Breakfast With Buddha

by Roland Merullo

  “Not easy.”

  He made a one-syllable laugh, something without much humor in it. “This is not a world for easy.”

  “All right. Have I used up my questions for the day?”

  “No.”

  “Okay then, why are there evil people in the world? Why are there people who rape and kill and abuse and steal from other people and fly jetliners into buildings? Why is it all set up this way?”

  He lifted his hands, as I’d seen him do before, and let them fall back to the tops of his thighs. “Every day,” he said, “many times every day, you can go one way or the other way. You can go with anger or not go. Go with greed or not go. Go with hate or not go. Go with eating too much or sexing too much, or not go. Two ways.”

  “The digital universe.”

  “Sorry?”

  “Nothing. I interrupted. Go on.”

  “These feel like small things, small choices, but every day, across one life, across many, many lives, if you choose the good way, again and again and again, in what you are thinking and what you are doing, if you choose to go away from anger not toward, away from hate, not toward, away from armor, not toward, away from falseness, not toward . . . then you become this person like you—good, not stealing, not hurting. Some people made good choices in their past lives and so, like you, they are given maybe an easy life for this time. Not the perfect life, not the life with no trouble or pain in it at all, but a life where it is easier to turn the mind to the spiritual part. You, my friend, you have work that you like not hate, a wife that you love and live with by peace, children that are good not bad. Is this true?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you have a small quiet space in your mind from that. And that quiet space gives you a chance to see deep, deep into the world if you want to. Another choice, yes? You can take that choice and look deep, or no. But if a person goes the other way, little choice and little choice toward the bad and the selfish, life after life, hour after hour, then this spirit does not have the good incarnation, so does not have the quiet space. Sometimes that person becomes the one who kills, who rapes, who hurts. Other times, in this life, they maybe make a big change to the good. Do you see?”

  “But why must the bad hurt the good? Why did you go to prison, for instance? Why did they kill Jesus, and Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, and so on?”

  “I don’t know the why. I know the is. This is the world and always the world. Always, since when the Bible was made, since when the ancient stories in all religion were made. Inside the big world that you cannot control, you have the small world of you that you can control. In that small world, if you look, you can see whether to go this way toward good, or the other way toward bad.”

  “Or remain neutral.”

  “Yes, but if you see good and don’t go, that is not neutral. To me, to my lineage, it is not the case that God is up in the sky looking at you and judging you. It is more easy than that, and more hard. God is God, the Divine Intelligence is the Divine Intelligence, the One With No Name is the One With No Name. But God is just giving out love and giving out love and giving out love, like a . . . like a very nice music always playing. If you hurt people you make yourself deaf to this music, that’s all. Not God’s fault, your fault. Not God’s judgment, your choice, you see? You make yourself no chance to feel God, or the moon going up, or any good love. Life after life you make yourself no chance, and then one life maybe you start to change, and be a little quiet inside, and listen to this music that is always there—for you, for the bad people, always there. Even the most bad people live in their trouble for thousands of lives, and then, one moment,” he clapped his hands together hard, “they chose a different way. They go this way and not that way. One choice, another choice. They start to come on the long trip home.”

  FORTY-ONE

  An hour or so into the afternoon we drove into the quiet little metropolis of Grand Rapids, Minnesota—birthplace of Judy Garland—and pulled into a parking space in front of a Chinese restaurant called the Hong Kong Garden. I had been pondering Rinpoche’s words for several hours by then, and, when I saw that Ms. Garland had grown up in this humble city, I found myself thinking about Oz, that kingdom of illusion, that place where you came to understand that you’d had everything you needed all along—good witches to call on in an emergency, all the courage, brains, and heart that was necessary in order to manage your way through this life. Oz was that place where the God you were going to for help could not help you, not really. All he could do was turn your eyes to what you already were and ask you to see it differently. Oz was that dreamlike place you returned from and couldn’t tell anyone in your old life about, because none of them believed it existed.

  And the Hong Kong Garden was that place where you sought refuge from the ordinariness of northern plains, small-city cuisine.

