Very Bad Buddhist

Chapter 6: Under the Bodhi Tree

The Bodhi Tree Decorated for a Puja

UNDER THE BODHI TREE

Lama Tsega taught me a great deal, but he insisted that he was not my teacher. "This isn't teaching," he repeated. "This is just two friends talking. I like you and you like me, and we have some kind of karmic connection."

I tried not to show my disappointment, though I value his friendship. My teacher was not in Buddha Gaya, or if he was, the student, yours truly, was not yet ready.

It was time to leave Buddha Gaya and get on with my trip. I didn't have the time to sit under the Bodhi Tree until I became enlightened. My cold had gotten much, much worse, and the candle had almost finished. I did not feel that I had gotten very far. Oh, some of what had happened there showed me a little more of what opening up would mean, but I had not taken the plunge. It was time to leave.

It struck me that people who have a teacher all say the same thing: "That's where I met my teacher." They say it matter-of-factly, as if the teacher were always there and it was only a matter of the student finding his way to where the teacher was.  Not one of the people who said this indicated the slightest doubt that they'd found the right teacher. It is these people who take the plunge.

So part of the reason I felt it was time for me to leave was that I sensed my teacher was not there. Chances were he would not be in Sarnath or Kushinagar or maybe even Dharamsala, places I would soon be going to. Maybe I wouldn't find him on this trip, but there were still things to learn. 

I had come to Buddha Gaya thinking about the Buddha becoming his own teacher, as we all have ultimately to do. It is the whole long process that must come before that moment of taking the final step yourself that you need a teacher for. We can't do the spiritual path alone so we go on alone looking for spiritual companions. Something of a paradox.

I decided I would leave in a couple of days.

Then one evening the little Ling Rinpoche, a boy of six or seven believed to be the reincarnation of the Dalai Lama's senior tutor, did a puja at the Bodhi Tree, and I climbed the fence to enter in back of the Stupa. Standing at the top of the steps with some lay friends, beaming in his new robes, was Bud. I hugged him and slapped him on the back, congratulated him. We stood and talked for a while. His English had made a comeback and his spirits had lifted considerably. As I descended the steps saying goodbye, I had a thought.

"Should I still call you Bud?" I asked.

He said his Tibetan name. "Karma," he smiled. "You should call me Karma now."

Karma. The law of cause and effect that brings people together and separates them. The work we do that prepares us for this meeting or that. And the work that we do not do and that leaves us with empty hands.

……………

On my last night in Buddha Gaya I walked my bike up through the bazaar and down through the first gates of the Stupa and parked it on the grass next to the second gate. 

Ani-la's candle still burned in its recess in the wall by the Diamond Throne. I felt lucky to see the little flame against the dark Stupa wall because getting in there that night was impossible. A group of 70 or 80 Sri Lankans had crowded in around the Tree and Throne and spilled out onto the steps and the marble platform outside. The three monks leading them wore saffron robes. Theravadans. The women all wore either light or white saris with dully colored cardigan sweaters. The lay men wore white dhotis and baggy sports jackets. All were dark, dravidian.

As the group next to the Throne continued its puja, another group of the same size came around the Stupa carrying lit torches made of oil-soaked cloth wound round crude wooden staves. The people doing the puja at the tree were led by a monk who chanted a line or a phrase into a bullhorn, which the group of lay people around him then chant back. Rather noisy, especially when the chattering torch bearers started essentially the same thing, but from a different text.

It was also quite beautiful. The torch bearers started out and circled the Stupa on the marble walkway, and I situated myself far back on the pavement so I could see them as they came round the corner of the building, led by a small group of monks. All the men, even the monks, wore knit watch caps. The women wore kerchiefs. My friend Audrey came behind them saying a mantra and moving the beads of her mala, rosary, as she walked.

For a long time, I sat on my meditation cushion listening to the bullhorn chanting and watching as this long line of torches came out of the darkness. The writer in me wanted to step between myself and the experience with questions about how to describe it. 

My cough left me alone for a change, and my bowels were calm.

