Breakfast With Buddha (29 page)

“I’m curious,” I said to Rinpoche, after I’d been running the question through my mind for an hour, “what you think about the war, terrorism, September 11, and so on. I finished your book last night, I liked it, I learned from it, but you don’t really address specific issues there, so I’m wondering what your stance is on all this.”

“All this is the world,” he said after a moment. “This has always been the world. I feel this world as a sadness in my own body.”

“Right. Me, too. But what I meant was, from your perspective, from a spiritual perspective, what is the right response to something like the terrorist attacks? Is it ever right to go to war? In self-defense? In others’ defense?”

Another long moment of silence, and then, “Jesus let people nail him in his hands and feet. He did not fight them.”

“Right, okay. But that was Jesus. What if you don’t have the courage or spiritual advancement to do that? What if your children are being attacked and you don’t think it’s right to allow it to happen?”

“You should protect your children.”

“All right. So what is the correct moral stance on the war, is what I’m asking.”

“There are people,” he said, “who are past being hurt, beyond being hurt. You should know this is true. You should try to become one of those people, to make an understanding with yourself that you are not your body, that you are something bigger. That is your work on this earth, do you see? Every experience here is to teach you to do that. Living, dying, every experience.”

“And if that’s beyond you at this point? I mean, if you are someone who still identifies with his body, then what?”

“You should try not to war.”

“And if you try and can’t avoid it? If you think it might prevent further killing in the future?”

“You should try not to kill to stop killing. Try. It is very hard. Sometimes I think it is not possible for many people. Only to try is important. Even not to have violence in your thoughts is important.”

“Not easy.”

He made a one-syllable laugh, something without much humor in it. “This is not a world for easy.”

“All right. Have I used up my questions for the day?”

“No.”

“Okay then, why are there evil people in the world? Why are there people who rape and kill and abuse and steal from other people and fly jetliners into buildings? Why is it all set up this way?”

He lifted his hands, as I’d seen him do before, and let them fall back to the tops of his thighs. “Every day,” he said, “many times every day, you can go one way or the other way. You can go with anger or not go. Go with greed or not go. Go with hate or not go. Go with eating too much or sexing too much, or not go. Two ways.”

“The digital universe.”

“Sorry?”

“Nothing. I interrupted. Go on.”

“These feel like small things, small choices, but every day, across one life, across many, many lives, if you choose the good way, again and again and again, in what you are thinking and what you are doing, if you choose to go away from anger not toward, away from hate, not toward, away from armor, not toward, away from falseness, not toward . . . then you become this person like you—good, not stealing,
not hurting. Some people made good choices in their past lives and so, like you, they are given maybe an easy life for this time. Not the perfect life, not the life with no trouble or pain in it at all, but a life where it is easier to turn the mind to the spiritual part. You, my friend, you have work that you like not hate, a wife that you love and live with by peace, children that are good not bad. Is this true?”

“Yes.”

“So you have a small quiet space in your mind from that. And that quiet space gives you a chance to see deep, deep into the world if you want to. Another choice, yes? You can take that choice and look deep, or no. But if a person goes the other way, little choice and little choice toward the bad and the selfish, life after life, hour after hour, then this spirit does not have the good incarnation, so does not have the quiet space. Sometimes that person becomes the one who kills, who rapes, who hurts. Other times, in this life, they maybe make a big change to the good. Do you see?”

“But why must the bad hurt the good? Why did you go to prison, for instance? Why did they kill Jesus, and Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, and so on?”

“I don’t know the
why.
I know the
is.
This is the world and always the world. Always, since when the Bible was made, since when the ancient stories in all religion were made. Inside the big world that you cannot control, you have the small world of you that you can control. In that small world, if you look, you can see whether to go this way toward good, or the other way toward bad.”

“Or remain neutral.”

