Very Bad Buddhist

Chapter 5: Dedicating the Merits

DEDICATING THE MERITS

On the evening that Lama Tsega and I were to make the offering, I bought a bunch of rice and fruit—bananas, apples, oranges, and grapes—and lugged it all plus both candles, the kata, and my meditation cushion to the temple grounds. Then I started circumambulating the outermost walkway around the temple carrying my bundle.

Darkness was just beginning to fall as I shuffled along amid the flowering trees and shrubs of the outermost walk. People had already started to place lit candles on the cement and stone walls and, below me, on the many small stupas. Michael did prostrations on a board set between a tree and a stupa down below where I walked. He had avoided the heat of the day and would do them a while longer before stopping. I remember thinking that evening that the whole place looked like a strange, crossless cemetery, with its many shapes and sizes of stupas. 

Once I'd gone around the outermost walk three times, and stopped to light a small candle at the Place of Unwinking Gazing, where the Buddha had spent the second week after enlightenment gazing at the Bodhi Tree, I went down the steps to the temple. I didn't go in yet, though. Instead, I walked the marble inner walkway around the temple and tree. Shaded by the spreading branches of the tree, this place was now near to darkness.

Someone had placed lit candles on each of the recessed carvings in the temple wall along the Cloister Walk, where Lord Buddha had spent the third week after enlightenment walking up and down in meditation. In all, the Buddha had spent about seven weeks in the immediate area after enlightenment, and where he spent each week is marked with a shrine. He had been unsure of whether he should simply enjoy living with what he had learned or whether he should begin trying to teach it to others. In the end, he had left to go teach, of course, but the important point for me was that even after enlightenment he had had doubts about what to do with the experience.

So that evening I walked the fruit and other items around the grounds three times and then went into the temple in my stocking feet, leaving my flip-flops outside with the usual pile of shoes. Most of the floor-space in the tiny, dark shrine room was taken up by elderly Tibetan women in chubas and long braids sitting cross-legged on the cold stones chanting prayers and swaying back and forth. An old monk loudly poured grains of rice from one tin pan into another as he repeated his mantra.

I found a place in a corner and set my belongings there under the kind gaze of the benign image of the Buddha, who sat on a raised platform in front of us. He was wrapped in saffron robes under an embroidered gold canopy. Metal bowls in front of him held bananas and oranges and other offerings of fruit. There were flowers and white silk prayer scarves.  I stepped out into the corridor of open space just in front of the Buddha, put my palms together over the sternum, the sign of the lotus bud that grows from the muck and reaches for the light and that holds the precious jewel—bodhicitta, the wish to attain enlightenment for the sake of all sentient beings—then touched my forehead, my throat, and my sternum, and fell to my knees, placing my forehead on the floor. 

"I dedicate my thoughts, words, and deeds to the enlightenment of all sentient beings," I told myself as I touched head, throat, and heart. Then, as I touched head to floor, "I take refuge in the Buddha, dharma, and the sangha," in the example of the Buddha's life, the teachings, and the community of Buddhists.  I had not been trained to do this, and had no idea if I had done it correctly. But it seemed right, and I knew you did something like that in the temple. I repeated the ritual three times, feeling more than a little stupid.    

Then I went back to my corner and sat down to meditate.  The Buddha's lips were painted red over his golden skin. His eyes and eyebrows and short, bumpy hair were painted black. There was a faint white dot just above and between his eyes—his wisdom eye. His golden earlobes hung long:  He had, after all, been a prince and had worn heavy jewelry from his ears since early childhood. The weight had stretched the lobes.

I straightened my back. His eyes did not move, but I felt them to be aware of me. His lips seemed set to smile, held back by will and kindness. "Stupid ass, Steve," they might have said.  "What was that little dance you just performed?"

I watched my breath for twenty minutes or so, trying to let go of the thoughts that forever clogged my mind, and then went outside to meet Lama Tsega. 

Pointing to the larger of the two candles, he laughed. "You brought that all the way from the States?"

We went inside and had fun filling the offering bowl with rice and fruit and lighting the candles. Then he showed me how to ball up one end of the kata and throw it up toward the Buddha.  "See if you can get it on his lap," he said. But my throw draped it over some flowers instead. "Ah, that's just nice," he said. I made Ani-la's donation and we lit the candles. Lama Tsega led me to a bare space on the floor and we sat while he chanted a prayer and I thought again about the enlightenment of all sentient beings.

