become the new Otto, or do you want to stay the old Otto?”

“The old Otto wasn’t half-bad,” I said. “Some people liked the old Otto. Loved him, even.”

“Today, you had a little bit of while when you were the new Otto.”

“Where? When?”

“Corpse pose. A few seconds.”

“How would you know that?”

“I see it.”

“How do you see it? Where? My aura?”

He chuckled and shook his head. “It was pleasure-making to you, yes?”

“Yes.”

“New pleasure, yes? Different.”

“Yes, I admit that.”

“Then I will show you more, but if you want to be angry with me I can’t show you. Anger is like hands over your eyes when another person is trying to show you.”

“All right. I’m done with it, then.”

“Good,” Rinpoche said. “We are not eating tonight, you and me. Tonight no eating, and tomorrow no eating. Tomorrow, dinnertime, we eat. Okay?”

“How about just a little snack before bed? Health food? Celery sticks or something. Popcorn.”

He sat on the couch and patted the cushion beside him. “Sit like me,” he said. So I sat there, separated from him by a few feet of motel sofa. He took one of the small throw pillows off the sofa, put it beneath him, and crossed his legs. I did the same, my recently overworked muscles protesting painfully. “Now,” he said, “listen to me with all your mind and all your self.”

“Okay. Trying.”

“Close your eyes, Otto, and listen to my voice.”

“Okay. Are you going to hypnotize me?”

“The opposite of hypnotize. The very different.”

“Okay.”

“Now. Do you hear that noise of tapping?”

“Yes, I do.”

“That is a bird hitting with his mouth against the edge of the window where he thinks it is wood.”

“Okay.”

“He is trying to make a house there. I saw him when you went inside to buy this room. He can’t make a house there because it isn’t real wood. It is pretend wood of plastic, but he is trying, do you hear him?”

“Yes. But it’s vinyl, I bet, not plastic.”

“Do you hear the noise of the refrigerator now?”

“Yes.”

“Do you feel this chair against your back and your legs.”

“It’s a sofa. Yes, I feel it.”

“Do you feel your breath going in and coming out?”

“Yes.”

“Now, we will sit here for two hours about. If your legs hurt, or if you have to, you get up and walk a little bit, but don’t get up at the first time you feel like it. You will be thinking about food. Every time you are thinking about food, now and tomorrow, I want that you think about the feeling that food gives you on your tongue. Think about exactly that feeling, the food on your tongue, in your mouth. Take one breath thinking about that feeling, and then let that feeling go away when the breath goes out. That is what meditation is: You see the thought and you let it float away, see the thought and let it float away. Maybe you say to yourself,
That is only a thought. . . .
After a while, listen
again to the bird, to the refrigerator, feel again the sofa on your back and your legs, feel the pain in your legs. You will think about food again. Breathe in and breathe out. You will think about your family, your work, about me sitting beside you, about many, many things that are interesting to think about. This is like the bird knocking. You cannot make a home in those things. They are not bad, they are just not the right home for Otto. Do not get upset because your mind thinks about them. Do not push the thoughts away like they are bad things. Let them go away from you but do not push them, yes? But always come back to the feeling on your mouth, and breathe in and breathe out. Yes?”

“I’ll try.”

Rinpoche went quiet. And shortly after Rinpoche went quiet, my mind became a combination circus/symphony/ rock concert. Seven television stations on at once, in the same small room. Grand Central Station but with a band marching through it now, advertisements being read aloud, the babbling of fifty voices. I thought about food, at first, and tried to do what Rinpoche had advised. I heard the bird tapping. I thought about food again—a good steak, in fact, medium rare. I could feel myself salivating, feel the gnawing in my belly, feel a twinge of anger at him for making me abstain and a twinge of anger at myself for being foolish enough to agree to abstain. I heard the bird, the refrigerator. I thought about Jeannie. I thought of Anthony playing football, imagined him sitting on the bench, with the first-string players muddy and manly on the field, and the cheerleaders cheering, and Jeannie and I and Tasha in the stands. This particular scene played itself out in elaborate detail for what must have been several minutes: Natasha sitting a few feet away from us in the cold bleachers, texting
and frowning, barely paying attention; Jeannie watching her son’s back to see what his mood was; me hoping for a lopsided score either way so that Anthony might see two minutes of playing time. It wound and spun, this scene, and then I heard the bird knocking and remembered to focus on the sensation of eating, remembered my breath. Then I thought of Rinpoche and actually even opened my eyes to peek at him, though it was like peeking at a stone to see what it is doing. I closed my eyes. Refrigerator. Bird. Rinpoche. Rinpoche. The steak. What were they doing at work? What would my assistant, Salahnda, say if she could see the boss now? Then, of course, my legs began to hurt.

