Very Bad Buddhist

Chapter 3: Among My Fellow Travelers

AMONG MY FELLOW TRAVELERS

It's a pleasant bicycle ride from the center of Buddha Gaya to the Root Institute.

I'd heard a lot about the Institute and thought it might be a good place for me to stay.

The Root Institute was founded as a charitable trust by the late Lama Thupten Yeshe in 1984, and is concerned with "socially engaged Buddhism," sort of a Christian social gospel approach to the dharma. These people believe in balancing the quest for personal enlightenment with efforts to make the world better right now.

Socially engaged Buddhism carries the Mahayana ideal of helping others to enlightenment to its logical conclusion: You are doing this for more than only yourself, so get busy now. To this end, the Root Institute reaches out primarily to Westerners to teach the dharma and to the local people to help solve some of their social problems. For the Westerners, it offers courses on meditation techniques and on basic Buddhist ideas, lectures by visiting teachers from all schools of Buddhism, a quiet, peaceful setting for meditation, and a library of works on the dharma. 

The local problems are many. The lovely local dialect, Magadhi, so much easier on the ear than the harsh, ugly Delhi Hindi, masks a cancerous culture of violence. Uncle Lal illustrates only one aspect of it. Much of the violence in the countryside is between one village and another and between castes. Naxelites, ideological Maoist guerrillas who have in many cases joined with bandit organizations, had great appeal there.

The Institute tries to address itself constructively to this environment. It is active in the local villages, developing various projects to help people become more self-sufficient: Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day; teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime is the philosophy. At the time of this story, 1992, they'd begun building a home for the dying, offering in one village a school for the children, and operating a successful leprosy project, which focuses on prevention as well as treatment. 

It sounded good to me. 

I walked my rented bicycle past the post office and up the hill past the gates of the Stupa and past the row of small-time Tibetan merchants who, with their backs to a low stone wall and iron fence, stood behind folding tables selling sweaters and cheap luggage, votary candles and incense along the left side of the road, the Stupa grounds behind and below them. Across the road is the bazaar and Mahabodhi Society Temple. At the very top of the hill, I stood on the left side peddle of my bike and shoved the ground with my right foot, gliding, gliding, raising my right leg and settling it easily over the seat and onto the right peddle. 

It's a steep hill, though short, so it was easy to coast down to the bottom and glide left past the bright Chinese Temple and onto the flats. Here the road curls right, and I peddled through the knots of push-cart vendors, rickshaws, and sightseers, past the fanciful, King and I-ornate Wat Thai, where the well-respected Christopher Titmuss had just finished leading a retreat, past but not into Temple Street with its Japanese, Bhutanese, and Tibetan temples, and past the Tourist Bungalow, where the California guru claiming enlightenment was teaching. The road enters a high canopy of mature trees as it leaves Buddha Gaya for the countryside, and the competing traffic here is likely to be a herd of cows, through which you weave as if in a dream. 

I made this trip looking for the Root Institute my second or third day in town. It wouldn't be enough to enter my pilgrimage staying with Lal and going to the Stupa each day to meditate. True, I felt something in Buddha Gaya, but not what I'd expected. Not an entering of a stream. Only a vague preparation.

The person directing me, Harry the Englishman, told me that I would see a small hand-painted sign on my left that would lead through the fields to the Institute. I'd be able to see the buildings out in the middle of the farm land from the paved road. And, sure enough, there was the sign and there were the buildings. The road of maybe one half mile through the fields was dirt, of course, with red brick tossed in roughly for character—it was an earthen dike that had been to school. I bumped along between lentil, tomato, and potato field. 

The two permanent buildings floated in a brownish-green haze beyond where several dots of women in orange or red saris worked in a blue-flowered lentil field. A tall woman in a blue sari carried a wide basket on her head toward me on the rutted dirt track. And then I glided along, past where local villagers worked in the Root Institute's vegetable garden, and onto the grounds.

A tall American straddled his bicycle next to the garden. 

"IF I RE-JOICE IN YOURR LAY-BORES," he called out, being sure to enunciate each syllable, "DOZZ THATT MEANN I WILL EARNN AY-PORTIONN UFF THEE MERIT?"

"You can what, saab?" asked a confused worker.

Even I had trouble understanding what he meant.

He repeated the question in exactly the same way, only louder.  Then, "YOU SEE, MY REL--A--TIVZZ, MY FA--MILLY, NEEDZZ THEE MERIT. THEY ARE ALL SWIMMING IN THE OCEANN UFF SAMSARA."

"Your family, saab?"

"YES, THEY ARE ALL SWIMMM-ING IN THEE OCEAN UFF SAMSARA."

"The Pacific Ocean, saab?"

The explanation of the difference between the Ocean of Samsara and the Pacific Ocean was too bloody to report here and, I dare say, was lost to me anyway. I rode onto the Institute's grounds.

