“I invented a stick that makes fire instantly,” I said. “I could teach—”
Gaspar glared at me and held up the finger again to poke my words out of the air. “Sit,” he said. “Don’t talk. Don’t wait.”
He heated water in a copper pot until it boiled, then poured it over some tea leaves in an earthenware bowl. He set two small cups on the table, then proceeded to pour tea from the bowl.
“Hey, doofus!” I yelled. “You’re spilling the fucking tea!”
Gaspar smiled and set the bowl down on the table.
“How can I give you tea if your cup is already full?”
“Huh?” I said eloquently. Parables were never my strong suit. If you want to say something, say it. So, of course, Joshua and Buddhists were the perfect people to hang out with, straight talkers that they were.
Gaspar poured himself some tea, then took a deep breath and closed his eyes. After perhaps a whole minute passed, he opened them again. “If you already know everything, then how will I be able to teach you? You must empty your cup before I can give you tea.”
“Why didn’t you say so?” I grabbed my cup, tossed the tea out the same window I’d tossed Gaspar’s stick, then plopped the cup back on the table. “I’m ready,” I said.
“Go to the temple and sit,” Gaspar said.
No tea? He was obviously still not happy about my almost-threat on his life. I backed out of the door bowing (a courtesy Joy had taught me).
“One more thing,” Gaspar said. I stopped and waited. “Number Seven said that you would not live through the night. Number Eight agreed. How is it that you are not only alive, but unhurt?”
I thought about it for a second before I answered, something I seldom do, then I said, “Perhaps those monks value their own opinions too highly. I can only hope that they have not corrupted anyone else’s thinking.”
“Go sit,” Gaspar said.
Sitting was what we did. To learn to sit, to be still and hear the music of the universe, was why we had come halfway around the world, evidently. To let go of ego, not individuality, but that which distinguishes us from all other beings. “When you sit, sit. When you breathe, breathe. When you eat, eat,” Gaspar would say, meaning that every bit of our being was to be in the moment, completely aware of the now, no past, no future, nothing dividing us from everything that is.
It’s hard for me, a Jew, to stay in the moment. Without the past, where is the guilt? And without the future, where is the dread? And without guilt and dread, who am I?
“See your skin as what connects you to the universe, not what separates you from it,” Gaspar told me, trying to teach me the essence of what enlightenment meant, while admitting that it was not something that could be taught. Method he could teach. Gaspar could sit.
The legend went (I pieced it together from bits dropped by the master and his monks) that Gaspar had built the monastery as a place to sit. Many years ago he had come to China from India, where he had been born a prince, to teach the emperor and his court the true meaning of Buddhism, which had been lost in years of dogma and overinterpretation of scripture.
Upon arriving, the emperor asked Gaspar, “What have I attained for all of my good deeds?”
“Nothing,” said Gaspar.
The emperor was aghast, thinking now that he had been generous to his people all these years for nothing.
He said, “Well then, what is the essence of Buddhism?”
“Vast amphibians,” said Gaspar.
The emperor had Gaspar thrown from the temple, at which time the young monk decided two things; one, that he would have a better answer the next time he was asked the question, and two, that he’d better learn to speak better Chinese before he talked to anyone of importance. He’d meant to say, “Vast emptiness,” but he’d gotten the words wrong.
The legend went on to say that Gaspar then came to the cave where the monastery was now built and sat down to meditate, determined to stay there until enlightenment came to him. Nine years later, he came down from the mountain, and the people of the village were waiting for him with food and gifts.
“Master, we seek your most holy guidance, what can you tell us?” they cried.
“I really have to pee,” said the monk. And with that all of the villagers knew that he had indeed achieved the mind of all Buddhas, or “no mind,” as we called it.
The villagers begged Gaspar to stay with them, and they helped him build the monastery at the site of the very cave where he had achieved his enlightenment. During the construction, the villagers were attacked many times by vicious bandits, and although he believed that no being should be killed, he also felt that these people should have a way to defend themselves, so he meditated on the subject until he devised a method of self-defense based on various movements he learned from the yogis in his native India, which he taught to the villagers, then to each of the monks as they joined the monastery. He called this discipline kung fu, which translates, “method by which short bald guys may kick the bejeezus out of you.”
Our training in kung fu began with the hopping posts. After breakfast and morning meditation, Number Three Monk, who seemed to be the oldest of the monks, led us to the monastery courtyard where we found a stack of posts, perhaps two feet long and about a span’s width in diameter. He had us set the posts on end in a straight line, about a half a stride away from each other. Then he told us to hop up on one of the posts and balance there. After both of us spent most of the morning picking ourselves up off the rough stone paving, we each found ourselves standing on one foot on the end of a pole.
“Now what?” I asked.
“Now nothing,” Number Three said. “Just stand.”
So we stood. For hours. The sun crossed the sky and my legs and back began to ache and we fell again and again only to have Number Three bark at us and tell us to jump back up on the post. When darkness began to fall and we both had stood for several hours without falling, Number Three said, “Now hop to the next post.”
