And so it got to the point where we shopped with consummate single-mindedness of purpose. We would look only at the best. Often we would enter a shop and, barely glancing at the inferior products on the shelves, demand instantly to be taken into the back room to see the newest, the latest, the most expensive work. We were the elite; the ones who knew the veins and arteries of the business. We were connoisseurs of Buddhas, of Taras, of Manjushris; and we begged not to be insulted by clumsy or sloppy workmanship.
And here I beheld the first of many twisted Zen truths pretzeled throughout this crazy koan called Shopping for Buddhas. Only through the yoga of true pushiness, only by being relentlessly pushy in the most charming possible way, would I ever find the prize that I was seeking: a Buddha that really said something. Or, a Buddha that really said nothing—and said it loudly enough for me to hear.
7
Suppose a man were pierced with a poisoned arrow, and his friends and relatives got together to call a surgeon to have the arrow pulled out and the wound treated.
If the wounded man objects, saying, “Wait a little. Before you pull it out, I want to know who shot this arrow. Was it a man or a woman? Was it someone of noble birth, or a peasant? What was the bow made of? Was it a big bow or a small bow? Was it made of wood or bamboo? And what was the bow string made of? Fiber or gut? Before you extract the arrow, I want to know all about these things.” Before all this information can be secured, no doubt, the poison will have time to circulate all through the system and the man may die. The first duty is to remove the arrow, and stop its poison from spreading.
In the search for truth there are certain questions that are unimportant. If a person were to postpone his searching and practice for enlightenment until such questions are solved, he would die before he found the path.
—BUKKYO DENDO KYOKAI, The Teaching of Buddha
It was at just about this juncture in time that I began to see everything that had transpired over the past few months—from the encounters with the Khandroma Rinpoche in Tibet to the hair-raising hike from Gosainkund Lake and the wanton marketplace madness that followed—as elements of a strange and inscrutable whole. My headlong search for a perfect Buddha suddenly took on bold new dimensions. It began to seem less like an unbridled shopping spree and mushroomed in my imagination into an epic quest, an odyssey capable of embracing nearly every situation I had ever encountered in Nepal or Tibet.
With this in mind, and inspired by recollections of Gurdjieff, I found myself recalling the single most remarkable man that I have ever met during my trips to Asia. He is a sort of haywire mystic, just a few years older than myself. It had been he, I think, who got my interest in Eastern thought rolling; for it had been he who first grabbed and twisted, a good decade earlier, the deeply lodged arrow tipped with my peculiar poison.
During my first visit to Nepal in 1979, Dorothy—the woman I had followed, in ill-fated pursuit, from Greece—developed a somewhat irritating relationship with a self-styled guru named Lalji. Every afternoon she would return from his house (he owned a bunch of chicken coops near the Bagmati River) and expound, clearly besotted, on all the marvelously insightful things he had said to her.
I was fresh from college at the time—B.A. in psych, magna cum laude—and had very little patience for the way this guy was spilling out all these great truths about Dorothy’s past, present and future. There was only one cure for my skepticism, Dorothy said. I would have to meet him. So one afternoon we cycled along Kalimati Road and forked left, down a muddy track that led to his compound.
Lalji greeted us by his gate, dressed in a bright pink sweatshirt. He was trim, if not athletic, with a round head and prominent ears. His black eyes danced, and as he gave me the once-over I thought I detected the eager, gleeful expression of a biology whiz kid who is about to pith and dissect his first frog.
Basically, I had been invited to observe a session between himself and Dorothy. I listened attentively, albeit suspiciously, to everything he said, cutting in now and again to chuckle, shake my head, and offer up bits of wisdom from the venerable science of psychology. Whenever I did so, I noticed Lalji peering at me with a kind of grudging admiration, like a magician who becomes aware that someone in the audience has figured out his tricks.
When it came time to go I felt well satisfied, secure in the knowledge that I’d given Lalji, if not a formal come-uppance, an indication that at least one person saw him for what he was: another Hindu fakir, stropping his spiritual razors on the Western money belt.
