There are times when one is thankful not to remember. The psychologist Carl Jung wrote about islands of consciousness washed by the dark waters of forgetting. In the Bhagavadgita, Lord Krishna confides to Arjuna:
I have entered into the hearts of all;
from me come memory, knowledge,
and forgetfulness.
All of us harbor memories we might prefer to forget. A careless deed, an indiscreet word. We know the meaning of remorse. But forgetting can never be deliberate. The blessed lapse of memory comes to us while we sleep, a thief in the night. And what is stolen will never be missed. In these matters one may justly speak of grace. The structure of reason and of history—the material out of which identity is forged—depends as much on what is consigned to the depths as on what adheres to the troubled surface of thought.
It would soon be two years since my arrival in India. When I recalled the image of Ed Rivers as he had appeared that evening in my room in Delhi, departing for the airport with his sitar and lungi, the memory elicited a kind of primal terror. I dreaded the thought of a return to my own past in Chicago. Now I was one of the foreigners who had made a home in India, one of the travelers who had ceased to travel, spirits crossed over into a land beyond time.
We survived on our accumulation of merit, profiting greatly from an international exchange rate that made us wealthy beyond our means. Or, like Richard, we lived by our wits, moving from one clever moneymaking scheme to the next. We were not Indians, nor were we tourists. We were not there to save the starving poor, to work for an NGO, or to cut deals with politicians or businessmen. Nor were we academics—that peculiar class of merchants whose business it is to trade in ideas. We had left all that behind. Whatever we might have been in a previous life, it was no longer important. Our path to salvation rested on a single, minimal requirement: no return ticket.
All alone, with past and future erased, one’s sense of linear time undergoes a curious transformation. One day becomes the same as the next. Morning opens like an exotic flower, a gift freely given and received. The heat, the smell of burning flesh, the temple bells and the call to prayer, the beggars and peddlers and pilgrims—all of it is simply present, taking shape in the imagination and passing away cleanly, imperceptibly, into a past that might just as well be a dream.
For the born, death is certain.
For the dead, there will be birth.
Therefore, as this purpose is given,
thou should not mourn.
In traditional Hindu reckoning, to remember is to imagine a future that has already happened an infinite number of times, for the world is periodically created and destroyed in the course of immense, repetitive cycles of time. Each cycle—from creation to destruction—is divided into four epochs, or yugas, taking their names from the four throws of dice in an ancient Indo-European game of chance: Krita, Treta, Dvapara, and Kali. Like the classical Greco-Roman ages, the Indian yugas begin in purity and decline as they pass by in a gradual, irreversible descent toward chaos and despair. Time moves, unwavering, from the point of creation toward an age when property confers rank, when wealth becomes the only mark of virtue, passion the sole bond of union between husband and wife, dissimulation the key to success, power over others the only means of enjoyment. An age when the trappings of religion are mistaken for spiritual purity, and intellectual prowess for wisdom. This, according to the Vishnu Purana, is where we are now, in the Kali Yuga, which began—according to certain obscure calculations—on Friday, February 18, 3102 BCE. In the Kali Yuga, our best efforts are condemned to fail.
The Kali Yuga will endure for 432,000 years. The preceding Treta Yuga lasted 864,000 years, the Dvapara Yuga 1,296,000, and the Krita Yuga 1,728,000. This comes to a cumulative total of some 4,320,000 years, a single complete run of yugas, thus a mahayuga or “great cycle”—the period of time between the creation and destruction of a world system. One thousand mahayugas, or 4,320,000,000 human years, makes up a kalpa, one day in the life of Brahma, creator of worlds. Elsewhere, a kalpa is said to be equal to the length of time it would require to wear down Mount Meru, the cosmic mountain at the center of the world, by brushing it once a year with a feather.