Shielding the tiny flame of the big candle against the evening breezes, I followed Lama Tsega outside and to the raised, enclosed area around the Bodhi Tree. I gave the Indian attendant a little baksheesh, twenty or thirty rupees, and he opened the iron gate and led us up the marble steps. Lama Tsega directed me to set the burning candle into a recess about five feet high on the wall of the Mahabodhi Temple. "This is my favorite one," Lama Tsega told me. And when I'd set it in, "There. Yes, that's nice."

This place is the holiest of Buddhist sites. We each prostrated three times to the Diamond Throne, a dark slab of carved stone marking the exact spot where the Buddha is said to have attained enlightenment. Lama Tsega said another prayer. 

Then we just stood there talking casually. It became clear that he wanted us to take our time. There was no hurry. We had no other business. And there were things he wanted to say to me on that spot. For one, he especially wanted to impress upon me that I should not get all caught up in a love for the magical aspects of (Tibetan) Buddhism the way some people do. "I wouldn't want you to do that," he warned.

"You mean I shouldn't go looking for any flying lamas?" I said and he held his large belly and laughed a long, long time.

"The important thing is compassion, but you have to have gut. You have to have the gut to practice Buddhism. You can't be afraid of anything ever. The Buddha had no fear, not even a little. He was beyond fear. And when you take refuge in the Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha, that is enough. Let that give you courage.

"You have to be like a soldier going into battle to practice Buddhism. A soldier gives everything up—home, family, everything—and doesn't look back. Real compassion takes gut. You have to have gut."

It was uncanny that in my fairly short association with serious Buddhists that there had always been one there with the right words just as I had been grappling with some question. Learning how to cultivate compassion is the central task of a Buddhist, and as I'd thought about it over the previous few days it had seemed that you have to be brave to do that. Fearless. Maybe, after a point, a little crazy. To have true compassion you have to walk into the suffering of others with your eyes and your heart fully open. Otherwise, how could you have consciousness of that suffering? Oh, if you peeked inside, you might glimpse a little of what was going on in the other's heart. You'd have some compassion, and that would be good. Or if you stepped inside the door you might see a little more.  And maybe this glimpsing and stepping in is where a cultivation of compassion starts, but—to gain deep understanding of the suffering of others and yourself—you have to walk right inside with your eyes and heart wide open, and that takes fearlessness.  It takes letting go of all extraneous thoughts, which is what watching your breath is about. It takes silencing the protective ego voice on your shoulder.

You have to be a little crazy to walk around like that. You have to be some kind of nut to climb out of the muck to the lotus flower. Some kind of nut or hippie.

So, although I did not yet feel it, I think I was beginning to understand what Lama Tsega was telling me. "You have to have gut. You can't stop half way if you want to be a Buddhist." I had to have "gut" to reconnect with what had given me spirit. When I found that courage and took that step, my pilgrimage would begin.

The night shadows twisted and stretched around us. Scores of candles. The chanting of pilgrims. All of it swirled around where we stood inside the holiest place in Buddhism. Before us was the Diamond Throne set between the carved wall of the Mahabodhi Temple on one side and, swathed in the saffron robes of a Theravadan monk, the Bodhi Tree.

"The Buddha and the Bodhi Tree were born at the same time," said Lama Tsega. "When he crossed the river, he was looking for his Bodhi Tree. He couldn't find it, though, so all the surrounding trees in the jungle were burnt. That one tree stood out. Then, getting a bundle of grass from a grass cutter for his seat, he sat under the tree, his tree, ready to achieve his goal or die trying. He sat right there next to where you and I are standing, and Mara tempted him with all the things of this world, but he held his mind steady. Then he touched the ground and all the sentient beings of the world witnessed that he was worthy and ready, and he entered into enlightenment. After awakening, he took the ashes from the burnt trees, put them all together, and out of that another pipal grew nearby. He had the gut, and we need to follow his example."

Lama Tsega didn't seem to want to leave. There was that feeling that I belonged again, odd for me. But as it came time to go, he knelt unsteadily by the Throne. "Arthritic knees," he grinned sidelong and touched the throne with his forehead. "Before you leave," he said, "you must touch the Diamond Throne with your forehead and make a wish. You go ahead now," and he stepped aside for me.

I knelt as he had and touched the cool stone with my forehead. Closed my eyes. Maybe I am superstitious and susceptible to all sorts of psychological suggestion, but I felt something. A current. An affection. A connectedness. I didn't try to interpret it. Just let it be whatever it was. I felt lucky to be there with this humorous man.

"Have you made a wish?" he asked me as I stood back up.

"Yes."

"Next, you always take a little something away.  Some dirt from next to the tree is nice. A leaf that has fallen. Never take a living one off the tree, though."

I scraped up a little dirt and put it in my pocket.