The torch line came in and out of the darkness all wrapped in layers of unstitched cloth—saris and dhotis. Minus the bullhorn, this ancient community had been performing this sort of puja for centuries.   

Watching Ani-la’s candle had slowed me down in Buddha Gaya, and that's what I'd needed. It had given me time to think, and there was little I didn't think about under the Bodhi Tree that evening as the one group of Sri Lankans circled with their torches and the other chanted under the Tree. Impermanence. All the changes I've gone through in my life and realized that I hadn't even started. Cause and effect. Spirituality as the watching of a flame. Sometimes, because of the wind, we have to stand up and relight it. But one thing about Buddha Gaya really amazed me: I've never seen people using matches. You can always light your candle off another. It's all the same flame.

My thoughts were as jumbled as the sounds of the competing groups of chanters and the flame light and shadow dancing high on the walls of the Stupa. Make a space inside and cultivate it and make it a compassionate space, something inside told me, and I kept thinking that I was right where I wanted to be and doing exactly what I wanted to be doing. It made me feel lucky and humble as I sat there listening and watching, wondering how to learn to be worthy of it. I watched my breath, letting myself be there in the scene without thinking about it.

Then, at some point that I did not notice and suddenly, the Sri Lankans were gone and I sat watching my breath in silence. My mind shifted to a guided meditation we had done on one of the last days of the meditation course at the Root Institute. Kabir had had us imagine all the beings in the world sitting around us. The old axis mundi—here I am at the lodge pole center of the world, with everybody else spread out around me. I found this visualization pretty easy, which is perhaps why it came back to me under the Bodhi Tree that night.

I started imagining the difficult situations people find themselves in: wars, extreme heat, mud huts caving in during the rainy season, inadequate water supplies, no decently paying work. I pretty much focused on some of the rickshaw wallahs and touts who drive me nuts and imagined the difficulties of their lives. The endless days. The violence of higher status drivers and the police. The sheer physical exertion. The heat. Rain. And of course home was seldom much. I saw a woman squatted over a fire making chapatti and dal, chapatti and dal, day after day. Kids with chronic runny noses and serious coughs. Serious illness comes to one of the children in the night; the rickshaw wallah has no choice but to work the next day. What would it be like to be intelligent in that situation, but unable to develop that intelligence? How would I react to that? 

Then I started thinking about my own life, about my material well-being, my ability to travel and to study the dharma, my reasonable education.

Sitting in the silence under the tree that night, I was moved as I had not been at the Root. India had elicited strong emotions, mostly of anger, since I'd arrived. I found myself constantly angry. The poverty is just not necessary. The world needn't do this. But I had become numb by the time I got to Buddha Gaya. The thought of walking into the caves of the lives around me had been too frightening to imagine then. 

I unfolded my legs and sat there feeling empty and put my head in my hands and started missing home:  missing my wife and our friends—feeling generally blue and guilty for having left Linda behind to go on this journey. Suffering for my self-indulgence, you might say. "Stop feeling sorry for yourself," I thought, and right away, obeying that little order, I started closing up shop emotionally. But then I stopped myself and thought, "Feel it, feel it. That's the way we all feel when we suffer." 

So I did—first for myself, then very quickly for other people: for Linda, my son Chris, my mother, my sisters, for my brother Frank, my dead brother Anthony and my father, my estranged uncle and on and on and on, even somehow remembering the suffering of Uncle Lal and Jan the Dutchman. I felt again the despair that had brought me to India, the despair that probably led my father to commit suicide, that my brother must have felt as he lay dying at the end, the despair of the beggars in the hot season "just sitting," and of my young friend Bud as he contemplated the biggest decision of his life, and of Uncle Lal as he looked into his private abyss.  

I forgot where I was, started swaying back and forth like an Hasidic scholar, exhausted. Audrey came by with her mala and mantra again and stopped. When I looked up she asked, "Are you okay?"

Of course I said I was, and that in fact was true. 

