One way or another, it seemed, half the time I spent outside the blissfully sequestered precincts of my room was flat-out wasted, and on such occasions, the bug up my ass would sting, sting, sting. I had a difficult time adhering to the advice I had found so attractive in that verse from the Bodhicharyavatara, the one I had memorized back in Delhi:
Whatever happens—
whether through your own resolve or the will of another—
circumstances conceal a deeper import.
See this, and learn.
Despite everything, I did my best to structure my life in Banaras like a retreat. Immediately after waking I ran through my early-morning exercise routine, then bathed downstairs, came back up, and sat meditation. After sitting I made coffee, had some yogurt and bananas, and read Sanskrit or Tibetan until lunch, which was usually at the Sindhi. In the afternoon I met with my teachers. I returned home in early evening, rinsed off at the tap, read more, had a snack in my room, sat meditation again for several hours, and went to bed. Every day followed the same schedule, and every day began before dawn with the furious clanging of a cheap Indian wind-up alarm clock I had purchased way back in Agra. It ticked so loudly I hadn’t been able to sleep at night until I grew accustomed to the sound.
In Manali I had met a Canadian from Vancouver, a student of Apo Rinpoche, who told me he went into a six-month solitary retreat with one of these same clocks. He allowed himself only a short period of sleep, the remaining twenty or so hours of each day scheduled tightly with meditation, rituals, and prayers. The clock was essential to maintaining his schedule, but within the first week it began acting up, the alarm going off unpredictably, depriving him of precious sleep and interrupting his strict routine. For six months he worked with the situation, tinkering with the controls, propping the clock in odd positions, or muffling it while he slept, in the hope that it would be less of a jolt when the bell went off. Nothing availed, though, and for the entire six months, he lived at the mercy of those erratic wheels and levers. The day his retreat ended, he calmly placed the infernal device on the ground outside his cabin and pulverized it with blows from a large rock he had carefully selected weeks before and stored in plain view under the altar, just below an image of the Buddha, in anticipation of this great event—the culmination of six months of intense spiritual practice. He assured me that full and complete awakening could provide no greater satisfaction than he felt the moment the clock shattered under his hands.
I too would gladly have destroyed anything that interrupted the strict regimen of my days—the pattern of my expectations and desires—if only I could have found a mighty enough rock.
26
I WAS HAUNTED by memories of the bus and by an irrational conviction that I was somehow implicated in the child’s death. It wasn’t as if I could have forced the driver to slow down, and once the accident happened, I certainly could not have stopped him from fleeing the scene. Nor was I naïve: I knew what would have happened had the crowd outside managed to get at him. I recalled an article in the Times of India that I had read way back in Agra, about another bus that had struck and killed a child; the driver had his hands chopped off by angry villagers. Since then I had heard many such tales of retributive mayhem. The point is, I knew there was nothing I could have done to change what happened that night in the Punjab. So why did I feel somehow responsible?
We bind our hearts to this big drama, and for that we must suffer.
No doubt my old guru’s words were true, but it’s one thing to suffer out of compassion for others and quite another to feel culpable. Why should an innocent bystander feel guilty? The question was very much on my mind when, one morning just before waking—less than a month after moving to Banaras—I dreamed I was back on the Super Fast.
In my dream it was nighttime, and I could see myself there in the bus sitting just as I had been, behind the driver, bent forward over my bag. It was as if I were looking over my own shoulder—an oddly disembodied point of view that I take for granted in my dreams, though in waking life I’ve often wondered at this capacity of the mind to somehow climb outside of itself and simply watch as it creates a world out of nothing but memory and imagination. It wasn’t until I’d been meditating for years that it occurred to me I was consciously cultivating a perspective already familiar from my dreams. In any case, the angle in my dream abruptly shifted, and the detached observer suddenly found itself firmly lodged in my dream body and staring at the back of the bus driver’s head. From this new vantage point I could now see over the driver’s shoulder to where his face, caught in the glow of a small illuminated portrait of Guru Nanak, was reflected in the windshield. The image of his face floated there on the dark surface of the glass like a spirit trapped in the bardo realm between death and rebirth.
At first I couldn’t take my eyes off it, but I soon discovered that by simply refocusing my gaze, I could look right through the reflection, out to where the glare of the bus’s twin high beams vanished into darkness. I experimented shifting the focus back and forth, looking directly at the reflected image and then through it—a game that once again I found absorbing—until something outside caught my attention: far off in the distance a single point of light emerged out of the void. It was as though the bus had been a rocket drifting alone through deepest space, but now, with this solitary star as a point of reference, I was suddenly aware that we were hurtling directly toward it at a fantastic velocity. Very soon, where the star had been I could make out the fluorescent glow of a streetlight, and then, under the light, a chai stand with people sitting on benches in front and a few children playing nearby. It seemed like the closer we got, the faster the bus moved, as if it were being sucked forward by a powerful gravitational force, until at the last possible instant a boy stepped out of the darkness and the bus plunged into the light and the horn shrieked and I was thrown violently forward.