"You have to come here every day now and take care of the candle," Lama Tsega told me. He made it sound like some onerous responsibility, but I'm sure he understood I was delighted. Then, glancing up at the burning candle and grinning, "It certainly is a big candle."

We both kept laughing about that as we left the tree and temple to get on our bicycles and ride off through the market for a glass of tea. Both of us (him first) almost ran over some poor bewildered guy in the market who shook his fist and yelled as if waking up from a dream as we sped away.

……………

The next morning and afternoon I meditated under the tree most of the day.

Afterwards I was sitting on the cement steps of the nearby sacred tank watching as a bunch of pre-adolescent monks stripped off their robes and splashed out through the lotus pads. They'd foray out and then come back to shiver and dry themselves off on the steps directly in front of me. A young Tibetan man in blue jeans and the flat, brimless hat I’d frequently seen in the Himalayan villages sidled up to me. He took a deep drag off his cigarette and flicked it hard at the tank. One of the kid monks snapped his head around to see it just miss him shooting by. My new neighbor lowered his head and looked at me and then away toward the monks. I didn't like or trust him.

"I'm one of them," he said, indicating the monks.

"You mean Tibetan?" I asked.

"No. Monk." And he lifted his hat to run his hand over his head. I saw now that his head had been shaven.

"But you aren't wearing robes. Why not?"

"Not yet." He looked away again and bit his lower lip. "Day after tomorrow."

"Oh, so you haven't gotten your robes yet." I sat trying to piece this together.

"New monk," he said and jerked his thumb toward the big Gelugpa monastery. "I start to study." He pretended to be writing and I nodded. "Tibetan," he said  "I learn how to write Tibetan."  He smacked the knuckles of his right hand into the palm of the left to indicate that he would also learn debate.

"Ah, good," I smiled. Somehow my dislike for him had softened. "Tibetan dialectics."

"Yes! Debate."

"Very good. Very good. So you will learn to be a monk." But he seemed old to be starting out. He was 18, which he said was not too old to begin. He never smiled as we talked and he alternated between watching me closely out of lowered eyes and looking away.  He wanted something from me and this bothered me. I moved my nylon shoulder bag twice so it would be out of his reach as we talked.         

He went to school for a time in Mussouri, in the hills, but had lived mostly in the Tibetan settlement in Old Delhi, Majnukatilla, a sorry place next to the mosquito-infested mudflats along the Yamuna River. Apparently he felt no clear direction in his life and so decided on the monastery. "I think I will be a monk the rest of my life," he said, but he didn't sound so sure to me.

His father copied Tibetan script—he’s sort of an artist/scribe apparently—and his mother is a housewife. They do not live in Majnukatilla, for some reason that I could not figure out.

"I think I give you a Tibetan name," he said suddenly. "You are Tashi."

It means good luck.

“Now you give me an American name, if you can think of one."

"I'll think about that," I told him.

"Do you have any pictures?" he asked.

"Yes, but not with me today."

So we agreed to meet the same place the next day. I would bring pictures of my family and an American name, if I could think of one, for him. I very carefully avoided promising to do anything but show up with the pictures.

"One o'clock," he repeated as we said so long. "Sharp."   

I still didn't trust him.

……………….

My mornings were free now that the course had ended, so I pedaled to the Stupa first thing the next day to check the candle. I stood on the left peddle and glided down the incline past the rows of beggars. Some of them recognized and greeted me now. We were all just arriving at work in the morning. I parked my bike outside and walked down the long steps and around to the other side of the temple. Handing five or six rupees to the guard at the gate to the Diamond Throne, I went inside as if I owned the place and checked the candle, which in fact had held its flame through the night.

I sat my meditation cushion next to the tree and prostrated three times. Then I sat down and crossed my legs. It was odd. During my meditation in this lovely, serene setting under the tree, after having finally figured out how to make Ani-la's offering and gotten inside the holiest place in Buddhism, I began doubting what being a Buddhist really meant. It was almost as if being there had triggered the doubts.

What was the minimum you had to believe to legitimately call yourself a Buddhist?

The Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path Gautama had taught at Sarnath? But the idea of reincarnation?

Buddhism, when I stood back and looked at it rationally, seemed nothing more or less than a wonderful ethical and psychological system. If you kept any one of the neatly numbered instruction systems in mind—the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, the Four Reminders, the Six Paramitas—and if you, say, performed your 100,000 prostrations, you would live a better life. Your thinking and your actions would be more constructive. You would feel the interconnectedness of all the life around you. And if we all lived that way, if society was built around these ideas, well—that would indeed be an enlightened world.

