Very Bad Buddhist

Chapter 1: Pilgrims Like Us

PILGRIMS LIKE US

I am a hapless traveler. As proof, here is the story of a pilgrimage I took many years ago and my reflections on it since then. Buddhism seems to attract lots of hapless travelers, lots of Mes.

January 1992

Picture this: I’m toting my blanket, cloth suitcase, shoulder bag, and a huge candle in its long cardboard box down the staircase behind the hotel’s reception desk, then scan the restaurant for a place to sit. A burly Dutchman with a handlebar moustache, the only other Westerner in the place, waves me to his table, and right away we’re deep in conversation about how he’s so busy working on making Tibetan Buddhist prayers chantable in English.

“But English is not my principal wernacular,” he tells me, “and I haf only the most basic yargon. Being able to recover yust the right English vord to fit the rhythm of the chant and to produce the exact spiritual resonance is the challenge. Mit Tibetan, it’s no problem because you can leaf syllables out vhen you need to and everybody vill still know exactly vhat’s goink on. It’s a much more flexible language than bloody old English.”

He sniffed professorially and adjusted his shirt collar.

I was impressed. As a beginning practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism, I had often thought my chanting made no sense. Not only could we Western Buddhists not pronounce the words, but usually we had no idea of the meanings. The Dutchman argued that the West had to have a Buddhism of its own. And he kept coming back to what a beautiful language Tibetan is.

“So you are fluent in Tibetan?” I asked.

He looked startled. His hands stopped in midair. “Fluent? No. I know two Tibetan vords: tashi delek and tu ji chay, hello and tank you.  No, I’m vorking mit English translations, yust trying to make them more chantable.”

Well, yeah. Okay. He was not actually doing translation then. But what, I testily demanded, was all this about languages? What was his background?

A degree in engineering, it turned out, and then training as a welder. And a natural gift for bullshit, apparently.

“As a technical person, I am attracted to Buddhism’s practicality—by its insistence on practicality,” he told me, as if explaining how someone with no special language training or expertise came to be so full of hot air—though what he said about Buddhism’s practicality hit the target dead on. My experience with Buddhism so far had convinced me that the basic teachings, stripped of the superstitious nonsense cultures usually impose on religions, were, at the very least, a useful, practical tool for making life better.

Our table faced across the street to the railway station in Gaya, administrative center for the Gaya District of Bihar, perhaps India’s most forlorn state. Gaya is three hundred miles as the crow flies northwest of Calcutta, although why a crow would fly there is anybody’s guess. Its only interest for the traveler is its location six miles from Buddha Gaya, the holiest of Buddhist pilgrimage sites, the place of the Buddha’s enlightenment. My destination. Like everyone else going there, I was seeking greater peace of mind, maybe some fragment of enlightenment. I pegged the Dutchman, who was on his way out, as one of those Westerners who come to India’s spiritual theme park, ride all the rides, and somehow think they have entered nirvana simply by having stepped onto Indian soil.

Looking out the window to the broken pavement and the chipped paint, the piles of refuse in the gutters, and the clouds of flies on a nearby fruit stand, I thought of what a friend said before I set out on my trip: “Gaya’s an armpit, man. Get out of there as soon as you can.”

The trains between Delhi and Calcutta, however, stop in Gaya, not at Buddha Gaya. And since my train had arrived four hours late and well after dark the night before, I had to thread my way through the crowded station and past the knots of men, women, and children wrapped in blankets and huddled around bonfires of trash to a hotel across the street and stay the night. Bandits, I had been told, controlled the six miles of road to Buddha Gaya between sunset and dawn.

My source for this information, The Buddha Gaya Tourist Guide Book, noted that, “There are gangs operating at the Railway Station and in the city also who may offer you ‘Parsad’, tea, food items or even cigarettes. There have been cases of persons being drugged and robbed. So beware.”

I’d slept under a mosquito net in the cavernous, unlit hotel. A water main had burst and flooded the hallways, so the young room attendant and I sloshed through great puddles of water in the dark to find my room. He carried my heavier bag and a lit candle. I carried my blanket, my shoulder bag, the long offering candle in its cardboard box, and my tiny flashlight.

The room attendant showed me how to drape the mosquito netting on poles at the four corners of my bed and then tuck the edges into the thin mattress. And he kindly brought me an extra blanket because the nights and mornings are cold in winter in that part of India.

The comforts he tried to provide didn’t help, though. Partly because I still suffered residual jet lag and partly because my room had an unclosable window directly above the kitchen of a restaurant, I could not sleep. A group of boys were scouring pots and pans and singing along to a blaring radio directly below, and the quality of the radio’s speaker couldn’t manage the volume at which they had set it. Each time the music reached a certain pitch or intensity the radio joined in with hysterical static and buzzing. The boys loved this and answered with louder and more theatrical singing and banging of pans.

Groggy and irritable in the morning, I went down to the restaurant to eat. The Dutchman thought my spending the night out of danger hilarious and hysterical.

“Bandits!” he snorted. I fumed as he laughed, “So take the roats. Vhy stay here? You call yourself a Buddhist and you are afrait of a little ting like death?”

To add to my irritation, ours was, or seemed to be, a complicated order for the waiter, who had little English. We had not enough words to order in Hindi and no words in Bihari and, after all, the menu was in English. We both were supposed to get cheese omelets and a half set of tea. I ordered toast with marmalade, no butter, and a Maaza, a mango drink. Jan, the Dutchman, ordered toast with butter. In fifteen minutes one half set of tea and an omelet arrived. I was feeling hungry and irritated by Jan’s conversation, so I took the omelet and gave him the tea. I ate slowly, though, expecting, against all experience, my toast to arrive in time to have a little egg with it.

“Toast and tea,” I reminded the waiter. Usually I’m polite, even solicitous, but I was tired from my trip and from the long night and already annoyed with the waiter. He insisted on not writing any of our order down.