I heard Joshua sigh heavily. I looked at the line of posts and could see the pain that lay ahead if we were going to have to hop this whole gauntlet. Joshua was next to me at the end of the line, so he would have to hop to the post I was standing on. Not only would I have to jump to the next post and land without falling, but I would have to make sure that my take-off didn’t knock over the post I was leaving.
“Now!” said Number Three.
I leapt and missed the landing. The post tipped out from under me and I hit the stone headfirst, sending a white flash before my eyes and a bolt of fire down my neck. Before I could gather my wits Joshua tumbled over on top of me. “Thank you,” he said, grateful to have landed on a soft Jew rather than hard flagstone.
“Back up,” Number Three said.
We set up our posts again, then hopped up on them again. This time both of us made it on the first try. Then we waited for the command to take the next leap. The moon rose high and full and we both stared down the row of poles, wondering how long it would take us before we could hop the whole row, wondering how long Number Three would make us stay there, thinking about the story of how Gaspar had sat for nine years. I couldn’t remember ever having felt so much pain, which is saying something if you’ve been yak-stomped. I was trying to imagine just how much fatigue and thirst I could bear before I fell when Number Three said, “Enough. Go sleep.”
“That’s it?” Joshua asked, as he hopped off his post and winced upon landing. “Why did we set up twenty posts if we were only going to use three?”
“Why were you thinking of twenty when you can only stand on one?” answered Three.
“I have to pee,” I said.
“Exactly,” said the monk.
So there you have it: Buddhism.
Each day we went to the courtyard and arranged the posts differently, randomly. Number Three added posts of different heights and diameters. Sometimes we had to hop from one post to the other as quickly as possible, other times we stood in one place for h
ours, ready to move in an instant, should Number Three command it. The point, it seemed, was that we could not anticipate anything, nor could we develop a rhythm to the exercise. We were forced to be ready to move in any direction, without forethought. Number Three called this controlled spontaneity, and for the first six months in the monastery we spent as much time atop the posts as we did in sitting meditation. Joshua took to the kung fu training immediately, as he did to the meditation. I was, as the Buddhists say, more dense.
In addition to the normal duties of tending the monastery, our gardens, and milking the yak (mercifully, a task I was never assigned), every ten days or so a group of six monks would go to the village with their bowls and collect alms from the villagers, usually rice and tea, sometimes dark sauces, yak butter, or cheese, and on rare occasions cotton fabric, from which new robes would be made. For the first year Joshua and I were not allowed to leave the monastery at all, but I started to notice a pattern of strange behavior. After each trip to the village for alms, four or five monks would disappear into the mountains for several days. Nothing was ever said of it, either when they left or when they returned, but it seemed that there was some sort of rotation, with each monk only leaving every third or fourth time, with the exception of Gaspar, who left more often.
Finally I worked up the courage to ask Gaspar what was going on and he said, “It is a special meditation. You are not ready. Go sit.”
Gaspar’s answer to most of my questions was “Go sit,” and my resentment meant that I wasn’t losing the attachment to my ego, and therefore I wasn’t going anywhere in my meditation. Joshua, on the other hand, seemed completely at peace with what we were doing. He could sit for hours, not moving, and then perform the exercise on the posts as if he’d spent an hour limbering up.
“How do you do it?” I asked him. “How do you think of nothing and not fall asleep?” That had been one of the major barriers to my enlightenment. If I sat still for too long, I fell asleep, and evidently, the sound of snoring echoing through the temple disturbed the meditations of the other monks. The recommended cure for this condition was to drink huge quantities of green tea, which did, indeed, keep me alert, but also replaced my “no mind” state with constant thoughts of my bladder. In fact, in less than a year, I attained total bladder conciousness. Joshua, on the other hand, was able to completely let go of his ego, as he had been instructed. It was in our ninth month at the monastery, in the midst of the most bitter winter I can even imagine, when Joshua, having let go of all constructions of self and vanity, became invisible.
Chapter Eighteen
I have been out among you, eating and talking and walking and walking and walking, for hours without having to turn because of a wall in my way. The angel woke me this morning with a new set of clothes, strange to the feel but familiar to the sight (from television). Jeans, sweatshirt, and sneakers, as well as some socks and boxer shorts.
“Put these on. I’m taking you out for a walk,” said Raziel.
“As if I were a dog,” I said.
“Exactly as if you were a dog.”
The angel was also wearing modern American garb, and although he was still strikingly handsome, he looked so uncomfortable that the clothes might have been held to his body with flaming spikes.
“Where are we going?”
“I told you, out.”
“Where did you get the clothes?”
“I called down and Jesus brought them up. There is a clothing store in the hotel. Come now.”
Raziel closed the door behind us and put the room key in his jeans pocket with the money. I wondered if he’d ever had pockets before. I wouldn’t have thought to use them. I didn’t say a word as we rode the elevator down to the lobby and made our way out the front doors. I didn’t want to ruin it, to say something that would bring the angel to his senses. The noise in the street was glorious: the cars, the jackhammers, the insane people babbling to themselves. The light! The smells! I felt as if I must have been in shock when we first traveled here from Jerusalem. I didn’t remember it being so vivid.