I lay on my back, engulfed in silence, still half asleep and lost in the feeling of the dream. Over my head the fan revolved slowly, churning the sultry air. My first thought was, That’s not the way it happened. On the real bus I wasn’t awake. I didn’t see the boy until it was over. But how could I know if I was awake or asleep on that bus? How could I know anything for sure when I was stoned out of my mind on opium? And then it occurred to me: maybe the whole thing had been nothing but an extremely realistic dream.
It was an extraordinary thought. The very idea that the accident might not have actually happened seemed, at first, beyond comprehension. And yet, on the bus that night after leaving Chandigarh, I had been totally blasted, sliding in and out of consciousness—and opium is notorious for producing hallucinatory dreams. But even ripped on opium, is it possible, I wondered, to conflate waking and dreaming experience so completely? I’d no sooner asked myself the question than I remembered a woman I’d known in Chicago who told me that when she was applying to graduate schools, she once dreamed that she got a scholarship to Harvard. The dream had been so vivid that she actually believed it was true. It wasn’t until she was on the phone telling her father, and he asked about the details, that she realized her mistake. She’d been wandering around literally for days feeling this huge sense of relief that had nothing whatsoever to do with waking reality.
At the time, I’d found her story far-fetched, but now I could empathize—for the past month I had been feeling guilty about the death of a boy who may never have existed. Perhaps the most disturbing thing was that I probably could never know for certain whether I dreamed it or not. I tried to imagine what it would take to get at the truth. Maybe somehow I could go back and make inquiries at the station, or with the police—surely they must keep a record of such things. But then again, maybe not. The accident may well have gone entirely unreported. All sorts of horrible stuff happens in India that never makes it into any official police record. To find out if the accident really happened, I’d have to go back to the Punjab and visit every chai stand between Chandigarh and Delhi.
The feelings were real e
nough, even if the event wasn’t. So how could real feelings be generated by an unreal event? But of course it wasn’t the event itself that generated my feelings; it was the memory of the accident—or the memory of a dream—which obviously had a power of its own. In fact, it’s amazing how powerful memory is, how everything about our present experience is interpreted through its lens—even sense perception is based on recognition. But if I were only remembering a dream, then the sense of culpability I’d been carrying around was doubly groundless. I lay there for several minutes pondering all of this, growing more and more disoriented, then finally gave up and threw back the sheet, forcing myself out of bed.
It was late September and the monsoon was winding down, but even at this early hour the air was uncomfortably hot and humid. When I finished my morning calisthenics, I was soaked in sweat. I took my towel from where it hung, picked up the bucket and the clay jar I used for drinking water, and stepped out into the hallway, heading downstairs to rinse off at the tap. I remember pulling the doors closed after me and fastening the chain in case a monkey happened to come down the stairs from the roof. Just as I turned from the door I smelled a faint, repellent odor. Following the scent I walked down the stairs and around the corner to the crawl space where I and the other tenants went for water. There, directly under the tap, a dog had collapsed on the cool, wet stone. The outside door to the alley was open—someone had obviously forgotten to latch it—and the dog had come in looking for a safe place to rest.
Her hairless gray skin was corrugated with oozing sores; the nipples hung slackly from her chest like tiny withered fruits. She was so still that at first I thought she wasn’t breathing. On closer inspection I could just make out the feeble movement of her ribs, a tenuous rise and fall of shallow respiration. Instinctively, I clapped my hands. She did not respond. Again I clapped and shouted in Hindi: “Hut!” I stamped my bare foot on the floor a few inches away from her muzzle. Move it! Still she did not stir, so I gently shook her with my toes. This time the ragged ears flopped back, and her head rose, ever so slowly. As though she were pushing upward against an overwhelming force, she struggled to lift her brittle, stinking body and drag it out into the hallway. Her spine had been severely twisted and both hind legs appeared to be paralyzed. I had seen dogs like this sprawled in the street, half alive, still lying where they had been caught under the iron wheels of a passing horse-drawn cart. After a few steps it appeared she could go no further, and when she started to lie down, once again I nudged her with the ball of my foot. I distinctly remember that it felt different this time, I was suddenly hyperaware of the sensation caused by her matted fur brushing against my bare skin. She stumbled, regained her balance, and continued to pull her useless, crippled back legs slowly toward the open door.
As I watched her struggle, I was overwhelmed with disgust at what I was doing—driving her out in this way. And then, as if in response to my feeling, I heard a voice say, This dog cannot remain in this place where I bathe and clean my dishes and take my drinking water. I realized then that ever since the first moment I had seen the dog, this same sentence had been repeating in my mind like a military command, with all the authority of reason. But now I was not just thinking this thought, I was aware that I was thinking, which was a whole different experience. And not only this thought, but everything else as well was now intensely clear and present—the smell of rotting flesh and dank air, the sound of claws scratching against stone, and a swirl of conflicting emotions that fell over man and dog like a shadow across the floor as early-morning sunlight broke through the open doorway and the dog emerged, working to catch her breath, her front legs folding, her chest dropping to the pavement.
I stood staring down at the animal, then turned quickly and walked back through the door, latching it behind me. I went to the tap, rinsed and dried myself, filled the clay jug with water and walked up the stairs.