“No problem, no problem,” he told us.

“And a second cheese omelet,” Jan said.

“What, sir?”

“A second cheese omelet. We both get.”

“Plain omelet?”

Jan and I glanced at each other. Our order was clearly in big trouble.

“He gets a cheese omelet just like mine,” I scolded the waiter, “and I get marmalade toast.”

“And I get butter toast,” said Jan.

“No butter on mine,” I added.

“Jam toast?” he asked me.

We had overloaded the poor guy’s circuits, and he wasn’t doing anything to improve my mood.

“Marmalade toast,” I told him. I insisted on marmalade. The menu gave me three choices: jam, marmalade, or butter. I chose marmalade. I’d been careful to specify no butter. “No butter,” I repeated. “Marmalade toast and tea.”

“And I get butter toast and a cheese omelet,” said Jan.

“No problem, sir,” and he was off to the kitchen.

A bunch of German backpackers lugged their gear up the steps from the street and came inside. The last one left the door open as a truck came by blaring its horn and kicking up a cloud of dust that rolled into the room. I bit my lower lip and went and closed the door. My sinuses were already filled with crud. Our waiter darted out from the kitchen to bring menus to the backpackers.

“Excuse me,” I called. “Please bring me my marmalade toast now.” I brought my index finger down for emphasis on the now.

And indeed in a moment he raced out of the kitchen with a plate of toast. Butter toast. No marmalade.

“Marmalade toast, no butter,” I nearly screamed.

The backpackers were all taking in the scene.

“And one cheese omelet,” Jan chimed in merrily. He clearly enjoyed my impatience.

One of the backpackers got up, stuck his head out the door, looked from left to right, and went back to his table, leaving the door open again.

“I want that marmalade toast right now,” I told the waiter. “Bring it right away.” If he didn’t bring it right away, I was going to wring his neck.

“Jam toast?” he asked.

“Marmalade!”

“Jam toast?”

“Yes,” Jan put in. “Jam toast for him. And one cheese omelet.”

Another truck with its horn blowing jammed its brakes on outside, throwing up an enormous column of yellow dust that entered the restaurant as if ready to order a meal. I stood up to close the door again. “Jam toast, no butter,” I sighed, going along with Jan and giving up on the marmalade. “And a cheese omelet for my friend.” I went and closed the door, glowering over at the backpackers.

“Settle down, settle down,” Jan laughed. “You haf to yust give in to it. This is India. You’re supposed to be a Buddhist.”

“I’m usually nice,” I whined. “But today I’d like my toast with my eggs, that’s all. I’m entitled to my impatience.”

“American Tourist Gets First Lesson in Patience,” he grinned, writing imaginary headlines in the air over his head.

It really was just too much.

“Listen Jan, you tulip-turding bastard, this is not my first time in India nor my first lesson in patience. Don’t be so damned self-righteous.” Anybody who has ever been in India considers himself an old India hand. I don’t know why this is so. “I’ve been through all this before,” I snapped.

But Jan—the guy who, for the last half hour, had been telling me all about himself, the Buddhist about to settle in India, the teacher of introductory courses in Buddhism, the pretend scholar—didn’t seem to notice just how angry I really was, and he didn’t give a damn about my “experience.” What did he care that he was making the situation worse?

He didn’t seem to know what was going on right in front of him. Longtime Buddhist practitioners are supposed to be trained in mindfulness, I reminded myself self-righteously. What kind of Buddhist did he think he was?

“Think of it as a teaching,” he smiled. “Everything you see from now on vill be a teaching.”

His cheeks were rosy. His blue eyes sparkled. He farted loudly and bawled with laughter. “Don’t be a bad Buddhist!” he guffawed. Then he lifted his gear from its pile next to his seat and harnessed up for the walk across the road to the railway station. He threw a handful of rupee notes on the table.

“You eat my food vhen it comes. If it comes. You are a dharma bum now,” he told me. “Marmalade or jam? What does it matter in the scheme of tings for pilgrims like us?”

He shrugged, either dismissing me or adjusting the straps of his backpack. I felt a powerful urge to punch him in the crotch. He was not the first Westerner passing himself off as a spiritual teacher I’d met in India. But I watched as he crossed the street and faded into the crowd outside the railway station.

……………..

I had come to India to try wriggling loose from an ongoing mid-life crisis that had somehow twisted itself into a slow-motion nervous breakdown.

I had become profoundly, absurdly depressed, rightly or wrongly feeling myself to have gone nowhere and come to nothing. I felt old, as if everything had battered and worn me down and closed me up. Always tough and ready for a tumble before this, now, at home at least, even a good staircase defeated me, left me huffing. I awoke each morning with a backache that curled its fingers around my front and grabbed at my chest. My neck was set in concrete. My shoulders and face jutted forward as if pulled by a taut bow string.  My doctor told me I had a pre-ulcerous condition and prescribed Ranitidine HCL and a bland diet. Old. Increasingly, hair left my head and regrouped on my shoulders, on my ears, in—of all places—my nose! Every boy's worst adolescent nightmare was coming true for me: I was beginning to look like my tenth grade drafting teacher!

Doors were closing. Time was running out. Even my friends were telling me it was perhaps time to do something else with my life, to make a change away from freelance writing and teaching workshops to a regular job with a predictable pay schedule and a dental plan.

"Good God, yes, Steve. The futurists tell us that we'll all change careers six times in a lifetime," a cheerful friend (with the pink glow of the healthy and happy) reminded me.

With that in mind, I began looking around. One morning I got out of bed and decided that I would go back to college for a certificate to teach elementary school. This seemed the best. I had worked with children and knew we got along, and teaching school, having a positive impact on kids, sounded great. So I told all my friends and family that that was what I was going to do. I even looked into a number of colleges, picked out courses and prepared to sign up and put my money down. But something stopped me.

