“A circus,” Rinpoche said.
“No, golf. Miniature golf. It’s for kids mostly.”
“I see the adults, too.”
“Yeah, some adults, but mostly for kids. We can try it after dinner if you want.”
“Try it now,” he said.
I was very hungry. My shoulders and thighs ached. “It’s really crowded now,” I said. “Look at the line of people waiting on the first hole.”
“Now we should try it,” he said, and he put a hand on my shoulder and looked into my eyes as if spying out the little whining man there who’d been imagining his steak and asparagus for two hundred miles and had to have it NOW! “What you say?”
“I say: After is better. But if you want to play now, well, let’s give it a shot.”
“Shot,” he said, with a big smile. Even with the hungry voice calling out its interior complaints, chastising me, lecturing me, mocking me, upset at the Rinpoche for his games, even with all that, it was impossible not to like the man.
Once we’d paid our small tariff (Rinpoche’s treat) and joined the line waiting to tee off, we found ourselves standing next to a middle-aged couple dressed in casual summer clothes.
“Aha, we have the possibility of making a foursome with a man of the cloth,” the male half of this couple remarked to his wife as we took our place just behind them. “Would you join us? Do you mind?”
“Happy to,” I said. “I’m Otto Ringling, and this is my friend, Volya Rinpoche.”
“Ah, Ringling,” the man joked. “And Volya Trapeze, how are you? This is my better half, Eveline, and I’m Matthew Fritton. We’re caught here in line like the rest of the proletariat and would be happy to have your company. Monks, are you? Tibetans?”
“Rinpoche’s the monk. I’m just chauffeuring him around.”
“Giving a talk at the university on the hill, is he?” Matthew asked.
“Not that I know of.”
Matthew and his wife turned to see how the line was moving. We were two or three groups from the first hole. They shuffled up another yard or so and turned back to us.
“We’re both professors,” Eveline said. “English,” she pointed to herself. “And philosophy,” to Matthew.
Rinpoche was smiling and nodding at them, as was his custom. When there was a break in the introductions he said, “Is furniture golf American fun?”
“Beg pardon?”
“Miniature,” I said. “Miniature golf, not furniture golf.”
“A lot of fun,” Eveline said. “Matthew takes it a tad overly seriously—look, he’s brought his own two-hundred-dollar putter—but for the rest of us, it’s fun.”
“Ah, marriage,” Matthew countered, putting his arm around his wife’s shoulders and giving her an ironic squeeze. He bent down and kissed the top of her head. “And what religion do you profess, sir, if I might ask? Buddhism, is it? The philosophy of the great Gotama? Many lives that lead us to the blessed nothingness, is that right?”
Rinpoche was smiling up at him, a small smile, a curious smile. “Almost,” he said. “Almost right. I am a Rinpoche. I sit. Sometimes I talk. And what is your work?”
“Well, Eveline has just told you, so this must be a Zen question. If you work at the university and you fall over in your office and no one is there to actually hear you, do you make a sound?”
Eveline made a small laugh at this, a nervous giggle. But the joke struck me as slightly off key, almost as if Matthew was assuming a defensive posture without realizing it, and then trying to coat his defenses in clever humor. I caught a whiff of gunpowder from the academic battlefields. A few years earlier, I had been asked to teach a course at Columbia University, just one course, one term, as an adjunct, as someone who knew the world of publishing firsthand. I’d made some friends there and liked the students quite well. But I’d also encountered people like this uneasy fellow in the Hawaiian shirt and toothy smile. In the faculty lounge over coffee you’d greet them with some pleasant, innocuous remark like, “Nice day.” And it would be as if you’d sent a lob over the net. Instead of volleying it back, they’d smash it, or spin it, or slice it, say something like, “Well, ‘nice,’ I don’t know, not nice, exactly, more like decent, or cosi-cosi, mezza-mezza. Seminice would actually be more accurate, wouldn’t you say?” It was all a joke of sorts, but the joke had nails and pins and poison in it.
