Kinley placed the plant on the wooden desk by the small window. “Old buildings in Bhutan used ladders between floors because they took up less space than true steps. When our people began constructing staircases, they built them like the ladders to which they were accustomed, steep and narrow.”
“How did you carry me up here?”
“You were unconscious.” Kinley chuckled.
Something on the fern caught Kinley’s eye. He bent close to the plant, tilting his head. He then extended his hand, gently touching one of the leaves. Next, Kinley brought his fingers to his face, rotating them as he studied the curiosity. After a minute, he walked to the window, extended his hand, and waved it slowly. Once his ritual was complete, he turned to Grant. “Ladybug,” he said.
“Oh.” Grant shrugged. He watched the monk pinch off a couple of dead leaves from the fern and then turn the pot so that the fullest side faced the bed.
“Making lists again?” Kinley asked.
Grant placed the laptop back on the table. He knew he shouldn’t take the bait, but he said, “I can’t just lie here all day long and watch my breath.” Grant admitted to himself that he’d been enjoying learning the tenets of Buddhism in much greater depth than he’d studied at Emory. In addition to filling the long days, his lessons with Kinley had stimulated his insatiable intellectual curiosity. But he found many of the meditation exercises Kinley suggested pointless. “I mean, I have to do something,” he said, a sentiment he’d shared more than a few times.
“What is it you have to do?”
“Well, my research for one thing.” He resisted adding that his research was directly related to the Issa legend, which Kinley seemed to be keeping from him, but then he suspected that Kinley knew exactly what he was talking about.
“And when you achieve that goal, what next?”
“Simple. I’ll set new ones, just larger. Publish books. Tenure.”
“This will bring you happiness?”
“Without our goals and the plans to reach them, we would still be chasing antelope across the savannah.” Reaching forward, he tucked a blanket underneath his cast to elevate his leg. It was starting to throb.
“You are in pain today.”
“I do have a broken leg that is set in this nineteenth-century-looking cast.” Grant knew Kinley well enough by now to know he could poke fun at the rudimentary cast that made his leg look like a log swaddled in tattered sheets.
But rather than smile, Kinley narrowed his eyes and said, “I wasn’t speaking of your leg.”
Grant remained silent.
Kinley paced the room, his hands clasped behind his back. He moved not with the nervous energy characteristic of pacing, but with grace, like a dancer gliding across the floor. “One day a student came to his master and asked, ‘When the leaves fall from the tree, what then?’ The master replied, ‘The body is exposed in the autumn wind.’”
Grant knew better by now than to try to dissuade Kinley from delivering one of his koans. He sighed deeply and turned to Kinley.
“Do I bore you?” Kinley asked.
“Look, I’ve been lying here for weeks.”
“You are a superb student, Grant, but your problem is not that you are missing information. You don’t need to be taught more. You need to be taught less. You don’t need to think more, you need to learn to think less.”
“Pretty anti-intellectual of you. Not what I’d expect from an Oxford grad.”
“Buddhism is not just about learning the teachings of the Buddha. It’s not about believing in a doctrine. The Chinese have a saying—”
“I’m sure they do,” Grant quipped, picking at the plaster on his cast.
Kinley chuckled and continued, “The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon.”
Grant began to respond and then closed his mouth. After a moment of contemplation, he said, “The teachings and doctrine are not the ultimate truth, they are just a sign pointing in the direction of the truth?”
Kinley smiled. “You want to know more about Issa, correct?”
Grant’s heart rate accelerated, but he kept his face passive.
“Issa too struggled with the teachings he learned on his journey through the Himalayas. What he learned differed greatly from what he’d been taught as a child in his homeland. Although his sharp mind quickly comprehended the essence of the teachings, it was only after he practiced what he learned for many months that he reached enlightenment.”
Kinley paused when he reached the desk by the window, staring at the fern. “One particular story ... but my memory is fuzzy on the details. Over twenty years have passed since I read the manuscripts.”