Then I told everyone that I was getting a master's degree in Teaching English as a Second Language. I had explored all the options to do that, too, and it also felt like the sort of profession that I could be happy in. I'd worked with enough non-native speakers to know this would be something I'd be good at. I took a course in linguistics, loved it, got an A. Wow! But every bit as suddenly as the urge to make that change had come over me I abandoned it. Just got up one morning and realized it wasn't for me.

It was as if I got the whim to become a fireman one day, a policeman or dog catcher the next. But each career choice came to nothing.

Then came a course of acupuncture and herbal medicine. Depression, anybody who's ever read a self-help book can tell you, is anger turned inward. As the sessions of acupuncture continued, I did in fact stop turning my anger inward. Now, instead of being angry with myself, I directed my anger outward, leaving stunned or tearful bank clerks and fast food counter help in my wake everywhere I went. But still—there I was looking at what I should do with the rest of my life and finding no decent answers, no clear path to follow.

At the beginning of my crisis, I had gone to India for the first time to write some stories, and had eventually done little there but confirm my love for India. Even with all its annoyances and discomforts, it is a marvelous place, full of warmth and humor. Often, as with my behavior with Jan, my stupid reactions supplied the comic relief. And, though the long-dreamed-of first trip had left me feeling incomplete, I knew from the day I set foot in the county that India would take up years of my life, though the exact path had not revealed itself.

So I had come back to India for a second try. The plan was to make a pilgrimage to the four major pilgrimage sites in Buddhism: Lumbini, in Nepal, the site of the Buddha’s birth; Buddha Gaya, where he attained enlightenment; Sarnath, where he began to teach the Dharma; and Kushinagar, where he died. I would also spend a month or so in Dharamsala, home of the exiled Dalai Lama of Tibet, where I had many friends from the previous trip. Wherever else I roamed was left open.

A pilgrimage, then. And while some may have been embarrassed by the word, I was not. It expressed exactly what I had come for. I wanted to change my life, to somehow become more completely my best self.

What was needed, I thought, was to shake everything up once and for all. Look at and experience my life anew. From a completely different angle. Go back to India. This time do it right. Don't hang out in comfortable hotels and restaurants in the cities this time. Go with purpose, like it's your last chance ever. Go to holy places and meditate. Look for an authentic teacher. 

Look at your own life, the life of the Buddha, the lives of those around you, and see what happens. Reconnect with what gives you spirit. That's what a pilgrimage is for. Nothing else worked, so try this. 

As luck would have it, my friend the nun Ani Nawang Chodon, Ani-la, lives in Minnesota now. "Be careful," she told me. "Always travel with Tibetan people." And she gave me a little Indian money, a silk prayer scarf (a kata), and two scented candles to make an offering at Buddha Gaya. One of the candles was nearly three feet long and as I stood at the door saying goodbye to her I wondered how I would manage to fit it into my suitcase.

But when she wrapped a second kata around my neck, put her palms together in blessing, and said, "Safe trip," I knew I was finally doing the right thing and felt my pilgrimage started from that moment.

…………..

After the Dutchman had gone, I ate his omelet and ordered more tea.  So far, despite what I’d felt at Ani-la's door, I did not feel like a pilgrim. But at least full and slightly settled down, I went out into the street to look for a three-wheeled scooter rickshaw. For thirty-five rupees it would run me to Buddha Gaya, where I would surely begin feeling holy. 

More immediately, though, what I felt was a trip through the countryside so jarring I thought the fillings would shake out of my teeth. Speed bumps announced every tiny settlement along the paved road, and these the rusty tin can three-wheeled scooter either smacked into full tilt or detoured by abruptly veering off through the dust and terrorized chickens in a tight semicircle.

 The craggy mound of a blunt mountain rose now and again to our left, disappearing just as suddenly in a kilometer. We drove along past paddy fields latticed between earthen dikes and through tiny villages of refracted, golden light, past dense clumps of reptile-green bamboo, and parallel to a dry bed of sandbars and wide, shallow channels, the Falgu River. Everywhere but where the craggy mountain the Buddha had wandered and where saints practiced for centuries, the land spread out astonishingly flat.  

Then we pulled up in front of a walled compound clearly at the outer edge of a little town. Across the road a tea stall’s tables spread out to the pavement. A shirtless, tattooed Westerner in billowy red Punjabi pants and a multicolored, brimless Kulu hat sat drinking tea at one of these tables. He did not look up from his tea. Next door to the tea stall was a dirt-floor restaurant with a grass roof. 

A couple of bicycle rickshaw wallahs dozed atop their rickshaws at the heavy iron gate of the compound, and three old women squatted begging. "Saab. Please, saab," they moaned at me. The pinkish, faded wall of the compound stretched maybe sixty yards parallel to the road. In low relief along the wall were sculpted, fancifully pointed pipal, bodhi, leaves painted green and also fading.

“Burmese Vihar," said the driver. The favorite home of the budget traveler.

I paid him and lugged my gear in through the iron gate. 

"Come back in one week," said the young Indian manager. "Here, all you have to do is give me your name and I will write it down. That way I will save you a place." He sat at a bare wooden desk under a pipal tree in the monastery's park-like courtyard. Birds sang. A banyan tree dropped its creepers. A saffron-robed Theravadan monk slept in a shaded hammock nearby. A couple of blond children played a noisy game of tag with an Indian boy their age. A tall, Western man twisted soapy water out of a blue shirt behind the manager. Off to the right a couple of other Westerners in the maroon robes of Tibetan monks chatted with an elderly Burmese monk in saffron. Theravadans and Mahayanists.

Theravada means "The Teaching of the Elders," and the members of this branch of Buddhism, from Nepal, Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, and, in small numbers now, India, take as their text what they consider the authentic tradition of the teachings of the Buddha, the Pali texts. Members of the Theravadan branch strive for personal, individual liberation from the suffering of rebirth after rebirth. They are also sometimes called Hinayana Buddhists, Hinayana meaning "the Lesser Vehicle" because each spiritual seeker travels the road to Nirvana in his own cart, as it were. 