“No, I didn’t understand,” Rinpoche said. “Sorry. For me, you talk very fast.”
“We teach,” Eveline told him. “There is a large university here, in Duluth, actually. I teach English and Matthew teaches philosophy.”
“Ah, very good. English I need a teacher for. And philosophy, very good. Many ideas about living, yes?”
“Thousands.”
“And it helps you live, yes?”
The line moved up another group. The Frittons shuffled another yard away from us; we closed the gap. Matthew’s hands twittered on the handle of his expensive putter. “Yes,” he said. “It does. I find it a wonderful exercise to ponder the wisdom of the ages, yes, I do.”
“Good, very good,” Rinpoche said, and he reached out to pat Matthew on the shoulder but then pulled his hand back, as if he’d thought better of the idea, and folded his arms beneath his robe.
“And you,” Matthew asked, “do you find your almost-Buddhism helpful in living? Does it enable you, as they say, to just drink a cup of tea when you are drinking a cup of tea?”
“It helps me miniature golf.”
“Really? You’re proficient then?”
“What is this proficient?” Rinpoche turned to me.
“Good at it,” I said. “Talented.”
“An aficionado, are you?” Matthew pressed on. I had the feeling he couldn’t help himself.
“Honey, these aren’t words he understands, you can see that.”
“I thought he might intuit,” Matthew said.
And at that I could not stop myself from saying, “He speaks eleven languages.”
Matthew drew his head back in surprise, actual or feigned, I could not tell. “Really. Say something, then, in Italian, or Russian, or Greek. Or are they languages none of us might know, your eleven?”
Rinpoche looked at him for a long moment, until the silence grew awkward around us, and then he said, “Kindness is one language I know.” And he spoke the phrase kindly, too, as if it were simply a statement of fact.
Matthew did not take it that way. “Am I being unkind? Mea culpa, as they say in Latin. Forgive me, Rinpoche. I don’t mean it personally, really. It’s just that I find the whole Buddhist, or almost Buddhist philosophy patently absurd. If nothingness is the point, why bother? If we must strain, struggle, and contemplate our thought processes in this life with the goal of the obliteration of our own ego, our self, well, it hardly seems worth the trouble to me, though I suspect you’d disagree.”
I thought Rinpoche would say then that he was Sufi, or Catholic. I thought he might ask the Frittons if they’d ever seen anyone at the moment of death, or if they could sit still for two hours every day watching their brains work, or go three years without speaking. Instead, he said, “Buddhism is not something I think you like very much,” another simple statement.
“It’s not a question of like or dislike,” the professor said, taking the lob and smashing it back across the net. “It’s a question of a sound philosophy or some kind of antisolipsistic shoddiness.”
“He wouldn’t know the word, dear.”
“Nonsense, then, some kind of nonsense,” Matthew said.
“Could be nonsense.” Rinpoche put a hand on Matthew’s arm as if to calm him, or to turn him back to facing us. “Could be. How do we test?”
“In our tradition,” Matthew said, “the test for thousands of years has been something we call logic.”
“Ah.”
“And, frankly, I’ve never found Buddhism to be able to pass. No offense, please.”
“You could not offend me.”
“It’s just not
every day you find a Rinpoche out miniature golfing and have the chance to . . . and give him the chance to defend the ideas his religion is founded upon.”
“Not a religion,” Rinpoche said, smiling happily. “Not Buddhism, and not me.”
“Bah, mere semantics.”
Rinpoche turned to me, puzzled, and I said, “Wordplay.”
And Matthew said, “Not exactly.”
By then, thankfully, it was our turn to begin the game. I pointed this out to Matthew and he indicated to his wife that she should be the first to hit. I’d played some miniature golf in my day—on the Cape, when the kids were younger, we’d go out for a game almost every night after supper. But I’d never seen a challenge quite like the one we faced: a long, narrow, green-carpeted track with four, foot-tall humps spaced probably five feet apart. The hole sat between the third and fourth hump. “This one’s a killer,” Eveline said happily. “I should probably just write down a six and pick my ball up.”
