Very Bad Buddhist

Chapter 2, Settling In

SETTLING IN

The plan was for me to stay in Buddha Gaya as long as I liked and try to connect in some way. Not to hurry it. My only other task was to make the offering of the candles, fruit, kata, and some money for Ani-la. I wasn't sure how to do this, though, as there would be a prescribed ritual.

Later on my first day, I decided to go look around and maybe start figuring that out. Uncle Lal and I walked out past the vegetable gardens to the road together. "I am working on my M.A. in history," he told me. He was only twenty-six. "And then I will go into civil service. Many of my friends say they will go abroad and study or work, but I will never leave India. Never."

We walked toward the Burmese monastery, where little of the scene had changed. The rickshaw wallahs still waited, McBeth’s witches squatted with their battered aluminum begging bowls, and the tattooed Westerner had been joined by an anorexic girl with stringy blond hair. 

Lal talked as if thinking out loud, deciding something. "One hundred thousand take the test for my job every year, and they only pick one hundred, but I know I will be picked. I know it. Because I study hard. I don't have to leave India to find work."

His resentful, curling lips annoyed me. He had been cheated out of an inheritance, it seemed, and he wouldn't let it happen ever again. But weren't people here in the place of Buddha’s enlightenment supposed to speak in reverential tones? Weren't they supposed to be concerned with higher questions? The world of resumes and job interviews wasn't supposed to invade my space here. He was spoiling my mood.

We walked on in the yellow dust past the police station, a low bungalow off in the palm trees behind a stagnant pool where a white cow and its calf drank, past a roadside bicycle shop with all manner of oily parts strewn here and there on a stained tarp, past five or six barbers and furniture makers amid respective piles of cut hair and wood shavings, past shops selling fabric, and tailors measuring and cutting and running treadle sewing machines, people arguing, teasing, living life as if it were a performance art on the public street.

Lal stopped at a paan shop and I said goodbye. "Just there," he said, indicating the direction of the post office. Then, "One hundred thousand, but I know I will be chosen."  

My friends all had the poste restante address and had, presumably, been writing me letters there since I'd left the States. So this day three weeks after having left home I wanted very much to hear what they had to say.

"Chai?" asked a potbellied tea seller as I passed his shop.

"Only come in and look," begged a cloth seller. "Maybe for your wife."

A couple of young guys in a barber's shop stood up and walked toward me as I passed. "Hey, Boone, Boone," they called. "Boone." And then they giggled to one another and went back inside. The desk clerk at the hotel in Delhi had told me that, with my high, receding hairline and bushy moustache, I looked almost exactly like the Australian cricketer, David Boone. "Hey, Boone, Boone," was a chant I would hear often.

The businesses became more densely packed past the police station, as I went from the fringes of the town toward the center. Traffic picked up in a hundred yards or so. Packed buses from Gaya spewed their exhaust through the market and blared their horns. Hindi film music shrieked from shops, one song overlapping another all the way to where the road turned right and climbed a small hill.

In the low dark post office at the base of this little hill, the postal officials drank tea from tiny red clay cups that they threw onto the street after each go-around. "Come back after tea," the little man behind the window's grillwork snarled at me when I asked him where to find poste restante.

Behind him a blondish women in the baggy pants and shirt of a Punjabi salvar kurta sorted through a pile of envelops. A tourist, not an employee. The man behind the window didn't seem alive enough to stop me, so I found the door and went inside. It was dark, of course, as some post offices in India seem required to be. The woman was pulling letters out of a cubbyhole in a wooden rack of cubbyholes on the back wall and mumbling in an accent (English?) that I couldn't make out. The four men who worked in the office sat oblivious to us as they drank their tea. My eyes adjusted and finally I could make out that this cubbyhole was indeed marked poste restante. So I joined the woman in searching through the letters that had been stuck unalphabetized in the rack. I came up with seven. 

"Don't forget to look on the flow-er," said the woman as I turned to go. "And under the table. Sometimes they drop them and they get kicked under the table." She smiled good teeth at me and looked straight into my eyes. She was young, little more than a teenager. 

"Thanks," I told her and looked on the flow-er but found nothing. She stood cheerfully haggling with one of the clerks as I walked off to have a good lunch of fried eggs and toast at the restaurant next door. I arranged the letters and read them in order, savoring the one from my son. I felt buoyed, ready to explore. 

I walked back to the area of cloth sellers and tailors, and haggled with a boy for a red and blue meditation cushion. Go to the shrine and meditate, I thought. That's what you came here to do. Two or three shops sold meditation cushions, so I entertained myself by letting them each see me going back and forth between them bargaining until the first boy and I settled on a price and I bought the cushion.

Then I walked back through the noise and traffic to the post office and took the right curve up that slight incline. Opposite the post office was a row of scooter rickshaws waiting for return trips to Gaya Train Station. Behind them was a bicycle shop, a hotel, and a medical supplies store selling mineral water and toilet paper, aurovedic medicines and band aids, aspirin and antacids. Up the hill and on the left were vegetable and fruit stands, provision shops, and then the gate to the Mahabodhi Temple, the place where the Buddha attained enlightenment.

