The Dalai Lama's Cat and the Power of Meow

by David Michie

  Around the piano, Serena, Sam, Kusali, and the waitstaff stared at one another. They had just witnessed one of the most dazzling, if all-too-brief, piano performances of their lives. A performance made all the more exceptional for knowing that Franc hadn’t touched a keyboard in more than fifteen years. To hear him dismiss his highly developed ability as “hopeless” left them speechless.

  “Tonight’s subject is compassion,” began Geshe Wangpo on the teaching throne at Namgyal temple. Every Tuesday night Geshe Wangpo, who—apart from being Franc’s teacher—was one of the monastery’s most revered lamas, gave a teaching in English. It was open not only to the monks but to anyone in Dharamsala who wished to attend.

  From the time that Franc had begun taking a serious interest in Buddhism years earlier, he had attended his lama’s Tuesday night classes. After recruiting Sam as bookstore manager, he had found himself irresistibly drawn up the hill for what he would tell people was “free psychotherapy.” Later, when Serena became caretaker-manager, she, too, had become a regular.

  The mysterious, calming atmosphere of the temple at night was part of the appeal. It was filled with drifting incense and beautiful Buddha statues, their gold faces lit by a sea of flickering butter lamps. But so, too, were Geshe-la’s teachings, which, week after week, seemed powerfully and personally directed at every single person who attended. As on my previous visits to the Namgyal temple, conveniently just across the courtyard from home, I perched myself on a shelf at the back that, over the years, I had made my own so I could survey the temple’s proceedings.

  One of the most revered lamas at Namgyal, Geshe-la was one of the “old school” and had been trained in Tibet before the Chinese invasion. He had a round, muscular presence that was both powerful and utterly heart-melting. He was as respected for his intolerance toward slothfulness of body and mind as he was loved for his unceasing kindness. Geshe-la was also well known for his clairvoyant abilities.

  “Love and compassion are the two core values of our tradition,” he told his audience while I looked on from my shelf. “But what do we mean by these terms? In Buddhism we define love as ‘the wish to give happiness to others.’ If we practice love, then compassion arises quite naturally, for it is ‘the wish to free others from suffering.’

  “All of us feel love and compassion for friends, family, and other living beings. This is natural. Normal. When we cultivate love and compassion as part of our spiritual path, our task is to practice pure, great love and pure, great compassion. Pure means free of attachment. Not only wanting to give in order to get something back. This is not love—this is business!”

  His chuckle reverberated throughout the temple.

  “How much of our love and compassion is conditional? We only want this one to be happy if he or she behaves in a particular way. We are willing to help that one because we think there will come a time when he or she can return the favor. It is up to each of us to be honest with ourselves. To challenge ourselves by asking, ‘How much of my love, my compassion, is pure—and how much is attachment-based?’

  “We also try to make our love and compassion great, which means not limited just to those beings we naturally care about. How many beings is that—five? Twenty? Two hundred? What about the other seven billion people on planet Earth? And the countless other nonhuman semchens, or sentient beings? Don’t they seek happiness, too? And the avoidance of suffering? Are their lives not as important to them as my life is to me? If so, on what basis can I say, ‘I only want this one and that one to be happy. The other seven billion, not so much.’ Or, ‘May all beings be free from suffering’”—here he brought his palms to his heart in mock reverence—“‘except for my ex-husband and all conservative voters.’”

  Again there was a ripple of levity as an evening breeze caught the tassels dangling from the thangkas in a gust of cool air.

  “Great love and great compassion come when we practice Buddhism without partiality. We don’t restrict ourselves only to those people and beings whom we like. To do this it helps to recollect that all beings, even the ones we find difficult, are just like you in that they only want to be happy. They only want to be free from pain. The way they go about seeking happiness may be delusional, it may cause great harm, but in what we want, we are all the same.”

  His voice fell then, so that each one of us leaned forward to catch his next statement. Geshe-la said, “Of course, we cannot genuinely accept others and wish for their happiness if we don’t first accept ourselves.”