“Yes, but if you see good and don’t go, that is not neutral. To me, to my lineage, it is not the case that God is up in the sky looking at you and judging you. It is more easy
than that, and more hard. God is God, the Divine Intelligence is the Divine Intelligence, the One With No Name is the One With No Name. But God is just giving out love and giving out love and giving out love, like a . . . like a very nice music always playing. If you hurt people you make yourself deaf to this music, that’s all. Not God’s fault, your fault. Not God’s judgment, your choice, you see? You make yourself no chance to feel God, or the moon going up, or any good love. Life after life you make yourself no chance, and then one life maybe you start to change, and be a little quiet inside, and listen to this music that is always there—for you, for the bad people, always there. Even the most bad people live in their trouble for thousands of lives, and then, one moment,” he clapped his hands together hard, “they chose a different way. They go this way and not that way. One choice, another choice. They start to come on the long trip home.”

FORTY-ONE

An hour or so
into the afternoon we drove into the quiet little metropolis of Grand Rapids, Minnesota—birthplace of Judy Garland—and pulled into a parking space in front of a Chinese restaurant called the Hong Kong Garden. I had been pondering Rinpoche’s words for several hours by then, and, when I saw that Ms. Garland had grown up in this humble city, I found myself thinking about Oz, that kingdom of illusion, that place where you came to understand that you’d had everything you needed all along—good witches to call on in an emergency, all the courage, brains, and heart that was necessary in order to manage your way through this life. Oz was that place where the God you were going to for help could not help you, not really. All he could do was turn your eyes to what you already were and ask you to see it differently. Oz was that dreamlike place you returned from and couldn’t tell anyone in your old life about, because none of them believed it existed.

And the Hong Kong Garden was that place where you
sought refuge from the ordinariness of northern plains, small-city cuisine.

A decent General Tso’s for me. Tea and a little white rice and broccoli for the Good Warlock of the North. A couple of mammoth souls in there for neighbors, taking full advantage of the all-you-can-eat buffet, shoveling the food down as if they’d been fasting all week. I tried calling Jeannie and Natasha—big Judy G. fans—on their respective cell phones, but neither of them answered. I missed my daughter so much that I called back a second time just to hear her recorded voice saying her own name.

Not long after we left Grand Rapids, we turned onto Highway 6 and entered the Chippewa National Forest. There were pine woods on both sides of the road, and I was still thinking about Rinpoche’s description of the laws of the world, and I was looking, as we went, for a way to show him another slice of America, to fulfill my half of the deal. During lunch, I had tried to tell him about Judy Garland and the Wizard, what an important part of my childhood—of so many American childhoods—that film had been. But I’d found it difficult to describe the plot adequately and impossible to convey the full impact of the songs and characters. He listened pleasantly enough, blinking, sipping his tea, but it was probably a little bit like him talking to me about the print in the Nepali restaurant in Madison: Some kinds of spiritual lessons just do not move well across cultural boundaries.

Heading southwest now, still on Route 6, I saw a flat concrete bridge ahead of us and a sign by the side of the road:
MISSISSIPPI RIVER
. “Something you should see,” I said, and pulled to a stop in the breakdown lane. We walked along that lane until we were standing at about the midpoint of
the bridge. Below us curled the mighty Mississippi, not so mighty at that point, only about seventy yards wide and clean as glass. Stretching east and west from either bank was a buffer of northwoods grassland, greens and yellows shimmering in the hot sun, the water itself as smooth and silvery-blue as a ribbon of polished steel. “This is the most famous American river,” I told him. “It starts just north of here and goes for, I don’t know, maybe fifteen hundred miles. To New Orleans. To the Gulf of Mexico. All kinds of books have been written about it. There’s a lot of symbolic importance to it because it more or less cuts the country in half, east and west, and stretches almost all the way from north to south.”

As I was saying this I was standing with one foot on the concrete edge of the bridge, looking down, hands on the guardrail. I saw something—a duck it appeared to be—swimming a little ways below the surface of the water, but there was a particular gracefulness to the way this duck moved. In a moment it surfaced, midriver, maybe thirty yards from us. I could see the intricate black-and-white pattern of its back, and its sharp beak. Soon it was turning this way and that and letting out an unmistakable cry, a quick, high-pitched laughing noise that echoed over the grassland and into the trees beyond. “Look!” I said. “Listen.” And I told Rinpoche the bird’s name.