No, I hadn't gotten very far with my meditation, even meditating three times a day and having Kabir guide me, but I could see that if I kept hammering away at what I'd been taught, my life would improve. The practice Kabir had given us of always bringing the mind back to the breathing had also been excellent, so maybe I could eventually begin making some progress with that.  It seemed central. Then there was the stuff about visualizing people in my life, a powerful tool. The business about sending out white light fell flat every time, though. It seemed rather New Agey and therefore suspicious. Too flashy. 

And what about reincarnation? A lot of New Age types take on the idea of reincarnation, it seemed to me, simply because it runs counter to what they are out to reject, not from any compelling experience, belief, or evidence. That is not to say that I ruled out the possibility of the continuation of mind from one life to the next to the next. I didn't. But I have no real evidence of literal reincarnation either, and a psychological understanding of it—we make the karma for our next figurative life now, in this life—would seem a good tool for personal improvement. Seeing it in metaphorical, psychological terms made perfect sense to me. We live many lives in a single lifetime. We die and in a sense are reborn more than once in a physical lifetime.

But I had to ask myself if I could be a Buddhist without the more cosmic understanding of reincarnation. This was the step between a worldly thought-system and a system whose reach went beyond this world. It was the step from reason to faith. "Why bother staying in touch with friends?" the committed dharma bums had asked me. "You keep running into each other in all your lives," Ani Susie had said. Hmm?

When I left home, I was convinced of my Buddhism, but by this time in my journey I had to wonder.

What was this something else beyond psychology that Michael didn't feel qualified to speak of? What was this something about that bell he had told me of?

That day leaving the tree I took a fallen leaf and put it in a plastic bag with the dirt I'd collected earlier. Then I put my forehead on the Diamond Throne and made a wish. 

Yes, there was something definitely going on at the tree. Psychology, magic, the door to another reality, whatever it was, I felt it. Something about the bell. But wrapping my mind around it was something else.

…………….

Soon after lighting the candle, I moved into a room at the Burmese Monastery. Rain had come blowing across the flat paddy fields twice since I'd moved into the mud hut, and the second time I could see clear evidence that my mud walls would come down in a third storm. Besides, I began to have sudden, urgent episodes of needing a latrine—caused, I'm convinced, by the Root's breakfasts.  At the Burmese Monastery, I'd be closer to a bathroom during the night. I had gotten a bad cold, too, and I figured I probably didn't have much time left in Buddha Gaya, would have to see a doctor in Varanasi soon, and wanted to try looking at Buddha Gaya from a slightly different angle before going. So it was time to leave the Root.

For the equivalent of 78 cents a night I got a room at the Burmese Monastery that opened to a veranda looking out over the paddy fields. Renting a bike cost less than a dollar a day. Food never cost more than three dollars. If I hadn't been sure I was getting sick, I would have kept living the good life right into the hot season.

The Burmese Monastery also put me closer to the candle and the Cafe Om, where I'd been taking lunch and dinner since Tsering had threatened to leave. My friend Junya, a monk I'd met a few months earlier in Minnesota, had appeared in the market one day, also, and so I wanted to be nearer to him, not so far out of town at the Root. Junya's job was to attend to a tulku, a high reincarnate lama, so he was busy most of the day, but if I stayed a little closer, we could work out times to get away for a cup of tea or a walk now and then.

On one of those breaks, Junya insisted on arranging with the manager of the Gelug monastery to give me an extra blanket. I came to appreciate this in the cold nights. "You have a cough, Steve," he told me. "You must be careful or you will become too sick."

I fell into an easy routine of visiting the Cafe Om to eat and see friends, going to the Bodhi Tree to read and meditate, spending at least part of each afternoon talking to Lama Tsega over cookies and tea, and then spending at least part of each evening sitting under the tree and watching the flickering of hundreds of candles in the darkness.

Each morning as I left the Burmese monastery, passing through the gate that I'd gone through on my very first day in Buddha Gaya, Macbeth's three hags waited. They squatted just outside the gates. Each had her battered aluminum bowl held out for money and/or food.

"Saaab," they moaned. "Saab. Namaste, saab."

Sometimes I gave them a little loose change. More often not. They were dressed in filthy rags. One had crooked, gap teeth.  Another had fluffy white hair. Each was very dark, and I thought I had seen the fluffy haired one in the muddy harijan village I passed through each afternoon to go to the Sakya monastery. I thought I had seen her with the crowds of beggars outside the Stupa, too, and late at night inside the gate there at the Burmese Monastery. One peripatetic beggar woman. Her head was often half covered in a dirty, white shawl. Her large breasts tugged at the buttons of her blouse, exposing dark, wrinkled skin between the fasteners. But maybe I was seeing two or three different women.