So after she and I had exchanged a few words, I gathered up my cushion and blanket and went further back into the shadows in front of the tree and quietly wept. I wept for the boy whose shoulder I put my arm around in the village several days earlier and for his mother. I wept for my father and for Chris and Linda and for Audrey and her sad moments, even for Alice, as angry a person as myself, for poor, phlegmatic, cuckolded Bruce, for the English woman and her son, for the people who winced and turned their heads from my family. The suffering I felt was the suffering we all feel and that motivates all of our actions; we seek to avoid and escape it, and this is the single cause from which all our actions proceed. A Unity Theory of the Heart. To understand this is to keep the heart open and compassionate. It is the real meaning of generosity. 

I watched to see my heart stay open. And at that instant, out of the darkness high above and behind me, from the wasteland between the Stupa grounds and the harijan village, came the sad song of the drunken farmer, so much like that on the night weeks ago across from my hut at the Root. It was so like that singing that it might have been the same drunken singer. All the time that I wept this distant singing continued, as if there to prop my heart open. I felt the bliss of compassion. Not of feeling sorry. Not of being above and better than, but of being inside and knowing the other.

There was then, I knew, more to Buddhism than a tight, helpful system. I had felt the impact of the first of the Nobel Truths. Nothing more. Not enlightenment. The truth that life is characterized by suffering and others suffer every bit as intensely as I do. That truth had taken me in its arms and rocked me. There seemed no more profound connectedness to other beings than this.

And it had always been there for me, if only I had let myself feel it. Staying at Uncle Lal's, riding the bus down from Nepal, visiting Lumbini or Sakya Centre, at home. You don't need a Bodhi Tree to feel what others feel. Just open up your heart.

I thought about the Buddhist refuge, the three jewels: refuge in the Buddha and the example of his life; refuge in the Dharma, the teachings; and refuge in the Sangha, the community of Buddhists. This gave me a courage I had not felt before. It was as if something had inhabited me. A lightness. An energy that took my form. Faith. Leaving my bag and cushion behind, I got up and walked across the grass to the tree. I put my hand on it, the living Buddha that the Theravadans clothed in saffron monk's robes. What was it that I felt? Affection. Acceptance. Each instant was brand new. Each instant the beginning of a new journey.

Later, I lit a dozen candles for Linda, putting one on "my corner" next to the throne. I walked off in a dream, distributing coins to the two or three beggars who had stayed to closing.

……………

The next day, the day I was to leave, I felt the same. As I packed, colors and sounds and feelings became more distinct. A bird high in the trees of the Burmese Vihar garden let go with a loud series of watery whistles. A beautiful call, starting slowly, trying out the notes, testing, listening to itself, then sped up, more sure of itself, then hit warp speed into an almost hysterical celebration. I stood in the universal silence its ending left. 

Once again, I had the sensation that I had dreamed all of this. And in fact it was a dream. I saw also that morning what the hard-core dharma bums had seen and acted on: how easy it would be to just keep on traveling. Let go. Don't go back. You can't help being connected, so what’s all the fuss?

But I was leaving, heading off to finish the planned trip. This was all just an interlude. I was not taking the plunge, though I had indeed let go of something. The unfulfilled ambition that had nearly broken me before coming to India seemed to have diminished in its importance. And, along with that, I found myself not giving much of a damn what people thought of me. I’d just get up and walk away. So what? Ships passing in the night, in a dream. That's at least something to take away.

But as the time came to go, I wanted to stall, bad cold that needed a doctor or not. Being in Buddha Gaya, I felt that blissed out morning, was like leaving the world, but even the Buddha didn't stay there. He rejoined the world—that’s what his going home was—and he began making his contribution. So the question I needed to begin answering was how to turn my small appreciation that we all suffer into a contribution.

That morning as I felt kindness and kinship with all beings, I foolishly thought, "Now it will be easier." And events, at least at first, seemed to confirm this.

I set about taking the first steps after my little awakening under the Bodhi Tree.

My first chore after getting up to the usual cold shower that last morning was to return my bicycle and the heavy woolen blanket Junya got me at the Gelug Monastery. When we got the blanket, Junya had led me up and down a couple of stairs and passageways and showed me the elderly monk I was supposed to give it back to. I was confused and just said, "Sure," thinking I might be able to recreate our walk when the time came. But that final morning I wasn't so sure. 