Back inside the room I changed out of my wet shorts and put on a light lungi, then went over to the bed and positioned myself on its hard surface, crossing my legs one over the other in a half-lotus posture. I sat without moving, hands folded in my lap, eyes closed, following the sensation of the air as it passed in and out of the nostrils. With my attention focused, I began watching the memories of what I had only moments earlier seen and done and felt—the abject fear in the dog’s eyes, the texture of her fur against my skin, the stink of her wounds, the scratching of her nails on stone, my thoughts and reasons and justifications, the horrible mixture of compassion and guilt that swelled up in my heart as I drove her out the door. As I sat quietly watching, these and other, more distant memories took shape and faded away again, along with an endless stream of thoughts and feelings and sensations, all of them perfectly clear and present, held in the mind’s eye like shimmering reflections on the glassy surface of consciousness.
But with the subtlest, involuntary lapse of attention, the glass would become a lens, awareness passing through the translucent images like light through film, filling the darkness with the captivating spectacle of a world where the play must go on no matter the cost. At such times I felt myself falling into the picture, and I needed to begin all over again, patiently adjusting the focus, bringing attention back to the present moment, to the sensation of breathing, to the memory itself as an object that arises and passes away.
I opened my eyes, very slowly, and looked around the room, taking in my books, the desk and chair, the aluminum footlocker, the jug filled with water. According to the clock I had been sitting for almost three hours. As I unwound my legs I felt the muscles tingle and burn, felt myself rise and stretch and walk over to the stove, where I put on water for coffee.
It was midafternoon before I summoned the courage to leave my room. When at last I walked down the stairs and opened the outside door, I found the dog lying exactly where she had fallen. The crows had already eaten her eyes. Her body lay there, stiff and covered with flies, all that afternoon and through the next night, before a sweeper finally came and dragged it down to the river.
27
I FIRST HEARD ABOUT Pundit Trivedi through an earnest young student from Kyoto who was then studying at Banaras Hindu University. Pundit Trivedi was well known around the university as an erudite and highly orthodox scholar who had a particular expertise in the literature of the Sankhya—India’s most ancient systematic philosophy. I was told that he had accepted some foreign students in the past; the last of these had been a number of years ago, but at this point in life he was no longer willing to teach anyone. Nevertheless, I decided to try.
Pundit Trivedi’s home was located in the maze of narrow alleyways behind Tulsi Ghat. Twice I knocked at his door, and both times I was turned away by a servant, apparently on the direct order of the pundit’s wife. On the third visit I encountered an elderly man sitting on a chowki on the front porch reading the local Banaras newspaper. He was wearing a white dhoti wrapped around and through his legs, the sacred thread of his brahman heritage looped diagonally over his shoulder and down across the bare, wrinkled skin of his chest. His face was pressed between two pendulous, wing-like ears, and he had a truly imposing raptorial nose on which rested a pair of reading glasses. I was immediately reminded of the magnificent and yet somehow comical Garuda, the mythological bird associated with the great god Vishnu.
I introduced myself in Hindi and inquired if I might speak with Pundit Trivedi. I was told to go ahead and say whatever I had to say. I briefly described my interests and my previous experience and said that I was searching for a suitable teacher to help me deepen my facility with Sanskrit. The old man listened in silence until I was finished, at which point he folded the newspaper and quietly set it to one side. I thought for a moment that he was about to rise, perhaps to go inside. Instead he began questioning me in some detail about my training at Chicago. He wanted to know exactly what I had read, both the root texts and the commentaries. But it was only when I mentioned my evenings with Shri Anantacharya that he warmed to my request. He proposed a
trial period of two weeks, during which time he would reserve the right to terminate our association, no questions asked. I accepted these terms immediately. But when I offered to pay him for his time, the reply was curt and evidently non-negotiable: “My home is not a shop.”
We met the very next day, late in the morning, and every day after that. Two weeks passed in this way, then four, and I gradually began to appreciate just how fortunate I was to have found my way into the world of this kind, learned man and to have him as my teacher during the final years of his long life.
Pundit Ravendranath Trivedi was the last surviving Sanskrit scholar in an unbroken line of brahman intellectuals that stretched back hundreds, if not thousands, of years, perhaps as far back as Vedic times, when, he assured me with great solemnity, his ancestors had presided over the elaborate rituals that brought human society into harmony with the implicit order of the cosmos. Pundit-ji occasionally told me stories about his father, a landed aristocrat and well-known scholar among the Banaras intelligentsia during the days of the British Raj. It was here in the very courtyard where we met for my lessons that his father had conversed with the wise and holy men of Banaras. It was here, as well, that his father had announced his intention to become a sannyasi, as had his own father before him, after seeing the first faint streaks of silver hair over his son’s temple. Astrologers were called to determine an auspicious date for the symbolic funeral, the first essential step toward renunciation. The service was performed, and from that day on he was, ritually speaking, dead to the world, released from the all-encompassing web of obligations that Hindu society imposes on every householder. These domestic responsibilities now fell to his son, my teacher.
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