  A decent General Tso’s for me. Tea and a little white rice and broccoli for the Good Warlock of the North. A couple of mammoth souls in there for neighbors, taking full advantage of the all-you-can-eat buffet, shoveling the food down as if they’d been fasting all week. I tried calling Jeannie and Natasha—big Judy G. fans—on their respective cell phones, but neither of them answered. I missed my daughter so much that I called back a second time just to hear her recorded voice saying her own name.

  Not long after we left Grand Rapids, we turned onto Highway 6 and entered the Chippewa National Forest. There were pine woods on both sides of the road, and I was still thinking about Rinpoche’s description of the laws of the world, and I was looking, as we went, for a way to show him another slice of America, to fulfill my half of the deal. During lunch, I had tried to tell him about Judy Garland and the Wizard, what an important part of my childhood—of so many American childhoods—that film had been. But I’d found it difficult to describe the plot adequately and impossible to convey the full impact of the songs and characters. He listened pleasantly enough, blinking, sipping his tea, but it was probably a little bit like him talking to me about the print in the Nepali restaurant in Madison: Some kinds of spiritual lessons just do not move well across cultural boundaries.

  Heading southwest now, still on Route 6, I saw a flat concrete bridge ahead of us and a sign by the side of the road: MISSISSIPPI RIVER. “Something you should see,” I said, and pulled to a stop in the breakdown lane. We walked along that lane until we were standing at about the midpoint of the bridge. Below us curled the mighty Mississippi, not so mighty at that point, only about seventy yards wide and clean as glass. Stretching east and west from either bank was a buffer of northwoods grassland, greens and yellows shimmering in the hot sun, the water itself as smooth and silvery-blue as a ribbon of polished steel. “This is the most famous American river,” I told him. “It starts just north of here and goes for, I don’t know, maybe fifteen hundred miles. To New Orleans. To the Gulf of Mexico. All kinds of books have been written about it. There’s a lot of symbolic importance to it because it more or less cuts the country in half, east and west, and stretches almost all the way from north to south.”

  As I was saying this I was standing with one foot on the concrete edge of the bridge, looking down, hands on the guardrail. I saw something—a duck it appeared to be—swimming a little ways below the surface of the water, but there was a particular gracefulness to the way this duck moved. In a moment it surfaced, midriver, maybe thirty yards from us. I could see the intricate black-and-white pattern of its back, and its sharp beak. Soon it was turning this way and that and letting out an unmistakable cry, a quick, high-pitched laughing noise that echoed over the grassland and into the trees beyond. “Look!” I said. “Listen.” And I told Rinpoche the bird’s name.

  The solitary creature went on and on, giving out its trilling, happy cry as if calling to a mate still in the nest. I opened my cell phone and dialed home, and this time Jeannie answered. I said, “Listen, Hon,” and held the phone up so she could hear. Rinpoche realized who was on the other end of the line and, after a few seconds, motioned for me to gi
ve him the phone. I handed it over.

  “Mrs. Otto!” he said excitedly. “Did you hear the fine noise? Yes, yes, the laughing bird. Is very nice! We are here, your good husband and me, and we are hearing this bird! Yes, he is fine, your husband. He misses you. He loves you. I am showing him the meditation wife, does that make you okay? Good! I will show you, too, yes! When are you coming? When are the children coming? I know I will see you, yes? Here is Mr. Otto, my friend. Here is the sound of the wound!”

  “Loon, he means,” I said, when I’d taken back the phone. “We’re standing on a little bridge over the Mississippi. It’s seventy yards wide here.”

  “He sounds like a sweetheart, your traveling companion.”

  “He is.”

  “And there’s a real live loon?”

  “There is. It’s incredible. A gift.”

  “What’s this about the meditation wife?”

  “Meditation life. L. He sometimes has trouble with that letter when he gets excited. Talking to you excited him, apparently, which is something I can relate to. . . . We’re fine. We were in Duluth this morning and we should be in North Dakota by tomorrow, maybe even the Bismarck Radisson tonight if I push it. Everything all right there? Kids okay?”