Matthew laughed. “No, no, sweet. We count all our strokes in this family.”
“Do you play for money?” I asked.
Matthew swung his eyes to me and there was something pained and terrified in them. “A challenge?”
“No, just a question.”
“Sometimes, yes. Would you like to?”
“Not particularly.”
“I play,” Rinpoche said.
“While you’re practicing your eleven languages, no doubt.”
“Honey!” Eveline interjected. “Why are you being so mean to the man? He’s done nothing to us, and it was you who invited him to join us, after all.”
Matthew seemed surprised and even hurt by this, which surprised me. It occurred to me then that he was partly or mostly unaware of the effect he had on people, of the dark, hidden places his words came from. I could see, in his angular face, something like the expression I’d seen on the features of the nun at Notre Dame, something like the emotion I’d felt in myself during the first few conversations with my traveling pal. Rinpoche’s way of being—his personality or his voice or his face—brought out a kind of terror that lurked inside people like us, thought-full people. The terror had been sleeping peacefully until he showed up with his bald head and maroon robe, his calm demeanor. When it awoke, we had to cover it over as quickly as we could—with piety, with wise remarks, with intellectual superiority.
“What say the Rinpoche and I have a match?” Matthew suggested. Prompted by his wife’s question, he was trying to bring himself back to a tone that sounded less aggressive, and halfway succeeding. “A duel of sorts. We’ll be like Barban and McKisco in Tender Is the Night. Or Bazarov and Uncle Pavel in Fathers and Sons. Do I have my references in line, Eveline?”
“He wouldn’t understand those references, sweetheart.”
Matthew didn’t seem to hear. He focused his wide-set blue eyes on Rinpoche’s face. “What say you, sir? A duel. Western rationalism versus the filly-fally of the East, played out upon the transcendental field of the miniature golf course. The winner gets to ask the loser a koan—that’s fair, isn’t it? And the loser cannot eat his evening meal until the koan is answered to the winner’s satisfaction.”
“Let’s just play a friendly game,” I said.
Rinpoche’s wide face had gone unreadable. I was trying to get his attention, to give him a signal: NO! In case you lose. . . . We have to eat. . . . So don’t! “Yes,” he said, after a moment. “Yes, okay.”
“Aha, excellent. Go ahead, dear, show us how it’s done.”
Eveline took her stance, waved the club awkwardly at her bright yellow ball, and pushed it halfway up the first hill. It rolled back to her feet.
“Honey, come on now.”
She was forcing a smile. She waved at the ball again, harder this time, and it squirted sideways, bounced off the board there, and made it over the first hill. “Now me,” Matthew said. “I’ll give his holiness the benefit of watching my ball fly into the hole.” He bent down over it in imitation of the real golfers I sometimes watched for a few minutes on TV on Sunday afternoons. He gripped and regripped his club, studied the shot, reset his feet twice, and at last made his stroke. The ball climbed over the first, second, and third hills a bit too fast and ended up beyond the fourth hill, far from the hole.
I stood up and made a similar shot, my green ball coming to rest an inch this side of Matthew’s brown one.
It was Rinpoche’s turn. The way he set his ball on the carpet and stood over it reminded me of the way he’d moved at the bowling alley—as if he had absolutely no idea what he was doing and was just trying to mimic what he’d seen. I worried we’d have another confrontation like that, Rinpoche’s ball flying wildly right, into a family of vacationers, Rinpoche chasing after it, more apologies, the match dragging on and on, with Matthew cruising to an easy win and crowing about it, spewing cluster-bomb quips like a sad clown with a grenade launcher. The whole thing would end in disaster: Rinpoche unable to answer the professor’s koan, yours truly unable to eat.
Rinpoche was playing with a pink ball, of course, his favorite color. He made a quick little swing and the ball climbed smoothly over the first hill, then over the second, losing speed and just barely reaching the crest of the third, and then it dropped down in a straight line right into the cup. I let out a shout. A dad on the next hole had been watching and he gave a small ovation. Even Eveline raised her arms above her head for a second.
