It was good to sit with him. It always added a dimension to my solitary meditations, justifying them in some way, if that makes any sense. It was like lying in the shade on a hot day. Instead of a brain-to-brain connection there was something else going on, heart to heart, maybe. Spirit to spirit, my sister would have said.
After a time the monk, my goofy friend, stirred, made a small grunt, and then stood and started in on yet another version of his bizarre stretching routine. On our first road trip together, years earlier, and during the ensuing visits we’d made to North Dakota and he and Seese and Shelsa had made to Bronxville, I’d come to understand that the great spiritual master was not much for talking. That was strange, because when he gave one of his presentations he could go on glibly for two hours or more. There were even times when it seemed he was purposely pushing the audience toward the limits of its patience. People wanted to eat, to use the toilet, to stand up and move around, and he’d be sitting there, cross-legged usually, words rolling out of him like bowling balls running up the track, one after the next after the next in a low, steady rumble.
But in more ordinary times—at dinner, on a walk, sitting around on our couches at home with a ball game on—he wrapped himself in a gold-trimmed silence. It wasn’t an unfriendly pose. If you spoke to him directly he always made eye contact and replied. Once in a great while he’d initiate the conversation or toss in one of his mini-lessons on the meaning of life. Before I knew him well I thought the long stretches of silence might have something to do with his lack of fluency in English. Now I knew better. It was part and parcel of him, and so he fit into that soundless landscape like one of its own creatures—a basking lizard, a great blue heron flapping across the sky, so high up you couldn’t hear its wings.
Something felt different this time, however. I’d noticed it even at the B and B, on the ride across the Cascades, at lunch in Leavenworth. His silences had—I don’t know what to call it—not an edge exactly but a filigree of discomfort to them. His discomfort. And this from a man who seemed so perfectly comfortable so much of the time.
“What’s wrong?” I asked him when the stretching had settled down to a slow circling of his big head, then a fluttering of his fingers, then—and I knew this was the final exercise—a rolling in and out of his lips and a flexing of the cheek muscles. He finished with a loud exhalation and looked at me from under his thin brows.
“Otto is here,” he said.
“Right. Exactly. I agree completely. Here I am and stop changing the subject. Something’s wrong, I can feel it.”
The big smile flashed and died. My intuitive skills seemed pleasing to him. “Funny word,” he said. “Wrong. Like the sound of a meditation bell at home. Wronggggg. Wronggggg.”
“What is it in Ortyk?”
“Unhal,” he said. “For a small problem, unhal. For the big, unhalHA.”
“So what’s unhal with you?”
“What is?” he said, his voice rising up almost into a falsetto at the end, a squeak.
“Stop it. What’s going on?”
“Going on is two things. One, my friend Otto, my good friend, my brother-and-law, has a sadness on him like the smell from smoke because his wife is not here.”
“Right. And two?”
“Two?” There was a pause, an unnatural pause for him, an unnatural break in eye contact. He contemplated the view upriver for a moment, then the gold-flecked eyes came back. “Rinpoche is having dreams. Three times now.”
“What kind of dreams?”
“Bad kind.”
“Bad in what way? Tell me. Spit it out.”
“Bad,” he said, looking across at the striated cliffs. “I have a dream that people would come to find Shelsa now. Hurt her. Maybe kill.”
Spoken by someone else, anyone else, this would have seemed to me merely the run-of-the-mill parental anxiety dream, as common as diaper rash in a baby. My friend Russ in California confessed to going into his newborn’s room half a dozen times during the night in order to make sure his child was still breathing. I’d done things like that, too, as had Jeannie. The worry changed shape as they grew older—Why were they out so late? Which one of their friends was driving? What kind of people might they be sleeping with at college?—but never disappeared. Worrying was part of the job description. Wanted: person to be father or mother; must be able to work weekends and nights and to worry to the point of physical illness about a wide variety of issues.
But Rinpoche was not an ordinary father. And, if you believed him and my sister (and sometimes I did), Shelsa was not an ordinary child. What if she was the next Dalai Lama or something, and the Chinese politburo was already putting together an assassination team? In the past, I’d known Rinpoche to have prognosticatory powers, but I wouldn’t admit the possibility in this case. I simply could not bear the thought of Shelsa being harmed. I didn’t want to consider it, to let it wander into the field of possibility. So I said, “That’s just a normal parental anxiety dream. I’ve had hundreds of them. I still do.”
Rinpoche pursed his lips and seemed to consider that idea, but I could sense he was unconvinced.
“Why would anyone want to hurt her, anyway?”
“Why? Why they hurt Jesus? Gandhi? Martin King? All the good people like that.”
Is she in that league? I wanted to ask, but I was having the bad chills then, a feeling I’d known with him before. A premonition was working its way into the molecules of air behind my ears and along the back of my neck. I did not like it one bit. In a desperate attempt to shift the subject I said, “I asked you about that years ago, and you never really gave me an answer. Why is it set up that way, the kindest people getting slaughtered? And why didn’t Buddha face hatred like that?”
Rinpoche didn’t take the bait. He wasn’t looking at me now, but had angled his eyes down and away, and there was a dark cloud across his features—utterly unprecedented. “She knew this,” he said, “from before she was born.”