I set out up the road that I'd walked that first day in Buddha Gaya. Past the bicycle repair shop with oily parts strewn over a dirty tarp on the road. Past the police bungalow and the barber and furniture-making shops with their piles of cut hair and wood shavings, past the boy who had sold me the meditation cushion. I stopped before the post office and gave my rented bike back, collecting my deposit minus daily rental. Then, where on that first day a bus had come down the hill jampacked with people and spewing exhaust, now just such a bus came again. I looked up and saw Thomas on the very front of the bus's roof, smiling down at me. He too was leaving. I waved. He put his palms together over his sternum and smiled ever more sweetly. I did the same, and then the moment passed. We would never see each other again.

Thinking I'd just wander through the monastery until I figured out where the blanket went, I walked to the monastery and went up the steps to the gompa (the worship hall) and then paused, unsure of which way to turn and clutching the blanket to my chest.

Suddenly this elderly monk appeared, I looked at his face and realized he was my monk, we both broke out laughing, I handed him the blanket, and we both turned around and went back where we had come from. Well, I smiled warmly to myself, my business is going better. So far, so good.

For some reason, I went down to the bazaar and started looking at the cheap little Buddha statues I'd so far avoided, wanting one to remember my visit by. But I didn't want any of the Buddha's they were selling, so I headed down to the Sakya monastery to say so long to Lama Tsega. As usual, he was busy walking around supervising the construction work, trying to expand his place beyond just a one-man operation. 

Lama Tsega came down from the roof to greet me.

"They said you were leaving today?" he asked. I'd left a message the day before. "Do you have to?"

I explained that my cold had gotten much worse and that I felt a real need to move on with my journey. He understood. We exchanged cards.

"I won't lose touch," I said, though I did.

We stood there talking for a while and then he ran inside for something. "Here's a little Buddha statue to remember me by," he laughed, handing me one of the cast of statue I had rejected in the bazaar.

"Oh, thanks, but how could I forget you?"

"Yes," he let his belly jiggle and his face shine as only a monk's face can, "how could you forget a fat, arthritic monk with constipation?"

He led me inside. "Mom made us tea." As I drank, he found a batch of dried and pressed bodhi leaves and piled them, a picture of the Sakya lineage tree ("I need to get another one of these anyway," he muttered), and a purbah onto my place at the table. The purbah, a "magic dagger" that looks like a fancy brass tent peg, had been blessed by Sakya Trizen and is supposed to protect you. Understand, I don't believe any of this, but it stayed in my pocket for months, and I eventually gave it to my son—about whom I've felt more secure since. So much for disbelief.

"Next time, you stay here," he told me. I didn't say anything about his installing a toilet, assuming that he would do so if he ever got over his constipation.

Then we went outside and sat in the shade of the new monastery building as workers from the village banged and hammered above us. I don't even remember what we were talking about that day, the last of our conversations about Buddhist philosophy over tea and cookies. My understanding of reincarnation in psychological terms again, perhaps. Maybe the nature of reality. I don't remember.

We had talked about both issues, and more, and this day as I took my newly expanded consciousness of suffering into the world of affairs and obligations the conversation glided dreamlike. 

As we sat trying to think and speak over the banging, a tall local man entered the gate at the other end of the long courtyard and walked toward us.

This white haired man in the clean white dhoti and the natty blue blazer was not a stranger. He was the good natured, beedee smoking building supplies contractor with whom Lama Tsega did business. He wore a neatly folded white cloth, his turban, over his right shoulder, as always, but that morning his face froze in a tense expression. He walked to directly in front of us and stopped, heaved a sigh, and sucked on his beedee. 

"Namaste, ji," whispered Lama Tsega, as if to say, "What's up?"