 Soon after struggling to peddle my bike down the rutted track to the Institute, I was walking over the grounds with a Dutchman named Gabriel, a tall, kindly, nervous man whom I liked instantly but never got to know properly. He showed me the larger of the two permanent buildings, where there is an upstairs meditation hall and downstairs dorms for men and women each and a library/office. The smaller of the two buildings houses the staff. For large gatherings, as when high lamas who will attract a crowd come to teach, there was a huge tent. And the dining hall and kitchen are in what might be called a semi-permanent building of bamboo and mud and tin, much like the tent restaurants in town.

It was an active place. The young woman with the indecipherable accent I'd seen at the post office hung wet laundry on a clothesline outside the women's dorm. A chattering young French-speaking Swiss in a red scarf held a clay figurine up to the sun and stamped his foot in frustration. A second group of Indian workers tended flower beds in front of the main building. Three Westerner women, one of them a tall nun with newly shaven head and fresh looking maroon robes, sat at a picnic table drinking tea and talking. The phone in the library rang and a search party was sent out for a man named Kabir. "I haven't seen him," Gabriel told one of the searchers. "Check the kitchen, but I think he had to go to town for something today."

We were joined briefly by the tall Western monk I'd seen doing prostrations at the Stupa and had spoken to outside the Mahabodhi Society. Gabriel introduced him as Michael and we shook hands. Michael was a newly ordained monk/psychiatric nurse from Australia. He had also been, I realized, one of the monks I'd seen my first day in Buddha Gaya at the Burmese Vihar. He wore his monk's robes with an aristocratic ease.

Gabriel and I walked off across the wide lawn. "This is a peaceful place," he warned me. "People here are only interested in working on their meditation." 

I understood what he was telling me. When he had shown me the main building, I noticed the rules on the bulletin board. They roughly followed the five precepts of the lay practitioner: no killing (unfortunately this includes mosquitoes), no lying, no stealing, no sexual misconduct, and no talking nonsense. I'd have to watch my tendency on this last one.

"We just finished these retreat huts this year," he told me, leading me to a spread-out group of circular mud huts with conical grass roofs. 

"Any problem with snakes?" I wondered.

"Not this time of year when it is relatively dry. It's the rainy season we have to worry about things like snakes."

"But they are still around?"

"Oh, yes. But we seldom see them this time of year."

I thought for a moment and then gave in. I rented a hut. This would be my home for most of my time in Buddha Gaya. Grass roof. Bamboo rafters. My front door opened onto a lentil field. The hut had three small windows to circulate the air and had a single bare light bulb for those evenings when the electricity worked. 

"We have only finished repairing this one," said Gabriel, "so you will have no trouble." The walls had been caving in. 

I made the trip back to town to hire a bicycle rickshaw to haul both me and my belongings out that very day. Gabriel, the designer and builder, had thought of pretty much everything. There was a bamboo writing desk, shelves, the light source, and a raised mud and brick platform of a bed with an excellent mosquito net and a cotton-filled pad over a mattress of straw. I thought as I arranged my things that this might actually be paradise.

Smug and snug, I sat under my mosquito netting, which kept flies out, too, and read for the rest of the afternoon, discovering what great fun mosquito nets are. When I'd climb under the net with my meditation cushion, my pouch, my blanket, and books, resting comfortably on a straw mat and a nice cloth sleeping cushion, I remembered what it was like to make a fort when I was a little kid. You had a roof and four walls, and you tucked the bottom of each of your walls under your mattress so the bugs—and other sorts of creatures you didn't want to sleep with—couldn’t join you. So by its very nature the mosquito met makes you feel protected and secure. Even though I knew there were mice (and maybe worse) in the hut, I felt fine and slept well, comforted by the whir of clouds of mosquitoes swarming a foot from my head that night, unable to bite me.

And that first night in the hut as I fell asleep, there was drumming from the village across the paddy fields. Drumming and strong singing so atavistic that for a time I felt frightened. It sounded vaguely religious, although I can't say why, and also angry, like it might explode into violence. "The natives are restless!" Too much of my consciousness has been formed by B-movies, I'm afraid. But there was communal noise from one direction or another every night after that, and I got used to it. Some nights I heard what sounded like political chants. One night a drunken farmer sat out on the dikes between the lentil fields singing a long and endlessly sad song. The first evening it was this group singing, a wedding, in the village, I later learned.

And how was the mud hut to live in in the days after? It was a cool, shady spot in the afternoons, and I felt at home. Young Uncle Lal had been a problem at the house. Neighborhood noise—stupid noise, blaring loudspeakers at one in the morning—had been a problem at night. The Root Institute offered escape from both those problems. Plus it offered a meditation course. The time had come for me to take a serious meditation course.

…………..