“But who would hurt her? Why?”
He was fingering the hem of his robe, another first, this twitchiness, this lack of physical ease. “Just a dreams, maybe,” he said.
“If someone tries to hurt her, I’ll forgo my oath of nonviolence,” I said. “I’ll buy a gun.”
“Maybe, sure.”
“Really?”
No response. If worry could take physical shape it would have been the shape of his square face then, the eyebrows in a straight line, the skin tugged up slightly over his cheekbones. “Hard life maybe she’ll have now, pretty soon, Otto.”
“Does she know that? I mean, would she be able to sense that?”
“Sure. Have to know.”
“But she seems so happy.”
He made a small, sad chuckle and looked up at me. “She know from before she was born. Her father is sad sometimes. Her mother sometimes wery, wery sad. She . . . not sad. She came to carry the suffering as her job now.”
“But why? She’s. . . I thought these people, I thought she . . . they . . . were beyond suffering in some way.”
Another small, sad laugh. He reached out and clapped a hand onto my left shoulder, and he was strong again, a stone. “Do you know why you make in this life the big spiritual step.”
Spirchal, was the way the word sounded on his lips.
“Not this again.”
“Do you know why you finish your karma and now you are ready?”
“Tell me.”
“Wery easy,” he said. “Otto has many troubles, yes. Eats too much maybe, little bit. Sometimes gets mad. Has the doubt. Yes?”
“Guilty on all counts.”
“But you, my friend, are a wery, wery good father! One maybe the best. Good uncle, too. A man with a wery big heart.”
“I don’t know about that,” I began. I was flattered, naturally, wanting to believe him and seem humble at the same time. For whatever reason or combination of reasons, being a good father had been, to me, far far up on the top shelf of things I cared about in lif
e, so far beyond being a good editor, making money, or seeming like a success, that it could be matched against nothing else. “I’d like to think—”
He squeezed my shoulder hard. “Lissen me,” he said, and his face had taken on a fierce aspect I remembered from other moments akin to this one. “Now is the adding up of your good actions in this life. All the goodness has power with it, see?”
“No.”
He threw back his head like a man laughing, but he didn’t laugh. There was a small smile there, a wrinkle of a smile, almost a wince. “Walk now,” he said, “with me.”
In his tone, in the suggestion, I recognized the start of one of what I thought of as his “mini-lessons.” And I wanted a mini-lesson then. More than anything I wanted some new word, some serving of wisdom to change the way the world seemed to me at that moment. If it really were true that Shelsa was in danger, or would be in danger down the road—and I wasn’t completely convinced—then it was just more evidence of the unfairness of this life. A good woman, a mother, dying at age forty-eight. An innocent girl, hated by “bad men.” Crucifixions, assassinations, bigotry in a thousand reptilian forms. Why didn’t good prevail? Why, if a person did, indeed, accumulate some power from being a good father, a good soul, or a great teacher, why didn’t that protect him or her from the hatred that grew everywhere on this planet like weeds in a hot lake?
We went across the sagebrush plain at the pace of an ant. The path was sandier there, wide enough for two. The air had grown warm. “This,” Rinpoche said, gesturing across the river at the cliffs beyond. “I know how this is made. Rinpoche knows. What is it, the way rocks make? What word is for it?”
“Geology.”
“Nice word.”
“Yes.”
“Rinpoche understands gee-olo-gee. Look,” he said again, swinging an arm out from under the robe and encompassing the cliffs. At three or four points in the thousand-foot façade there were dark horizontal lines, almost as if we were seeing the edge of a road that had been cut there. They were, I guessed, places where the river had stayed at that level for years, perhaps centuries. Or they were horizontal outcroppings that only looked like lines from this angle, strata of denser rock that had partly resisted erosion. “The river cut down through the rock,” Rinpoche said. “All in one big flood. Many years between. Then one big flood again. Like an exploding. Look how slow, Otto! Look how many years. How many you think?”
“A million, maybe. We could look it up.”
“A million! For a long time the river doesn’t cut, and then the explosion comes.”
“I don’t know. I think the river is continually cutting. Maybe a little stronger in spring when the snow melts, but I think it cuts all the time.”
“No, no,” he said, as if I had it all wrong. “Look at the lines and you can see. An explosion. Big cut. Then a thousand years’ rest. Then another one.”
I felt a prickle of irritation then: Rinpoche sounded so certain of his geological theories. Have a little humility, a bad voice said. A spiritual lesson, fine, sure. That’s your area of expertise. But do you have to sound so sure about geology? It was a sour run of unspoken words, probably just my wanting him to be wrong—about the rock formations, about Shelsa.
“Same with us!” he said. “The pain cut us, cut, hurt, then maybe we rest of a times, then an explosion and hurt, yes?”
“Sure.”
“Jeannie, Shelsa. Cut us, cut.”
“Okay.”
“And make us beautiful inside, see?” He swung his arm at the view, which was, in fact, more than beautiful.
“It doesn’t feel that way in the slightest, Rinpoche.”