Mahayana Buddhists believe in postponing final liberation, or entering into Nirvana, until all sentient beings have reached spiritual maturity and are therefore ready to take the final liberating step together. This Greater Vehicle (all will ride it together to Nirvana) is the basis for the idea of the Bodhisattva, one who has attained spiritual maturity but who voluntarily continues taking rebirth in order to help other sentient beings along on the path. Tibet, China, Korea, Japan, and much of Vietnam are Mahayanist.

I printed my name on the sheet of paper. "In one week," sang the young manager, "you will have a room."

I was on the point then of asking him how to find the Tibetan Sakya-sect monastery when the Westerner doing his laundry caught my eye. "I think I have a place for you two houses down," he said in an English accent. He wore small, round wire-rimmed glasses, and his dark, curly hair, cut short on the sides, seemed to lift from the top of his head as if he were under water. "A nice family.  Indians," he sniffed. "Friends of mine. If you'll just give me a minute to hang these things out to dry, I'll take you round." 

That sounded good to me. He did his laundry outside a long, low building running along the inside of the compound's wall. Roughly half the twenty doors of the tiny rooms were opened, Western men and women in Indian clothing coming in or going out, doing laundry, exchanging books, shaking out bedding, talking, making plans for the day. I waited at a bulletin board at the end of the building.

One announcement said that Christopher Titmuss, an internationally known insight meditation (vipassana) teacher, was conducting a three-week retreat at Watt Thai, but it was an old announcement. The retreat was just ending. Another said that a teacher named Andrew Cohen, somebody I'd never heard of, was leading question and answer sessions each evening at the Tourist Bungalow.

"You've arrived a little late for the courses," said the Englishman when he'd finished with his wash. He turned out later to be partly wrong. "The Christopher Titmuss retreat was excellent, as usual," he added. Then he pointed to the announcement for the Andrew Cohen talks. "I don't know what to tell you about this bloke. He's from California, if that tells you anything." He shook his head. "You're not from California, are you?"

"Nope."

"He claims to be enlightened." 

We walked a hundred yards back toward Gaya to a house set facing the road from behind a quarter acre of vegetable gardens. He led me through heavy wooden doors, down a whitewashed passageway where two bicycles were parked, through a sunny courtyard, under a low, narrow door and cement staircase, between the latrines and a hand pump to curl around and up the railingless staircase we had a second ago ducked under. Then we were on the roof, confronted by an astonishingly beautiful girl in a pink party dress. She had smooth, deep chocolate skin and snickering eyes. Rekha. Once my newfound English friend, Harry, had gotten me there and stated our business, all his attention went to Rekha while I negotiated with grandmother and "Uncle" Lal, a short man in his twenties who showed me to one of the three rooms on the roof.

My room had two Morris chairs, a large bed, assorted family pictures and books, a large, garish poster of elephant-headed, prosperity-bringing Ganesh on the wall, and a television set in a plastic cover. I was given to understand that the television didn't work, but I didn't care. The room cost Rs. 30 per night, slightly over a dollar at the official exchange rate current then. I put my things away and stretched out on the bed, listening to Rekha and Harry talking. 

My spirits began to lift. This was it. Buddha Gaya. Numero Uno of places of pilgrimage for twenty-five-hundred years. The place where Siddhartha Gautama finally put it all together. The center of the universe in the middle of nowhere.

…………..

"We believe the place in which a person attains a high level of spiritual development has been blessed by him," explained the Dalai Lama in John Avedon's In Exile from the Land of Snows. "Just as an ordinary man or woman creates a certain atmosphere in a room in which they live, so have great beings in holy places. As you draw conclusions about a person from the atmosphere in his room, so you can in Bodh Gaya about the Buddha himself. This is the basis for making pilgrimage: to draw some positive force from a blessed place, so that one's own merit—the store of good qualities within one's mind—will increase."

And "to draw some positive force" from the place you should know what happened there.

Twenty-five hundred years ago, Siddhartha Gautama was born at Lumbini in what is now southern Nepal, where his journey to Buddha Gaya really starts. The countryside there was dense forest, not the wall-to-wall carpet of paddy fields you will find today. Monkeys, missing from the scene now that their habitat has been destroyed, swung from the branches of trees. Tigers dined on pretty much what they liked. Rhinos slopped around in the rivers and wetlands. And even nine hundred years after the Buddha, the Chinese monk Fa-hien wrote that "inhabitants are few and far between. On the roads people have to be on guard against white elephants and lions, and should not travel incautiously." A wild place, in other words.

And wild things happened, at least as the story gets handed down. Maya Devi, the Buddha's mother, dreamed on the night of conception that she was carried to the highest peak of the Himalayas, where the waiting Buddha entered her womb disguised as a six-tusked white elephant. An auspicious dream. The Joseph of this story was King Suddhodana, ruler of Kapilavastu, twenty kilometers or so west of Lumbini. It was the custom in that place back then for expectant mothers to go home to their families as the time of delivery approached, and Maya Devi, the daughter of a nearby royal household, had headed out on a string of elephants with her attendants when she came to Lumbini Park for the usual pit stop.       

Some Buddhist scholars and historians say that the king had bought the park for Maya Devi and that she had named it after her own mother, and that's why she liked stopping there so much. In any case, the party stopped to refresh itself. It was at that time just a clearing in the forest. A place to rest and bathe. Give the transportation something to eat and drink. But pregnant women shouldn't ride on elephants. 