On and on the circus went. Four or five times in the two hours, I got up and took one loop around the room, watching Rinpoche be perfectly still. By the last half hour my legs were starting to stiffen and ache terribly—the yoga was catching up with me—and I was anxious to be done with this exercise, and I sat there in a more comfortable posture, feet on the floor, eyes closed, the circus going, spinning, whirling.

And then, five minutes or so before Rinpoche tapped me on the knee, I began to settle into a kind of quiet that was very pleasurable. There were thoughts, but they came and went without carrying me away. There seemed to be spaces between the thoughts—that’s the only way I can express it. Thoughts and images floated across the sea of my mind with spaces between them. I could watch them come and let them go. The bird had stopped tapping, gone elsewhere for the night. The refrigerator hummed. I thought about eating, of course, but even those thoughts were small sailboats out on a placid bay, harmless and interesting but not particularly enticing, wending their way across the calm waters of
my new mind. Rinpoche tapped on my knee, and when I opened my eyes he was studying me. Then he was smiling. “Good, yes?”

“Yes, partly. I felt—”

He held up a hand. “Now,” he said. “Go to sleep, and just every little while in your sleep if you remember, breathe in once and out once and sleep. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said. “But can we talk about what happened?”

“Just sleep now instead of eating, instead of talking.”

“All right. Thank you. Good night, then.”

“Good night.”

THIRTY-FIVE

In the morning,
I woke to the realization that I could not move. I discovered, in my postyoga agony, that there are hundreds of tiny muscles—back of the neck, armpits, pelvic area, front and back of the legs—that we do not pay the slightest attention to in the course of our normal waking activities. During the ten or fifteen minutes I spent lying there, trying to work up the courage to move, it occurred to me that yoga was all about becoming aware of those muscles, training them, feeling them, and that the misery I was then experiencing must be a kind of payment for four decades of being half-oblivious to my own body. I wondered, too, if this physical situation was a metaphor for my spiritual one: Maybe, surely, there were whole areas of the mental landscape that I had been blissfully unaware of all these years.

When I tried to sit up in the bed the silent crying out of my muscles turned into a full-throated screaming. On top of everything else, I was ravenously hungry. I lay there and
concentrated on the hunger, imagined the pleasure of food in my mouth (for some reason that morning I had a particular inclination for a bran muffin, grilled and slathered with butter, a plate of fresh fruit, and hot black coffee), then breathed in and out slowly, once. Again. A third time. I tried to move just my feet and found that I could twist them in circles, very gently. Then I moved my hands the same way. Not too bad. In this fashion, after fifteen minutes, I was able to sit up on the edge of the bed and hold myself there on locked arms so that my stomach and back muscles would not have to do any work. Outside the window I could hear the bird at its fruitless tapping. I breathed in and breathed out. I pushed myself to a standing position and let out an involuntary groan. Getting back and forth to my bathroom for ablutions and medication and getting dressed was another fifteen-minute process, but as the muscles warmed, and as the ibuprofen kicked in, they hurt slightly less. When I stepped out into the main room I found Rinpoche waiting for me, standing at the sink, big smile on his face, glass of water in one hand.

“So we can drink, at least,” was my morning greeting. “I’m glad. I worried I was cheating because I already had a few sips with my ibuprofen.”

He filled a second glass and handed it to me.

“You didn’t tell me you were a yoga master.”