Kabir Saxena, the Root Institute's director, is a tall, thin Anglo-Indian, an Oxonian, who favored loose pajama suits and vests in those days, though since, all these years later, he’s put on monk’s robes. Most elegant and aristocratic, this fellow. A poet. A velvet voice aware of its velvet. He led the meditation course, "Expanding Our Circle of Compassion."

"We will begin by watching our breathing," Kabir told the group. But, as usual, instruction in "just breathing" included posture and mindfulness.

About twenty of us sat crosslegged on meditation cushions, spines set, shoulders loose, right hand resting in left palm, chins tucked in, and tongues resting comfortably behind top incisors.

"If your mind wanders off," said Kabir, "make it your business to bring it back to watching your breath."

Then, as we sat there watching our breathing, letting go of other thoughts and making it our business to bring our minds back, he talked in that voice as smooth as cream about the nature of mind. There are supposedly three minds: self-cherishing mind, awakening mind, and, I guess, awakened mind, but I didn't follow very well. My legs had gone dead after thirty minutes and so I was deeply, deeply enveloped in my self-cherishing mind. And as my legs came back to life again, so painfully, flies crawled all over my face. The angry, crazy, disappointed voice on my shoulder jeered into my ear. That was the worst part. But, though most of the time my mind would not behave itself, wandering off at every opportunity, now and then, for an instant, it really would focus on only the breathing and just glide like a train that had hit a good, smooth section of track. This at least encouraged me.

"Now visualize," Kabir instructed, "the lives of the beggars outside the main temple. Try to see individual faces, if you can."  He paused as we tried to do this. "Think of the beggars you have seen as you walk into the Stupa grounds." 

I had no trouble doing this, as I'd been forcing myself since after my first visit to the Stupa to really look at the beggars outside the gate there. In my meditation I saw a pretty young woman who didn't look as if she were starving. She's laughing at some joke and her teeth are white and perfect, like Rekha's. I saw a mother holding a naked three-year-old on her left side. Her right hand extended to me, head tilted, eyes sad and desperate. She pointed now to her baby, spoke to me in Bihari, or Magadhi, and gestured toward her mouth with closed fingers. Then she pointed to her baby's swollen stomach.

The child's hair had a reddish tint from malnutrition, as did her own. Easy to visualize, but when Kabir asked us if there were some corner in our hearts for compassion for these people, I could find none. I was completely closed off, as if I were standing behind safety glass, able to see but unable to hear or smell or touch.  Caring about these people is too big an order to fill, too frightening, I thought. 

Kabir began the dedication for all sentient beings at the end of our meditation. "Now dedicate your efforts to the well-being of all sentient beings," he instructed us. "May all beings be well and safe. May all beings find happiness. Always end your meditation with a dedication for all sentient beings."

We finished and sat there for a few minutes trying not to look at one another as we stretched our legs out, each of us apparently lost in our own thoughts. Suddenly, I wanted to go home. Much safer there. After tea, somebody banged a tin pan and we straggled back upstairs to the meditation room for discussion and guided meditation. 

When we had all gathered and gotten reasonably comfortable on our cushions, Kabir asked about our feelings toward the beggars outside the Stupa.

"I've heard that some of them go home at night and live comfortable middle-class lives," said an American from Indiana, Loud Al, who nearly always wore a Go For It t-shirt. 

"Lots of the beggars in Calcutta belong to a guild, so when you give to one beggar you also give to the gang leader who rules the guild," said a classically beautiful young blond Swedish woman who had recently come from working at one of Mother Teresa's hospices.

"What can we dough to help at least a leettle while we are here?" asked the young woman from the post office. She was on the verge of tears. I listened closely but couldn't tell from her accent whether she was a Brit, a New Zealander, or an Australian. There was something odd and unpredictable about her speech. "Don't forget to look on the flow-er," she had said in the post office.

"One thing I've found," said the Swedish woman, "is that you don't always have to give a rupee. You can just smile and recognize them as human beings. That's often enough."

It is difficult to know if this comforting thought makes any sense at all. I tried to look closely at the beggars. I tried to see individual personalities and histories. This young woman with the hardened smirk keeps everybody laughing at night with her impersonations of Tibetans handing out coins. She's about to be married, but knows nothing much will change. This man—how old is he?  50?  40?  80?—contracted leprosy ten years ago and is now watching as his feet rot away. He sometimes visits the local leprosy project to get medicine, but he nearly always sells the medicine to buy food. He has long since accepted that he will die.  All he wants is a reasonably full belly when the time comes. His head is wrapped in a dirty white cloth, one end of which dangles over his left ear and shoulder. He sets his aluminum bowl, identical to the ones used by the three beggars at the Burmese gate, out in front of where he sits and places his rotting foot next to it. When I come by, he picks up the bowl and motions toward the foot. "Saab," he moans melodramatically. "Saab. Namaste, saab."