As I walked up the hill, a bus came blaring its horn, positively stuffed full of people who hung on at front and back door and rear ladder and who sat packed together on the roof luggage rack. The bus left clouds of heavy black exhaust fumes lingering in the air around the fruit and vegetable stalls.

I walked through the crowds of bicycles and pedestrians and pony carts, and coming toward me on a rickshaw was this Western woman, thirty-fivish and tending to plump, just over ripe, wearing a fresh blue and white floral dress and holding an open pink parasol on her left shoulder. She smiled the inward looking smile of the blissed out newly converted. When she saw me notice her, she smiled deeper inside and cast down her eyes. Memsahib in the Promised Land.

Past stands selling candles and incense and, oddly, coins in clear plastic bags, I found my way through the wide gates into the temple grounds. Suddenly a wall of murmuring rose before me. Perhaps five or six hundred beggars—men, women, and children—squatted in neat, tightly-packed rows on the slope running down from this first entrance to a second gate. A ripple like the wriggling of some animal buried under muck went through the rows of beggars when they saw me, a Western man. I had read accounts of the beggars in Bihar, all of them full of stomach-churning descriptions of self-mutilation and deformity, and I had seen plenty of beggars before this. But there was a frightening oneness here. They were dark, dressed in rags, with matted hair, bulging yellowing eyes rolling listlessly into scabby heads. My stomach knotted as I walked past them, wanting to look, yet unable to turn my head their way. All I wanted this day was to see the Bodhi Tree and to meditate.

"Saab," they moaned. "Please, Saab."                                 

It was a relief to enter the Mahabodhi Temple grounds. Passing through this second gate, you find yourself at the top of a long staircase down to the 180-foot-tall temple itself. It is a huge, pyramidal tower balanced by four smaller towers at each of its corners and recessed all over with niches containing small statues. There has been a lively scholarly debate over just when the present grand building was erected. Sometime between the fifth and seventh centuries A.D. seems to be the best guess, but the popular legend is that the original temple was built by the great Emperor Ashoka.

Ashoka, "the sorrowless," was a convert to Buddhism who ruled over an empire that encompassed most of modern India and Pakistan and parts of Afghanistan between 269 and 232 B.C. He is considered the most enlightened of ancient Indian rulers, having, among other things, decreed, Lincoln-like, "government by the law, administration according to the law, gratification of my subjects under the law, and protection through the law," and initiated the digging of public wells, the building of rest houses, and the planting of trees along the highways he had built for travelers. All-in-all a great guy after he'd seen to the bloody expansion of his empire. Under Ashoka, many Indians became vegetarians, and he gave up the annual royal hunt in favor of going on pilgrimage to holy places, where he would invariably erect a pillar telling of his visit. Animal rights people would have loved him.

It is customary to walk clockwise around the temple on one or all the three paved walkways that circle it. The first of these follows the upper rim of the bowl the temple stands in the bottom of. The second winds through a garden of trees and smaller memorial stupas below. These smaller stupas are usually pyramidal or dome-like forms (like overturned bells) erected over some relic of a saint. The Mahabodhi Temple is often referred to as The Stupa. The third walkway is a marble walk around the Mahabodhi Temple walls itself.

I took the top walkway, turning to my left, and strolled around the upper rim of the bowl along a cleanly swept sidewalk. Pigtailed Tibetan women in striped aprons picnicked on the lawns beyond a low hedge to my left. 

Other Tibetans shuffled along the walkways with me. An elderly Ladhaki man in a long brown chuba like a bathrobe wore a Dodger's ball cap and spun a heavy wooden prayerwheel as he repeated the mantra Om mani padme hum. Lo! the jewel in the lotus, the mantra of the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, embodiment of compassion who appears in one manifestation as His Holiness the Dalai Lama. It seemed at the time a mindless, superstitious recitation. Childlike. Embarrassing. Like the Na-na-na-na-naaaa car sounds little boys make.

Down the hill to my right, amid the trees and flowering bushes and small stupas and shrines that surround the Mahabodhi Temple, pilgrims did prostrations on special wooden boards. The pilgrim stands on one end of the board and faces the sacred Bodhi Tree, said to be a direct descendent of the one under which the Buddha attained enlightenment, next to the temple. Palms together in reverence over the sternum, the pilgrim raises the joined hands to the top of the head, lowers them to the forehead, throat, and heart, bends to put hands on the board, slides over the polished board on cloth pads (no splinters!), and stretches out face down and arms extended on the board. Once fully extended, the pilgrim stands again with joined palms over the sternum and begins the process again. Many of the people I saw below me prostrating that day, both Western and Tibetan, had come to Buddha Gaya especially to perform the 100,000 purifying prostrations during three months of the pilgrimage season. A Western monk with a long, aquiline nose and a shaven blond head and a tall, lean build like a basketball player's did prostrations next to a flowering hibiscus. He wore a red gravedigger's shirt, and he had a sunburn. Michael. He and I would become friends.

