The Dalai Lama's Cat and the Power of Meow

by David Michie

  The Dalai Lama considered this with an earnest expression on his face before rising from his desk, stepping over to the sill, and sitting beside me.

  “Good quote,” he said. “But I think I prefer the version by Buddha himself: ‘The objective world rises from the mind itself.’”

  Oliver raised his eyebrows. “Identical concept, expressed more succinctly.”

  His Holiness chuckled as he reached out to stroke me. “And more accurately,” he said, “Buddha’s version includes the minds of all sem-chens—not only humans.”

  “Oh, I see what you’re saying.” Oliver smiled.

  “May the world arising in the mind of little Snow Lion, and all living beings, be very happy.” The Dalai Lama spoke softly, as though in prayer.

  At the doorway, Oliver paused. “Is there any particular reason you wanted to see this book today?”

  “Oh yes,” the Dalai Lama said, nodding. “I am studying the terma that was brought to us recently. The more I study, the more parallels I find with quantum science. I think it will prove to be one of the most remarkable discoveries in recent times . . .”

  CHAPTER NINE

  It was the middle of one of those brilliant Himalaya mornings when the skies are perfectly azure and the air, having blown from the ice-capped mountains, is so crisp that it seems to sparkle. I was on the filing cabinet, watching Tenzin and Oliver pore over their paperwork.

  “That completes the returns from Sera, Ganden, and Drepung,” announced Tenzin, pushing aside a thick set of printouts he had just finished checking. “A minor celebration is called for.”

  Opposite him, in the chair previously occupied by Chogyal, Oliver looked up with a smile. “I know you may think me perverse, but I’m actually quite enjoying this. It’s something different for me.”

  “Doing the work is celebration enough, you mean?” tested Tenzin.

  “Oh,” Oliver said, his eyes twinkling. “I wouldn’t go that far!”

  Two weeks earlier, the Dalai Lama had invited both men into his office.

  “They say that no one is indispensable, but still we can find no one to replace Chogyal,” His Holiness had observed.

  “It has been difficult,” agreed Tenzin, looking somewhat embarrassed. He had been leading the search for an adviser to His Holiness on monastic matters but so far had been unable to find a person with the rare combination of organizational knowledge, people skills, and the quiet authority needed for such a sensitive role.

  “I know you have been doing a lot of his work yourself,” acknowledged the Dalai Lama, “but we have the census coming up, and you’ll need much help with that.”

  Tenzin nodded. Every two years a census was held of the sangha, or Buddhist community, within every monastery in India and the Himalaya region. The results were sent to Namgyal to be aggregated and analyzed. It was a massive undertaking that took Chogyal several weeks of concentrated effort.

  “Oliver, would you be willing to assist?” His Holiness turned to his translator. “This job does not require your language skills, but you may perhaps find it interesting.”

  “I am very happy to help in whatever capacity you wish,” agreed Oliver. “If you like, I can hand over the translation of the Tsongkhapa exposition to that very promising young monk from Ladakh.”

  Oliver had been training a linguistically talented young monk as an assistant in recent months.

  “You will supervise him?” His Holiness confirmed.

  “Yes.”

  The Dalai Lama looked from one to the other of them with a level expression. “The two of you are happy working together like this?”

  As Tenzin and Oliver nodded, they exchanged an expression of amused anticipation.

  In the months since Oliver had arrived as official translator, they had spent an increasing amount of time in each other’s offices. Not only that, they had taken several extramural excursions together. The soiree at the Himalaya Book Café had been one. On a different occasion, they had both gone to watch a cricket match at the local grounds. And two weekends before, the two of them had traveled down to Delhi to watch a special performance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado.

  Within days of taking on this new assignment, Oliver began sitting in the chair once occupied by Chogyal. He pored over spreadsheets, transcribed figures from printouts onto a computer, cross-checked them for accuracy, and compared them to the previous years’ data.