It was hard to look and yet I did most times that I walked into the Stupa.  From the street, the main gate of the shrine is 100 paces, and all days during the pilgrimage season there are rows of beggars along each side of the walk. Nasty little men with sticks patrol the rows, striking beggars who misbehave as if they were cattle.

"They don't even look like people," complained Loud Al. "If they looked like people, you might be able to feel sorry for them."

He was right. They were dark and dirty and undersized from heredity and malnutrition, what V.S. Naipul  has called “cricket people.” They always seemed to me to have somehow risen from the dirt they squatted atop, ready when the time came to sink back into it.

"And they don't act like people," he went on.

He meant that they moaned and chattered collectively when they saw a pot of food or a bag of coins. They began moving around, ducking under the lathi, enduring its sting to get that much closer to the treasure.

"How can they be human if they don't even look or act human?"

It's a hard question. But then, in my imagination, I remembered coming by at dusk one evening and some of the children were scampering around playing tag, and I thought of catching lightning bugs and playing tag at dusk in Pennsylvania when I was six or seven.

"They don't even thank you when you give them money," said a small Englishman with a twisted mouth. "I mean, how can they expect you to give your money if they can't even say thank you? It's beyond belief really."

His anger stopped us. We sat thinking and then in a low, patient voice stepping out of the silence, Alice, a pretty social worker from New Mexico, began explaining.

"You see," she told us, "you can't expect that your own cultural assumptions will be relevant here. It is considered a good thing in their culture for you to have the chance to give something to someone else, so why should they say thank you if they have done you a favor?"                  

Even Kabir nodded his head. Alice's tone suggested none of the anguish the other speakers had expressed. She seemed beyond anguish.

"And besides," she went on, "there is not even a word for thank you in their language, so how can they thank you in the way you expect?"

The Hindi word for thank you is dhanivad, or at least that was the word I had read and had learned in a short language course I'd taken before coming to India the first time. I expected there was likely an equivalent in Mughadi. But people around the room raised their chins in ah-ha's, and Alice's manner accepted us all as her pupils.                           

"We do have to take the culture into account," said Kabir.  "Actually, there is a word for thank you, but it is not used very much. Remember, though, that you are getting something, good merit, from giving to beggars, at least in their way of thinking."

Alice nodded and went on. She reminded me of myself in the classroom when I have a point that I want to drive home but have had to listen to a pretty good student take the discussion off course. I didn't listen too closely to what she said after that, but I did hear her repeat, without acknowledging Kabir, that they had no word for thank you in their language.   

The discussion went on. People seemed genuinely confused.

Me too. I told them about buying one of those clear plastic bags of coins outside the Stupa gates and distributing them to the beggars. "I was ashamed," I said. The minute I stepped into the Stupa grounds the lines of beggars had fallen apart. People jumped on and over each other to get closer to me. Fistfights broke out.  Then a nasty little man, the head beggar, appeared next to me with his lathi and whacked a leper on the side of his head. A fat Tibetan monk appeared on my other side. He too swung a lathi as they escorted me down the line.  "There I was, the burra sahib in my VanHuesen shirt, giving out coins like J.D. Rockefeller. And a monk kept the lines of beggars in order with a stick while I gave it out! I climbed the fence next time I went to the Stupa!"

After that, we had a short break to stretch and then came back for an hour of guided meditation with Kabir. He talked about the nature of mind as being like space. Like a blue, blue sky and thoughts are clouds that pass, that have no real substance.

"What is the mind hearing these sounds and feeling these bodily sensations?" he asked. "Where does it begin and where does it end?"

My mind refused to become blue sky. It was rather a small, frightened animal clinging to a loose kite flying out-of-control through the air. But Kabir worked his image for an hour, and I made no progress. 

I was zonked, glad to get out of there and go back to my hut. I lay down under the mosquito netting and closed my eyes.  Flies, not many of them but enough to be an annoyance, buzzed around on the other side of the net. My mind hurt like a muscle that had been overused. A small animal rooted in darts and persistent gnawings under the straw mat across the packed dirt floor of my hut. A bird chirped and I opened my eyes to see a house sparrow perched in the sunlight atop my bamboo door. The scrambling under the straw continued along the edge of the hut, coming closer clockwise. I must have dozed off then.

When I woke a few minutes later, the rustling under the straw had come to within a foot and a half, under my straw mat, between me and the mud wall. I slowly turned on my side, curious.  Whatever it was couldn't easily get past the tucked in mosquito netting. The straw moved and a tiny mouse raised its head and looked me over. It sniffed the air first this way and then that before continuing on its way to the door and then out into the lentil field, its circular reconnaissance over for the time being. Two sparrows perched now on the bamboo rafters up under the conical roof. They sat up there scolding me for a while and then flitted out again. 

This was to be a familiar pattern: Kabir worked our minds like a gymnastics coach, I'd retreat for rest to my hut, and my birds and the little mouse visited—or I was their visitor for the time I stayed there. I looked forward to their coming.