And here is what we know of the great god Vishnu: Conscious, but wrapped in deep slumber, Vishnu begins to dream. A white lotus arises from his navel and opens to reveal the four-headed Brahma, who will shape a world from the stuff of Vishnu’s reverie: birth, aging, sickness, and death, heavens and hells without number, demons, ghosts, and animals. We are now in day one of the fifty-first year in the lifetime of “our” Brahma, and it will unfold in a gallery of marvels as time moves forward like the hands of a clock sweeping over the same numbers again and again. Victories of the demigods followed by their inevitable defeat at the hands of the titans. The sporadic incarnation of divinity: Lord Vishnu taking birth in his various animal and human forms. Everything from the creation of the universe to the last exhalation of a beggar dying in the streets of Banaras is forever fixed in its position in the circle of time, the same events repeating themselves in the same order, forever.
For the born, death is certain.
For the dead, there will be birth.
Only accomplished seers and yogis can bear to shoulder the full burden of the past. To see that the future already exists in memory is a blessing that shatters the pretensions of the ego. Even the great warrior Arjuna pleads for blindness when granted an uncompromising vision of the Lord’s maya—the memory of all memories, the endlessly repeating dream of birth and death. And yet, scattered through the scriptures, there are clues for the discerning, tiny epiphanies that could easily be ignored or explained away—just as we so easily ignore or explain away the experience of déjà vu.
For example, we are told in the Puranas that during the first Manu Interval of the present kalpa, Vishnu incarnated as a boar and plunged into the sea in order to rescue the goddess Earth. She was at that time a young virgin who had fallen into the lascivious hands of Hiranyaksha, the Golden-Eyed One. In the ancient story we hear how the demon is slain and Earth rescued. As Vishnu ascends to the surface, the willowy goddess draped over his powerful tusks, he inadvertently reveals his awful secret when he whispers in her ear,
Every time I carry you up this way . . .
It is so much easier to forget, and in any case the act of remembering brings with it another kind of loss. Pompeii, Freud observed, was truly destroyed only when it was excavated and raised up into the light. For Freud, as for the Buddha, it is repression and denial—and all the other various intricate mechanisms of forgetting—that invest the past with its tremendous power to shape entire worlds of experience. All the joys and all the sorrows of existence have their roots in this dark, fertile soil.
Letters from Judith. Bleached photographs of family and friends. Messages from my past; light from distant nebulae. The infant. The schoolboy. The lover. The husband. The scholar. The traitor. The recluse. The seeker. The one who grows old.
Sicut eram in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in sæcula sæculorum.
As I was in the beginning, am now, and ever shall be, unto the ages of ages.
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I SIT MOTIONLESS before the first gray light of dawn, settling into a timeless gap between night and day, where the breath of God moves over the surface of the deep. One leg is crossed on top of the other, back straight, eyes closed, watching. A gentle, even pressure of the lungs and diaphragm. In . . . out . . . in . . . out . . . expanding and contracting. Thoughts fall through the silence like snowflakes in an empty sky, melting into an immeasurable sea of darkness. Hopes and plans, memories and regrets, intangible seeds of joy and despair, all these ghostly spores returning to the source. The stream of breath enters, tapers off, hesitates, and turns outward, tapers off, hesitates, and turns inward again, completing its journey through the invisible circle of respiration that revolves at the center of the body, marking the entrance to an ancient path that still leads home. Sweat collects under my arms, forms riv
ulets, trickles down along my elbows and drips onto the cushion. A single mosquito whines at my left ear, surveys the terrain, spirals down onto the auricle and hangs there, insubstantial and irritating, like the lingering memory of an unfaithful lover. I sit still and bear witness, settling back into the open space of awareness, watching as she delicately probes the tender flesh, observing the faint tickling sensation as she punctures the skin, exchanging poison for blood.
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BY THE TIME I finished my morning meditation, purple light streaked the sky above the Ganges. From where I stood at my window, I saw people lying along the edges of the street stretched out next to each other in parallel rows—husbands, wives, and children, ancient grandmothers withered and bent even in their dreams, beggars and holy men, pilgrims collapsed after their long journeys—all of them covered from head to foot with soiled cloth, like so many corpses in the pictures I had seen of villagers killed during an air strike somewhere in the Vietnamese jungle. They had begun to stir now, rising to join the growing stream of humanity that wound around the corner of Ganga Mat and down Assi Ghat to the river for morning ablutions.