  He paused so his words could be absorbed. Not only his words, but the meaning behind those words. Their simplicity and significance were amplified in the sacred place.

  “What is the sense in wishing for the happiness of all beings but not for our own happiness? What is the point of practicing patience with complete strangers but not with ourselves? This kind of thinking makes no sense. It is also lacking in wisdom, because the self we may believe is so hard to accept has no independent reality. We cannot find it. It’s just a story we tell ourselves—a story that changes depending on our mood.

  “What is the point of making up a story about ourselves that we hate? Whatever story we come up with is going to be different from the one that other people have created about us anyway—you can be sure of that.

  “So relax. Let go of whatever story it is you have conceived about yourself, because it’s only a story. Don’t take it all so seriously. Don’t fool yourself into believing that what really is only a thought is the truth.”

  As Geshe-la spoke, I looked over the backs of the attendees’ heads from my vantage point. Franc’s in particular. I remembered Franc’s harsh self-criticism as he sat at the piano. And my own self-blame this morning as I’d come to the end of my meditation session and realized I had spent almost no time at all focused on my breath.

  Here in the airiness of the temple there was an easiness, a lightness that seemed to dissolve away the intensity of all those feelings. Like all the great Buddhist masters, Geshe-la was able to communicate in a way that went beyond words.

  “So to cultivate compassion for others, first we begin with ourselves. And our practice must be meaningful, because superficial practice will only give superficial results. We must go beyond mere ideas and deepen our understanding. Can anyone here give me a definition of the word ‘realization’?” he asked.

  Several hands immediately shot up from among the large group of monks at the front of the temple. When called upon, one of them replied: “When our understanding of an idea develops to the point that it changes our behavior.”

  Geshe-la nodded. “Very good. And this development, this deepening of understanding is greatly helped by meditation. In a conventional state, the mind is usually quite agitated. What happens when you throw a rock into a choppy ocean? How much impact does it have? But take that same rock and cast it into a tranquil lake—then see the result.

  “Same with the mind. When our minds are calm, quiet, and we consider, for example, self-compassion, our understanding deepens. There is a chance that, instead of just considering it a nice idea, we realize the truth of it. And, little by little, our behavior starts to change.”

  The following day, His Holiness departed for a two-day visit to New Delhi. Left to my own devices, I allowed my afternoon visit to the Himalaya Book Café to include a doze. Before I knew it, Serena and Sam were about to take their end-of-evening hot chocolate—something of a ritual when both were on duty. The restaurant was down to its last few diners, and Serena had made her way up the low steps to the bookstore section. Two sofas were arranged on either side of a low table, and the spot provided a perfect vantage point for keeping an eye on the whole premises. Sam joined her and, a short while later, Kusali arrived bearing a tray of hot chocolates for the two of them. As on the other rare occasions that I had been around that late, he brought milk for me, too.

  “That was a wonderful teaching Geshe-la gave last night,” said Serena, raising her mug of hot chocolate to her mouth.

&
nbsp; “And the meditation that followed,” Sam agreed from the sofa opposite.

  “As always, the teaching seemed just exactly what I needed to hear.”

  Sam nodded and glanced over to where a man sat at Franc’s piano, playing hotel-lobby standards with an assured ease. He wore chinos and a white shirt and had flowing, gray locks of hair and an air of mystery about him. I hadn’t been able to place him when he walked into the café earlier that day, but when Serena introduced him to Franc I remembered where I’d seen him before. He was Ewing, one of the longtime students at the Downward Dog School of Yoga. He paid only rare visits to the Himalaya Book Café.

  “It’s interesting how things worked out for Franc,” Sam said.

  Serena smiled.

  When Franc first stepped into the café that morning with the dogs at his feet, he had been a man unburdened. Neither blazing with energy nor beset by gloom, his expression was relaxed. Under his arm, he had held some sheet music.