After we left his place, as Dorothy and I were slowly cycling down the little dirt path that led along the river and away from Lalji’s compound, we heard the gate creak open, and Lalji’s voice call to us from behind.
“Dorothy! Dorothy!” He was leaning out of his front yard and shouting in an agitated manner. “This is very important! Please, please tell your good friend Mister Jeffrey: either he has to let go of all his neuroses or he will be in a mental institution within ten years—guaranteed!!!”
This malediction filled me with a combination of rage and gloom, but I ultimately decided to accept it as a challenge. A few weeks later, after Dorothy had left for a trip to Burma, I dropped by Lalji’s to demand that he qualify what he had said.
He stood by his claim, and raised the ante by announcing that as an artist—at the time I was calling myself a sculptor—I was doomed to failure. I was nervous and critical, he declared, and therefore could never produce anything that did not reflect neurosis and criticism.
“I will give you a challenge,” he said. “I challenge you to create something—one thing, however small, however large!—that does not reflect the fact that you are both completely dissatisfied and highly critical of everything in the world!”
“But you haven’t even seen my work!” I stormed.
Still, when I left Nepal after that first visit, I couldn’t help but wonder if he had a point. As long as I can remember, I’ve always been inclined to see the worst in myself—a masochistic quirk that forced me to accept Lalji’s harsh judgment of me while simultaneously proving it to be true.
Over the next few years I found myself continually dredging up Lalji’s rude diagnosis, and wondering how much my neuroses actually contribute, for better or worse, to my creative temperament. What would happen if I ever did achieve a non-neurotic state? Could I still produce anything worthwhile? I mean, don’t all artists create by reproducing their identity in every single work they fashion? And isn’t it precisely this quirky sense of self—call it “neurosis” if you will—that gives body to an artist’s style, that fleshes out his or her portfolio?
These questions bedeviled me as much as—or more than—the image of myself bouncing off the walls of a padded cell. And so, when I returned to Nepal for the second time in 1983, I felt compelled to seek out Lalji once again. He had identified my poison; perhaps he could supply the antidote as well.
His wife met me at the door of their home and directed me toward the yard. Perhaps, over the past four years, I had romanticized my image of Lalji just a bit. At any rate, the figure I saw was hardly the earnest, learned ascetic of memory and imagination.
He had clearly put on some weight—but this in itself didn’t surprise me, given the time-honored Asian tradition of corpulent gurus. No, what really threw me for a loop was the sight of Lalji in Ray-Bans, lounging on a lawn chair, leafing through a copy of OMNI and helping himself from a carton of—Marlboros!
“It can’t be!” I cried. “An enlightened soul like yourself, indulging in one of the most repulsive and self-destructive habits in the world! Tell me, dear Lalji: how do you reconcile your spiritual pretensions with the consumption of fine Virginia tobacco?”
“Mister Jeffrey!”
Lalji folded up his magazine, dropped it onto the grass, and beamed with apparent delight. Without missing a beat, he launched into reciting a parable about a great saint, an ancient guru from South India, whose only mortal shortcoming was a voracious and incorrigible appet
ite for food.
“This guru would often jump up”—Lalji leaped from his chair—“right in the middle of the most profound discourses, and run wildly into the kitchen to see exactly what was being served, in what quantity, and, most importantly, when.
“ ‘Be still!’ his wife would chastise him. ‘It’s your food; no one else will take it! What will people say, seeing you always jumping like this? Here you are, a sadhu, a holy man, preaching temperance but unable to control your appetite!’
“ ‘Dear wife,’ the guru replied earnestly, ‘do not worry that I must cling to this one thing; it is all that is holding me to the earth! When you see that I have at last lost my appetite for food, only wait; in three days I will be completely gone.’ ”
The rest of the story, of course, followed faithfully—the guru did indeed lose his appetite, and in short order he had vanished; simply vanished, without a trace.