He laughed happily, kindly. “Otto has muscles that hurt today, yes?”

“Otto hurts. His selfhood hurts. The innermost essence of who he is has become pain.”

He kept laughing. “Next time not so bad,” he said, and when we were done drinking he hoisted my suitcase and carried it and his famous oversized purse down the stairs.
In the lobby, checking out, I tried to keep my back turned to the breakfast buffet, but I could smell everything—the apples, the toasted bagels, the sugar-dusted raisins in the Raisin Bran in its vacuum-sealed packet in its cardboard box. I could hear the morning news: a number of men had been arrested in Great Britain because they had been planning to blow up airplanes in midair. New restrictions on carry-on luggage were to be put in place. To distract myself from the food smells and bad news, I filled out one of those comment cards, telling the GrandStay management how nice I thought the room was, and soon we were in the car, driving away, filling up with gas, and starting north on Route 53, in the direction of Lake Superior.

Every half hour or so, Rinpoche would tell me to stop, and I would get out of the car by the side of the road, stretch for ten minutes, and drink from a bottle of water, then get back in behind the wheel. It made for a long and very slow trip. Duluth was the next big city on our route, and I had cell phone service, at first, so on one of those stops I called information, selected a massage therapist at random, and made an appointment for the next morning.

All this time I was thinking about eating. In a not very serious way, I wondered if, by not sticking to my body’s usual routine, I might be doing myself harm; if some organ—spleen, maybe—would cease to function because of the lack of caloric intake and be damaged forever. I pictured Jeannie and the kids eating. I pictured myself at work, taking my time with a raisin scone and coffee at the midmorning break, or walking around the corner to the Taj Raj for chicken korma and gulab jamon. Every time we passed an exit I looked at the signs for chain restaurants and thought about all the people there with their burgers, their fries, their
slices of factory-cooked cherry pie. Was God angry at those people? Was the creator of the universe sitting in judgment on them for indulging their appetites? It seemed only right and natural to eat and a kind of violence to be refraining. A very logical interior voice kept nagging at me to sneak a bit of chocolate and break Rinpoche’s fast. But I did not.

Somewhere in the middle-north of Wisconsin, where the fertile cornfields had fallen behind us and we were traveling through a stony terrain of weatherbeaten houses and shaggy farms, I said, “I have to say I don’t see the point in this not-eating stuff.”

“No point,” Rinpoche said.

“Then why do it? Is eating evil? Is it sinful? I don’t understand.”

“Not evil.”

“What, then? Tell me.”

“Eating. Sex. Movie. Bohling. Nice things. Not evil. It makes you think about itself, though, yes?”

I thought of the days when Jeannie and I were first married, and the great sense of anticipation I’d always feel as we climbed the stairs to our third-floor Chelsea walkup, arm in arm, knowing we would make love. I thought about it then, and thought about it afterward, and the next morning, and the next afternoon, and the next night walking up the stairs again. “Yes, I suppose so. Of course,” I said.

He nodded. “And this always thinking about the next pleasure, this is not so bad. Except it keeps your mind from how it could be calm in this moment. This can happen on a very subtle level, or not so. If you don’t eat for a little while when you can, or don’t sex for a little while when you can, then you see better the way the mind makes the world for you.”

“And that does what, exactly? Abstaining, I mean.”

“Makes the glass more clear. When your mind is more clear, you see the true way the world is made. When you see the true way the world is made, you feel at peace inside. You see how you make your own world, so then you can make it different if you want.”

“But that’s just another pleasure to anticipate, isn’t it?”

“Yes, very much.”

“You’re Zenning me. I’ve been Zenned.”

He laughed but did not say anything else. By the side of the road I saw a barn with
IT’S A GIRL!
in faded white paint on one side.

“At the end of the meditation there, last night, and at the end of the yoga, there was a short period where my mind seemed to be functioning differently.” I glanced over at the Rinpoche, expecting a smile, a word of praise, or encouragement. He seemed bored. “It was a wonderful feeling, a kind of quiet. Do you know that feeling?”

“Of course. I am in that feeling all the time.”