Maya Devi had no sooner bathed than she went into serious labor. This scene, along with the scene of her dream of the white elephant, is regularly depicted on Buddhist temple walls and sculpture. The story goes that after Maya Devi had come from bathing in the sacred pool, she felt a hard labor pain and a sal tree lowered one of its branches to steady her. She took the branch with her right hand, and Siddhartha Gautama was born from Maya Devi's right side. At that instant the whole countryside burst into blossom and hot and cold running streams came down from the sky to wash the infant. A magic curtain materialized to protect mother and child. A small, oily river, the present-day Telar, suddenly flowed for Maya Devi to cleanse herself.

The baby was golden and held himself erect as the Hindu god Brahma received him. He took seven steps toward the north, leaving a lotus flower at each place his foot touched, and said the words, "Foremost am I in the World, Seniormost am I in the World, Best am I in the World. This is my last birth. No more am I to be born."  The earth quaked and the wind suddenly ceased. All became peace and silence. Then the precocious kid with friends in high places became as helpless as any ordinary newborn, and began his extraordinary life.

When Siddhartha was brought home to Kapilavastu from the birth at Lumbini, the saint Asita came to look at the baby and wept that he would be dead by the time Siddhartha grew to maturity and fulfilled his destiny. Asita inspected the infant and found markings of the wheel of dharma, the wheel of the law, on his feet. If the child had a worldly upbringing, said Asita, he would be a great king; if he renounced the world, he would be a Buddha, an awakened one.

 "He will either be a great king, the greatest the world has ever seen," said Asita, "or a great holy man. Mind you," said the old sage, "he will leave you and become a holy man if he ever sees the realities of this world." This meeting between Asita, the king, and the infant is also a scene in the life of the Buddha depicted on most temple walls.  

Siddhartha's father, wanting an heir to his throne, then began making plans to shield his son from the realities of life, and Siddhartha became the original boy in a bubble. His father had three mansions built—nine, seven, and five storeys respectively—and raised him amid 40,000 virgins to protect him from the outside world. Nothing of the outside was ever to contaminate or trouble his mind from the time he was old enough to consider it consciously.

But Siddhartha showed signs early that there would be no stopping destiny. Once in his infancy his father took him along to the ceremonial spring plowing, the king's equivalent to the president's throwing the first baseball of the season out, and set him in the shade of a rose-apple tree while he worked. The sun was rising, and the king reasoned that he would have to move his son to keep him in the shade, so he went back to where he had left Siddhartha. But when he got there he found Siddhartha sitting in full lotus meditation posture, having attained the first of the seven levels of meditative trance. The shade of all the other trees had moved with the movement of the sun, but Siddhartha's rose-apple tree's shade stayed where it was over the baby. The king bowed to his son.

He didn't give up, though. As Siddhartha grew, he was made to live a restricted life inside the walls of the citadel of Kapilavastu. His playmates were carefully chosen and instructed. He was given the best food and entertainment. Nothing was to disturb his mind. Yet legend says that he was not an unpleasant or spoiled child. On the contrary, all the stories of the boy Siddhartha show him as unusually kind and thoughtful.

In one story his cousin is practicing with his bow and arrows and shoots a swan flying over the gardens. The wounded bird falls at Siddhartha's feet, and Siddhartha immediately begins to nurse it.

"But that's my swan," yells his cousin. "Let me have it right now." And he began to place a second arrow in his bow to finish off the victim.

Siddhartha shielded the bird with his own body. "He fell at my feet and I'm going to help him get well."

They argued thus for a long time. The cousin claimed that, since he had shot the arrow that brought the swan down, the bird rightfully belonged to him. Siddhartha contended that, since he was caring for the wounded bird and meant it no harm, the swan should stay with him. Finally, they took the wounded bird to the wise men Siddhartha's father kept around to advise him. Both made their cases and Siddhartha—surprise!—was declared correct. The story made the rounds and made him even more beloved.

But the king worried. He married off his son to the most beautiful young woman in the region and installed them both in a pleasure palace full of musicians and dancing girls. Siddhartha must have reasoned out the absurdities of his father's arrangements and one day went to his father and begged to be allowed to ride his horse outside the gates of the citadel to look over the kingdom. A sensible request. The king could hardly say no, but he nevertheless took precautions. He told his son, yes, yes, no problem, go tomorrow, and then he gave strict instructions that everything along the prince's route was to be cleaned up, that anything disturbing to the eyes was to be removed, and that only beautiful, clean, happy people were to be in sight—and that all of them were to line the streets and greet the prince.

So Siddhartha rode his horse Kanthaka out of the gates of the city, followed by his attendant Chandaka, and they saw a clean, happy, untroubled kingdom. But fate lurked in the shadows, too, and out of the crowd of beautiful, advertising-copy faces and perfect  hairdos came a withered, bent, not-ready-for-prime-time oldster who walked right up to Siddhartha and stared into his face.        

Well, it was a shock, and the pampered prince turned right around and headed for home. "What was that all about?" he asked his attendant Chandaka.

"That was an old man," said the attendant. "We all get old."

"You mean you will get old some day and be like that?" 

"Yes."

"And my father?"

"Yes."

"And I, too?"

"Every person gets old."

Siddhartha hadn't heard about this in the songs played in the pleasure palace. All those songs had been about youth and fun and springtime. This experience gave him plenty to think about. He became withdrawn for a few days, and then one day he went back to his father and asked if he might be allowed once again to ride outside the gates.

Again, his father said yes, and again he made precautions—this time, though, they were to be much stricter. All the old people, all the sick, everyone who needed a perm or had a facial blemish was sent on holiday far away. When Siddhartha rode out the gates of the citadel, he was once more met by the crowds of predictably pretty faces, but of course a sick person appeared by the side of the road. He shook with fever, threw up into the ditch. Rashes covered his arms and legs and face. Siddhartha fled.

"And what was that?" he demanded of Chandaka.

"That is sickness, Melord," he answered, or words to that effect. "Happens to the best of us."

Well, we might assume that Siddhartha, because he was such a mensch, wouldn't worry too much about himself getting sick, but he did worry that his young wife and the baby she carried might get sick like that. He brooded for days until finally approaching his father again to ride out and continue his studies.