“Manuscripts!” The word escaped Grant’s mouth in a gasp. “You’ve seen writings about Issa?”
“We have several.”
“Here in the monastery?”
An electricity originating in Grant’s core spread through his body. He felt it send pins and needles to his hands and feet.
The monk nodded. Grant thought he detected a spark in his dark eyes. Did his new friend understand the magnitude of what he claimed? Grant longed to talk to Kinley about his theories, but he wasn’t ready yet. Instead, he indulged himself by playing out the scenario of how he’d be received back home. All the problems he’d faced since his undergrad years. He could regain the respect of the board, which had admitted him only because of Billingsly. This was the kind of discovery that happened once a generation. He would have his pick at tenure opportunities—Harvard, Princeton, Yale.
The thoughts swirled in Grant’s mind like a tornado picking up debris. If Kinley was right, then Grant’s theory about Nicholas Notovitch’s discovery a hundred and twenty years ago would be proved. Grant’s professors at Emory, even Billingsly, all regarded Issa as just one more in a series of quaint legends, but something about the story had always resonated with Grant, something about the teenager searching for answers that eluded him. Grant sided with the common people he encountered in India who believed in the popular legend of Issa over the majority of Western scholars who rejected it. Grant thought back to his own upbringing in his fundamentalist household: the teachings that other religions were the dark work of Satan, that three-quarters of the world’s population was going to hell because they didn’t “believe in Jesus”—the “my God versus yours” attitude that made Christianity seem like more of an exclusive country club than a religion based on love and tolerance. Now Grant had an opportunity to show the ultimate fallacy of this line of thinking. He would uncover the mystery that would show not just a compatibility among the world’s great religions, but a direct historical link.
Then another thought stopped him. He sat up straighter. Kinley referred to manuscripts in the plural, but Nicholas Notovitch wrote about a single text he’d seen at the Himis monastery, a large book written in Tibetan with an ornate cover.
Trying to keep his voice even, Grant asked, “May I see the manuscripts?”
Kinley shook his head. “Not possible. They are located in our library, on the top floor of the utse tower. Even if you could climb the steps, which you can’t in your condition, the library is off limits to outsiders.”
Grant felt as if his mind were moving in fast forward and the rest of the world was in super-slow motion. Even Kinley’s words seemed to be drawn out too long. How could he be this close and not see the texts?
“But—”
A knock on the door interrupted his protest. Kinley opened it. “We will talk about this subject another time. Now we must eat.” Jigme entered as silently as ever, carrying a wooden tray with three steaming bowls of food and cups of tea.
Grant stared at the two monks. Kinley couldn’t just drop a revelation like that on him and then not allow him to see the evidence. I’ve got to convince him to allow me access, he thought. But watching the elder monk pass the bowls from Jigme’s tray, Grant knew that the discussion had ended. As much as he needed to see the Issa writings, he feared appearing too desperate. Surely over time he would b
e able to reason with a man like Kinley—an Oxford grad who valued the Western world enough to have pursued his education at one of the greatest universities—that there was value in helping Grant complete his dissertation at the very least. Not to mention the impact it would have on the masses.
Grant took a deep breath and said, “Three o’clock already? I’m starved. I don’t know how you guys eat just two meals a day.” He thought he detected the corners of Kinley’s mouth turn up ever so slightly.
For most meals Grant ate some kind of vegetable—green beans today—smothered in a bland white cheese sauce with a hint of ginger and served over a bed of coarse red rice. Jigme and Kinley ate the same dish, but theirs also contained several bright red peppers that bled into the cream sauce. Only once did Grant make the mistake of tasting one of these peppers in the hopes of adding some flavor to his food. His lips burned for the next half hour.
The three men continued their meal in silence, Grant sitting upright on his bed, while the two monks sat with legs crossed on the stone floor. Grant observed the peculiar way they ate, deliberately chewing each bite like they were grinding wheat into flour. Watching them chew for a full ten minutes after he’d finished, Grant could no longer contain his impatience. “Okay, I get that by living in a monastery you immerse all aspects of your lives in your practice. Mindfulness, right? Everything you do—cleaning, walking, and even eating—you take your time, but doesn’t doing everything so deliberately get old?”
