The Far Shore

by Paul T. Scheuring

  He left the stage to polite applause. Gray sat for a long time in uncertainty. Had this been the point all along? Had he been hoodwinked by the Mahabodhi Society? In his desperation, in his pain, he had seized at the ideal of pilgrimage, the only thing that gave him any sense of hope—though hope was too strong a word. This pursuit, this aspiration to address the overwhelming issue of suffering, had been all-encompassing. And in a sense he had been used. They wanted him to be a blade of grass on this plain, a claim on this territory.

  Incredibly, and unknowingly, because of his desperate embrace of a belief and its promises of deliverance, he’d become a soldier again, the tool of another political movement.

  There were others in the crowd, it turned out, who felt the disaffection he did.

  And it was fortunate, because Gray at that stage was so crestfallen he could feel his will abandoning him. He had come all this way, invested the last of his shattered resolve in this journey. His legs were tired, his back tight, his soul exhausted. There was no glimmering light on the horizon. There was only agenda. And agenda led to division. And division led to suffering.

  He watched as the Mahabodhi Society representatives conducted a mass meditation at the foot of the Bodhi Tree. There were thousands of pilgrims there, their eyes closed, the air filled with that collective nothingness that had before been so beautiful to Gray. But all Gray saw was the Bodhi Tree, which was not the Bodhi Tree, for that would have meant it was two thousand five hundred years old, but instead a new tree birthed from the planting of one of the Bodhi Tree’s original branches. It was not in the end the tree the Buddha found enlightenment under, but it was venerated as such. All Gray saw were the Mahabodhi Society’s representatives soliciting “alms money” from the pilgrims, this ragtag group that had less than nothing, so that the Society might one day gain control of these few acres of sun-scorched plain.

  He was heartbroken. Even the holiest of things could be appropriated, commoditized, rendered divisive, it seemed.

  Most of the other pilgrims seemed untroubled by such considerations. But there was a handful that seemed quietly displeased. They were monks that had come from Burma. But while Gray felt on the verge of collapse, the monks, who were not far from where he sat, simply slung their bags over their shoulders and prepared to start walking home.

  One of them considered Gray, for it was evident he was alone and despondent. He asked Gray in poor English what the source of his disappointment was. Gray told him. The monk agreed that he was equally let down by the politicization of the pilgrimage. Then he shrugged and said, “But it is a thing that has now passed.” And with that, the Burmese monks started to walk off.

  Gray called after them. Asked where they were headed.

  “Home,” they said.

  “To Burma?”

  The monks nodded.

  “But that’s thousands of miles.”

  “We walked that much to get here. Now it will be easier to get home, because we know the way.”

  Gray let them go, managing a weak smile as they departed. Something about them felt right. There was no judgment in them. Despite the terrible letdown of the pilgrimage, their answer was It is a thing that has now passed. As if that were enough. As if it were a thing with a pain that held no purchase. Nor was there, he realized, any hurry in them. No overriding impulse to get somewhere, get beyond something, arrive at definition. It was just part of a continuum of things they were passing equably through.

  Gray found himself hurrying after them. For he knew he had nowhere else to go. He had no money, and the traveling group of pilgrims he had been with was now dissolved, without that unifying purpose of travel. He was alone on the land, with nothing. He caught up to them after a short while, asked them if he could walk with them a bit. If they could teach him about what they knew. There was some sincerity in this request, though at this juncture he was tired of trying to wrest answer from the world. What he really wanted, if only for these passing miles, was company. Company without agenda. He would walk with them until they tired of him, or he of them. Anything was better than his own company at that moment.

  So they walked. Gray took alms with them in the morning, rising at first light, moving through the villages with their alms bowls, accepting whatever was given by the local populations. Sometimes it was a considerable amount of food, other times very little. Every day they did this, moving east back through India, toward what is now modern-day Bangladesh. Gray meditated with the monks during the mornings and evenings, learned to consume all his food before noon, as was consistent with the monks’ practice. An interesting development was taking place in him. He was not actively seeking anything else out—other than company—and he was not particularly interested in delving deeper into Buddhist theory or practice. He had no destination in mind, as he had when he’d set out for Bodh Gaya. He was simply moving with the monks. The days were cyclical, for the most part undifferentiated. In a way, he came to understand, nothing was contextualized. It was just movement, the process of living, of passing time. A respite. Nothing need be dissected or understood. These were quiet days, with little conversation among the monks around the alms bowls, or within his head.

  The monks did not tire of him, nor he of them. They walked together not thinking to ask why they would walk all that way together, but why wouldn’t they walk all that way together? It was a neutral thing, it seemed, their companionship, not subject to scrutiny or judgment. It was just happening, and no one resisted it.