On some days, to prepare myself before the morning's meditation session, I would take a wicker chair from the veranda of the large building and sit in the shade inside my door and just stare out across the fields at the back of the enormous Buddha statue built by the Japanese a mile away.  The orange ball of the sun rose over his right shoulder each dawn as vague forms of villagers walked single file along the earthen dikes.

Fog hung above every wet place in the fields, and walking silhouettes disappeared and reappeared through these puffs of mist. Vapor rose in a straight line along the irrigation ditches and then turned at right angles at field’s end.

To the Buddha's left was a line of indistinct shapes, temples—Japanese, Kagyu Tibetan, an Indian village—and then, at some distance, the Stupa. Herons flew to within fifty feet of me and then turned and glided away to the right, lost in the grey morning. 

Beyond my front door and to the left, surrounded by lentil paddies, were the mud huts of a Brahmin farming family, and in the early mornings, when it was still far too cool for me to do the same, I could sit and watch the men bathing under their water pump. A common sight was of one of the teenage sons, wearing nothing but a lungi, squatting by the constantly flowing water pipe and washing his hair, scrubbing with great billows of soap suds.  Then, lathering his body, he filled a bucket and dumped it over his head. The sun caught the streams of water as they fell from the bucket and set it sparkling silver. 

Now human silhouettes walked slowly along the paddy dikes going to work. Some carried bundles on their heads and heavy walking sticks.

A pleasant place, my hut. It prepared me for the meditation sessions and it gave me a place to recover afterwards.

………..

After each meditation, we filed down the stairs to where our shoes waited in an unruly heap. The small French-speaking Swiss in the red scarf stood on the veranda holding one of his clay Buddha figurines up to the sunlight. "Yes, yes," he went on to a woman standing next to him, "this one will do, BUT I 'ave not yet learned 'ow to make them quickly, enough." 

He set the figurine back in the sun, where it and others like it were drying on a cookie sheet. His arms gestured in every direction and he spoke as if doing a farcical imitation of a Frenchman. At tea one day he sat down next to me, and I asked about the statues.

"I 'ave tomake 300,000 of-dem, but I 'ave not fig yourd thee meth--oud yet."

"Why 300,000?"

"For my stupa. Actually, it is 300,000 or three years." He was building his own stupa, which he's also designed himself and it will be square instead of conical. But I couldn't figure out the three years part.

"I was going to be ordained," he sighed heavily, "but Lama Zopa told me I had to wait three years. I said, 'But, what can I do?  The fabric for my monk's robes is already to the tailor!'"

So. His lama, to keep him occupied and probably to test his commitment, gave him this project to do for the next three years.

At the start of his interest in Buddhism ten years before he stayed five weeks in a monastery in Thailand, but they threw him out.

"What can I tell you?" he shrugged. "I must have been too noisy."

In a place like Buddha Gaya, rubbing shoulders with people who are heavily into a particular path, one has to ask how those people are doing. Does it seem to make a significant difference in their lives? One can always find silly people in religions, and surely there are plenty of those around Buddhism. 

Early one morning at the Root Institute I decided to skip breakfast and only grab a cup of tea. My laundry needed to be done, and if I waited until after breakfast and after the first meditation session of the day I'd have to wait in line at the sinks. It had seemed that Alice had been doing an awful lot of laundry for a couple of days. Every time I came out to wash my clothes she'd be squatted by the sinks beating on a sudsy pair of jeans or a shirt. Her husband, a phlegmatic, sickly soul named Bruce, would be standing around nearby as if his mere presence were some kind of help. Both of them ignored me, Alice rather ostentatiously, I thought, since she wouldn't even answer a direct question.

I figured the only way to beat Alice to the sinks, and thereby avoid being ignored, was to do it during breakfast, and so I strung a light rope between two trees near my hut and piled my dirty clothes together inside my beach towel. She and Bruce were not there, but I was not the only one who had decided to beat the rush. An American named Frank stooped over one of the buckets. He was a skinny, drawn man, with a long, deeply pockmarked face. Though I'd seen him around the Institute and in the bazaar and had watched as he sang along to the puja my first day in Buddha Gaya, we had never before spoken.

"I'm almost finished here," he said, looking up. He was using the red bucket. The blue one was filled with clothing soaking in sudsy water. "I don't know whose that is," he said pointing to the soaking colors.

He spoke as if we already knew each other.

"You takin' the course then?" he asked.

"Yeah, and you?"

He wasn't, it turned out. He was friendly enough, but oddly detached. 

"No problem about the bucket," I said. "I'll shave. Take your time." 

There was a good quality mirror over the sinks. I lathered my face.

"How do you feel about the course?" he asked without looking up.

"So far so good. Not bad. Have you been here long?"     

"Actually, about as long as you," he said. "I saw you in Gaya and then at that puja our first day."

"Where were you before that?" I asked.