By now everybody in the royal court and in the town had the drill down, and all the usual suspects were rounded up and sent away for the duration of the princely promenade. This time a dead man appeared right in his path, and, on going hurriedly back to the citadel for his post-ride roundup with Chandaka, Siddhartha learned that we all eventually die. Shocking news. 

He was not now in any huge hurry to go riding outside the gates and risk the possibility of finding something even more horrid out, but he couldn't now be happy in his pleasure palace either. The prince had been out of the palace, and the genie was out of the bottle. Siddhartha's wife Yasodhara and the dancing girls and musicians tried to cheer him up, but it was no use. How, he was asking himself, do we learn to live with this knowledge? How do we cope with the suffering of old age, sickness, and death? It's a question we all ask in one way or another.

He had gone a fourth time to his father for permission to ride outside the citadel and on this trip, aside from the usual happy faces his father arranged for him, he had seen a holy man. Of course it had been the same holy man taking on different appearances each time before, but now Prince Siddhartha saw him in this other form, and he knew without having to ask that this was the way he had to go about learning the ultimate truth about old age, sickness, and death. He became in that instant a spiritual seeker.

So one night while everyone else slept, some say on the very night that his son was born, Prince Siddhartha, the obedient son, attended by Chandaka, rebelled. The pampered prince who had been protected from the realities of life was now driven to understand them in the most profound ways possible. He rode Kanthaka out through the Eastern Gate and left the life he had led for twenty-nine years behind forever. Legend has it that the gods lifted the horse Kanthaka off the ground as he passed through the citadel and town so his hooves would make no noise. Before him lay miles and miles of flat, dense forest. Somewhere out in that dense forest, Prince Siddhartha stopped, cut off his long, bejeweled royal topknot and sent Kanthaka and Chandaka back to Kapilavastu with the news that he'd be missing breakfast.

Then began his search. His father had failed to show him the way in the world and had failed to prevent Siddhartha from living out his destiny. The teachers Siddhartha was now to adopt temporarily along the way would ultimately fail him also. 

Siddhartha Gautama wandered for six years after he left his father's house. First, he had set out to find a master teacher named Alara Kalama, who had gathered about him a large following of students. When Alara Kalama had taught Siddhartha all he knew, he suggested that the young prince stay with him and help to guide his community. But Siddhartha was not satisfied; he had not gained the ultimate realization he had set out to find. Certainly, his goal had not been to head a community, so he left to continue his search. He stayed in this spiritual community and then that one, learning something more in each, but not finding the ultimate answer to the question of why we suffer and how to overcome it.

His standards were high. All with whom he came in contact understood, even though he had perhaps not yet reached the goal he had set for himself, that Siddhartha had already attained a high level of spiritual development. While he was meditating near the city of Rajagaha, the capital of the kingdom of Magadha, King Bimbisara, impressed by Siddhartha's bearing and reputation, came and invited him to rule the kingdom with him. A repetition of Alara Kalama's invitation. Siddhartha turned him down, of course, but promised that if he did eventually find what he was looking for, he would return and teach it to the king. 

Some time after this, in a desperate dash toward his goal, Siddhartha joined a group of forest ascetics who practiced severe austerities. Going naked with matted hair. Meditating for hours, days, weeks. Not eating. His flesh wasting away to nothing. Some stories relate that he eventually only ate a single grain of rice a day. The temple statues and paintings that depict Siddhartha during these times show a skeletal figure with long matted hair seated in deep meditation. A crazy-eyed zealot.

But Siddhartha finally realized that this mistreatment of the body was getting him nowhere, and so one day he left his companions and walked off in search of a better way.

He wandered in the craggy mountains I'd watched from the three-wheeler on the way out from Gaya—looking for a place to meditate, but could not find a suitable spot. As he crossed the nearby river, the last of his strength ran out. Just at that moment Sujata came out of the forest on the bank. According to some stories, a barren woman who had come into the forest to pray for fertility, according to others a young girl sent by her mother to give offerings to a forest god, she believed that Siddhartha was the god she'd come looking for. She fed him a bowl of rice-milk and immediately his strength returned. He walked on and found a place to meditate under a pipal or bodhi tree, bought a bundle of grass from a grass cutter and sat under the tree, determined that he would reach the goal of enlightenment or die trying.

And sitting under the Bodhi Tree on a stack of kushi grass he attained his goal. Enlightenment. Awakening. An understanding of the true nature of reality that can only be experienced, never fully articulated, and that leads to the cessation of suffering and allows one to transcend old age, sickness, and death. It is the great opening of compassion and wisdom. All existence is interconnected. All is one. We are not ultimately separate and individual, but depend on each other for our existence—the law of dependent co-arising. We are always dependent on other beings for who and what we are from one instant to the next.

When several weeks later he began teaching this at Sarnath outside Varanasi, he taught it as the Four Nobel Truths and the Eightfold Path.  The four truths he realized under the tree were that 1) all worldly existence is characterized by suffering, 2) suffering is caused by craving or desire, 3) if you stop craving, you will stop suffering, 4) you can stop craving by following the Eightfold Path: right (in the sense of wholeness or completeness) view, right resolve, right speech, right conduct, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration.

His previous lives and his teachers had helped to bring Siddhartha to that point, but he, like the rest of us, had to take the final step beyond a superficial understanding of reality alone. The understanding of the oneness of all beings was so profound that, in one story frequently depicted on temple walls, he was able to calm a rampaging elephant. 

Many, many years later, after he had taught the dharma and lay dying, he told his followers to, "Be lamps unto yourselves. Seek wisdom and work out your salvation with diligence," thus handing responsibility directly to each of them. He had brought them that far but was now leaving them, in a sense, to the dharma and to themselves: We always come back to individual responsibility and to the individual who has to have that final experience, and that final experience is the ultimate teacher.