Usually after my morning's meditation under the Bodhi Tree, I'd relax at Cafe Om for lunch, where I might meet up with a few people from the Root. Thomas was often there, and we would sit together and talk. He had slowly taken to me and I to him. Audrey threw her arms around me each time we met. 

Afterward, I'd go buy a box of orange flavored milk biscuits and cycle over for tea with Lama Tsega. Our conversations were always fit in between his duties as construction supervisor. One afternoon we might talk as he hacked away at a bamboo pole with a huge meat cleaver from the kitchen or drove 16 penny nails with a tack hammer. He's a strong, energetic guy, and I only saw him miss with that tiny hammer twice, a good thing since my fingers were usually close by keeping the bamboo steady. 

His subject of the day might be Andrew Cohen, the California meditation teacher who claimed to be enlightened. He seemed genuinely confused by Cohen. 

"I don't understand what he's doing. He meditated for a couple of years and then, bang, he says he's enlightened. Maybe he had an experience. I don't know. We all ask him questions, but his answers don't make a lot of sense. None of our best teachers, the lamas who have been meditating for years and years and years, will talk to him anymore. He keeps trying, but he can't get in to see any of them. I don't understand what he's doing. I think he's just making money."

At another point he might focus on the Root Institute: "The Root Institute must be making a lot of money?"

In fact, I thought it spread itself too thin to make much money. That day, I introduced my problem with reincarnation to change the subject away from what was beginning to look like institutional rivalry.

Our better conversations were Buddhist philosophy and my metaphorical understanding of reincarnation. "I resist the idea [of reincarnation]. I see so many Westerners come along and see something exotic and say, 'That's neat! I'll believe that,' and I am just not one of these people. On the other hand, I have no problem philosophically believing that we come out of some interconnected pool of life (like a plant coming out of the ground), that we grow into maturity, age, get sick, and die, going back into that pool of life that we came from. Then we are reborn in some other form. I have no problem with that. It makes perfect sense to me, though I have no direct evidence that it actually happens.

"But can we really point to this person and say that he used to be that person, like you Tibetans do with your reincarnate lamas? This seems a bit farfetched."

He was sympathetic but told stories about high lamas like His Holiness Sakya Trizen giving letters with very precise directions for finding the reincarnated lama. "There is no question of reincarnation," he said. "That is out there. No question. But identifying just the right person is more difficult."

The high lamas who go out in search of reincarnations, he explained, look for a child who shows special promise to fulfill the sometimes arduous duties of the high office. They want a child who is bright and who has good heart. Then he will be educated to the duties of the office, cultivated.

Others he feels definitely are the continuations of those bodhisattvas. Further, the high lamas who go out looking for the reincarnated child have supernatural powers and make good choices. There is always talk, maybe too much talk sometimes, about the powers that high lamas and reincarnates have, but on the other hand, he reasoned, something must be going on for this talk to continue.

Lama Tsega's great uncle was a high lama who, after a scandal involving a nun, went into retreat for the last years of his life. Then he got sick and asked for all his family to gather round. They talked, reminisced, I suppose, had a good time, and people generally forgot for a time that he was sick. Then he told them that he wanted to do some meditation and that they should go outside and enjoy the beautiful countryside of the mountain where he had lived in retreat. They did as he asked, taking walks in the woods, sitting on rocks and under trees, and generally exploring this beautiful area. Then one of the older members of the family had an intuition that the uncle was more ill than they had thought. They all rushed back to his hermitage, where they found him in his formal robes sitting in the lotus position dead.

"These high lamas have powers the rest of us don't understand," he said as he reached for another cookie.

It was a good story, but it didn't seem to answer any question about reincarnation. So his uncle had been in tune with his body and knew when he was going to die? Extraordinary, but it doesn't tell us anything about rebirth.

After we had settled comfortably in chairs in the shade on another afternoon, I asked Lama Tsega about my metaphorical understanding of reincarnation. "In a life," I began, "we live many lives, meaning that we undergo many changes, are born and, in a sense, die many times. Each of these changes is a result of our actions, the karma that we create for ourselves in this life. It doesn't seem to me that this metaphorical understanding of reincarnation has to exclude the other, more literal understanding that we spoke of earlier."

He thought for a long time, munching on another cookie. "No, I don't think it will harm your practice," he finally said, though with a hint of disappointment. "No, this is not a bad way of looking at it."

We can understand all this in metaphorical or psychological terms, like Michael's bell, but, then too, maybe there is something about that bell that is beyond reason.

…………..