  “Anthony made the JV.”

  “Yes!” I shouted, too loud. The loon splashed a slow takeoff and flapped away. “Tell him his dad is on top of the Mississippi River, rooting for him, scaring birds. And Tash?”

  “Two thousand eighty-eight dollars as of last night. She was up before me this morning, if you can believe that. Sitting at the kitchen table, looking at used-car ads in the newspaper.”

  “Make sure to get her something solid,” I said.

  “We’ll wait for you to get home. Hurry safely.”

  “I will. Dickinson tomorrow, I hope. I’ll call tonight, so I can talk to the kids.”

  “Bring home a little Dakota soil for me, would you?”

  “I will.”

  ALL DURING THAT AFTERNOON, Rinpoche did not go anywhere near the subject of the meditation wife. I was coming to understand that this was his teaching method: He’d offer a lesson, usually taken from everyday experience, and then allow time for it to sink in, time for the living of ordinary life, which, after all, was the point and purpose of his teaching. It was as though he sensed that I could not absorb too much in the way of new information in any one day without overloading some circuit. And, after my Oz lecture, I sensed the same about him.

  Once we put the Mississippi behind us, Route 6 shunted us off onto Route 200, which ran westward past a series of lakes and rivers—Big Sand Lake, Mable Lake, and the Boy River. We stopped at one of them, Leech Lake, because the day was warm and clear and there was a small beach right by the highway where we could see a few people swimming.

  Pulled the car in. Got out. Stretched. Went into the woods to change. Rinpoche in a bathing suit was a sight to see, especially since he was wearing some kind of Speedo outfit that really did not leave much to the imagination. I suppose some store clerk in Duluth had been having a good time at his expense, selling the monk a pale blue swimsuit an Olympian might use to minimize aquatic friction but that was really not quite appropriate for a man his size on a Minnesota public beach. For the sake of the sensibilities of the family nearby I tried to hurry him into the water, running in and diving and telling him how wonderful it was—clean, warm, not too deep. All that was true enough, but Rinpoche was a bit timid about his entry and preferred to spend ten minutes doing elaborate yoga poses on the shore, working up a sweat, while the other swimmers could not keep from gawking.

  At last he took a clumsy running start, made it in about calf-deep, and went flying forward on his face in a calamitous belly flop. He managed a few furious strokes there in the shallows (I figured it was the way I’d swim, too, if I’d grown up in a place where the river water never got above forty-eight degrees), then flipped over on his back and started laughing. He had a wonderful laugh, as I’ve said, but it was especially wonderful at that moment, with his toes and brown face sticking up above the calm blue surface and the laughter echoing against the birch trees on the bank as if he were part human and part loon. “Fun! Fun!” he started to sing after a while, still floating. “American fun!” The family moved a ways on down the beach.

  We splashed around for half an hour, then came out, dried off, and took turns changing discreetly with a towel and the open car doors blocking the family’s view. “Like it?” I asked.

  “Kisses. Bohling. Golf. Outside swimming. Now America is my favorite place, and you are my favorite friend. Thank you, Otto!”

  “Not a problem.”

  “Thank you for showing me fun.”

  “I have the feeling you’ve had a little fun before you met me.”

  “Yes, little bit,” he said, and he laughed some more, and it occurred to me that the modern spiritual leaders of my tradition were always somber, self-important men, thickly coated in others’ idea of who they were supposed to be. Rinpoche seemed free of that. It made me think of a tiny news report I’d read somewhere—browsing the Times, probably, with a cup of coffee and a sandwich on the table and a hundred other things on my mind. It had been an article about Pope John Paul, when he was still young, before illness had taken over his life. Apparently, he’d sneaked away from the Vatican for a day or two, in disguise maybe, I don’t recall, and taken a couple of runs down a ski slope in the Italian Alps.