He laughed in a gentle way. He has dreams, the bad voice went on, visions of his daughter being killed by evil men, and he’s laughing at the pain in the world, saying how it makes one beautiful inside! For the hundredth time I found myself evenly torn between two conclusions: Either he was a fool, living in a fool’s world, not in pain himself and so constitutionally unable to feel the pain of another. Or he was beyond pain, at least in one dimension. It was enough to make you lose faith in him one second and beg him to take you on as a disciple the next. I teetered there between those extremes, watching him, wrestling with myself.
“The hurt is real,” he said. “Wery real.”
I loved him for saying that . . . until he added, “On one level,” and then I momentarily hated him. Or, not hated him, precisely; he was impossible to hate and, in spite of my sharp edges, I am not a hating type of person. Better to say that I resented him, in a guilty way. It was the same guilty resentment the chronically ill might feel for the healthy. You don’t know what this is like, they might think. Sure, you can laugh, you can philosophize, but if you had this pain, this hardship, if it was your wife who died, what would you be doing?
“The two levels of life are both of them wery real,” he said.
“Buddha’s ‘absolute’ and ‘relative’.”
He patted me on the back, though not in a way that made me feel like a particularly successful student. “Words,” he said, dismissively. “The real is past words.”
“Right, but words are all we have to express it.”
A nod on his thick neck, but it was not a gesture of agreement. “Here in this whirl,” he said, smacking himself in the middle of the chest, “we live, yes?”
“Sure.”
“Wery real. The fun is real. The hurt, wery real. Being born and dying, all real.”
“I sense a but coming.”
“But,” he said without irony, “but then every times in a minute—”
“Every now and then, you mean.”
A distracted nod. “Something happens that shows you: Not so real, this life. Or not the only real. Or not the full real. Not the real you thought.”
“But can you trust those moments? Against the mass of so-called realness you’ve lived in day after day, year after year? People hear voices and see the future and commune with the dead, but most of them, maybe all of them, are charlatans, fakes. I’m the Bible’s doubting Thomas. I want evidence, fact. I’m open to the idea of other lives, just not while this one is going on.”
He looked around us, up, sideways, down. At last his eyes settled on a small flowering plant, a spray of yellow blossom on a pale green, spikey stem. Beside it was a stone the size of an egg. He pointed to them with both hands, the way no American would. “The flower now is real, yes?”
“Sure.”
“The stone too, yes?”
“Yes.”
“But in maybe one day, one week, the flower is gone, the stone is there the same.”
“Okay. But in a million years the stone will be dust.”
He turned his head to me and the face was painted with an expression I’d seen there countless times. A muted exasperation. He put a hand on my shoulder, as I somehow knew he would. Then, as I expected, he laughed, but the laugh had a sadness running across it like a line on the cliff. “My brother-and-law is wery hard to teach,” he said, grinning.
“Not really. I just want to be honest. What you’re saying is that there’s a part of consciousness that’s stable, and the world changes around that part, like planets around a sun or something, movement around stillness. And that we can go to that stable place, in meditation maybe, and maybe there the vicissitudes of life don’t rock the boat so roughly.”
“Wissitude, what is?”
“A big word for troubles, for what you don’t want to have happen to you. In that quiet, still place the world’s troubles don’t bother you as much. You’re beyond them. I’ve touched that place in meditation. But who wants to live there? It’s too still for me. Too removed from feelings. I don’t want to be a stone, even for a million years. I want to be alive, vibrant, feeling.”
“Of course,” he said. “Everybody wants.”
“But a second ago you seemed to be saying the feelings are the flower and there is a stone that outlives them.”
“Yes, good,” he said.
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br /> I looked at him. “You,” I said, “could drive a person nuts in about three minutes.”
He looked back. “And you,” he said, “want that the whirl, the true whirl, the wery biggest real, be wrapped up in words like the toy for a baby on Christmas. Words and thoughts, words and thoughts. You by now know it isn’t.”
“I think,” I bent down, picked up the stone, and flung it toward the still river. “I think, when Jeannie first got sick, the words and thoughts became important again. I was starting, just starting, to see that maybe there was something beyond them. And then the pain of watching her suffer and die made this world the only reality. What she suffered was real. To my final breath I will refuse to let anyone tell me otherwise. I watched her. I sat by her bed for hours and hours and watched her suffer. Please don’t try to tell me that wasn’t real.”
“Wery wery real,” he admitted sadly. “But I watch, too. Many people like that I watch. Inside the real hurt, wery wery deep, something else is there. Jeannie even saw it.”
“She told you that?”
“One time.”
“That hurts. She never told me that.”
“She and you,” he said, another hand on the shoulder, “were past words. That’s why. See?”
“Yes, but it hurts anyway. I feel like I have an armor that’s a quarter of an inch thick and any little thing can pierce it now. I yelled at people at dinner last night. I pounded my fist on the table.”
“Good, wery good,” Rinpoche said, patting my shoulder again. He bent down and picked up a small stone and slid it into his robe. He’d been doing that since we arrived at Cave B, putting together a collection.
“It felt good . . . for about three seconds. And you’re the one who’s always counseling against anger.”
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