It seemed necessary to ask questions.

That night I dreamed that one of my sisters called me at the Root Institute and told me to wait while she put our mother on the line. Then Mom got on the line all weepy and said that her doctor told her she was going to die. At first I naturally thought this meant that something had given way and was no longer responding to any sort of treatment and that death was therefore expected in a week or, at the outside, a month. But through the course of the conversation it became clear to me that he had been telling her that we all die, and that this had come as a shock to her. 

"I just have one final wish," she wept into the phone. "I want to be buried by Houdini." 

Of course I assured her that we'd get Houdini to do it, though making this assurance made me uneasy, since I knew even in the dream that Houdini has been dead a very long time indeed, and I doubt he did funerals anyway. We kept on talking and it slowly dawned on me that she wanted the great escape artist to do the funeral in case her doctor had his facts wrong. I gently tried to explain that he was right, that we all die, but I heard myself increasingly using Tibetan Buddhist philosophy to explain death and to ease her anxiety. But the longer we talked the more unsure I felt about my own belief and understanding in any of these ideas. My philosophical explanation of reincarnation does nothing to give comfort at death, so I felt odd and foolish as I tried telling her about rebirth. I could use such an explanation to guide my life and to enhance my human potential, but could I or anyone else take real comfort or ultimate refuge in understanding reincarnation in psychological/metaphorical terms alone?

On another afternoon, veering toward looking like my teacher, Lama Tsega wanted to talk to me about some general principles of ritual. "If you are an ignorant, uneducated person and you are making an offering, everything will be all right if you have faith and if you have respect. It is easier to become too proud making a big offering. The bigger the offering, the greater the chance of becoming prideful and losing the merit. But a simple person making even the smallest offering with an open heart, with faith and respect, can gain enough merit to become enlightened.

"There is a story," he continued, "about a poor beggar woman who wanted to make an offering to the Buddha, but she didn't have the money to buy the butter lamp to do it.  So the day that the Buddha was coming and people were going to make their offerings, she went out and begged. All she earned begging that day was one rupee and 50 paise, and with this, with everything she had earned that day, she bought a simple butter lamp and butter. She had nothing to eat, but she had a pure heart.

"And Buddha saw this and kept her lamp burning long after the others had gone out.

"So you can earn great merit if you make even a tiny offering with a pure heart."

I asked about the meaning of merit. "Is making an offering or doing a visualization like exercising our bodies?  If we practice compassion and open-heartedness and keep practicing them, then we will get better and that getting better, that making the Buddha's thinking more natural to our own ways of thinking, is the merit?"

"Yes, that makes sense," he answered quietly. "The storing up of good qualities is the merit."

So making offerings in the correct frame of mind is a practice like meditating or doing prostrations. But clearly, if my understanding of it is correct, the idea is widely abused. "Just think," the stoned American had gushed, "how much merit we could accumulate if we really knew what the words of the puja actually meant!"

So if you believe in it as a sort of magical power, and only that, it becomes a seduction into greed. My own experience of making Ani-la's offering is instructive. I became prideful of my ability to go inside the Bodhi Tree area and I enjoyed having people come and see me meditating there. I had stopped thinking of the candle as an offering, as a practice in generosity and open-heartedness, and had started thinking of it as an excuse to get into Buddhism's holiest place. Taking care of the candle, then flat out bakhsheeshing the beejeebers out of the attendants, was the key that opened the gate. As my own greed grew, so did theirs, and I saw myself reflected in their come-ons—"Brother," with hands in prayer over the sternum. "I have to rush home. My wife is very sick. I must buy her medicine."

I worried over the candle, hurried up there in the mornings, made sure to slip the watchman a few rupees at closing time.  I pointed it out to friends who came by. "That's my candle," I'd gloat. "It's been burning for days!"

The candle did seem to show me my unflattering personal traits. Merit is only what you internalize of your training and that you put to use for the sake of all other sentient beings. When you dedicate the merits of a meditation or an offering, you are saying that you want all that you come into contact with to resonate with the good qualities you have cultivated. Not with the hang-ups and angers and delusions you carry around. Let those go. React with the store of positive, creative, connected qualities.

Like most steps on the spiritual path, of course, this was easier to understand and articulate than to actually do.

The evening I was meeting my new soon-to-be-a-monk friend, I wandered around thinking these thoughts. I’m sure, remembering that evening from my present distance these years later, that it must all sound like Buddha goo to my readers. Maybe it did to me, too, because, in fact, switching gears to come up with an American nickname for him was like opening the windows and letting in the fresh air. I decided to call him "Bud." It seemed about right, being a diminutive with the sort of class connotations that seemed to fit him. I also liked the little twist of humor I felt in it.