"I stayed in Varanasi a couple of days," he said as if beginning an explanation of something. Varanasi is the holy city on the Ganges, an auspicious place for a Hindu to die and be cremated, also a place of universities and teaching ashrams. "The city of learning and burning," say the local wags. The twisted, narrow streets of the old city are a favorite hippie haunt. Frank's smile was partly embarrassed, partly mischievous. "Smoking the weed a bit, I'm afraid. Watching the river flow."

"Did you go out to Sarnath?" Sarnath is where the Buddha went to preach his first sermon after attaining enlightenment at Buddha Gaya. 

He smiled the same way again. "Like I say, I was into the weed, and I guess I sort of forgot about being a Buddhist. I was so stoned I didn't even realize Sarnath was so close."

For a Buddhist, that's pretty stoned.

"I heard you singing at the puja the first day," I said. "You must know Tibetan. Very beautiful."

He laughed. "Oh, no. I don't really know any Tibetan. I just learn to pronounce the words of the puja." Then he paused thoughtfully. "We earned a lot of merit doing that puja."

I hadn't done the puja. I had merely been there. Besides, it didn't make any sense to me that you could take part without understanding the words and get anything much out of it. Any store of good qualities in my mind gained by having been there, any merit earned, came from feeling welcome and friendly, not from having participated in something I didn't understand. After all, there is substantial intellectual content to the dharma. It demands a certain amount of work.

"But we didn't understand the words," I protested.

"Yeah!" He clapped his hands and stepped backwards in a fall, his face shining as if he'd discovered gold under a rock. "Just think how much merit we would all have earned if we did know what the words meant!"

Yes, just think. 

It's easy to find the stoned and the silly. So the place to start is with a serious minded person. Many of the dharma bums reminded me of graduate school, and so I tried not to take them—or my reaction to them—too seriously. But Michael, the monk from Australia, besides being my age, attracted me. He was just forty. As that birthday came up, he told me, he had started asking himself what would be the best way to spend the rest of his life. Things hadn't been bad for the past twenty years, but he knew that the next would fly by like the last and that, given the rate he was going, he would not be where he wanted to be spiritually when he hit sixty.

He considered getting married and nearly did. But somehow that didn't feel like the best. So six weeks before I met him he had taken ordination, put on the robes, and that, he said, finally felt right.

"I wanted to go join this group of about twenty Western monks in the south of France," he said, "to spend a couple of years just learning, but my teacher said, 'No, that wouldn't be the most beneficial.' So I'm here doing my 100,000 prostrations and then I'm going to go to Dharamsala for a while to take some teachings and then go back to the Center at home."

So every day Michael went to the Stupa, faced the Bodhi Tree, and did prostrations. He had placed himself in the hands of his teacher. He was not sure which teachings he would take in Dharamsala. His teacher was not specific, and he grinned sheepishly when I asked him about it. "Something will develop," he smiled. He didn't know how long he would stay there before returning home.

I liked him in spite of his vagueness. And, in fairness, what I saw as vagueness was really also an openness, a sweet modesty. He was open to experiences, though he'd now narrowed that path, and to people, where there didn't seem to be a narrowing.

 I sought him out at the Cafe Om one evening and asked him for some guidance on making the offering for Ani-la.

"Which is the more holy place?" I asked. "The temple or the Bodhi Tree?"

"That's a good question," he smiled. "I don't know. There must be somebody here who could answer that for you," and he started craning his long neck to check out the other faces. No one else knew either.

Michael smiled when I told him I thought some of the things Tibetan Buddhists did looked meaningless—the endless recitation of mantras, the prostrations. "It's just my ignorance," I told him, "but I'd like to understand what they are doing."

"Sometimes I wonder, too," he said, "but I do these things and I see results. So, you know, I keep doing them."

"It just looks like so much rigmarole to me."

"Oh, I know what you mean," he smiled. "That's what I used to think, too. But it's not."

He went on. 

At a particularly difficult time in his life he had gone to a retreat in Nepal and not known whether he should put his trust in the exercises and teachings that he was being given.

"But I figured that the other way I was going about my life wasn't working so I'd try this, even though I didn't understand why I was doing certain things. I just decided to have faith and see what happened."

He let himself go and the results were positive, though the retreat was a difficult one for him. Instead of letting him externalize his problems with food and television and going out, the retreat forced him to go inside himself to look for a solution. It forced him to do this using techniques that he did not intellectually understand. This must have taken a great deal of courage, because he would have had no idea of whether he would end up a madman. It happens on the spiritual path. But he let go and in the process of the retreat experienced an opening up like he had never known before. That experience in turn gave him the confidence and faith to take the next step.

"All my experience," he told me, "tells me true, recognized teachers in the Tibetan tradition can be trusted." Michael reached a kind of bliss during that retreat.

"How much of that are you able to sustain?" I asked.