  There came a point, after a number of weeks, once they’d crossed into Bangladesh, that the monks inquired where Gray was ultimately headed. He told them he did not know. They asked him if this was unusual, for an American, a layman, to wander without destination in a foreign country. He said it was, but that the world was broken, and a lot of things were broken, and old rules and norms had been shattered, perhaps forever, by overreach. He was talking about himself mostly, and the monks no doubt knew this.

  They walked for a thousand miles and did not discuss theological or philosophical concepts, and yet Gray was, despite himself, learning. He saw in the monks a decided lack of grasping—for things, for events, for a summative arrival at understanding. He came to understand them as the opposite of what he had always perceived a monk or holy man to be, which was a person of profound depth, of penetrating wisdom. They were simple, almost embarrassingly so, to the point you might call them backward. In this sense, while Gray appreciated their company, which calmed him, he felt separate from them, because he was not simple. There were great labyrinthine complexities in him, if at present in abeyance, that would nevertheless have to be confronted, unwound were there to be a future for him. He sensed it, somewhere in the back of his mind: this was a respite. The road was smooth under their feet now, the trees and hills around them a buffer from the jagged edges of the world and its realities. But those realities were nevertheless there, biding their time unseen. Pain was patient, chaos innate. The twin gods that ruled the world of men.

  A central moment in Gray’s life came around this time. They had forded a river, and in the process, Gray had accidentally sunk into a stretch of mud where, it turned out, a local municipality was dumping its spent motor oil. In no time Gray found himself soaked in a terrible coat of viscous oil and mud. No matter how he tried on the opposite bank, he was unable to get the sludge out of his clothes, which were already at that point approaching threadbare. The monks offered him a stretch of their robes as a replacement. Seeing no other option, Gray took it, abandoning the boots, pants, and shirt that he had worn crisscrossing the continent. He now walked with a wrap of saffron cloth around his waist, barefoot, his feet acclimating to the terrain, building up a sheen of scars and callouses to insulate the flesh from the earth.

  It was not the assumption of the robe, however, that was the central turning point in Gray’s life. It was what the monks said afterward, which in many ways was said in collegial jest.

  Nodding to the robes, one of them said, “You are a
monk now.”

  Gray did not want to be ungrateful. But for the first time in a long time he felt a resistance in him. He did not want to be a monk. He did not want to belong to any construct of ideas. And yet these monks, they had been such silent, dutiful, good-natured companions. He sensed that they wanted him to join them. So, not wishing to dismiss the idea out of hand, for that would be rude, especially gauging by the expectant looks on the monks’ faces, he asked how one went about being a monk, becoming a Buddhist.

  “To be a Buddhist you simply say you accept the dharma, the sangha, and the Buddha,” the monk said.

  “That’s it?” Gray asked, with an incredulous smile.

  “To be a Buddhist, yes. A monk is a bit more.” The monks all laughed.

  Gray smiled; the conversation had been diffused perfectly so that he did not feel like he was ducking the insinuation if he did not directly respond to the monk’s suggestion to join them.

  So, Gray did not answer him.

  He did not in fact ever answer them.

  Not in words, I would argue. But if there is one thing about my teacher, about the man who came to be known as Anagarika Ratha, it is that perhaps he protests too much! For his subsequent history suggests he did make that commitment, if not in that moment, then by walking with the monks the rest of the way to Burma, or if not then, then when he took up residence in the town outside their temple, or if not then, then during any one of those daily meditation sessions he attended regularly at the temple for the ensuing two decades.

  To this day, he steadfastly refuses to be characterized as a Buddhist. He is stubborn in this regard. Perhaps that is why he wears the long, matted hair of the Hindu sadhu. Then again it’s probably because he doesn’t have a razor!

  He has stopped resisting the name Ratha bestowed upon him by the monks and townspeople, if only, he says, because it is “a lost cause” to fight it.

  He has settled into a community, a way of life, that asks little of him as he pursues his contemplative practices. He also serves as the de facto doctor in the community, using the skills he learned in the war to treat the minor, and sometimes not-so-minor, maladies of the population. Again, as in the case of teaching me, this is not a position he sought out, but rather one that was foisted upon him because no one else could do it.

  There was a time, over tea, that he told me, “I am of no value to a sect, and a sect is of no value to me.” I am highly inclined to think that his distrust of isms is because of his experiences in the war, all the damage he saw as a result of ideology. In some ways I also think it may be because he had no family, and felt uneasy in a collective. Perhaps for him it was safer not to belong—not officially—to anything, but rather to exist alongside and parallel to people and groups, as he did to the town and the temple, coexisting and interfacing regularly and earnestly, but without the fetters of expectation, of membership. No one had claim to you, and as such you could map out your own way of being in the world. For Gray such a way of being was a heightened civility at all times—life as he wanted it to be—but just as equally, there was a border to him and his availability. Implicit in his presence was the feeling that this man owed nobody anything, and could retreat as he wished into his private world of contemplation whenever he wanted. This would seem to most a lonely world, I know, but you must understand that there is a certain type that is drawn to monastic life; isolation is not a lonely place, not per se, for one has trained the mind how to inhabit that space, and all sorts of fascinations live within it, some of them harrowing, some of them mundane, some of them ecstatic.