I only half circled the temple that first day. Directly on the side opposite of where I had entered the temple grounds is a second, back, entrance whose gates were locked the whole time I visited. In time I would learn to climb these gates to avoid the unpleasantness of the beggars and as a shortcut when I moved away from the private Indian household where I first stayed. These locked gates lead also to a long stairway, and as the stairs on the other side lead straight to the door of the Mahabodhi Temple, these stairs lead straight to the Bodhi Tree next to it. On this first day of my visit, a large group of Tibetan families and monks held a puja on the area in front of the tree. I walked down the steps to watch and listen.

The trunk of the tree is not visible from this position as it is behind a six-foot high stone fence and altar. Behind this fence is the innermost of the three walks around the temple and then a second stone fence that encloses the tree on three sides, the fourth side being the temple wall itself. The middle and upper branches of the Bodhi Tree seem then to sprout from the top of the fence.

It was a stew of color and noise at the puja. Green, white, orange, and yellow prayer flags on clotheslines set at odd, catch as catch can angles to each other. The presiding lama chanted into a squawky public address system. Maroon robed monks, their heads freshly shaven and their yellow cloth shoulder bags set nearby, chanted from long, narrow, loose-leafed texts held over crossed knees. Women in long braids tied at the ends with blue or red ribbons and wearing the multicolored aprons of their regions of Tibet (bar code aprons, I called them) sat next to men in dark chubas and counted rosary beads as they chanted. Small children played among the stupas.

I sat crosslegged on my new cushion in the last row and began trying to meditate. Just letting my mind go empty. Let things wash over and absorb me. But these pujas are noisy and my mind wanted to run. A tall, pockmarked westerner chanted along with the Tibetans. I looked at the sacred tree and thought about how the Buddha was born underneath a tree, attained enlightenment under a tree, and died under two trees. And that first sermon in the Deer Park at Sarnath, I assume, was also under a tree. I like trees. This was the religion for me!

 And there was about the scene an air of the festival. Wandering about around the edges of the crowd and sometimes on impulse walking right through it on her own strange errands was an older Tibetan woman who seemed to have been having a mental or emotional breakdown. Her eyes were heavily bagged and blackened and she carried a small Indian flag as she walked around in front of the tree talking to herself. Her hair hung loose and uncombed past her shoulders. No braids. Big wooden prayer beads. She imagined a conversation, listening to a voice the rest of us could not hear, cocking her head patiently, and then responding, scolding, setting aright, pointing an accusatory finger. I seemed to be the only one noticing her. Then she wandered off.

One of the little boys playing amid the many small stupas in the temple grounds plopped himself into the lap of a man sitting in front of me. A woman reached over and wiped the snot from under his nose with her bare fingers and then wiped them on the grass. She said something cooing to him and tickled his belly.  Sitting there, it struck me that I didn't feel the slightest bit out of place.

……………

Momo. Everybody's favorite Tibetan food. Seasoned meat, or a mix of vegetables if you don't eat meat, is placed inside a pouch of dough and then steamed. We get the same thing in Chinese restaurants at home and call them pot stickers. I had my heart set on momo for dinner and so went out looking for the Tibetan tent restaurants that spring up during the pilgrimage season.

The tent restaurant is a typically Tibetan institution, pragmatically rough and ready and surprisingly comfortable. They are framed up with stout bamboo poles and then canvas or polyurethane sheets are stretched over them. Most of the time they have two-and-a-half foot high mud and brick sides. These extend past the poles into the rooms and serve as deep benches to eat at during the day and as sleeping berths at night. You can leave your gear unattended and the managers will keep an eye on it. There must be six or seven of these places open for the pilgrimage season in Buddha Gaya, from October to March.  

But this day in late January, as I wandered out past the thinning rows of beggars (many of them had taken off for dinner, too) and crossed the road to the bazaar at the top of the hill, I could see already that fewer people were in town and that the pilgrimage season was coming to an end. Tibetan families carrying huge canvas bundles ambled single-file toward the bus stand down the other side of the hill near the post office.

At the top of the hill, the imposing Mahabodhi Society Temple (different from the ancient Mahabodhi Temple next to the Bodhi Tree) and the biggest of the Tibetan monasteries stand side by side facing the bazaar. On the far side of the Tibetan temple, where the dusty hillside begins sloping off into the flat countryside of paddy fields and villages, are the tent restaurants. I entered the first one, the Cafe Om, and sat down at a table with some other Westerners. 

They stank of Buddhism.

The word at my table was "skillful," for the skillful (graceful and efficient) means Buddhist practitioners try to bring to all their thoughts, words, and deeds:

"If you are really skillful about it," a lanky young Englishman intoned to his girlfriend.  "I wasn't skillful enough . . . I have to learn to be more skillful . . .  He is an incredibly skillful teacher . . .  One could make everyday skillfulness one's practice."

"On the bus down from the Nepali border," he said, "we ran out of gas right before Varanasi. We could see the glow of the city lights from where we clunked out, and do you know what they did?  Do you? Can you guess? They sent one of the blokes back to a filling station with a jerry can and they used a banana tree leaf as a funnel to pour it in!" He waited for her face to register the genius of such a solution, which it did. "They are great improvisers, aren't they?" he said about the Indians. "They don't even think about it, but skillfulness is part of their everyday consciousness."