  “If we could only automate this, it would save a huge amount of time and cut down on human error—by which I mean my errors,” Oliver observed during his second day on the job as he pushed his chair back from the desk.

  Sitting opposite, Tenzin looked at him over the tops of his glasses. “Chogyal used to say exactly the same thing. But getting all the monasteries to use the same software is where things come unstuck.”

  “Legacy issues?”

  “Precisely.”

  “You don’t think a request from above would be enough to get it over the line?” Oliver asked, tilting his head toward His Holiness’s office.

  “Only if combined with a lot of diplomacy. We’re already imposing on the abbots’ goodwill to get the figures sent. Asking to receive them in the format of our choice . . .”

  “Well, if anyone is up to that task,” observed Oliver, “it would have to be you.”

  “Hmm . . . ,” Tenzin mused as he returned to his own spreadsheets.

  Oliver and Tenzin were looking at the completed set of census printouts that Tenzin had just checked when Tenzin’s posture suddenly shifted. He turned toward the open window near the filing cabinet, his head slightly raised. His brow furrowed and his eyes closed in concentration.

  At the very same moment I caught the scent, too. Lifting my head, I flared my nostrils. There could be no doubting. It was an unmistakable aroma.

  We exchanged a glance.

  “Mrs. Trinci?” queried Tenzin.

  Oliver glanced at the calendar on his computer. “We have Russians coming for lunch . . .”

  Tenzin pushed his chair back, stood up, and headed for the door. “Her first event since she took leave after her heart attack,” he confirmed.

  Hopping down from filing cabinet to desk to floor, I followed him as fast as my somewhat unsteady gait would allow me.

  “How do you know she’s here?” Oliver wanted to know.

  “I caught a whiff of her famous chocolate-chip cookies,” said Tenzin. “I’m going to investigate.” Then, as he stepped into the corridor, he said, “If there are any on offer, I’ll bring a couple back.”

  “Minor celebration,” Oliver reminded him.

  “Elevenses!” called out Tenzin, using the very English term for a midmorning snack.

  Oliver chuckled.

  A short while later, I followed him into the kitchen downstairs. Sure enough, Mrs. Trinci was standing in the middle of it, and, to my surprise, Serena was there chopping vegetables on a countertop.

  “Mrs. Trinci!” Tenzin greeted her with an outstretched hand. Even at his most cordial, diplomatic protocol was so engrained in Tenzin that there was always a touch of formality about him.

  “My dear Tenzin!” Mrs. Trinci said, ignoring his hand and kissing him on both cheeks.

  “May I be the first to welcome you back! Serena has been wonderfully generous to help us in your absence. But you have been greatly missed.”

  At that instant, Mrs. Trinci caught sight of the tip of my bushy, gray tail behind the counter. “Oh, my little dolce mio! Have you come to welcome me back, too?” she crooned.

  I walked over and rubbed her legs, purring appreciatively.

  “You see?” said Tenzin, as though my appearance confirmed what he’d just said. “You have been missed—and not only by the human residents.”

  Mrs. Trinci soon lifted me onto a counter and, while stroking me effusively, reminded me why I was her tesorina, or treasure. Face-to-face like this for the first time in weeks, I could tell that something had changed. It wasn’t only that her mascara w
as less thick and that she wore only one gold bracelet instead of a whole percussion section. It was more her manner. She was just as warm and engaged as before, but there was a quietness about her. A calmness in her focus that I had never observed before.

  “I’m pleased to see you here, too, Serena,” Tenzin said, welcoming her.

  “Just like the old days.”

  “She’s a good girl,” chimed Mrs. Trinci.

  “When I offered to help,” said Serena, “I never thought she’d accept. She’s usually so stubborn.”

  “I’ve changed.” Mrs. Trinci shrugged. “Why make things difficult for myself when my own daughter is one of the best chefs this side of Europe?”

  “Oh, pffff!” Serena made a face.

  “Quite right,” agreed Tenzin.

