I pulled into the unpaved circular driveway, turned off the engine, and got out. My sister was crying again. I held her against me for a moment, then turned and went up the three wooden steps, across the front porch, used my key in the door, and opened it to a hot, musty hallway and living room and a set of stairs leading up to the place where I’d slept when I had been a boy. A flood of memories washed over me: all those years, all those meals and conversations and arguments and dreams. Rinpoche took my sister’s hand—the first time I’d seen him touch her—and she began leading him through the small downstairs rooms, telling him what they had been used for in those days. We’d had people come in and put everything into boxes, roll up the rugs, pack up the photographs and pots and pans, so the house felt oddly empty and stale to me. Even so, I could almost hear my parents’ voices. My mother singing at the piano on a Saturday night. My father standing at the kitchen sink, remarking on the weather, or thanking his wife for a meal, or expressing his irritation about some chore one of his children had forgotten to do in the barn. For so many years it had seemed like nothing would ever change here: The larger picture, the big questions, had been submerged in an ocean of duties and moods and the mundanities of survival.
A sad wash of thoughts hit me then. I stepped out into the back yard, meandered past the unplanted garden, and found myself going along the path that led to Snake River and what I’d called my “secret hiding place” on a big, flat stone, on the bank, in the cottonwoods.
That stone had been one of the places where I’d worked through my own wondering about the pain and purpose of life. As a teenager I’d hated my parents here, at moments, and hated my sister, and myself. On happier days, I’d brought favorite books here to read in the long summer evenings, and a snapshot of my first girlfriend to stare at in privacy, and the thick letter from the University of North Dakota that I found in the mailbox one day after school.
It was a place where I had always been able to step out of my own daily struggles for a clearer view, and I did that now, again. The core of my life was Jeannie and the children, I knew that. Nothing could change that, I thought, at first. And then I realized that, of course, something would change it: Our family love wasn’t immune to the subversion of time. Something was changing us with each breath, each second. The delusion of youth was that you believed you’d never reach middle age, and the delusion of middle age made you believe you could go on more or less indefinitely the way things were. Yes, the kids would grow up. Yes, you’d grow old and eventually pass away. But, really, there were so many pleasures to be had between now and then, so many tennis games, so many meals, so many weeks at the Cape and the ski lodge, so tremendously much to do before that other stage of life eventually set in.
My mother’s mother, May, had died in one of the upstairs bedrooms of the house that stood only a few hundred feet from my secret hiding place. I was a junior in high school, and on the night she died, I was sitting in the living room with the TV off, a schoolbook in my lap, Seese in her room, and my parents upstairs at the deathbed. “I’m dying! I’m dying!” I heard my grandmother scream, six or eight times, and there was such surprise in her voice, such raw terror. It was an awful thing for a teenager to hear. And yet, at the same time, in my wise-guy, sixteen-year-old, know-everything way, part of me had almost wanted to say, “What did you expect, Grandma? That you’d be exempted?”
What I wanted to take hold of then, sitting on that stone beside the parched streambed, was a dependable method by which a person could lead an ordinary life, cherishing the ordinary comforts and pleasures, fulfilling the ordinary familial and professional duties, and still be able to make the transition from here to who-knew-where when that time came. And make it at peace. I had wanted to find that method, it seemed to me, for many years. In some buried, secret, papered-over place inside myself, from the hour of Grandma May’s death, I had wanted that. And I knew, sitting there, that if I had the courage to reach down beyond all my strategies, my pride, my clever humor, my busyness and wants and penchant for distraction and judgment, my resistance to Cecelia’s odd enthusiasms, and arrive at the place where intuition and intellect joined forces—the place where a person came as close as humanly possible to seeing the world as it was—in that place I would have to admit to myself that Volya Rinpoche knew a secret about living and dying in peace and might be able to pass that secret on to me. On our strange trip, I had caught a glimpse of that truth. I could no longer deny it. The only question now was: What did I intend to do about it?