“Ah, is that good?” Rinpoche inquired.
Eveline and I managed to get the ball into the hole in three hits, but Matthew, wielding what indeed appeared to be an expensive putter, knocked his shots back and forth over the hills, playing more and more poorly as his frustration mounted, trying for casual laughter, as if it didn’t mean anything to him, as if there were no bet, no ego involvement, no attitude. He scored a seven.
From there, the game dragged on with exquisite slowness. We played a hole and waited, played a hole and waited, an awful tension forming between the Frittons and us. Either Rinpoche had played golf before, had a natural aptitude for the game, or, my personal theory, was working some kind of yogic magic, because he made two more holes in one. Matthew was behind by nine strokes at the halfway mark, seven behind with four to play. By then, Eveline had adopted a neutral silence. Matthew made a hole in one, finally, on the last hole, earning himself a free game next time around, and the Rinpoche made an awkward four. Still, the pro from Skovorodino had won the bet.
“So,” Matthew said as we were returning our borrowed putters and he was enclosing his in some kind of protective sleeve, “congratulations to the holy one. And now I shall take my medicine.”
“You’re a good sport, honey,” Eveline said.
“I’m ready to pronounce the correct answer or begin my fast,” Matthew said.
Rinpoche was studying the angular face as if it were a painting. “You want a question?” he asked.
“Yes, a koan.”
“But in my lineage we do not use koans.”
“Make something up then. Surely you have a test for me.”
Rinpoche was nodding. “Yes,” he said. “I do. But you can eat if you don’t answer it. It maybe takes you a little time. I don’t want you not eating. Not eating is very unhealthy in our tradition.” He looked at me and one of his eyes flickered. It might have been taken as a wink. “I have the small question,” he said, turning back to Matthew. “My question is,” he freed his right hand from the cloth of his robe, held it up, and brought the thumb and third finger together in a circle. He held the circle for a moment, then opened his hand. “If I think make a circle and my hand does not, what is happening?”
“I don’t follow.”
“Look, my hand is open now, yes?”
“Yes.”
“But I am thinking to my hand: Make a circle. But it is not making a circle. What is happening?”
Matthew frowned. “That’s obvious. Another part of you is overriding the order. You are thinking, Make a circle, but another part
of you, call it the will, is not going along with the order.”
“Excellent,” Rinpoche said. He reached out and warmly shook the professor’s hand. “You may eat. You and your wife may eat tonight. With us, if you want to. Rinpoche pays. This restaurant right here. We go there now, we’re very hungry. Will you come?”
Eveline was smiling and starting to nod when Matthew cut her off. “Not possible, I’m sorry to say. Other plans, you see. But it was a pleasure, really. I’m sorry if I was a bit competitive. Sports bring that out in me. My apologies.”
“Niente,” the Rinpoche said with a respectful bow, a smile, a friendly squeeze of Matthew’s forearm. “Nichevo.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
I can tell you that the wood-grilled prime New York strip steak served at the Boathouse Restaurant on Barker’s Island was one of the finest pieces of meat I have ever had the pleasure of putting into my mouth—and that, for a North Dakota boy, is saying something. Rinpoche contented himself with a fillet of whitefish, caught in the big lake just to our north, and watched with evident pleasure as I made my way through an appetizer of lobster, oyster, zucchini, and hazelnut tartlet in a champagne sauce; a superb salad of mixed greens with herbs and buttermilk dressing; and then the steak, which arrived with roasted shallots, fingerling potatoes, asparagus, and marrow sauce. All this was accompanied by two glasses of cabernet. After my long fast, this was such a satisfying meal that I did not even order dessert, just a cup of coffee. Rinpoche had tea. We sat there contentedly in the start of a long northern dusk.
“You’ve played miniature golf before, haven’t you?” I said, when the hot drinks had been served and sipped.
“In Europe,” he said, “at my center, I have a very rich student, and this man sometimes takes me to play golf. Big golf. On his very nice course.”
“Somehow I can’t picture it.”
Breakfast With Buddha Page 21