After checking the candle and meditating, I started around the Stupa and had just reached the first of the lotus footprints when Bud and two of his friends slid through the stone fence behind me.

"Tashi!" I heard. "Did you bring the pictures?"

For just an instant, maybe because of the persistence of the demand for photos, I felt menace as the three of them bore down on me. But that lifted as I looked closer at his two companions. They were brothers, about six years apart, the older boy being 20, and they dressed in the neat slacks and sports shirts worn by nearly all clean-cut Tibetan youngsters. And both wore neat haircuts and loafers. They smiled and extended their hands to shake as we were introduced. Well brought up boys.

As I showed the pictures, Bud gave my wife Linda the Tibetan name Dolma and my friends Joe and Mary became Norbu and Tsering respectively.

"You are like my father," Bud told me at one point. "Both no hair but beards. Both funny and you are both writers."

"Is your father here?" I asked. Somehow I had it in my mind that the whole family would come to see a son enter the monkhood.

"Only me," he said. "Alone."

"Are you guys going to be there?" I asked, but they had to leave before the ceremony. They had only met Bud a day or two earlier and all their plans were made. We talked and then I had to go to a different appointment.

"But why do you need to go?" Bud asked. "Stay."

There was absolutely nothing menacing about him now. He was taking the biggest step of his life and he was frightened.

"I have to go see the lama at the Sakya monastery," I told him, and, as I'd known he would, he understood. "We'll find each other later, though."

………….

My cough was bothering me and I thought I'd buy some medicine and mineral water at the pharmacist shop near the post office after checking the poste restante cubby hole. But the cubby hole contained nothing for me. Later on I walked up the hill to the Cafe Om to find dinner.

As I pulled back the cloth over the tent's doorway, I saw Tsering taking an order from Alice, her husband Bryce, and Thomas at a table in the back. I had to sit with them or appear rude. Alice was more talkative and bright than usual, and, as always, well turned out and saying the upbeat, kind-sounding word. Full of energy. Bruce looked as sad-faced and phlegmatic as ever. I had thought at first I would like and get to know him. But his silence, which I at first attributed to sickness, his silence now struck me as either dullness or a feeling of moral superiority, maybe both.  Maybe he simply didn’t want to be there and was bored with all of us.  

Anyhow, I sat down with them and tried being cheerful.  Bruce made no effort at conversation and Alice only nodded and sniffed each time I interjected an observation, usually facetious, I admit, into her intense conversation with Thomas. Part of the problem was that she only had intense conversations, and she seemed to have no decent sense of humor. I couldn't warm her up to me. 

As I got my egg chow mein with chopsticks, Alice stopped me and said that they only wash the sticks in cold water and that there was hepatitis going around. "You may want to use a fork," she said.

"Ah, thanks." I set the sticks aside and looked toward the sideboard for silverware.

"You can use them," she allowed of the sticks, then before going on ignoring me, "I just thought you'd want the information."

No, I thought, her hostility is not in my head. It's real. I felt my anger rising.

"Now what choice would you think I'd make with that information?" I asked slowly. "I've had hepatitis and it's not pleasant." But she was already not listening. She had rushed back to her conversation with Thomas, who watched me quietly as he listened to her. Bruce sat looking at me through the bleary eyes of a basset hound.

She had some kind of thing about me, I told myself, not for the first time. But so far I'd reacted in my old ways. After all, I had some kind of thing about her, too. Like I had for the English woman and her son. They looked and acted like people who had long, long ago ignored me, had perhaps inadvertently insulted me. Oh, yes, I had a thing about them all, and they knew it. After all, she's the bright, pretty woman everybody, including me, wants to be liked by and paid attention to by. With other people I might have become combative, but she frightened me. What was worst in me resonated to her.

A few other Root people joined us and, as I was eating my chow mein, Bruce ordered quiche and there were some jokes about real men not eating quiche.

"Real men," said Alice, "eat chow mein with a fork."

Open hostility for the most mysterious reasons. I couldn't believe either of our reactions to each other. I watched my breath, practicing letting go of my thoughts as I'd been trying to learn to do in meditation. Let go of the thoughts. Let go of the anger.

But I had to bug out early. Rage. And rage, of course, is the bottled up, impotent anger of the weak ready to unload itself upon something even weaker at the slightest provocation. Her anger had joined my own, closed up inside me, and the two of them gorged themselves on my spirit. As I walked into the lights of the bazaar, I tried to remember an instructive story about the Buddha. An angry man once came to him and started abusing him.