So it was at the place I had come to that Siddhartha, five-hundred years before Christ, had sat and struggled and had the insight into the nature of reality that eventually touched my measly little life. I wondered what merit, what store of good qualities within my mind, I brought to Buddha Gaya and, frankly, what that might mean for the rest of my life. How would I experience the merit Buddha had left and what path would I choose, anyway?  And how would I increase those good qualities when I felt so angry and confused about my life?

……………

How, indeed? And what did I bring to my experience of the place? My life had, after all, been nothing like Siddhartha's. A fairly normal birth, as far as I know. No lotus footsteps or precocious proclamations. And the father situation was rather a bit different.

My father hanged himself when I was eight, and the circumstances of our lives afterwards have always been with me. They defined me as nothing else could. They colored the store of qualities, good and bad, I brought to every experience.

My mother moved herself and the six of us children back to Bucks County, Pennsylvania, from Reading so that we could be closer to both sides of the family. Bucks County, just north of Philadelphia and separated from New Jersey by the Delaware River, was one of the original Quaker counties settled by William Penn's followers. The landscape is spotted with Early American fieldstone farmsteads and meeting houses and the family names of those early settlers.

They made up a sort of aristocracy. They owned timber and milling, the big farms down along the river between Centre Bridge and New Hope. The first family of Lumberville, a strip of a village between a forested mountain and the Delaware River, owned the lumberyard. The mountain belonged to them, we assumed. They all seemed to live there in large fieldstone houses by the business. They were an active, genial, Kennedy-like clan, all of them apparently destined for either the family business or something much larger and more interesting. 

Then, too, since Bucks County is convenient to both Philadelphia and New York, there were many well-to-do city families—ad men and Wall Street-types, cash and collateral, to paraphrase Sandburg—who had moved their families out to "the country."  For the most part, Bucks County was and is an affluent place, an embarrassing place to be poor.

 So after an initial period of living in the households of various aunts and uncles when we came back there, we went to live together in the Cake and Beer House downriver from Lumberville. It was a ramshackle antique of a place on the Delaware Towpath, between the canal and the river. An earthen bridge with a wide concrete pipe running through it for the canal flow connected us to River Road, which clung to the edge of the mountain that sloped steeply into the canal. Often sections of River Road's macadam broke off and tumbled down the bank into the water, leaving the white posts of the guard rails dangling like inexperienced climbers to the thick cable. Drunk drivers regularly ended their lives in the canal between our house and Lumberville, two miles north. It was a road so dangerous that the school bus drivers eventually refused to drive it.

Maybe it is true of all families, especially large ones like ours marked by tragedy, that they feel themselves set apart from the rest of the community, but in fact, the Cake and Beer House did set us apart. And it was, really, a sort of paradise. In its day, it had been a stopping point for the barges that mules pulled up and down the canal between Philadelphia and Easton. The people working the barges stretched their legs, ate, and—I suppose, since it was many-roomed—slept there. They fed and watered the mules, hitched fresh teams when they were ready to go again. 

Across our long lawn was what had once been the mule barn. On weekends a man from Philadelphia stayed in a small apartment upstairs there with his men friends, sunbathed in tiny, bright shorts, and tended the antique cars he kept on the ground floor. Fifty yards up the towpath in the other direction, in a tiny cottage under enormous hemlocks, lived Mr. Carlburg, an elderly Swede who had long ago worked the locks on the canal. His white hair was cut in rough bangs and he twinkled as he spoke. A kindly Carl Sandburgish figure we seldom saw.

Our house stood as ancient as the two grand oak trees framing its front door. Rhododendron and honeysuckle blocked out the foundation and climbed the white clapboard past the first storey windows. A narrow corkscrew staircase connected the kitchen to the second floor bedrooms. There were five of these and a bath with a huge claw-footed tub and then the attic, where my brother and I slept on one side and, on the other, a room where we stored outdated dresses and worn out coats and trunks and our father's Army Air Corps dress uniforms and medals.

My mother cooked scrapple and spam and cornbread, county food shelf handouts, on the wood and coal stove, but on mornings before payday we had shredded bread with sugar and milk and, in summer, cat fish and sunnies from the canal. In season, too, we had asparagus and rhubarb from somebody's previous garden. For at least a couple of summers our mother planted a large garden in the patch of ground between our house and Mr. Carlburg's. In the yard was a Japanese chestnut tree, an apricot tree, and a couple of apple trees.

And we could swim straight out into the river's current behind our house and land on the tip of a two-mile-long island and wander all day long over the ruined buildings and orchards of a lost farm. Upstream debris washed onto the shorelines everywhere, and so we came home from our adventures with waterlogged footballs, canoe paddles, strangely twisted driftwood, once, a naked doll with a stomach so full of water that when you squeezed her water shot out from her belly button. And each time we heard of a new drowning, we kept our eyes out for the bloated body turning in the current. We never found one.

We belonged to ourselves off alone down by the river, I guess. We were the six Peters Kids. Tony Peters' kids. I don't know what people said or why exactly they turned their faces from us. Maybe the calamity was simply too great for them to watch. Maybe they didn't want to get any of us on them. And maybe they didn't stand apart from us at all; Maybe it was us, in our predicament, our devastation, who stood away. Or maybe, and more likely, only me imagining it all.

But that time and place will always be where I am coming from, the starting point.  The sense of being apart from the workaday world of the apparently happy clans in the large country homes around us. The Brahmins lived upriver in Lumberville—my father's relatives, from whom we seemed strangely cut off even living so close.

Up the winding River Road two miles away in Lumberville my father's brother lived with their mother. Even in old age she was a beauty. Tall. Bosomy. The stylized folds and pins in the hair of a Gibson Girl.

"You know, dear," she told me when I was about twelve, "I was right on the edge of the Gibson Girl era."