  In that same session over tea, he told me, “I’ve only agreed to teach you because at present I’m the only one who can. And I warn you, I can pass onto you the methods and the process of insight, but I am not to be held up as an example, to be venerated as a teacher. Because, despite my dedicated efforts of the last two decades, I am as equally haunted by the violence of the mind as I was when I started. I have wrestled it into abeyance through meditation and contemplation, but I have not resolved it. It is within me, a reservoir of unplumbed truths that has not yet found expression. I am a dam in some sense, with a fatal, crippling crack in it. The dam will break, and all of what I have been holding back will flood forth, cataracts of pain probably, because there must be a deeper pain there, within which is a deeper and perhaps more fundamental truth—one that must be the true foundation of things, the human mind, my mind at least—for why else do we struggle on the spiritual path, why do we search, if it is not to unseat some deeper unrest that compels us to reach ever further outward, ever further inward? I am amazed by the self, I must say. Some fundamental thing drives us, of such primacy, and we cannot catch a direct glimpse of it. But it must be an unease, for if it was anything otherwise, a calmness, a contentment, we would not search so furiously as a species for an answer to it.”

  It was a candor I appreciated as a student. And it really helped me, once I’d gotten over my naive Orientalism as to what a teacher should be like, to have a teacher that was so accessible in terms of his manias and foibles, his humanity. Sometimes I think that spiritual aspirants are underserved by inaccessible, supposedly “perfect” spiritual masters, who seem to have none of the very human problems they do, and thus represent impossible ideals, spiritual supermen.

  If there is one thing I may say—and Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed may strike me down—there are no spiritual supermen.

  There are only us and our fumbling attempts to find peace…

  XXIV

  She calls Bruce once she is back in cell range.

  Hasn’t wanted to—the whole bit back in Japan sort of monkey-wrenched things—but this demands it.

  He’s scarcely said a word beyond hello and she’s into it.

  She’s talking fast, excited, telling him there’s this monastery and there’s this guy and there’s this book, and she’s got an ironclad lead.

  She’s got a timeline.

  All the way up to 1977, when the book was published.

  They know, they know now, that Gray can be accounted for, that he showed up somewhere in the world, that they’re tracking him forward through time and this thing’s still got legs.

  (You’re talking this fast because you almost don’t want to hear his voice, do you?

  Don’t want to hear any reproach or dismissiveness or any other sort of emotional blow-off, right?

  [Yeah, maybe, but I’m ablaze right now, a juggernaut of intent.

  Alive.

  Willing a version of the world into being.

  Coffee + purpose = magical powers.

  Superheroism.

  Copyright that.])

  Bruce wants to know more and she tells him.

  All of this geared toward going to Burma, next flight out.

  But Bruce is asking the right questions.

  Well, what about since 1977?

  Can the guy tell you what happened to Gray afterward?

  Well, not in the book.

  What about in person, you said you saw him in person.

  He’s supposedly not talking for the next year.

  Bruce lets out an exhale on the other end of the line; it’s filled with a lot of things, most of it incredulity.

  Tell him it’s a matter of life and death.

  I can’t get to him.

  Well, get to him.

  It’s said curtly, like he needs something to move the needle before he gets invested again.

  In the meantime, he says, if you email the name to me, the Anna-garrick-ee one, I can look for it online, see if there are any hits.

  (Good, so he’s not completely out of the boat.

  Half in, half out.)

  So there’s still a chance.

  She finds the number for the bookshop at the monastery, calls.

  The woman answers.

  Lily asks if it’s possible to have a conversation with Bennett Daniels.

  Why, no, I don’t, think, that’s possible, says the woman very slowly and uneasily, like it
’s an utterly foreign thought.

  We couldn’t just, you know, pull him out for a minute?

  It’s a matter of life and death, Lily finds herself saying.

  (You just became Bruce, Lil.

  Bristle-brush mustache and all.)

  Is it?

  Well, no, not in the classic sense; I’m just trying to find his teacher, the one he studied under in Burma.

  He’s my grandfather.

  Oh.

  And there’s a lot of silence on the line.

  Oh.

  It’d really mean a lot to me.

  Well…the woman says.

  She’s so uncomfortable with all of this Lily feels sorry for her.

  Well…I think the only thing I could do, you see, I’m not the abbot or, you know, officially part of the monastery, so I don’t have the right to talk to the monks, but maybe I could pass your message onto the abbot, and he could pass it on to Bennett if he sees fit, and they could decide?

  Anything.

  Okay, I can call you back at this number?