  After waiting for the breakfast crowd to dissipate, Franc once again sat at the piano and lifted the lid. He placed the music in front of him. A Bach sonata. He played the self-contained piece of music with quiet deliberation—and a few fumbled notes, to which he made no obvious reaction. This time he didn’t have an audience. The staff in the café made an elaborate show of going about their business, apparently paying him no attention. After the Bach, there came Mozart.

  When Serena arrived to take over before lunch, he’d told her, “I had a very good time on the piano today. But we need more than me for a soiree. Ideally someone who can read music and improvise. Even better, someone who can sing.”

  He’d been in the manager’s office sorting out some accounts when Ewing arrived for a lunch date with a friend. As soon as Ewing stepped through the door, he had noticed the new addition to the café and made a beeline toward it.

  Just as Franc had on the day it had arrived, Ewing inspected the piano with the keenest curiosity, unable to stop himself from pulling out the stool, sitting down, and raising the lid.

  “Do you play?” Serena had asked.

  “Oh yes. I used to be a prompter in New York and Europe,” he said in his soft American accent. “And for years I was the resident pianist in the lobby of New Delhi’s Grand Hotel.”

  “Of course!” Serena nodded. “I remember, now. Will you play something?”

  “You wouldn’t mind?”

  “I’d be delighted!”

  Some minutes later, Franc emerged from the manager’s office, a sheaf of invoices in one hand and a calculator in the other. He stared at the source of a charming rendition of “On the Street Where You Live.” Ewing not only played the tune straight, he segued through different styles, throwing in a Chopin-like version before riffing off on a jazz interpretation.

  Serena approached Franc and quietly explained Ewing’s background.

  “Bravo!” Franc congratulated him after he’d ended. “Can you sight-read?”

  “Pretty well.”

  “Are you free this Friday night to perform in a concert?”

  A slow smile crept across Ewing’s face. “In recent years I’ve been more at home in the background . . .”

  “New venue, new gig,” Franc delivered with a mischievous smile. “Time to get into the foreground!”

  At 7:00 P.M. the following Friday night I was in pride of place on the top shelf of the magazine rack in the Himalaya Book Café, which had been arranged cabaret-style, with the piano near the reception counter. Tea lights in decorative colored-glass holders flickered on the tables, lending the room an intimate atmosphere. Almost all the people there were locals, friends of Franc’s, café regulars, or people who had been invited especially for . . . no one knew exactly what.

  At one table sat Sid, immaculate in a white, Nehru-collared shirt, chatting with Mrs. Trinci and her good friend Dorothy Cartright. Serena busied herself in the front of the house. Ludo and at least a half dozen students from the Downward Dog School of Yoga occupied several of the tables—including Merrilee, dressed in flamboyant crimson and quaffing copious quantities of champagne. Several members of His Holiness’s staff were present. Tenzin and his wife, Susan, a classically trained violinist, were engaged in an animated conversation with Oliver, His Holiness’s new translator. For the first time ever, His Holiness had hired a Western translator. Oliver had been born in England but fully ordained as a Tibetan Buddhist monk fifteen years before; apart from being able to switch effortlessly between Tibetan and English, he was also fluent in a half dozen other languages.

  Franc arrived shortly after seven wearing a fawn-colored jacket, an emerald-green cravat, and the broadest of smiles. As soon as Ewing arrived, looking dapper in a dinner jacket and bow tie, Franc wasted no time in escorting him around the room. As a longtime McLeod Ganj resident, Ewing already knew many of those present, and there was a tide of good feeling as they circulated. They didn’t skip greeting its most highly placed occupant.

  Reaching the magazine rack, Franc gestured toward where I was sitting, paws tucked neatly beneath me. “And this is Rinpoche,” he said, using the name by which I was best known at the café, a word Tibetan Buddhists give their beloved lamas, meaning “precious.”

  “Or Swami, as she is known at the Downward Dog School of Yoga!” Ewing brought his palms together and bowed. “We’re already well acquainted.”