“An enlightened being on the earth must find an anchor,” Lalji said. “Or else he will simply blow away. He is like a man who has climbed to the top of a high, windy peak with an open parachute. The moment he loses his grasp on some earthly thing, he is gone. To take flight from that point—to actually fly—is the easiest thing.”
I nodded, helped myself to a smoke, and settled back into a chair. I told Lalji that while I didn’t entirely agree with his point of view about my art, I was ready to accept some kind of mental exercise that I might use in dealing with my anxieties and neuroses—an Eastern process that might work where my Western techniques had failed. I wanted to learn how to exploit my creative drive—that potent, pushy force—without actually having to give up my all-important ego.
“I can give you a solution,” Lalji rejoined immediately. “I require only this: Do not ask why it works. The only important thing is that it works. Long before people knew about carbohydrates and sugars, they were nourished by apples! What if they had refused to eat apples until they could understand exactly why those apples were of any use? So! You don’t question why an apple nourishes you. You just eat, and it nourishes! This process I teach you will be the same.”
He instructed me to sit back in my straw chair, with my arms out. “Can you feel your heartbeat in your index finger?” I replied that I could. “Look at your fingers,” he said. “I want you to imagine, one at a time, flames coming from each finger.”
He joined with me in this difficult exercise, at which I was not what you might call successful. Once all our fingers were ostensibly lit, like candles, he began playing with the fire in his hands: waving it, swooping and juggling it. “It is just like this,” he said, hands dancing with invisible energies. “You will juggle those flames—the flames that are flowing, wasted, from your fingertips. You will roll them and juggle them. And then—maybe you will feel they are getting a bit heavy, yes? And you will find, you will perceive this heaviness, and when this happens you”—he quickly inverted his hands above his head, eyes closed—“Whoosh! Like this! You let all the energy re-enter you, flow back into you.”
He leaned forward, a flash in his eye. “You can even do it in bed—during sex! Even if you are in deep intercourse, you can do this thing and—whoosh!—the woman you are with will also feel it! And the next day she might say, ‘You know, I felt something very fine!’ Because if you are so intimately connected, the energy will circle through both of you—in the form of great ecstasy!
“If you are doing this for a few months, you will begin to change. Maybe your anger will increase a bit, and your sexual energies will go up four or five times what they are now. The anger will pass; it’s the only disagreeable part of the cycle. And if you keep this up, I promise you, in one or two years you will be a completely changed person. The flames will cleanse you entirely, burn all the garbage out.
“But listen carefully to what I say now. After six months or a year of concentrated practice, if you go into a dark room and do this, there will be actual visible light—a pale, bluish light—coming from your fingers. And if any friend is with you, he can see this also, all around you. He might say, ‘I see some kind of pale, bluish light, but I cannot find its source.’ You will be that source!
“This is really the perfect exercise for you, for your special situation.” Lalji settled back in his lawn chair, and tapped a cigarette from its box. “All your powers are concentrated in your hands. Now they just flow out, useless, and you’re waving your hands around and biting your fingers. Do this instead. And keep a flame burning, whenever you can, to guide you. Carry candles with you all the time; make sure you are always affluent in candles!
“And you can burn them at any time, day or night, because being an artist you know that there is no day or night for such people—only cycles of inspiration or barrenness. Life is a single span, a continuum marked by certain periods and creations. Thus, gradually, will you find your inspiration and creativity increasing—and your work will become enlightening instead of neurotic and critical. Then and only then will you meet my challenge! But until that time it is impossible. You cannot create something better than you are.
“Why be satisfied with a penny,” he asked, holding his thumb and index finger pinched in front of my eyes, “when you can possess the wealth of all diamonds?”
Shortly after that encounter, when I departed the Kingdom of Nepal in the early autumn of 1984, I carried home the conviction that all things were within my grasp. The world could be my pomegranate, if only I could muster up the self-discipline to perform the simple daily exercise Lalji had recommended.