"Wow," she gasped. "What a teaching!"

What a teaching. It was a phrase I was to hear often. The hard core dharma bums, like Jan, used it to let you know that you should always learn from your experiences; the kids out for a romp in India's spiritual theme park, like these, used it as a sort of mantra to explain whatever stirred their consciousness out of its torpor. If it had been a song, you would have sung it to the tune of, "Wow! This is great dope."

On a roll now, the English boy pronounced on Buddha Gaya itself. "This very place," he said, "can be a teaching, if you look at it skillfully. I mean, like, it really is like the lotus, isn't it? Its roots grow out of the mud and muck of a world in social calamity, but its flowers open to the sun at the Stupa. And the Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama, sits on a lotus throne in all the pictures and statues. In all his previous lives, he has climbed out of the muck, up the stem to the flower, and finally he sits atop the flower as the Victorious One. The trick for us, the skillful thing for us, is to see the whole plant, not just the mucky roots and certainly not just the flower."

I smiled, hoping to catch his eye. This was a good thought, and I wanted to begin knowing people here. But the boy and his pretty girl only had eyes for each other. "Wow," she gasped again, "what a teaching." They held hands across the table. I had to wonder if she were capable of any other sentence, imagining, though, that her friend was not in need of hearing any other. Nor would I have been. 

At the table opposite, two American women sat talking about their meditation teacher over heaping plates of chow mein.  Both were slightly plump and middle aged, close to my own age and build, and both were turned out in colorful salvar kurtas and beautiful prayer beads. One mala, string of beads, was of large amber stones; the other of wood with interspersed turquoise and bone. Both women wore neat, glossy pageboy haircuts.

"Well, I don't know," said Amber. "I mean, look at Andrew's life. He was a horrible student, failing all—or nearly all—his subjects, and now all he can do is teach."

"Yes, I know. And he has to teach," said Woody. "He needs to teach."

"That's what I'm saying: All he can do is teach. And look at him. He's just so vulnerable up there by himself."

"Amazing. I'd never find the courage."

I turned my ear from conversation to conversation, like a satellite dish trying out signals. A Tibetan woman in the traditional striped apron over her chuba brought my food. They didn't do momo, so I had ordered a plate of mashed potatoes and fried eggs. She smiled wryly and I smiled back. She too was fortyish and seemed worn down and slightly closed up. I could imagine her working the counter at a greasy spoon in the States.

After she had gone back through the blanket over the doorway into the kitchen, the young Englishman turned for the first time and spoke directly to me. He had suddenly developed a hard curl to his lip. "You have to watch them here," he said, "or they'll damned sure get it wrong. Your bill, too." He nodded as if he'd now done his duty.

I had already bitten into my eggs. I chewed and then swallowed, trying a smile. "Well, I guess then I'll just have to be especially skillful."

But the Englishman had finished with me and said something low and unrelated to his girlfriend. Throwing good money after bad, I continued smiling so long my face hurt. I looked down at my plate and saw nothing wrong. What could be wrong about mashed potatoes and eggs? The couple got up and left. 

After I'd had a dessert of apple pie and sweet lassi, my bill came to thirty rupees. I handed the woman in the striped apron a fifty-rupee note. 

"Ah," she complained. "I don't have change for this. Do you have smaller?"

I fished into my money pouch and came out with a ten, but nothing smaller. I had a ten and a bunch of fifties. "Take the fifty," I said, and you can give me the change next time I come in. I'll be here for a while."

She handed me the fifty. "No, give me the ten. You pay next time you come in. No problem."

And so that very first night Tsering and I set the pattern: One of us would always owe the other money as long as I stayed in Buddha Gaya. Small rupee notes, useful in making change, were always hard to come by. We wouldn’t finally settle our accounts until months later in a different part of India.

Just as I was ready to go, my Englishman, Harry, from the Burmese vihar joined me uninvited and simply started talking, as if we had set this time for me to interview him and he knew all the questions I would likely ask, saving me the trouble of constructing the narrative myself. 

"I was a bookish lad," he said by way of starting and in a tone suggesting that he was leaning over to check and make sure I wrote it down correctly and had my non-existent tape recorder running. But then, he told me, and for reasons he did not explain, he took an after-school job at the local garage and a not-so-bookish lad down there wanted to fight with him. Harry hadn't the slightest notion of "how to go about this fighting business," so he went to the local library and discovered a book on karate.

He didn't say what became of his interlocutor at the garage, but he was now clearly headed toward "the East" intellectually. The practice of concentration and meditation in karate attracted him. He gravitated a little further. Soon he was practicing an austere form of Burmese meditation.

"Some of these Burmese chaps," he said, "travel very light indeed. They'll have only their begging bowl, a mat, a mosquito net, and an umbrella. At night they spread out the mat on the ground, jab the umbrella into the dirt and drape the mosquito net over that. Many of them sleep sitting up in the meditation posture and live only in the forest."