"Not a lot," he said. "My teacher throws up obstacles to that because too much of it makes you want only the bliss and not the result of having had the experience."

"Like too much candy?"

"Right. You see him putting his close, long term students in really difficult situations all the time. He's not interested in just giving you a good time. He really wants you to deepen what you've learned."

Like the prostrations.

"For example, this business of doing 100,000 prostrations is no empty ritual." He wasn't so vague anymore.

The 100,000 prostrations, he explained, is an essential step in the spiritual career of a practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism. It is the "building the foundation of a house," a spiritual house, and a "purification." While doing the motions of the prostrations, practitioners think first of the guru, the teacher, because the teacher is in direct lineage back to the Buddha. So they are visualizing the lineage tree of teacher and their teachers and their teachers, etc., as they stand, then lifting hands to crown of head and to the third eye the guru, throat voice, and sternum mind—all the while visualizing the tree and all other sentient beings doing prostrations with them. Then they lower their bodies to the knees and push out into full prostration, imagining that they are pushing away their bad karma, the demerits of their accumulated bad thoughts, words, and deeds.

When people doing prostrations get into the full swing of it, working their way through 100,000, they can do as many as 4,000 a day, working up rather a good sweat. This perspiration is put to good use. The practitioner imagines it as black water of bad karma that is pushed away back into the mouth of Yama, who causes death to sentient beings, therefore keeping them swimming in samsara.

Then the practitioner stands up, lifting all other sentient beings because you do spiritual exercises for all sentient beings, not just for yourself.

The exercise is to get rid of the bad stuff, negative actions and their results, negative ways of thinking, and to provide new ways of thinking, a foundation, for a start to a good spiritual career. The exercises affect the practitioner psychologically. "Okay," said Michael, "you've done this and that bad thing in the past. Now push it away from your life. Drop it. Here is another way of thinking. Adopt it. Make it fully your own."

And in making this other way of thinking about and being in the world fully their own through endless repetition, the practitioners are never to forget that they are now connected to a lineage of teachers and students going all the way back to the Buddha, who attained enlightenment under a tree from which the tree before them now is a direct descendent.

"So it's just an elaborate psychological exercise, then?" 

He paused warily. "Yeah," he said slowly. "Yeah, but I wouldn't stop there. There's something more about the exercise, too. Something that can't be explained by psychology."

And what was that? I wondered.

But Michael couldn't articulate that. "I don't know enough yet."

Then he told me a story about when a lot of the practitioners at his Center were having conflicts. Their teacher had a special bell brought in from Nepal and placed at the bottom of the stairs, right inside the front door and between the Center's main rooms. "You couldn't avoid it, even if you tried. And the interpersonal conflicts stopped," he said.

"So it was like a psychological reminder for all of you," I reasoned.

He hesitated. "Yeah, that's true," he agreed, "but I think there was also something about the bell, too."

……………

I had a strange sensation in this place. It felt familiar. Climbing the stairs to the meditation hall and finding a place to sit the first time or riding my bike through the town's bazaar, I kept having the same odd sensation that I was about to meet myself, that I had been there before. I saw everything for the first time, but with the feeling of one who has been looking at a place for years and then suddenly sees it.

It was not a wholly pleasant feeling. 

Even the faces of the other members of the meditation course caused me this sensation. The Englishwoman who banged the tin pan to call us to meditation and meals had graying black hair pulled into a tight ponytail, and this seemed somehow to accentuate the pinched, almost pointed, cast of her jaw and her nose, which was rather long and thin and was red and dripping in the cold at breakfast each morning. And it was this redness and dripping that made her seem so familiar and that caused me a riot of conflicting emotion. When I saw this, I also saw that she had been pretty once, with smooth, milky skin and eyes painted onto porcelain. 

The boy who had been on the bus to Varanasi and who spoke with such assurance of skillfulness my first evening in the tent restaurant was never far from her. He was not what would normally be called handsome. His facial structure was too bumpy and somehow random, his hair, even in the rough and ready atmosphere of Third World travel, too wild, his hands and feet too large and bony. But he had a real quality also in his large, active eyes and in how he seemed to own every situation he entered. The woman was obviously his mother; they had the same wild look.

Every time I looked at the two of them I was brought back to the Quaker families of Bucks County. There had been, after all, something so English about those families, so finally and perhaps over bred about them. The mother and son did not remind me of anyone in particular, but rather of a set of features and sensibilities.

And I did not just know that I had seen them before. What I knew and what gave me the odd sensation was that I had seen them in this very situation before, sitting exactly where they sat then and waiting for the meditation course to begin each day. I was eight years old again, and my father had just killed himself and thrown our lives into the twister. Something more was about to happen.

Just what, I couldn't have told you, but these people and that place upset me. I had a foreboding about it all, maybe also from Bucks County, and about the general competitiveness I felt for the other members of the meditation course. Maybe I was simply remembering my hated years in graduate school, when, under the false promise of studying literature, we were implicitly encouraged to knife one another for committee assignments and the attention of mediocre professors. 