My resolve got off to a redoubtable start, and for my first month or two back in the United States I practiced the finger-flame meditation religiously. Before long, though, the seductive distractions of dinner parties, live jazz and safe sex left me too bloated, wired or exhausted to conduct the visualizations more than once or twice a month.
By mid-1987—as I prepared to embark on the voyage that would take me into Tibet, out of Gosainkund and through Kathmandu’s bustling Buddha emporiums—I was burning candles and focusing on my seething inner powers about as often as I was flossing my teeth.
8
There are many new roads in Kathmandu—the oldest of which is named “New Road.”
New Road begins at the Tundikhel Parade Ground and plows a broad swath through what has become, such as it is, downtown Kathmandu. I steered my rented clunker—an Indian-made Hero bicycle with tassels streaming from the handgrips—through the brightly painted arch, flanked by images of Shiva and Ganesh, and glided to a halt at the first gundpak shop on the left. I bought fifteen rupees worth of the sweet, nutty brown mass. It was wrapped, still warm, in yesterday’s New York Stock Exchange report.
Then it was off again, past the shimmering displays of the gem and jewelry shops; past Vision Stationery and Human Fit Tailors; past shops selling soccer balls and trikes, chutneys and doughnuts, King and Queen commemorative plates and Singer sewing machines; past a crowd of Nepalis massed before a storefront, watching color photographs spew from the maw of an instant processing machine; past the steel-shuttered windows of the American Cultural Center, with their dramatic display of space shuttle photos; past the ancient pipal tree, beneath whose spreading branches lay broad plastic tarps blanketed with rows and rows of local newspapers and magazines; past Central Drug, Human Fit Tailors, Optic Nerve, enormous black bulls chewing complacently in the road as traffic swerved obediently around them—and in the windows of the tour agencies I read the brightly lettered signs saying,
Visit Dakshinkali!
Live Animal Sacrifices
Every Tuesday and Saturday!
At the end of New Road is the old royal palace with its towering pagodas and fantastic courtyards populated by gods, goddesses and demons. Not a bad venue for some shopping! But before making that plunge into the giddy world of Buddha buying, I cycled around the staid bronze statue of Chandra Shamsher Jung Bahadur Rana, stopped my bicycle, and locked it by a telephone pole at the corner of Dharma Path and New Road. And there I gazed up, f
ace to face with the entrance to the city’s most grotesque capitalist monument: three tiers of sooty raw concrete, and a hand-lettered blue and white sign reading “Super Market.” This was Bishal Bazaar, Kathmandu’s first enclosed shopping mall: a mere seven years old, but already an ancient ruin.
I’ll tell you why I stopped. Some friends had come to town a couple of weeks earlier, and they returned from a stroll one afternoon to inform me that the management of this so-called Super Market had just finished installing an attraction that had proved to be the modern-day equivalent of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. We’re talking about Kathmandu’s very first escalator, linking the first and second floors of the gritty enclosed mall.
Now, I’d been by before, hoping to find this marvel of technology in action. As a rule it was broken, covered over with enormous sheets of plastic, like a minor work by Christo. Today, though, contrary to any of my expectations, the escalator was running; and this I had to see.
There were two enormous crowds. One was gathered at the foot of the escalator, where a sneering guard wielding a nightstick pushed the bravest of the brave, one by one, onto the veranda, the no-man’s-land at the base of the procession of hypnotic, endlessly ascending steps. A barefoot porter in filthy, tattered rags—some lost refugee from the hills—stood immobilized at the starting line, awed to paralysis by the stream of metal that flowed as if by divine writ from beneath the rubber cowl by his toes. As I watched, I realized that the man was experiencing a beatific transformation. His knees weakened; and within a moment he was bowing, praying, practically prostrating himself before this divine sight, this river of steel issuing miraculously out of the ground, just as the holy Ganges flows from the scalp of the great Lord Shiva! The guard reached forward and jerked him rudely aside.
Shopping for Buddhas Page 6