At some point he taught at university but left. "These fellows so often have big strong minds and such teeny tiny weak little hearts." He's a general contractor these days, doing a job in a friend's house in Denver now, taking on a couple of jobs somewhere else—France, perhaps—six months later. "I still own a house; I still own a mortgage, that is." But he plans to get rid of this soon.

A few years ago he met a Nyngma rinpoche, a reincarnate lama in the oldest of the Tibetan Buddhist sects, and has followed him since. Seven months ago he followed his teacher to Sikkim and India. The Dalai Lama knows Harry by name. They had once shared a joke.

"I've thought it out," he said, ready to go on.

"I beg your pardon?" The suddenness of his declaration startled me. As he'd been speaking, he fidgeted. Moved the plate away from himself. Moved it nearer. Turned it, looking closely at his food. Adjusted his cuffs. Sniffed. Stretched his neck side to side. All while talking. I kept my spine straight and my elbows off the table, dabbed my moustache repeatedly with a napkin from my shoulder bag.

"I mean," he said, "that I've been on the spiritual path for a long time now and I have my theories. Like, it's good for dharma students to think about death, don't you know?" he insisted. "Good for men especially."

"Why especially for men?"

"It's the hunter in us, mate. The primordial urge, for heaven's sake. The ancient pattern."

Sounded like Robert Bly drum-beating, seminar-selling balderdash to me. 

"Male spiritual life is different. I don't know a thing about women, but there is, there has to be, something different about how we men are spiritual, don't you think?"

I think I looked at him stupidly. But Harry only asked rhetorical questions, not ones designed to get you talking. I have a rather nasty theory myself that an American accent to a British ear causes the same reaction that, say, a backwoods Alabama accent causes to an educated New York ear:  The New Yorker will trip over his silk necktie at any glimmer of intelligence in the Alabaman, so unexpected it will be to him. Harry didn't expect me to have any answers.

"I mean, listen, mate, aren't you even a little bit scared on the bloody public transport here? But, listen, what I'm saying is this:  A genuine male spiritual experience, at least in our culture, needs some element of danger. Look at what all this drum-beating blokes in your country are doing. Going on Red Indian 'vision quests,' where a man goes off by himself into the wilderness to make contact with the deepest of his spiritual wellsprings. Why does he do this? It's the ancient pattern. He leaves the protection of mother and father and community. So he's out there in the woods or in the desert by himself with the wild beasts or the devil and he's got no choice but to fall back on his own resources—and to find out who he is in his deepest being. He then comes home to take his place in the community."

He was on a roll, lecturing again at university. Was this the education tent, or what?

"Therefore, obviously, one way to nurture or feed male spiritual development is to help men find ways to 'go out' and 'come back' constructively. 

"That's what a whole bloody lot of male rigmarole is supposed to do, but it doesn't. We've invented all this warped boy/man activity. 'Football will make a man of you,' men tell boys in America. I have no trouble with blokes being tough. Life is hard and we need to be tough. But there are many, many ways to be tough, and toughness without joy is deadening to the spirit."

He signaled to Tsering that he would order dessert.

"Does the spirit have to do with breathing, with the breath?" he asked the space between and above us. "Yes. It is the animating or vital force. Breathing gives and gives back life. It is that part of us that has vision for what our lives might be; it is that part that believes and wants to believe, that keeps believing through hard times. And because we are breathing, we are connected—being spiritual has to do with being connected in some important way. 

"We all seem to be out there by ourselves doing our own little thing. Isolated. It would seem to me that an awful lot of men are going out from the community and not really coming back. These chaps have gone out alone to do what men are supposedly supposed to do, but they have not learned to reconnect, to apply their experiences to the rest of their lives. They are spiritually incomplete.

"But reconnecting in this way and letting the 'going out' inform your life after you've come back, it seems to me, is really what living the spiritual life is all about. And one can only do this by keeping an eye on a morality higher than the morality of our own time. We have to find a way of being that is timeless, that transcends the fads and fashions of this or that period. To connect ourselves with the longer, larger view closer to ultimate truth. To look for wisdom and compassion. The Buddha's life is an example:  He was born of great promise into an affluent environment. His father, as fathers will, had plans for him and tried to control his experiences so that he would fulfill those plans. But the Buddha, as sons will, had his own vision of what he thought his life should be, and, though he loved his father, needed to answer some rather large questions himself. To answer those questions, he stole away from the comforts and confines of home in the middle of the night to begin his journey. He deserted father and country, wife and child. He studied with various teachers, surrogate fathers, but eventually, like all of us, had to find the answers within himself.  Through this quest, the Buddha came fully into his own and only then could return home for the inevitable confrontation with his father, wife, and son. Having taken the essential steps of separation and then reconnection, he learned to understand and then act upon his life's mission. He never claimed to be a god or a bloody son of god, only a man, and as he lay dying he urged his followers to become their own teachers, just as he had looked within himself for the answers he found." 

He leaned back into his seat as if he'd just finished a big, satisfying meal, or—better—as if he were letting me finish jotting down my notes for the term-ending test. He tried again to get Tsering's attention.