A single, sturdy old pipal tree grew at the end of the street, not far from the Ganges. At its foot a Shaivite ascetic sat rapt in silent contemplation, back erect, legs knotted in a full lotus. His body and hair were smeared with ash from the cremation pyres. An iron trident impaled the hard clay at his side, a replica of Lord Shiva’s own weapon on top of which the Holy City of Banaras is said to rest, outside space and time and beyond the reach even of the law of karmic retribution.
I had looked out over this same scene every morning for months, but on this particular morning nothing was quite the same. There was no precedent in my experience for the lingering sense of ambiguity that permeated everything. It was as if I’d been turned inside out. What normally belonged to the subjective world of feelings, thoughts, and sensations had, for a time, spilled over into the world of the senses, so that even now the smell of my neighbor’s incense and the sound of the Muslim call to prayer were no longer simply out there in the world but were, at the same time, somehow intimately mine, elements of my own psyche that had drifted into consciousness and would soon drift out again. And yet the old, well-defined structure of things was regaining its hold; the line between inner and outer was steadily being redrawn by an invisible hand. Such elemental habits of mind do not easily loosen their grip.
I brought out the brass Ajanta stove from its spot in the corner and filled it with kerosene purchased from a neighborhood black-market cloth merchant. In the few months since Indira Gandhi had rescinded the stringent regulations on black-market profiteering, the city’s alternative economy had returned.
With the water heating for coffee, I sat at my desk with a bowl of yogurt and bananas. Before me a copybook lay open to a passage from the Prajnaparamita I had recently finished translating. The Buddha is speaking with Subhuti, one of his closest disciples:
Here, Subhuti, the bodhisattva, a great being, reflects as follows: “There are measureless, countless beings who should be led by me into nirvana. And yet there are neither those who should be led to nirvana nor those who should lead them.” However many beings he might lead to nirvana, still there is not a single being who has attained nirvana, nor anyone who leads others. Why is this? Subhuti, for one who apprehends his illusory nature, this is in accord with the essence of things. It is as if a skilled magician or a magician’s apprentice were to conjure up a large group of people at a crossroads; and then, having conjured them, he were to make them disappear. What do you think, Subhuti: Has anyone been slain or killed or destroyed or made to disappear? In just this way, Subhuti, a bodhisattva leads measureless, countless beings to nirvana, and yet there is not a single being led to nirvana nor anyone who does the leading. If a bodhisattva, a great being, hears this teaching and is neither afraid, shocked, or otherwise shaken, then, Subhuti, that bodhisattva, that great being, may be known to be well prepared.
The elegant flow of the Sanskrit was completely lost in my stilted English. I reached over and selected a stick of Tibetan incense from a nearby bundle, lit it, and fitted one end between Garuda’s tiny palms. Since meeting Geshe Sherap, I had become more interested in the old Indian scriptures on the perfection of wisdom. But this morning, in light of my dream of waking, this ancient Buddhist text reverberated with new associations.
The water almost boiled over, but I heard it just in time and lunged for the stove, twisting the valve closed. The flame died with a tiny hiss. I waited a minute while the grounds settled in the pot, then filled my mug and took it over to the desk.
I had been working for over an hour when someone knocked at the door.
“Kaun hai?” My first thought was the sweeper. Lately she had been coming around asking for baksheesh, and I was not in the mood to listen to all the stories of her various problems. “Who is it?”
“Aray, bhaiyaa! Open up.”
The muscles in my shoulders spontaneously relaxed. I rose and walked over to the door, released the chain, and drew both panels back. “Good morning, Mick.” And it did feel good to see him standing there, radiating ordinariness. His presence made everything seem safe and normal. He already had the blue rubber flip-flops off his feet and was edging his way past me, sniffing at the aroma of South Indian coffee that filled the room.