I remembered, at the start of the trip, saying to my sister that I was a Christian, old-fashioned Protestant stock. How strange then that after all my mental and physical travels I returned, not to those rigid doctrines exactly, but to the stories we’d been raised on, the fieldstone foundation of my faith. Precisely reported or altered by church elders, it did not really matter to me at that moment because every one of those stories circled around essentially the same idea: that there was another dimension to this life as surely as the earth turned; that there were people, there had always been people, who sensed that dimension and made some kind of leap of faith to be in harmony with it. And there were others who did not. It was about choosing between A and B, yes and no, and sometimes those choices were petty, and sometimes they were of enormous importance. It was about cruising along in the comfortable vehicle of old habits and ways, old thought patterns, old conceits, or sensing some new truth and setting off on foot. Sure, there were phonies and charlatans claiming to know The Way. But at some point you had to stop closing yourself off because of them. At some point you had to risk the ridicule of the mob, of your own internalized voices, and try to see clearly what had been set in front of you in this life, and try to act on that as bravely and honestly as you could, no matter what kind of rules you’d previously been living by. At some point before the blue pickup ran the stop sign on an ordinary, cold morning, you’d be asked to believe in some possibility that transcended newspaper headlines and TV shows and the opinions and assumptions of your friends. And how you responded to that would have a greater impact on your life than anything else you’d ever decide to do, or refrain from doing. I could see that. Sitting there on my rock, in my few minutes of North Dakota solitude, I believed I could see that very clearly.
In a little while, Spanakopita Cecelia came and found me. She sat beside me on the rock and told me, as I knew she would, that what she wanted to do was to sell off fifteen hundred acres of our land and have all that money—after taxes and commission—go to my children. The house, and the remaining five hundred acres she wanted to give to Rinpoche, to start his first North American meditation center. He could lease the five hundred acres and probably manage to live on the small income from that and from his talks. He could turn the larger barn into a dormitory and meditation hall and live in the house himself. She hesitated a moment, as if afraid of something, and then, still looking at me, said, “And I want to move back here and live with him as his spiritual wife.” I watched her say that, one strand of her blond hair moving in a tiny breeze.
I didn’t say anything at first. I was studying her. I was thinking about what I had thought about.
She did not take her eyes from my eyes. She said, “Otto, brother, I’d like it if you’d agree to this without having bad feelings. I’d like it if maybe you’d bring Jeannie and Natasha and Anthony out once every year or so, not to meditate or anything but just to be here with us, for Thanksgiving or something. The last thing I’d like, I guess, the most important thing maybe, is for you not to think of me as some kind of nutcake. That would mean more to me than you realize.”
I looked at her. The wild hair framing her extraordinarily beautiful face, the floppy, too colorful dress, the sandals that were supposed to massage your acupuncture points and keep you free of illness. I imagined what our father and mother would have said about her plan and her choice of mates, and then I looked at her in a certain way we’d had of looking at each other when we were kids, and I sai
d, “Nutcake is as nutcake does.” And after a second or so, she laughed her happy, kid’s laugh, and the sound of it went sailing out over the plains.
We stood up then, but before we started back to the house, I said, “Do you have a name for her yet? My niece, I mean.”
She watched me for a breath or two, and then I was enveloped in the hug of hugs, my fingers against the muscles of her back, tears soaking through the shoulder of my shirt to my granite-hard, and still a little sore, trapezius muscles. When she at last released me she stood back and there was printed on her features a mix of bashfulness and pride, and something else, too. “Did he tell you?”
“I intuited. I’ve got kind of a psychic thing going lately.”
She slapped me on the arm.
“I’m happy for you. Jeannie and the kids will be ecstatic.”
“I’m afraid,” she said through a smile.
“Jeannie can talk to you . . . about the delivery and everything, you know. She’s great that way. We can give you a couple of hints about the bringing up.”
“Okay, thanks, but not that. I didn’t mean that. I meant, about . . . who she is supposed to be and everything. I want to do it right, and I’m not sure I’ll be able to.”