"That's why," he declared, "we have to do something every day of our lives that frightens us."

I smiled my approval. India frightened me with its intensity and its otherness more than I liked to admit, and it was that quality that had probably brought me back. I was still "going out," as Harry would have put it, having not yet even found my teacher or my path. I liked this guy.

But then he crossed his arms and smiled back at me. "And what brings a nice middle-class, middle-aged fellow like yourself all the way to India?" he wondered aloud.

……………

My breakdown brought me, of course. That and the meditation I'd started a year or so before. It seemed strange at the time but wholly logical now that it was my meditation more than anything else that brought me to the breakdown.

There is a Zen story that may help to explain this. 

Two young monks were traveling from one monastery to another and made a pact that they would have nothing whatever to do with women along the way. They didn't want to be tempted away from their vows. But as they came to a stream they met a beautiful young woman in a brand new, lovely kimono who asked that they carry her across. 

The first monk, true to the deal he'd made on setting out on the trip, ignored her. The second picked up the young woman, carried her to the other side, put her down on dry land, and went on his way. His friend, previously talkative, refused now to pass the time in conversation. But when they finally reached their destination, he turned on his friend and complained. 

"We agreed we wouldn’t have anything to do with women," he scolded, "and then there you go carrying her across the stream! Whatever got into you, anyhow?"

"Are you still carrying her?" asked the second monk. "I put her down back at the stream."

Much of my meditation has to do with putting the woman down and going on. But putting down is difficult. Before you put down, you have to notice you are in fact carrying, and this noticing causes terrible anxiety. I didn't realize it at the time, but I had begun to notice some of what I carried, and the idea of putting it down scared hell out of me. The nice middle-class man Harry took me for had come to India looking for a place to put the woman down.

Annoyed and a bit worn out, I left the Cafe Om soon afterward and walked through the dark back into the lights of the bazaar and down the hill to the Stupa. Each one of the three walkways around the Stupa was lined with candles on both sides, and all the small stupas had candles defining their shapes in the darkness. The place was abuzz with pilgrims lighting more candles and saying mantras as they circumambulated. Lovely. My annoyance began to lift.

I went inside the temple and prostrated myself three times, then found a place to sit on the floor amid the noise of Tibetans saying prayers and mantras. The golden Buddha statue gazed down at me from behind his altar of fruit offerings. Ani-la had said she made the offering each year at the temple. That would be there, in that room. But the tree seemed more holy to me, and more my style. I went back outside, wondering again how I would manage the offering.

As I walked around the Stupa grounds, I saw the memsahib who had had the pink parasol earlier. She was with a small boy of maybe ten. "We're leaving, Naropa," she called to him. "Come along now." So not a recent convert at all, if she named her child after a Buddhist saint. Just permanently blissed out.

I set the new meditation pillow on my spread-out blanket in the shadows thirty yards in front of the Bodhi Tree and tried watching my breath and letting go of my thoughts. 

A potbellied little man wearing a beanie and checkered pants stood on my shoulder and shouted obscenities into my ear. If a thought threatened to drift away from my consciousness, he'd reach up and pull it back. "Look at this, idiot!" he'd yell. "What's the matter with you! Don't let this one go!"

I did my best to ignore him. He'd been there for years and years, "protecting" me. But sometimes in the time since I'd started meditating he slept. He'd be yelling and carrying on and jumping up and down, then suddenly, like a narcoleptic, fall asleep and leave me alone, and if I also managed to avoid the deer running dog mind that ran away with my thoughts, I might make some progress. 

Without warning, I found myself enjoying the scene of flickering candles and praying shadows again. Think of your mind as a loving mother, my teachers had told me. The light and shadow wavered in the Bodhi Tree and robed shadows came slowly out of the darkness from every direction. People put candles in odd places—in the lap of a knelling statue, in openings on the stone railing around the Diamond Throne. In the recessed wall of the Stupa. Then there were the still silhouettes of people deep in meditation. All hushed and peaceful. The slight breeze carried the sounds of chanting from dark shapes of monks and nuns who moved in and out of one another like ghosts.

There was no need to take offense at Harry. I wanted to lecture him was all. Egos. My pilgrimage was to get beyond that reaction. All my life I had reacted to other egos as if their very existence were an attack on my own, and here I was at a place that told me ego itself was illusion. What would be left once I put the woman down?

A breeze stirred the upper branches of the tree, obscure, dark patterns against a starry sky. A star fell, and then another. My breathing became deep, even, and relaxed for what must have been ten enormous seconds.

………….

How should I make Ani-la's offering? I wondered from the start. The problem was that there is the Bodhi Tree and then there's the Mahabodhi Temple. You can light candles and leave katas and fruit at both places, so it was not clear to me where she wanted the offering made. I began scouting the place out from the first day to see what people did about offerings, but it seemed the more I went the more confused I became. Then I remembered that the scripture master at Sakya Center, where I had visited for a few days before coming here, had told me his very best friend was head monk at the Sakya monastery at Buddha Gaya and that I should go to him for any help or explanations I needed. Unfortunately, through a series of events I don't begin to understand, I hadn't gotten his name. 