  “I realized that I don’t need to prove myself,” Mrs. Trinci continued.

  “You already did that a long time ago, Mrs. Trinci,” Tenzin assured her, shooting a look toward the oven, where the cookies were baking to a rich, gold color.

  “Would you like a plate of cookies to take upstairs, Tenzin?” Serena asked, noticing his glance with a smile.

  “Only if . . .”

  Serena was already opening the oven door and pulling out a tray of cookies baked to perfection.

  “Be careful when you take a bite into them,” she warned, lifting several onto a plate with a spatula. “The chocolate inside is still hot.”

  That was how, a short while later, Tenzin, Oliver, and I found ourselves enjoying celebratory tea and cookies on a balcony. Between the executive assistants’ office and His Holiness’s suite was a VIP lounge where visitors could be seated before being shown in for an audience. That lounge opened onto a balcony that was rarely used. The Dalai Lama was over at Namgyal Monastery all morning, so the unused balcony, with its arboreal view of the local countryside, was the perfect spot to relax.

  Tenzin had prepared two cups of tea in the correct manner: by warming the teapot first, measuring out five heaped teaspoons of Ceylon leaves, adding the boiled water, allowing proper time for the tea to steep, gently rocking the teapot first one way and then the other, and finally pouring the tea into cups through a strainer. In the meantime, Oliver had poured out a saucer of milk for me.

  In the open air, the three of us enjoyed our treats with the mindful contemplation of connoisseurs.

  It was only after the two men had finished their cookies that Oliver wiped his hands on a napkin and opened a folder on his lap.

  “The figures in from Herne Hill Monastery are especially interesting reading,” he said.

  Tenzin looked over with a querying expression. Herne Hill was one of the most isolated monasteries of all, and although not a large one, the sangha there was well known for its commitment to meditation retreats.

  “Average age,” Oliver quoted, “eighty-four.”

  “That is high,” agreed Tenzin.

  “Highest of all the centers in our census.”

  “I visited there a few years ago,” Tenzin told him. “There was no hiding the wrinkles, but the monks’ demeanor, their life force, was still very youthful. They are an excellent case study of what happens when people are left alone to get on with their practice.”

  Oliver nodded. “In the West, we are still struggling to learn how consciousness affects the body. But just recently there have been some great results showing how meditation slows down aging. Telomerase activity. Genetic copying. It all adds up . . . to eighty-four!”

  Tenzin chuckled. “Average,” he emphasized. “Half of them are older than that.”

  For a while, the only sound was of me licking the saucer to purge it of every last drop of cream. Every rasp of my tongue caused the saucer to clink against the leg of the chair on which Oliver was seated. Oliver reached his arm down to stroke me.

  “Why is it,” mused Tenzin, “that Westerners struggle so much with the idea that the mind affects the body?”

  There was a pause while Oliver considered the question. “It was only about a century ago that mind was even considered to be a valid scientific subject.”

  “About two and a half thousand years after the East?”

  “Exactly. Up till then, Western science focused on the external world. For most of this time, people thought of the mind as part of the soul—it was a religious matter. When scientists finally did turn their attention to consciousness, at first they thought it amounted to nothing more than brain activity.”

  “The mind is the brain?” asked Tenzin.

  “It’s what a lot of people still assume.”

  Oliver raised his cup to his lips and sipped his tea reflectively. “Trouble is, scientists can’t really prove the theory—to explain exactly how cells can create consciousness, for example. To me it seems as unlikely as saying that your laptop can feel emotions.”

  “Haven’t I read somewhere that there is still no evidence that memories are stored in the brain?” Tenzin raised another objection.

  “Exactly. Despite billions of dollars of research, it’s never been proven. And there are other big holes in the theory, like how people in comas, whose brains are completely inactive, later report the most vivid experiences.”

  “Not a very convincing theory,” observed Tenzin.

  “But you’d be surprised how many Western scientists still believe it,” agreed Oliver. “Fortunately, things have started to move on. Recent developments in quantum science have helped us see the most wonderful convergences between Western science and Eastern wisdom.”