Cecelia had crossed then into the territory of past mockeries, the territory of my unbelief. She—a poor psychic from Paterson—had been chosen to bring a kind of savior or teacher or saint into the world. A special being, a distillation of the Great Love—that was the story. I felt words rise into my mouth, and though I did not say them, I knew she could read my face. Truly psychic or not, she was my sister, after all. I struggled just the smallest bit with my old self, and held off for a few seconds, and at last ended up saying, “You’re the perfect person for the job.”
And she smiled, watching me, happy as I’d ever seen her.
“Let’s go in,” I said. “You can call Jeannie and the kids and give them the big news.”
But as we were walking back to the house, something happened inside me; one old thing that had been bending and bending finally broke. Sure, there was a bit of a mocking voice squeaking out its familiar song, but all you had to do, really, was just watch it like you’d watch any other thought float past. Watch life do its thing, watch the end of life do its thing, and try to go toward the good side when you could see it. We went in the back door, through the kitchen, and found Rinpoche sitting there in Pop’s old leather recliner, as if it were some kind of throne. I went part of the way across the room toward him, and then I stopped and got on my knees and bent down and touched my forehead to the old pine boards in front of him and stayed like that for a while with my sister watching. Because that seemed like the right thing to do.
—April 17, 2006–May 24, 2007
AUTHOR’S NOTE
THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION, and all the characters are imaginary. But the story is based on an actual road trip I made from Bronxville, New York, to Dickinson, North Dakota, in the summer of 2006. With a few small exceptions (I don’t think there is an O’Malley Auditorium at Notre Dame, for example), the inns, hotels, restaurants, buildings, and roads are described with as much accuracy as my notes and memory have allowed, though, in many cases, through the very subjective lens of my own opinions and tastes. Although I did transplant one radio broadcast (about Biblical corporal punishment) in place and time, I made nothing up: the words of the radio programs described here are, again, as accurate as my memory and notes permit. The same is true for billboards, landscapes, locations of crosses by the side of the road, and messages posted in front of churches and homes and at the edges of Ohio fields.
Rinpoche’s ideas are drawn from thirty years of reading across the religious, philosophical, and psychological spectrum and meditation retreats at Catholic, Protestant, Buddhist, and nondenominational retreat centers and monasteries. For those interested in these ideas, here, in no particular order, is a sampling of my readings over those three decades: the Bible; the writings of Thomas Merton, especially Zen and the Birds of Appetite, The Wisdom of the Desert, and Asian Journal; Tao Te Ching by Lao Tsu; Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism and Shambala by Chogyam Trungpa; Psychoanalysis and Religion, The Art of Loving, and The Sane Society by Erich Fromm; The Road Less Traveled by Scott Peck; The Way of Perfection by Teresa of Avila; The Real Work by Gary Snyder; When Things Fall Apart and The Wisdom of No Escape by Pema Chodron; The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying by Sogyal Rinpoche (also his lectures and talks in person and on tape); the retreat talks of Seung Sahn; Fire Within by Thomas Dubay; I and Thou by Martin Buber; Saving the Appearances by Owen Barfield; Freedom from the Known by Krishnamurti; What the Buddha Taught by Walpola Rahula; Going to Pieces without Falling Apart and Thoughts Without a Thinker by Mark Epstein; Ordinary People as Monks and Mystics by Marsha Sinetar; Light on Life by B. K. S. Iyengar; the talks of Father Thomas Keating and the retreat talks of Lama Surya Das; The Inner Life by Hazrat Inayat Khan; The Only Dance There Is, Be Here Now, and Grist for the Mill by Ram Dass; The Book of Job in Stephen Mitchell’s translation; The Spiritual Teaching of Ramana Maharshi; The Art of Happiness and talks by the Dalai Lama; The Parables of the Kingdom by C. H. Dodd; The Essential Mystics, edited by Andrew Harvey; The Miracle of Mindfulness and talks by Thich Nhat Hanh; Poetic Vision and the Psychedelic Experience by R. A. Durr; the personal example of my father’s mother; the novels of Dostoevsky, Hesse, and Maugham; the stories of Isaac Babel; the poetry of Walt Whitman and Anna Akhmatova; and the nonfiction of Carlo Levi and James Agee—among many other creative works. My gratitude to all these teachers and writers and to those not named here.