But finding this monk would be a big help, so I went to the Tibetan temple next to the Mahabodhi Society and asked a young monk at the water pump in the large courtyard if this was the Sakya monastery. He nodded yes, that it was. "Do you speak English?" I asked stupidly. Again, he nodded that he did. So I told him in general terms who I was looking for and he nodded, then motioned that he had to wash something out under the pump first.  The pump was broken at the place where handle meets piston (actually the pin kept coming loose), so I stood there and held things together while he did his one piece of laundry and then stuck his head under the water. After that he nodded and went off, I thought to find my monk. When after thirty minutes he hadn't come back, I left. 

It turned out that this large monastery is not the Sakya place at all, but the temple and monastery of the Gelug sect of Tibetan Buddhism, the sect of the Dalai Lama, who has apartments on the top floor. There are four Tibetan sects: Nyngma, Gelug, Kagyu, and Sakya, each with its own temple and monastery in Buddha Gaya. But by the time I figured that out, I'd also learned that the Mahabodhi Society management building had a library. I thought I'd do some research there and figure out the offering by myself.

The guard at the Mahabodhi Society of India told me, however, that the library was open only between ten and two. I had come at three to the attractive complex of attached bungalows. We stood and talked on a shaded porch with wicker chairs overlooking a nicely kept garden. 

The next day I went back at about one to use the library for an hour, but the same heavy padlock closed off any thought of use, just as it had the day before. The same guard suddenly had no inkling of when it would be open. He took me to a room where three marooned-robed Tibetan monks were sitting on the floor talking. Their shoes and slippers were scattered on the porch by the doorway.

"Does anybody here speak English?" I asked into the room.

One monk stood up and came outside, "No," he smiled.

I pointed to the library. "When open?" I tried.

He shrugged. So I walked over to the main Mahabodhi Society building, thinking there was another library there.

The tall Western monk I'd seen doing prostrations my first day, Michael, stood outside the building talking to an Indian.

"Is the library in this building?" I asked.

He took his time. "No, that's the library over there." He pointed to where I'd just come from. A bemused, vague guy, I thought. His nose got longer the more you looked at it.

His Indian friend added, "You have to bother them. They are not serious over there. Sometimes they come; sometimes not. How long are you staying?"

"Maybe a month," I said.

"That's good. Maybe you can get in twice if you keep at them."

Maybe, I thought, I'll go looking for the Sakya monastery again.

………….

It is my first full day of staying with the Indian family, and we are sitting in the sun on the roof. From where I sit I can see into my room, to where the television set is wrapped in its clear plastic cover, its wrinkles shining in a slant of sunlight.

The beautiful Rekha and her Uncle Lal, or Red, who is only ten years her senior, sit next to each other on wooden chairs that look as if they were once part of a dinning room set. I sit on my new meditation cushion with my legs crossed. 

Rekha's teeth are perfectly straight and white; Lal's are small and pointed and stained red from the paan he chews. From where I sit I can look at both as we talk and I can look out over the paddies of rice and potato and a row of palm trees growing on one of the dikes that crisscross the landscape.

"You are a student?" I say to Lal, though I already know that.

He says he is.

"And what do you study?"

Political science, which I also knew of course.

"Ha," I say. "Indian politics is a fascinating subject."

"Not only Indian politics." His voice pitches higher and he leans forward in his chair. "I know about politics all over the world. Pakistan and India. India and Sri Lanka. Vietnam and Cambodia. France and Vietnam. I know all about the relationships. Wherever it is, I know about it." This last with a sweep of his right hand before he almost settles back into his seat.

"How about you, Rekha? Are you a student, too?" She had mentioned a typing class earlier.

She too studies political science, she says, but, unlike Lal, who is going to start his M.A. soon, she says she is an undergraduate. I want to have a conversation about Indian politics, which I've followed after a fashion for years.

"Which political party do you like?" I ask.

"The BJP is the best," Lal tells me without hesitation.

"Why is that?" The BJP (Bharata Janata Party) is a Hindu revivalist party, a right wing organization that seeks to water down or destroy India's secularism, and has now, these many years later, come to power. At the very moment we spoke, their leaders were leading a march to Srinagar in Kashmir to symbolically raise the Indian tricolor as a protest against Article 370 of the Indian Constitution. This is the article that gives Kashmir and Jammu special status within the Indian Union. It is the concession that allowed for their entrance into the Union in the first place. Rolling it back, or threatening to roll it back, could only inflame separatism in both states. The BJP Yalta, as it was called, seemed from everything I'd read to be a calculated attempt to make mischief for the already faltering Congress Party government (which eventually fell, bringing the BJP to power and leading to the rolling back of the special status granted under Article 370).

"Why is that?" I'd asked Lal when he told me the BJP was best.

He rapped the arm of his chair and leaned forward toward me. "I will tell you," he nearly shouted. "It is because the BJP stands up for Hindu people! And no other party does that!"

I smiled and turned to Rekha, who listened, it seems now in retrospect, with a kind of dismay and foreboding. "Which party do you think is best?"