  A short while later, Franc announced the start of that evening’s proceedings through a microphone.

  “It’s curious how different people come into our lives at different times . . . ,” he began. “Although many of you have been friends with Ewing for years, I met him only recently. And I discovered that, in addition to being the most wonderful pianist, he can also sing.”

  There were whoops of encouragement from Ewing’s fellow yoga students, for whom this was also, evidently, fresh information.

  “Ewing used to be a prompter. I’d never heard of a prompter before, but his job was to follow every note of an opera or musical and to step in if a singer forgot his or her lines.”

  “Whenever a singer forgot his or her lines,” Ewing observed drolly, causing a burst of laughter.

  “Prompters must have great voices and tremendous range. Ewing, who has lived so long in the world of music, has reconnected me to something that was the most important part of my life when I was growing up,” Franc said with feeling. “And for that I am truly grateful. And so it is my privilege to invite to our inaugural soiree Mr. Ewing Klipspringer.”

  Ewing, already seated at the piano, played the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, to general amusement.

  “I feel sure he has some wonderful things in store for us.”

  I don’t know what word I can use to describe the music that evening, dear reader, except for “enchanting.” None of us who had come had any idea what to expect, but from the moment Ewing began singing Bononcini’s aria “Per la gloria d’adorarvi,” it became clear that this would be a night to remember.

  The gathered at that night’s soiree were fulsome with their applause, and as the wine flowed and the evening unfolded, their appreciation grew all the more. After a number of songs there was an instrumental interlude during which Ewing treated the audience to everything from Chopin to Count Basie. Then, to everyone’s surprise, he announced that Tenzin’s wife, Susan, would perform Massenet’s “Meditation” from Thaïs.

  Most of us saw Susan only rarely—and we only realized her exquisite talent as she performed that achingly beautiful piece. Petite and slender, as she stood in front of us all it seemed almost as though she and her violin came together; she drew us listeners into the music with her. For a few moments we became the music and were as one with the timeless experience, as if in a state of deep meditative absorption.

  Was it a coincidence that Geshe Wangpo decided to take a nighttime stroll that evening, only to walk past the café at the very moment that the night’s proceedings approached their finale? He slipped in through a side door, and a chair was quickl
y made available to him by one of the Namgyal contingent. He followed the concert with interest.

  After Susan’s mesmerizing performance, Ewing sang several more songs. Then he asked impishly if, before the evening came to a close, they’d like to hear Franc play something? The answer to that question was a foregone conclusion, the mood in the room having built to one of rapturous enthusiasm.

  I couldn’t forget the sight of Franc sitting at that same piano only weeks earlier, harshly criticizing himself for being “a hopeless musician.” How his self-loathing had made him deaf to the genuine enthusiasm of all those around him! He had placed limitations on his own happiness by convincing himself he wasn’t good enough to follow his passion.

  Right now, however, it was a different story. Franc sat down at the piano and placed sheet music on the stand. Ewing acted as page-turner. First he turned out a flawless performance of Mendelssohn’s dainty “Spring Song,” which won him the rapturous applause of his audience. Encouraged by this, he then played Brahms’s Hungarian Dance no. 3 with magnificent Central European aplomb—a triumph that won him a standing ovation.

  The crowd thundered with approval as Ewing shook Franc’s hand in warm congratulation. There were enthusiastic chants of “Encore! Encore!”

  As he turned toward the candlelit audience, Franc saw the faces of so many customers who had long since become friends, those he had lived among for all this time and who had never had so much as an inkling about his hidden talent. Then, for the first time that evening, Franc caught sight of his teacher.

  His eyes filled with tears.

  Holding up his hand for quiet, he spoke with a soft but compelling voice when the lull quickly descended. “You know, I’ve been wanting to have a soiree here ever since I first came to Dharamsala. From the beginning, staging musical evenings was a dream of mine. But only that, a dream, for the simple reason that I never thought I was good enough.”