"You are a fake," the man told him. "A humbug and a windbag. You tell people how to live and yet you haven't got a clue yourself."

But the Buddha had in his awakening opened up inside and could see all of what he contained. He could count, as one Tibetan lama was to tell me, all the leaves on a tree or all the grains of sand in the Ganges at a single glance. He knew his own goodness and truth.

"What would happen," the Buddha asked the man, "if you gave a gift to someone who refused to accept it? Who would the gift then belong to?"

"Well, the one who was trying to give it, of course," the man shot back. "Any nitwit knows that."

"That's right," said the Buddha. "And it's the same with your anger. I don't accept it as my own, so it is still yours."

The Buddha won him over by refusing to join the fight, and the man became a follower. The man's anger found nothing with which to resonate inside the Buddha. But so often when sneaky people try to belittle us in subtle ways we want to show them and the world that we understand the message and that, in our greater honesty and virtue, we are now sending an unambiguous one right, smack dab back at them, aimed for between the eyes. It's a great, prideful, angry temptation in a world where we can easily justify anger. It's my greatest temptation and downfall.

Much of my own informal training has been to not let any of this stuff get by me. I intercept and destroy those missiles as they come in. My innards are a hard shell. My senses are radar. My wit, fighter scramblers. But the fight always leaves me angry and alone. I always feel diminished and defeated by it. The strategy does not work and I take the stomach medicine to prove it. In fact, I reminded myself walking away that night, it was just such a reaction to the world that had sent me into my slow motion nervous breakdown and that had brought me to India.

My anger, even when expressed at the person or people involved, is not effective. So when I get a little further away from things I collapse inside myself. Going on is no use. I want to give up, start over at something altogether different, start a new career, maybe travel to the other side of the world.

The trick that night in Buddha Gaya was to learn how to not accept the gift of anger, to react the way the Buddha did to his angry listener, to know myself well enough to be kind. "Think of your mind as a loving mother," said my first meditation teacher. A loving mother is unconditional; she has faith in her child even when others don't. Alice was a chance for me to remember this. My attitude toward her, not her attitude toward me, stood in the way of my reconnecting. She was a teaching. If I could let go of my anger, I could begin my pilgrimage. 

But, oh, God, how I hated her for reminding me that I didn’t believe I belonged.

…………….

I was sitting at the table near the door of the Cafe Om talking to Tsering and coughing my guts out when Bud and the older of the two brothers, Tenzin, came in. Something had shifted. Bud spoke to me through Tenzin.

"Tashi," he said as they came in, but that was about all he said directly. The rest of the time he spoke in Tibetan to Tenzin, who put it into English. Not that there was anything hostile going on. If anything, communication between us was warmer. I put my arm around him and told him he could be my son. "You are younger than my son," I said, turning my head to cough away from him. He reminded me, through Tenzin, that I was like his father. He toyed with a large piece of burgundy cloth, part of the robe he would begin wearing at sunrise the next day.

"Why don't you speak English to me tonight?" I kept asking him. "Your English was perfectly good last time."

But he gave no clear answer. My head had begun feeling woozy and I couldn't stop coughing. A couple of times I got up to go outside to spit the green gunk from my throat. 

"I think it is time for me to go," I said finally.

Tenzin offered to walk me back to the Burmese Vihar, where he was staying also. The three of us went outside. The sky was a velvet pierced by the silver tips of stars. Stray dogs lay as clumps of shadows around us. Bud was only feet away from the side entrance to the monastery.

"Come on," he said, leading us in the wrong direction. "Let's ramble."

English. But it was a bad idea for me. I only had on flipflops and my feet are bad and the way he wanted to go was rough. Besides, I felt one of my get-me-to-a-bathroom episodes coming on. "It's a bad idea for me," I said. "You come this way with us."

Which he did. I joked that this was Bud's bachelor party, that tomorrow he was getting married when they made him a monk. We wandered up through the lights of the bazaar and Bud bought us each bags of popcorn. I worried about my filling, which had lately been coming loose, but ate mine anyway. Then we had tea. None of us seemed to want it. We were stalling. As Tenzin paid for the tea, Bud launched out toward the road and found a rickshaw. I followed but hung back, waiting for Tenzin. We stopped and shook hands with Bud and wished him luck and I told him I would find him in his robes the next day. 

"Next time you see me," he said as he climbed atop the rickshaw, "I will be monk." His face fell as he realized what he'd said. "I will be monk all my life, I think."

Yes, and if he were reincarnated, if reincarnation really did exist, the renunciation that a monk lives would make the next life better than this one. If not . . .

The rickshaw took him away. I don't know where to.