"Oh, I think Congress is best," she said, but Lal now leaned across her and pounded on her chair's arm.

"The BJP is better. I will tell you. Congress has done nothing for Indian people. All they care for is the Moslems. They want to only give to the Moslems. A Moslem from Kashmir can come here and build a house any time he likes. Any time he likes. But a Bihari won't be allowed to move to Kashmir and build a house because 370 says he can't. You know 370? It gives everything to the Moslems. The BJP will change that so we can go live anywhere like the Moslems.

"Hindu people are for peace," he pleaded, spreading his hands in a gesture of supplication. He smiled his small, jagged, red-stained teeth. His gums and tongue were also coated red from the paan habit, and his small dark eyes spoke of some wound or insult long since forgotten but now the dominant force in his personality. I recognized a part of myself in him and hated him all the more for it. "Hindu people only want peace. Moslems are only causing trouble."

I told him I doubted it could be that simple.

"No, I will tell you. It is. Moslem people want the whole world to be Moslem. Hindu people only want to be left alone. It is that simple."

I asked him what besides allowing for Bihari people to move to Kashmir repeal of 370 would achieve. As often happens when there are language differences, he didn't fully understand how I had put the question and so gave his own answer, which turned out to be unexpectedly interesting.

"Yes, I will tell you. Then Hindu people will move to Kashmir and there will be more and more of them and the Moslems will have to leave them alone. Look at how it is here. Most of the people here are Hindu and only some are Moslems. The Moslems here don't cause any trouble the way they do there in Kashmir. I will tell you why. It is because there are too many of us. When it is like that in Kashmir, everything will be okay. No problem."

It is not, of course. The Modi government has eviscerated 370 and I don’t think you can argue that things are better. But that was a long while still in the future.

For some time now he had been shouting at me and pounding on the arm of Rekha's chair. He wanted me to shake my head and tell him he had a point and when I didn't do that he became frustrated and angry. I didn't care. He was the sort of frightened, desperate little man who makes communal violence everywhere in the world. He was little different from the so-called Alt-right that would later emerge to chant Donald Trump’s name in the United States. To hell with all of them.

"I sounds to me like the BJP is looking for a fight," I told him.

"No! No!" he shouted. "I will tell you. All we want is peace. All we will do is raise the flag and then if the government changes 370 everything will be fine."

"Do you think Hindus are better people than Moslems?" I asked.

"Yes," he shouted back. "Hindu people are soft-hearted. Moslems are always causing trouble."

"But not here in Bihar?"

He gave me an icy smile. "That's because they know what we would do to them. They are outnumbered here."

"It sounds to me like a lot of people are going to be killed," I said and saw Rekha's face agreeing, though she'd said nothing since Lal cut her off.

"Only if they fight back. Then I will tell you. It will be like 1947. If they do what is right, no problem. If they don't, they will be shot. All these Moslem people here, they are really Hindu and they should come back."

He began to give me the history of the Islamic invasions, the mass, forced conversions of Hindus to Islam, the destruction of Buddhism in its homeland. I wasn't having any part of his conclusions.

"They are Moslems now," I said. "These aren't the same people who were forced to convert. Don't talk nonsense."

I'd pushed him as far as I could with this and, to my surprise, he backed off. But here before me was the BJP thinking and passion that eventually controlled the national government. We joked after that, slapped each other on the back and said what a tough-minded bugger the other was. And we leered warily at each other and wandered off in different directions.

That evening I came back to the house after dark and found Lal and his mother standing at the top of the stairs on the roof.

"Do you like Hindi films?" he asked sweetly.

"Sure I do. Sometimes."

"There will be a very good one, very emotional, on the television tonight."

He said this as I held my tiny flashlight under my chin and worked the combination lock.

"I could give you a better lock than that," he said.

Yes, one with a key so you could pick it, I thought. Better only for you.

"That's okay," I said as he and his mother followed me into the room. I was too tired to resist. Soon even Rekha appeared at the doorway. "Come in, come in," I told her. I had climbed in under the mosquito net, determined to veg out in front of the tube, which I'd thought didn't work.

It was an endless Hindi film, full of the loveliest songs and the most absurd fistfights, car chases, and gun fights. I leaned back and enjoyed myself, and after a while only Lal and I were left.  When the power went off, as it does now and then, he turned to me and said, "What is the best way for me to go to America?"

This came out of the mouth of the young man who would never leave India. He'd do his M.A. in Political Science and work in public administration, though thousands and thousands of applicants tried for every job. "But I will tell you," he had said, "I know that I will be selected." An empty boast of a desperate young man.

Now it turned out he wanted to go to America and work in a restaurant.

In the morning I opened my door and sat reading in bed.  He stuck his head in the doorway and flicked a couple of switches. Then he stepped grinning into the room and turned the television on.

"Excuse me?" I said. "But didn't I rent this room?"

"I want to watch," he tried.

"No. I want to read."

He left, but later in the day we made up and walked off holding hands in the Indian gesture of friendship. He had no idea I was on my way to find a different, more congenial place to stay.