Kinley set his wooden bowl on the floor and answered, “Meditation for us is not just sitting and watching the breath or chanting a mantra.”
Grant picked up his laptop from the side table and set it on his lap. He was in the habit of taking notes whenever Kinley launched into something interesting. The monk continued as Grant opened a blank document and began to type.
“Twenty-five hundred years ago, a young man traveled to Sarnath in India, where he spent several days observing the Buddha and his disciples. Confused about the nature of their practice, the young man approached the Buddha and asked him what exactly it was that the monks practiced. The Buddha smiled at the young man and said, ‘We sit, we walk, and we eat.’ The young man became animated and responded, ‘But Master, everyone sits, walks, and eats!’ To which the Buddha replied, ‘Yes, but when we sit, we know that we are sitting. When we walk, we know that we are walking. When we eat, we know that we are eating.’”
Grant stopped typing. Clever, he thought, but simplistic. “I get it from an intellectual standpoint, but how is that really different from what I just did? I know that I just ate too, only faster.”
Kinley stood, poured two cups of water from a pitcher on the table, and handed one to Grant, keeping the other for himself. “What is water?” he asked, holding up his cup.
The uneven but smooth surface of the tin cup felt cool in Grant’s hand. He glanced at the water inside. “Two hydrogen molecules for every one oxygen.”
“True, but look deeper. What is water?”
Grant raised his cup and made a show of studying it. He’d figured out the monk’s game. He might not agree with the conclusions, but at least he understood. He rattled off, “Water is a liquid now, but it can also change to a gas or a solid. Water doesn’t smell or taste by itself, but it can take on the characteristics of the substances within it, just as it can mold into any shape of container.”
“Yes, but what is water?”
Grant continued without hesitation, “It’s sixty percent of our bodies, and seventy percent of the earth. Water carves canyons, yet sits atop the tallest mountains. It’s the origin of life on earth. Without it, we would all die. But with too much,” Grant said with a sweeping gesture to the cast on his right leg, “we also can die.” He grinned at Kinley, particularly pleased with his last insight.
“Yes, but what is water?”
Grant sighed. He didn’t like being stumped. But what answer did the monk want? He stared at the tin cup for several moments and then closed his eyes. He reviewed the lessons he’d learned over the past three weeks. Kinley always brought the discussions back to the personal, to some internal insight. Then it occurred to him. He was thinking about water in general. Instead, he thought about the specific water in his cup.
He began slowly with his eyes closed, “This water was carried here by Jigme, but it originated in the river outside the dzong.” The same river, he realized, that had caused him to be in that bed drinking the water. “Before that the water was runoff from the mountain snow, and before that it was vapor molecules in a cloud.” He let his mind drift farther back in time, his eyes still closed. “Before the vapor was evaporated into the air by the sun’s energy, those molecules were again water, part of some distant ocean or lake.” He thought back to the many generations of cycles the water he now held in his hand had been through. These molecules had traveled around the world for millions if not billions of years. Then Grant understood. “And when I drink the water, then all of that history, that energy, will become part of me too, just like the food we ate.”
The sound of clapping hands caused him to open his eyes. “Quite impressive. That is looking deeply,” Kinley said. A mischievous smile spread across his face. “But there is still more. What else is water?”
Grant frowned, finally out of ideas.
“Drink.” Kinley motioned to Grant’s cup.
Grant opened his mouth to speak. Kinley cut him off. “No talking. No analyzing. No thinking. Just drink.”
Grant looked from Kinley to Jigme who sat silently with a bemused expression on his face as if he had been through this lesson before himself. He drained his cup. The cool, crisp water flowed over his tongue, leaving a faint metallic flavor from the tin container.
“That is water!” Kinley exclaimed.
Then the monk raised his own cup, as if to toast Grant. Without warning, he tossed his water onto Grant’s head. Wetness ran down his hair and soaked into his shirt.