"Namaste, ji," the supplies contractor answered back. Then he began speaking in Mughadi. I gathered through his tone and some stray words that something awful had happened in Gaya District. And Lama Tsega's expression, too. His jaw had fallen open and he leaned forward and then fell back in his seat, aghast.  The contractor politely spoke to both of us, shifting his gaze from Lama Tsega to me and then back as he explained.

"They killed a hundred people in a village in Gaya District last night," Lama Tsega translated. "Cut them and shot them. At least a hundred. Maybe more." And then in disgust, "India."

It had happened, really, only a few miles up the road in a village called Bara occupied by people of the Bhumihar caste, a village not so unlike the ones in the Buddha Gaya neighborhood.

"Yet another massacre stuns blood-spattered Bihar. Will the killings ever stop?" lamented the news magazine The Week in its later report. The official tally of dead by then was 39, not 100.  On the street in Buddha Gaya the day of the killings, however, the number sometimes rose to 150, and I have to wonder which—the official or the popular—figure was the more accurate. George Orwell's observation that, in the East, "a story always sounds clear enough at a distance, but the nearer you get to the scene of events the vaguer it becomes," came to mind as I listened to the talk and later read about the massacre.

It had been a vendetta killing between private caste armies, one in a chain with no end in sight. And the links on the chain kept getting larger and more grotesque. Several weeks earlier three members of the Bhumihar caste had been murdered by the Maoist Communist Centre (MCC) in another village of the Gaya District. Ramadhar Singh, "commander-in-chief" of the Savarna Liberation Front, the private army of the Bhumihar caste, had warned that he would kill a dozen MCC activists for every Bhumihar killed, and shortly thereafter, at least ten Harijans were murdered in retaliation for the three dead Bhumihars. 

So one evening in February, while I was lighting candles at the spot where Lord Buddha had attained enlightenment and weeping blissful tears for the suffering we all endure, MCC activists, many of them disguised in police uniforms, surrounded the nearby Bhumihar village of Bara, took the local men out of their houses, led them to the irrigation canal, and hacked and shot them to death one by one.

Looking at the ballooning figures in the murder reports, one can see why the authorities might have wanted to downplay the official totals. 

"These politicians," said an Indian acquaintance later, "they play one side off against the other. And Laloo is the worst."  That's Laloo Yadav, the Chief Minister of Bihar at the time, the equivalent of a state governor in the United States. "When even a single Harijan stubs his toe, Laloo runs to the scene with a truckload of assistants to make pronouncements and give condolences, but where was he when those three Bhumihars were killed when this cycle started? He had better things to do, that's where."

Indeed, many found Laloo Yadav's behavior curious a year earlier after a BJP candidate was murdered. Even after the Maoist Communist Centre claimed responsibility for killing the man, Laloo persisted in blaming the Bhumihars.

"Terrible people all around Buddha Gaya," the scripture master at Sakya Centre had told me. "I can't understand why Lord Buddha chose such a place to start a religion."

I had laughed then, as he'd meant me to, since he was only half-serious. It's a poor place, full of desperate people, is what he meant to say, so watch out. And terrible people, too. Like every other place we go. What would happen between blacks and whites in comparable economic conditions in the United States? How many of us remember that there were mass murders of Chinese railroad workers in Northern California in the nineteenth century? The Russian River flowed red with blood. You could have walked from bank to bank on the bodies. Ever hear of Wounded Knee? The murders and burning of the Black Wall Street in Oklahoma? And playing politics with race and class hatred has been common in the United States. "India," Lama Tsega hissed in disgust, but the America I'd nearly forgotten in my blissed-out state came back to me.

I was stunned. The image of myself weeping over my own measly suffering, taking it as something significant and life-changing while people were hacked to death nearby—this self-indulgent image wouldn't stop playing itself over and over again in my mind. The eat, pray, love self-indulgence of a tourist with a ticket home, out of harm’s way.

The supplies contractor and I walked silently up the single dirt street between the mud huts of the harijan village. All aware of the news from Bara—shrunken grandfathers naked to the loins, wary, dangerous men fingering farm tools and sharpened sticks, hags, children penned by mother's arms—the villagers watched these two with the full bellies and said nothing, hardly moved as they watched us get through the village as quickly as possible.