The Englishwoman made me crazy. She spoke and moved with the unerring confidence of one who knows she has been born into the right group. Her son was the same. They expected you to listen. They expected you to agree. They expected the best as their due. The power of my jealousy could have run a freight train.

She had lived, it seemed, in various places in Asia for the last six or seven years. Mention Tokyo and she'd tell you, in great detail, which bus to take for Yokohama as if you had just said you were going to Japan tomorrow and wondered how to get from the Ginza to Yokohama. Or if you showed a slight twinge of interest when she mentioned Hong Kong, she'd launch into a dissertation on renting cheap apartments there. All this I got sitting at some distance and listening before the meditation class started each day. I could barely control myself around her, and I couldn't bring myself to so much as look at her son. Crazy, bad Buddhist!

Most evenings we met in the meditation room at sunset. The Englishwoman banged the tin plate to signal us. Alice and the Swedish woman who worked for Mother Teresa usually went into the room early and meditated as the rest of us waited for Kabir to arrive.  

In our after-meditation discussions, we learned more than we needed to know about one another. Alice had worked with native rights in the Southwest and with Central American issues. I was having some sort of ongoing midlife crises, which by then was beginning to bore even me. Thomas, a Swedish kid who had been traveling for over two years, always arrived first and would hang around the window watching the sun go down over a village beyond us. He was a great watcher, but he said little in the discussions. You could sense him trying to hear something beyond your words, trying to get onto your wavelength so he could evaluate it.

At first this made me uneasy, self-involved and paranoid as I was, but then, over time, as I settled and accepted it, I was grateful. You had to slow down with Thomas. You had to make sure of your ground and listen to yourself. He did not like me, I felt. I talked too much. Talked too fast. 

Audrey, the woman whose accent I couldn't make out for the longest time, often joined Thomas at leaning her elbows on the deep window sill at the top of the stairs and watching the sunset. She, too, had been traveling for about two years. They had both, separately, been to Australia and Malaysia and Japan. Audrey had taught English in Tokyo and become fluent in Japanese. She mentioned that she had "rung up" her mother, and she ended all her sentences with that lift that is halfway between a question and a chirp. But she's from Colorado, and the longer I listened to her accent (she'd say "awksent") the less like any one thing it sounded. 

And Loud Al, who had grown up in New Jersey and now lived in Ohio, wearing his "Go For It!" t-shirt and carrying a nylon NorthFace backpack with mosquito repellent, toilet paper, mineral water, journal, camera, and sun block in it. Very bright but a tad rough around the edges. Sometimes I saw him crossing the fields in the early morning on his way to meditate at the Japanese Temple and listen to the chanting. 

I had known them all before, in these same circumstances—but with some vague difference that I couldn't put my finger on and that made me uneasy.  

"The day after tomorrow," Kabir told us one night, "we will go and visit one of the local villages and talk to the women in the Institute's sewing project."

He wanted to know how we all felt about going out and talking to the people in the villages. Maybe not surprisingly, many of us found the prospect frightening. Walking by the destitute at the Stupa was one thing; going to see where they lived was another. But we had come to India at least in part to be shaken up.

"It will be a good teaching," said Kabir.

Thomas, in one of the few times he spoke, suggested that we should learn something about each of the villages before we visited them. He had many questions about caste, how people made their livings, that kind of thing. Kabir agreed that one of the English-speaking workers could come in and answer our questions beforehand.

 "Make sure," Alice told Kabir, "that whoever comes explains to them about traditional women's roles."

I thought this a good suggestion, but had to wonder, because of her phrasing, if Alice were keeping something from the rest of us. Thomas must have seen my expression change as I fought back my usual irritation at the sound of her voice. He watched me, bit his lower lip, and rocked gently.

The discussion dwindled off. People were rubbing their arms and necks and faces, any exposed portions of their bodies, with mosquito repellent, sharing their bottles.

"You people don't need that," Kabir teased. "All you need is to learn how to ignore them."

Alice refused the bottle that came her way, so when it got to me I refused it too. Crazy, bad Buddhist. But fifteen minutes into the meditation, my face, neck, and arms were coated by feeding mosquitoes. I had to leave, but she stayed until the end.

When, the next morning, I overheard Alice speaking long distance on the phone, my nastiness for her peaked. 

"Well, I don't know," she told the person at the other end. "My feelings are still very mixed. How are yours?" Clearly a relationship that had been in trouble before she left still was. "Have you worked any of that out in the past two months?"

She listened again. "Well, all right. Like I say, my feelings are mixed. I don't know what to think. Sounds like you are the same way." 

Just then she spotted Bruce coming across the lawn toward her. 

"I've got to go," she said into the phone. "We can't talk about this anymore."

I felt glee, my nasty little man dancing.