  “Ancient and contemporary.”

  “Outer and inner,” Oliver said, eyes sparkling. “The Buddhist definition of mind as ‘a formless continuum of clarity and cognition’ is very much in keeping with quantum science theories that matter and energy are two aspects of the same reality. E = mc2.”

  Tenzin was nodding. “I have also read about how quantum science has no notion of subject and object.”

  “Exactly,” chimed Oliver. “This perhaps gives us a clue to why meditators who have some control of mind also have some control of the body.”

  Tenzin nodded. “The one manifests as the other.”

  As the two men continued to discuss the subject, talking with some excitement about the subjects of consciousness and healing, I found a sunny spot on the balcony between their two chairs and began a post-prandial grooming session. I listened to Oliver explain how the words “meditation” and “medication” came from the same Latin root word, medeor, meaning “to heal” or “to make whole.” How our every thought has an energetic component that translates into a physical result. How the placebo effect provides evidence of the power of the mind.

  Such conversations intrigued me because we cats, too, are mind-havers. We also have consciousness. Thoughts and feelings manifest in the bodies of felines as much as in humans. Is the act of purring, known to resonate at a level that promotes healing, not evidence that we cats possess an innate understanding of how to use our own consciousness to “make whole”? And is it possible that feline longevity, like human longevity, can be extended by of our state of mind? In a home filled not only with the necessities of life but also with a true sense of giving and receiving love, is a cat like me more likely to thrive into ripe old age than when bereft of kindness?

  The two men were chuckling at a joke of Oliver’s when I detected movement in the room behind them. Through the open doorway to the balcony, there was a swish of red robes—and then His Holiness appeared.

  For a moment it was as though a head teacher had made an unexpected appearance and discovered his students at play instead of working. For my own part, having reached the most delicate portion of my grooming routine, I had raised my leg and was attending to my nether regions. I, too, looked up at the Dalai Lama, caught unawares.

  Oliver and Tenzin made as if to rise to their feet. I lowered my rear leg.

  “Please! Stay!” His Holiness gestured at them emphatically.

  “Your Holiness—” began Oliver.
/>   Tenzin chimed in, “We thought—”

  “One of my meetings was canceled. I’m home early.”

  “We are celebrating a milestone with the census.”

  “Very good,” the Dalai Lama said, nodding. Then, wagging his hand between the two of them, he added, “I am pleased to find you working so well together.”

  An enigmatic smile tugged at the corners of his mouth.

  On the middle of the afternoon that same day, Mrs. Trinci was shown into His Holiness’s office.

  “I wanted to thank you for a wonderful lunch,” the Dalai Lama said, taking her hand as he sat down on a chair next to hers. “Our visitors especially liked the . . . how do you say . . . blinis?”

  “Sì, sì,” Mrs. Trinci beamed.

  Forehead wrinkling in concern, he continued, “Not too much stress in the kitchen?”

  “Oh no.” She shook her head and paused for a moment before continuing. “The weeks of rest when I was at home gave me time to think. I remembered the advice you gave me when I first started cooking here.”

  Both of them smiled at their fond recollection of an earlier time.

  “You said to me, semplice. Simple.”

  The Dalai Lama nodded.

  “I think those early months were the most enjoyable. I used to love being asked to prepare lunch for Namgyal. But I think I forgot about being simple. I wanted meglio—better and better. I wanted to . . . excel. Then, when I was resting, I remembered again: keep it simple. You never asked me for complesso. Magnifico! You never asked to impress your guests!”

  His Holiness chuckled. “You are right.”

  “So now, I go back to being simple. It’s not about me. Being a great chef. It is for your guests. Simple, delicious meals.”

  “Very good. Thank you!” The Dalai Lama reached out again and patted her hand. “I am pleased to know that you have taken something very useful from the heart attack. You are cultivating inner peace. Contentment. A focus on others.”