I cut across the fields to the Stupa's back gate for a last visit. The plan was for me to light the rest of my candles and incense, then meditate and have a nice walk back to the Burmese Vihar for final packing and departure. Maybe I could reclaim some balance from a head full of murder.

But I ran into this American named Peter who both whines and drones, unable it seems to hear either himself or anyone else. I ended up walking around the Stupa with him. By the time Peter, who had not yet heard of Bara and anyway dismissed it with some sophistry about illusion he'd read in a book, by the time Peter and I had talked and walked for a while I had to use the toilet, realizing I might be sick, so meditation was out of the question. The closest comfortable toilet was at the Burmese Vihar. I hurried out the gate.

One of my vest pockets was full of the change I'd bought for beggars the previous night outside the Stupa, so I started handing coins to the beggars as I went. The problem was that the nasty little bugger with the stick wasn't there to beat them back into line, and they descended on me like blackbirds on seed.

Some of the previous night's compassion came back.

"One at a time," I called out soothingly. "There you go. One for you. One for you. Hey! Wait!"

A hand had gone into my pants pocket. Another grabbed my wrist and pulled it toward itself. Filthy hands. Stinking bodies pressed in on me. A bony black fist careened by my face and smashed into the face of a snot-nosed boy standing in front of me. Hot breath blew on the back of my neck. I yanked the hand from my pocket, pushed through the sudden crowd, tried handing out coins in an orderly way.

"No, no. You already have one. Here. One for you over there."

But one of McBeth's hags weighed in with a stout length of sugarcane, walloping a path straight for me. I threw a handful of coins into the air and ran for the three-wheeled scooters that waited in a line across the road from the Stupa grounds. I had to get away to a bathroom. I threw another handful of coins into the air to confuse my pursuers. The scooter drivers looked at me and then at each other and laughed. Somehow McBeth's hag and a small boy got out in front of me. She drove the boy off with two fierce blows of her sugarcane staff across his shoulders. My bowels jumped. Get me to a bathroom!

There must have been thirty of them crowded around me again as I reached the scooters. "Burmese Vihar first," I yelled over the din. "Then Gaya train station."

I pushed through the mob and sat myself down in the back seat of one of the scooters.

"100 rupees," said the driver. The price should have been 35, and we all knew it.

Hands reached through the window and grabbed me by the hair. Body parts tried to join me. Every so often we heard the thwack of the sugarcane staff.

"35 rupees to Gaya!" I yelled. I had to get to a bathroom.

The face of an old woman with a swollen, twisted nose oozed through one of the windows and smiled a strange, gummy smile at me. A couple of separate fights broke out between different beggars (a grown man beating up a couple of scrawny half-naked kids) and between beggars and the scooter wallahs who didn't want them there. At one point one of the scooter guys spit a long stream of red pan juice over one of the children, but its color was lost in the kid's general grime.

"95 rupees," yelled the scooter guy. "Last."

"Last my ass!" I yelled back. "What? Are you a dacoit?"

His expression changed to anger. He was ready to pull me out and forget me, but saw I was only playing and a couple of his buddies laughed, too. We kept bargaining until reaching 55, and then we were off to the Burmese Vihar bathroom.

But even as we coasted down the hill toward the post office, where my driver jump-started the engine in a cloud of black exhaust, the crowd of beggars for whom I had felt so much mysterious compassion the night before followed.

And that's the way I left the place of enlightenment—with fifteen or twenty beggars chasing me down the street demanding rupees and thrashing one another to get closer to me. I left without having found a teacher and still unsure of my exact path. What had happened under the Bodhi Tree had been real. I climbed a little way out of the muck, up the stem of the lotus, and that gave me courage and would, I hoped, inform my actions from then on. There could be no doubt of what I had experienced. But that and the high comedy of my escape to the safety and relief of a toilet couldn't change Bara. My experience under the tree had perhaps changed me a little, but not the world. I'd have to keep working on that. After the tree, there was no other option. From now on, if I could only remember, each instant was the beginning of a new pilgrimage.