I started to skip down the street and the angel caught me by the shoulder; his fingers dug into my muscles like talons. “You know that you can’t get away, that if you run I can catch you and snap your legs so you will never run again. You know that if you should escape even for a few minutes, you cannot hide from me. You know that I can find you, as I once found everyone of your kind? You know these things?”
“Yes, let go of me. Let’s walk.”
“I hate walking. Have you ever seen an eagle look at a pigeon? That’s how I feel about you and your walking.”
I should point out, I suppose, what Raziel was talking about when he said that he once found everyone of my kind. It seems that he did a stint, centuries ago, as the Angel of Death, but was relieved of his duties because he was not particularly good at them. He admits that he’s a sucker for a hard-luck story (perhaps that explains his fascination with soap operas). Anyway, when you read in the Torah about Noah living to be nine hundred and Moses living to be a hundred and forty, well, guess who led the chorus line in the “Off This Mortal Coil” shuffle? That’s where he got the black-winged aspect that I’ve talked about before. Even though they fired him, they let him keep the outfit. (Can you believe that Noah was able to postpone death for eight hundred years by telling the angel that he was behind in his paperwork? Would that Raziel could be that incompetent at his current task.)
“Look, Raziel! Pizza!” I pointed to a sign. “Buy us pizza!”
He took some money out of his pocket and handed it to me. “You do it. You can do it, right?”
“Yes, we had commerce in my time,” I said sarcastically. “We didn’t have pizza, but we had commerce.”
“Good, can you use that machine?” He pointed to a box that held newspapers behind glass.
“If it doesn’t open with that little handle, then no.”
The angel looked perturbed. “How is it that you can receive the gift of tongues and suddenly understand all languages, and there is no gift that can tell you how things work in this time? Tell me that.”
“Look, maybe if you didn’t hog the remote all the time I would learn how to use these things.” I meant that I could have learned more about the outside world from television, but Raziel thought I meant that I needed more practice pushing the channel buttons.
“Knowing how to use the television isn’t enough. You have to know how everything in this world works.” And with that the angel turned and stared through the window of the pizza place at the men tossing disks of dough into the air.
“Why, Raziel? Why do I need to know about how this world works? If anything, you’ve tried to keep me from learning anything.”
“Not anymore. Let’s go eat pizza.”
“Raziel?”
He wouldn’t explain any further, but for the rest of the day we wandered the city, spending money, talking to people, learning. In the late afternoon Raziel inquired of a bus driver as to where we might go to meet Spider-Man. I could have gone another two thousand years without seeing the kind of disappointment I saw on Raziel’s face when the bus driver gave his answer. We returned here to the room where Raziel said, “I miss destroying cities full of humans.”
“I know what you mean,” I said, even though it was my best friend who had caused that sort of thing to go out of fashion, and not a moment too soon. But the angel needed to hear it. There’s a difference between bearing false witness and saving someone’s feelings. Even Joshua knew that.
“Joshua, you’re scaring me,” I said, talking to the disembodied voice that floated before me in the temple. “Where are you?”
“I am everywhere and nowhere,” Joshua’s voice said.
“How come your voice is in front of me then?” I didn’t like this at all. Yes, my years with Joshua had jaded me in regard to supernatural experiences, but my meditation hadn’t yet brought me to the place where I wouldn’t react to my friend being invisible.
“I suppose it is the nature of a voice that it must come from somewhere, but only so that it may be let go.”
Gaspar had been sitting in the temple and at the sound of our voices he rose and came over to me. He didn’t appear to be angry, but then, he never did. “Why?” Gaspar said to me, meaning, Why are you talking and disturbing everyone’s meditation with your infernal noise, you barbarian?
“Joshua has attained enlightenment,” I said.
Gaspar said nothing, meaning, So? That’s the idea, you unworthy spawn of a razor-burned yak. I could tell that’s what he meant by the tone in his voice.
“So he’s invisible.”
“Mu,” Joshua’s voice said. Mu meaning nothing beyond nothingness in Chinese.
In an act of distinctly uncontrolled spontaneity, Gaspar screamed like a little girl and jumped four feet straight in the air. Monks stopped chanting and looked up. “What was that?”
“That’s Joshua.”
“I am free of self, free of ego,” Joshua said. There was a little squeak and then a nasty stench infused us.
I looked at Gaspar and he shook his head. He looked at me and I shrugged.
“Was that you?” Gaspar asked Joshua.
“Me in the sense that I am part of all things, or me in the sense of I am the one who poofed the gefilte gas?” asked Josh.
“The latter,” said Gaspar.
“No,” said Josh.
“You lie,” I said, as amazed at that as I was at the fact that I couldn’t see my friend.
“I should stop talking now. Having a voice separates me from all that is.” With that he was quiet, and Gaspar looked as if he were about to panic.
“Don’t go away, Joshua,” the abbot said. “Stay as you are if you must, but come to the tea chamber at dawn tomorrow.” Gaspar looked to me. “You come too.”
“I have to train on the poles in the morning,” I said.
“You are excused,” Gaspar said. “And if Joshua talks to you anymore tonight, try to persuade him to share our existence.” Then he hurried off in a very unenlightened way.
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