The solitary creature went on and on, giving out its trilling, happy cry as if calling to a mate still in the nest. I opened my cell phone and dialed home, and this time Jeannie answered. I said, “Listen, Hon,” and held the phone up so she could hear. Rinpoche realized who was on the other end of the line and, after a few seconds, motioned for me to give him the phone. I handed it over.

“Mrs. Otto!” he said excitedly. “Did you hear the fine noise? Yes, yes, the laughing bird. Is very nice! We are here, your good husband and me, and we are hearing this bird! Yes, he is fine, your husband. He misses you. He loves you. I am showing him the meditation wife, does that make you okay? Good! I will show you, too, yes! When are you coming? When are the children coming? I know I will see you, yes? Here is Mr. Otto, my friend. Here is the sound of the wound!”

“Loon, he means,” I said, when I’d taken back the phone. “We’re standing on a little bridge over the Mississippi. It’s seventy yards wide here.”

“He sounds like a sweetheart, your traveling companion.”

“He is.”

“And there’s a real live loon?”

“There is. It’s incredible. A gift.”

“What’s this about the meditation wife?”

“Meditation
life
. L. He sometimes has trouble with that letter when he gets excited. Talking to you excited him, apparently, which is something I can relate to. . . . We’re fine. We were in Duluth this morning and we should be in North Dakota by tomorrow, maybe even the Bismarck Radisson tonight if I push it. Everything all right there? Kids okay?”

“Anthony made the JV.”

“Yes!” I shouted, too loud. The loon splashed a slow takeoff and flapped away. “Tell him his dad is on top of the Mississippi River, rooting for him, scaring birds. And Tash?”

“Two thousand eighty-eight dollars as of last night. She was up before me this morning, if you can believe that. Sitting at the kitchen table, looking at used-car ads in the newspaper.”

“Make sure to get her something solid,” I said.

“We’ll wait for you to get home. Hurry safely.”

“I will. Dickinson tomorrow, I hope. I’ll call tonight, so I can talk to the kids.”

“Bring home a little Dakota soil for me, would you?”

“I will.”

A
LL DURING THAT AFTERNOON
, Rinpoche did not go anywhere near the subject of the meditation wife. I was coming to understand that this was his teaching method: He’d offer a lesson, usually taken from everyday experience, and then allow time for it to sink in, time for the living of ordinary life, which, after all, was the point and purpose of his teaching. It was as though he sensed that I could not absorb too much in the way of new information in any one day without overloading some circuit. And, after my Oz lecture, I sensed the same about him.

Once we put the Mississippi behind us, Route 6 shunted us off onto Route 200, which ran westward past a series of lakes and rivers—Big Sand Lake, Mable Lake, and the Boy River. We stopped at one of them, Leech Lake, because the day was warm and clear and there was a small beach right by the highway where we could see a few people swimming.

Pulled the car in. Got out. Stretched. Went into the woods to change. Rinpoche in a bathing suit was a sight to see, especially since he was wearing some kind of Speedo outfit that really did not leave much to the imagination. I suppose some store clerk in Duluth had been having a good time at his expense, selling the monk a pale blue swimsuit an Olympian might use to minimize aquatic friction but that was really not quite appropriate for a man his size on
a Minnesota public beach. For the sake of the sensibilities of the family nearby I tried to hurry him into the water, running in and diving and telling him how wonderful it was—clean, warm, not too deep. All that was true enough, but Rinpoche was a bit timid about his entry and preferred to spend ten minutes doing elaborate yoga poses on the shore, working up a sweat, while the other swimmers could not keep from gawking.

At last he took a clumsy running start, made it in about calf-deep, and went flying forward on his face in a calamitous belly flop. He managed a few furious strokes there in the shallows (I figured it was the way I’d swim, too, if I’d grown up in a place where the river water never got above forty-eight degrees), then flipped over on his back and started laughing. He had a wonderful laugh, as I’ve said, but it was especially wonderful at that moment, with his toes and brown face sticking up above the calm blue surface and the laughter echoing against the birch trees on the bank as if he were part human and part loon. “Fun! Fun!” he started to sing after a while, still floating. “American fun!” The family moved a ways on down the beach.