  ONLY A LITTLE WAYS farther down that same highway, we came upon the Northern Lights Casino, built, more or less, in the shape of an Ojibway lodge. More American fun. I explained to Rinpoche what it was and how it had come to be, and he said he was interested in trying it. We went into the windowless world of ringing bells, flashing lights, and Minnesota retirees sitting dull-faced in front of slot machines, making compensatory payments, a quarter at a time, to the people whose land had been appropriated by their ancestors, so many years ago. It was a treat, I have to say, to sit beside the holy man and watch him watching the spinning dials. He was not a conservative gambler. He would put in four one-dollar tokens—the maximum bet—and push the SPIN button and, when he won, when four or ten or twenty coins clanked down into the bright chrome tray, he’d clap his hands once, fill up his plastic bucket, and start feeding them in again without delay.

  “We can cash in our winnings and leave, you know,” I told him once, when he’d just made a 7-7-7 score and had a pile of dollar tokens in front of him.

  “Not yet, not yet.”

  After half an hour, Rinpoche was still holding his own, focused on the spinning dial as if the salvation of the troubled modern world depended on it. And then, as so often happens, the machine started to exact its payment for earlier kindnesses. Rinpoche’s white plastic bucket went from full, to three-quarters full, to half full, and still he plowed on, feeding and feeding. I’d sworn to myself to keep to a twenty-dollar limit, and had gone through those coins in ten minutes. So I just stood by his shoulder and watched. “It’s fixed, you know. Rigged,” I said, when I saw that his bucket was now only a quarter full. “Keep playing and eventually you’ll lose everything. It’s mathematical. Eventually the machine always wins.”

  But he was a man of faith, not math, and paid me no heed. He had sixteen coins left. Twelve. Eight. He fed the last four in deliberately, as if the problem was that he’d been pushing them into the slot too quickly, not giving the machine enough time to absorb the full measure of his goodness, his earnestness, the blessing of his presence. The wheels spun, the symbols appeared, and they demonstrated convincingly that the machine had no real appreciation for the blessing of his presence. Rinpoche sat there a moment in shock, letting the fact of his losses sink in, and then he was reaching into his robe for his wad of money, already looking around for the place where you changed cash into tokens. I took him firmly by the arm and lifted him out of his seat. “Let’s go,” I said.

  “Not yet, not yet, Otto.”

  “We’re going.” I kept hold of his a
rm and marched him sternly toward the exit, a scene the likes of which I’m sure the security people had encountered once or twice before.

  It was always a surprise, going through a casino door and back out into natural light. The casino designers’ seemingly innocent, self-contained, artificial playground had cast some kind of magic spell, so much so that, even after only forty-five minutes, it was the bright, relatively quiet and plain outside world that seemed false. And boring. No promise of free money there on the tar streets. No ringing bells when the fates turned their smile upon you.

  “I was winning the big prize almost,” Rinpoche said, when we were in the parking lot outside the front door.

  I led him a safe distance away, toward the car. It’s a fool’s gambit, I started to say, a trick. I’m surprised you fell for it. But then I saw his face. The muscles near his mouth were twitching. He was struggling to keep the big smile from breaking through.

  “Otto, you saved me,” he said, dramatically.

  “You could be on stage, you know, Rinpoche. You could be in films.”

  “Next time I pushed the button,” he started to smile, “big prize would be!”

  “Right, big prize. You are what we used to call in North Dakota a piece of work.”

  “Piss of work?”

  “Right. Exactly. Get in the car, your highness.”

  All the way out of the parking lot, and for another mile or two along Route 200, my friend the Rinpoche had his chuckle going. It rose up through his chest, bubbles of joy, and spilled out across the car’s leather dash. I was thinking about what the massage therapist in Duluth had said. A reincarnation of the Buddha, or Jesus, or Moses, he was supposed to be, this kooky character. I was thinking that, maybe, if you saw the creatures and objects around you as pieces of a sacred whole, everything temporary, just playing out a role in a dream, then things would be funny a lot of the time, kadeidoscopic, comically absurd.