“Hey man, how’s it going? Look what I brought you.” He handed me a small sack made from recycled newspaper. It was saturated in warm syrup. “Jalebi. Still hot.”
“Thanks.” I put the bag on the desk and gestured toward my mug. “Want some?” I didn’t wait for him to respond but instead went over and fired up the stove and put some water on, mixing in a big spoonful of fresh grounds. While the water heated I munched on a jalebi. I offered the bag to Mickey, who took one and popped it into his mouth, then sank down onto the bed. He began to swab his head and neck with the cotton gamcha he carried over one shoulder.
“You know something, Stanley? It’s hot.”
“You’re in India, Mick. This is what they call ‘the hot season.’”
“I mean,” he let his arm fall limply, “it’s fucking seriously hot.” He ruminated on this observation. “I saw a fist fight yesterday afternoon out in front of the Lalita. They were really going at it. Two BHU students.”
“People you know?”
“Yeah. It’s a union deal that sort of went sour.”
The Lalita was a local cinema in Belapur, and I could easily picture the whole chaotic scene, what is called, in Hindi, tamasha. A crowd would have gathered instantaneously, some to egg on the fight, others struggling to pry the men apart. Most would simply be spectators watching absent-mindedly while the contestants flailed at each other, their arms revolving like the blades of a windmill, like the arms of the girls who used to fight in the parking lot outside my high school.
“I’ve been tempted myself to take a swing at someone,” Mickey continued. “Which reminds me . . .” He stuck one hand into his jhola, drew out a small piece of stiff gray cardboard, and tossed it onto the book that lay open on my desk. “Here’s your ticket. Leaves at two o’clock tomorrow afternoon.”
“Thanks, Mick.” I picked up the ticket and examined it, the Kashi Vishwanath Express for New Delhi station. “Was the station crowded?”
He shrugged. “Don’t worry about it. I had it taken care of, you know?”
By which he meant that he had one of his friends—someone with connections at the station, no doubt—pick up the ticket. Anyway, I was deeply grateful. Offering him a cup of coffee was the least I could do.
He took a sip, then gazed out the window, looking down toward the river. “So who exactly is this guy you’re going to meet?”
Mickey knew I was studying Tibetan at Sanskrit University, but I had told him very little about Geshe Sherap and our conversation.
“He’s a lama. A tulku. You know, the reincarnation of an earlier teacher.”
“Oh, yeah. The Tibetan thing.”
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br /> “This is true,” I said. “It’s a Tibetan thing.” Mick’s stint as a Theravadin monk had left him with a healthy skepticism when it came to certain Tibetan beliefs and practices, and this whole business about reincarnate teachers struck him as over the top. As with so many other things in the world of Tibetan Buddhism, I reserved judgment.
“So what’s his name again?”
“Nortul Rinpoche.”
“Sure you don’t want company?” He grinned.
I returned his smile and shook my head. “I don’t think so. Not this time.”
“I could use some air-conditioning—like at Nirulas. And an ice cream sundae, all slathered with hot fudge and nuts.”
The ends of his mustache twitched as he smacked his lips. Sometime after arriving in Banaras Mickey had grown a Nietzschean affair with long, waxed tips, precisely the sort of thing in vogue among the wrestlers and miscreants with whom he hung out.
“It’d be great to get out of this madhouse for a while. See the big city, you know? Something different.” His eyes drifted over to the papers that lay scattered on my desk. “What’s this?”
“A translation I’m working on.”
“What is it?”
“Ashtasahasrika Prajnaparamita—the Perfection of Wisdom in Eight Thousand Lines.” I considered telling him about the dream but then decided against it.
He picked up my copybook and began to read out loud. “‘What do you think, Subhuti, has anyone been slain or killed or made to disappear?’” He studied the page for a few seconds and then continued reading. “‘If a bodhisattva hears this teaching and is neither afraid, shocked, or otherwise shaken, then, Subhuti, that bodhisattva, that great being, may be known to be well prepared.’”
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