"Oh, yeah," I cracked, already honing my wise guy skills. "Which edge?"

My sister split her sides laughing, but our grandmother, after a moment of looking stunned, only smiled indulgently.

She was busy creating her myth by then. Colonel Elmer Ellsworth, we were frequently reminded, leading a regiment of New York fireman and the first Union officer killed in the Civil War, was a distant cousin (a highly doubtful claim). The landscapist Turner was a distant relative (a highly, highly doubtful claim), she claimed. Our grandfather "rated" a limo each morning. She had "frequently stayed with" fabulously wealthy relatives at their place on Long Island. Her father had been a musician who made wax recordings for Thomas Edison. A "gifted" musician. Her family was descended from an earl in Ireland, which and exactly where we never heard.

It was an attractive story. Never mind that the Long Island visits had been as governess to the wealthy relatives' children. Never mind our grandfather's and father's suicide—and the superstition that would haunt us the rest of our lives that we too would end that way. Never mind that the musician had been an alcoholic who consigned his family to life in a Manhattan tenement. And never mind that she never mentioned her first husband, a failed painter and another alcoholic. Why would she have? All of the darker elements came out this way or that over time. We loved hearing about it and always begged for much, much more than she gave us in her careful, calculated dribs and drabs. It was a classic landscape she painted for us. In the foreground stood the bright aristocratic figure she chose to descend from, a brass knobbed walking stick in hand, ready to stride again through the countryside of illusion. An Ellsworth or a Turner. The middle ground was a ruined castle, perhaps belonging to that Irish earl. It was up to us to look behind that, off in the shadow of trees overhanging the deep water of a lake, pushed off to the back, to find the darker bits.   

And carrying on this line was our aunt, my father's sister, who had “married extremely well.” Both she and her husband had doctorates. Their children always asked "such intelligent questions."

"That," she pointed out repeatedly, "is the result of excellent breeding," a reference to our father having "married down." 

The weekend mornings our aunt and uncle and their excellent offspring (all three of whom, by the way, grew up to be nice people) arrived from New York, we put on clean, pressed clothing and waited in our living room for the call from Lumberville. "Sit still. Don't get dirty," ordered our mother.

So we sat. When the phone rang, our mother pounced on it.

"Yes, Mumsie. Right, Mumsie. We'll be right there, Mumsie."

And we were out the door and on our way to the car. 

"And don't forget—say 'How do you do,' not 'Hi!'"

We drove the couple of miles along the perilous River Road. The weekend mornings when our New York cousins visited, we rode the distance mostly in silence, already deadened into our “best” behavior. We couldn't play with them as normal children. They had to be handled as if they were fine china that might easily break under our rough touch.

And when we arrived, they had all usually just sat down to a mid-day meal. We could wait in the living room while our cousins learned how to use that tiny fork on their artichokes. Our mother whispered, hissed, instructions, as they chatted ten feet away. Sometimes the girls or our mother helped serve the food. Maybe that was the big hurry.

So we were cut off. Oddly, at the same time, I felt very much a part of something enormous and terrible that could make your spirit swell out of your throat with love, something that stayed with me for years and years and set me down a long lane in the dark.

On Sundays, our mother took us to sing hymns under the vaulted half-timbering and white walls of the Methodist church in New Hope. It seemed a vast, stained-glass space filled by our voices and the swelling of the golden organ in the corner. Somehow, I don't know how, "Our Father, who art in Heaven" translated into my dead father watching me, and so the music and testament readings and the sermons all took on a terrible emotional quality that I could not talk about. Then, after church and changed back into the more comfortable and normal clothing and wandering along the banks of the river, there it all was again. In the trees and how they swayed in the wind. In the force of the water's current and in the sculpted piles of drift on the bleached dry rocks. In the drinking deer across the channel on the island. In the possibility of dead bodies in the river. I was still at church. I still felt the power of my father's death and presence. I still felt the connectedness of the seen and unseen. The fabric of the senses could be felt on the white rocks by the rapids, watching the curled silver and green of the water. Birds called over the roar of the rapids. No other sounds. Only the hard rock on my skinny, elementary school ass. The black darting bugs in the tiny golden backwater at my feet. The blue and bronze oak leaves at the bottom of the pool. Heat of the sun on one cheek. Cool breeze from the shade on the other. No sounds from inside me. Over the mountain and across some fields where men came each fall to shoot pheasants was my father's grave. The rapids drowned everything else out, and I'd be left with the noisy silence of my father's death. So I just sat. 

I watched the birds, the turtles, the darting bugs never getting their feet wet on the surface of the water, the fish racing their shadows across the painted rocks of the creek that emptied into the Delaware. It was like those moments in the Methodist church in New Hope, but I never once thought about God in Heaven. With my dad across the mountain, there was an awfulness about it; Death was there in the dead leaves and in the rotting animals we occasionally found in the woods. Death was there. Once we had found a collie tied to a tree and beaten to death in the trees up the hill across River Road. So not only death. Cruelty, too, just as we knew our father's death had been cruel beyond measure, cutting us off forever from our rightful inheritance of respect and artichoke forks.

But the water flowed. The place teemed with life. It didn't matter what went on in school or in our family. It didn't matter that I was there. Water had been running downhill before there were Indians, before there were Quaker settlers, before they had built the canal, before Mr. Carlburg worked the locks. Before us. Nature didn't care about my father, or about the hurts we carry like charms. 

I had had no preparation for this experience. No way to cope with it. No person to spill my belief to. Belief in precisely what, I can't say. The something beyond that was ever present, perhaps. For a long time, this something was God, a Father in Heaven that I felt at the best moments in church and often wandering outside alone. Never in school. Never in the house. There was only fear in the dark lying awake at night in the attic bedroom, afraid to pull the cord to the light for fear of what I would see. But the woods, the river always offered it. I wanted nothing but the river and the woods.

Those moments were the best I could bring to Buddha Gaya.

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