Breakfast with Buddha
A CONVERSATION WITH THE AUTHOR
QUESTIONS AND TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION
A CONVERSATION WITH THE AUTHOR
One gets the impression in reading your novels, especially those dealing with spiritual matters, that you are probably a deeply spiritual person yourself. Is that an accurate description, and if so, are these novels an expression of your beliefs and in some regard autobiographical?
I guess it’s true that I’m a spiritual person, though the word spiritual always calls to mind somebody who is not part of the average, ordinary, everyday world, and that is not the case with me. From childhood I have been interested in what I think of as “the big questions”: Why are we here? Why do we suffer and die? Why does suffering seem to be spread around unevenly? Why does evil exist? Why does beauty exist? Etc., etc. I was brought up in a very devout Catholic family, but I have traveled away from that—while still holding on to a lot of what I got from it. I practice meditation regularly, and have done so for thirty years. I do yoga, though not much better than Otto does. I have read widely across the religious spectrum, as you can see from the list of books in the back of Breakfast with Buddha. I have gone on retreats—Catholic, Christian, nondenominational, Zen, Tibetan Buddhist, Quaker/solitary—but the ideas in the books I write aren’t always my ideas or beliefs. Sometimes they are, but often they are just questions that I want to explore via the characters.
A lot of novels that are spiritual in tone and content tend to be either overtly religious or patently sentimental, but you clearly aim at avoiding either path. Why is that?
Well, it is very dangerous territory for a novelist. I mean, look at all the killing that has been done in the name of religion, all the family fights, divorces, arguments! I think the best way to approach it is with a sense of humor and without trying to convince anyone of anything. I don’t want to be a preacher, and I don’t want my books to seem preachy. I want to entertain, maybe to make people think about things, but I’m not in the enlightenment business. You can spoil a novel very quickly if the reader thinks you have a particular agenda and have built the story around it. I have my ideas and beliefs, but I try to be open to those of others. And I try to find common ground among all the belief systems.
In explaining your belief system, you once made the following statement: “In a mysterious fashion not completely understandable to us,
everything moves the individual toward humility.” Please elaborate.
If you are young, beautiful, strong, and talented and live long enough, all of that will be taken away from you. If you are tremendously rich, you can’t carry your wealth across the threshold of death. Those are facts, not tenets of any religion. For all but the most conceited or desperately insecure, it seems that you get wiser as you age, and that wisdom and humility go hand in hand. I know it isn’t that simple, and I know some older people are far from humble. But it seems to me that life is a kind of boot camp, designed to break you down and build you up in a different way—if you let it. So you lose your ability to sprint a hundred yards, but maybe you gain something more important in the process.
Humor, or at least a humorous approach to life, plays a big part in your novels. Do you include humor in an effort to lighten the approach to serious subjects, or do you actually view the world with the same humor that infuses your work?
Both. Certainly, as I mentioned above, I put humor into these novels intentionally. In my earlier books, which were not so overtly spiritual, there wasn’t nearly as much humor. I like humor in real life, too, though I can’t honestly say I always see the funny side of world events. Some things are sad, or awful, or painful, but in most lives there are these windows of time in which you can laugh, and it seems like a good idea to take advantage of those opportunities when they come along.
It is apparent in this novel, as in your previous one, Golfing with God, and your newest, American Savior, that you feel that organized religion in America, if it has not become corrupt, has at least lost its way. Why do you feel this way?
I want to qualify that. For a lot of people, millions of people, organized religion is a wonderful thing and an important part of their lives. I understand that and respect it, in part because I grew up among people who felt that religion gave their life a good structure. But I also know a large number of people—good, caring, sensitive, compassionate people—for whom organized religion just does not work. The ideas are stale, the language is stale, the rituals do nothing for them and do not seem connected to their everyday lives. What really bothers me, and what I went after in American Savior, is when religion, instead of being something that a person uses to become more loving and considerate, turns into something people use to justify their own hatred or close-mindedness. That tendency has been part of human psychology for thousands of years, but the form it takes here, now, is abhorrent to me.
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