“Hey, what are you doing?” Grant sputtered.
“And that is water,” Kinley replied.
Grant heard him laughing until his orange robes disappeared at the end of the hall. Jigme gathered the empty dishes with a wide grin on his face and followed his master, leaving Grant wiping the water from his eyes.
CHAPTER 6
EMORY UNIVERSITY ATLANTA, GEORGIA
TIM HUNTLEY FELT the excitement course through his body. His gloved fingertips drummed to an imaginary beat on the steering wheel.
The rebroadcast of Reverend Brady’s sermon crackled over the AM station on the van’s radio: “Yes, my children of New Hope, you, the Believers, will be saved. But do not let down your guard, for Satan is manipulative. Carry the strength of your faith in front of you like a sword against those who blaspheme against the Word!”
Tim checked his rearview mirror and noted the headlights that were still about fifty meters behind him. The reverend’s voice continued over the radio, “In chapter twenty-four of Leviticus, we see the fate of these blasphemers: ‘One who blasphemes the name of the Lord shall be put to death; the whole congregation shall stone the blasphemer. Aliens as well as citizens, when they blaspheme the Name, shall be put to death.’”
Stones. Tim smiled to himself. What would Moses have done with the firepower produced by modern technology? “Aliens as well as citizens,” the Bible said. Tim had heard variations of this sermon many times. His usual thought was which blasphemers should go first? Tonight he knew. Tonight would be the night that he redeemed himself for his past sins. God had so many grand plans for Tim, and this night was just the beginning.
The Army had trained him well. After excelling in the elite combat training he’d received at Ranger school in Fort Benning, his unique intellectual talents were finally noticed and he was selected for INSCOM, the Army Intelligence and Security Command, where he specialized in cyber ops. Tim was a natural with a computer. In another life, he might have been a software mogul, but Tim loved the Army. In the fifteen years he’d spent there, Tim not
only got to direct drones at his nation’s enemies, locate insurgents through their cell phone calls, and hack into enemy computer networks, he’d been born again. His life since his father’s murder had been directionless, but once Tim found God and the Army, his life had purpose. Everything changed again, however, when his career was taken from him.
On this evening, Tim understood that for every setback, God had planned an even greater return.
The hours at the call center job he’d taken when he’d first returned from overseas three years ago had sucked, but the pay was decent. His long-range plans developed slowly, but as they began to crystallize in his mind, he realized that he would need funds to accomplish his goals. He may have left the Army, but he was still a soldier—only now he was working for a higher power than the U.S. government. He was a soldier for God. But then one day, six months into the job, his company announced that their call center was moving to Chennai, India. They offered to retrain many of the employees but told Tim he wasn’t “a good fit going forward.” His penchant for emailing the other employees his political and religious ideology had resulted in more than one reprimand from his manager. He was happy to leave behind the bureaucracy of the call center, not to mention their bullshit sensitivity training classes. Shortsighted idiots, all of them, he remembered.
He had next moved to Birmingham to take a job working in the IT department of the UAB Hospital. That job lasted eight months after similar misunderstandings, plus accusations of missing medications and supplies. But those accusations were never proved.
Tim glanced at the glowing dial of his watch. Just under three hours. Not bad for sticking to the speed limit. The last thing he needed in his moment of glory was for the police to catch him speeding in a stolen van, especially one that contained a two-hundred-gallon plastic tank filled with ANFO in the strippedout rear passenger area. He and Johnny had stolen the black minivan just after midnight from the long-term parking lot of the Birmingham-Shuttlesworth International Airport, driven it to their hunting trailer in the woods in the Sipsey Wilderness Area, removed the rear passenger seats, and then installed the tank. This had taken just under an hour, just as Tim had rehearsed it several times. Tim had been hesitant about including Johnny in his plans, but the simple doofus was good at taking orders. Even better, he was a true believer—a lifelong member of Reverend Brady’s New Hope Church.
The Breath of God Page 5