“Where is your father?”
“Gone away. He come back soon, I think.”
“How soon?”
The boy wagged his head noncommittally. I snorted. Time was a wastin’. Our appointment had been for two; it was already a quarter to four. Soon the shops down on New Road would be closed—their new shipments of Buddhas spoken for by affluent collectors. Who could say what golden opportunities were slipping away as we bided our time in Patan? Finally, it was too much to stand.
“Tell your father I couldn’t wait any longer,” I said, “and that his rudeness has cost him a very important sale. I was genuinely interested in that little Chenrezig.”
“You must please come back tomorrow.”
“No chance. One wasted day is enough.”
The moment we stood up to leave I heard the tympanic thrum of a motorcycle approaching down the alley. Sure enough, it was Tashi, the proprietor of the shop. He parked the cycle, glanced guiltily at me, and pulled off his helmet. He looked surprisingly pale.
“I’m sorry to be so late. . . .”
“I’m sorry too,” I snapped.
“. . . but right after you called, my sister-in-law came running over to give me some terrible news. My brother was hit by a taxi, and they had to rush him to Patan Hospital.”
“I see.” We stood there in silence for a long moment. “Gee, I’m really sorry.” More silence; it was still my move. “Well,” I said, “do you feel like taking a walk down to your shop? I’d still like to see that Chenrezig.”
The shopkeeper nodded, and we strolled in silence to his store. He opened the lock and threw back the shutters. There it was—the statue that I’d had such grand memories of, that I had essentially made up my mind to buy.
But wait! Something was wrong! Something was terribly, terribly wrong! The Chenrezig, which in my memory had been smooth and clean, seemed to be covered all over with black, rancid butter!
“What’s all this gook?” I cried, setting the statue down and wiping my hands compulsively on my jeans. I turned to Nancy, embarrassed and apologetic. “It wasn’t like this before!”
“Oh, yes,” Tashi muttered. “Same, same, same. . . .”
“No it was not the same! What have you done? You’ve smeared all this butter oil all over it! Oh, why, why, why?”
“Same as before. Nothing is change.”
I heaved a sigh of disappointment and shook my head. Was he right? No—he couldn’t be—I would definitely have remembered something like this! Wouldn’t I?
“Well, listen. There must be some way to clean all this stuff off, isn’t there? Some chemical? Look, I could do it myself.”
The shopkeeper picked his keys up off the glass counter. I won’t describe the look he gave me.
“There is no way. Everything is same. You see the bell shape? Same. So. Do you want to buy?”
“No. No. No. No.”
I trudged from the shop into the dusty, dry air, avoiding the sight of my reflection in the snack-shop windowpanes.
My only thought, as Nancy and I shuffled miserably down the street, was that if the Buddha himself had witnessed that scene he would have been horrified.
His reaction would have had little to do with the issue of my reaction to the news of Tashi’s injured brother, or with the fact that I had been having fits over cooling my heels for a couple of hours. No—Buddha would have been bent out of shape by the irksome realization that here and now, a mere two-and-a-half millennia after his death, the most important of his unspoken lessons was being outrageously flaunted. Buddha was famous for his clarity, and there was a particular issue he seems to have been especially adamant about: he was not a god. Nor was he a saint, angel, deity, divine personage, heavenly host or holy ghost. He was simply an awakened human being—species Homo, genus sapiens—who had found, and traveled, the Path.
This was the whole point. We could do it, too. Anyone can. You don’t have to be a member of some celestial Bohemian Club.
Graven idols were completely anathema to the Buddha’s philosophy. Not only did he not approve of them, but anyone with any sense could see that they wouldn’t do any good. There was no point to them. To achieve insight in meditation, one looks within. When you find the Buddha there, you know you’re on the right track.
For five hundred-odd years after his death, the Buddha’s directive was respected. No likenesses of him were made (unless you count a couple of legendary ones, which I’ll get to in a minute). There were, however, at least half a dozen ingenious ways of portraying the Buddha with symbols. There was the Bodhi tree (Ficus religiosa) with its long-tongued leaves, under which Siddhartha Gautama battled with Mara and found enlightenment; the lotus, the eternal lotus, whose heart-shaped bud explodes into a radiant natural mandala; the eight-spoked wheel, symbolizing the Law; the Buddha’s footprints, displayed alone or in front of an empty throne; the stupa, which some say represents a retired, overturned begging bowl; and the flaming pillar, ancient symbol of the link between heaven and earth.
Now, about those legends. The first concerns a ruler named King Udrayana, who supposedly lived during the time of Buddha. One day the king, a devout Buddhist himself, convinced himself, for variously described motives, that he required an effigy of his spiritual master. One version tells how Buddha was paying a courtesy call to heaven when Udrayana—Buddhism’s first spiritual materialist—decided he missed the Buddha so badly that he had to have at least a statue of his absent teacher, and damn the expense. Udrayana dispatched a sculptor up to the celestial realm, and the artist returned with an exact sandalwood likeness. Some believe this statue actually exists. Needless to say, it has never turned up.
In another story we cast King Bimbisara, a contemporary of King Udrayana, as the patron of the arts. Bimbisara wanted to convert Udrayana to Buddhism and decided that the only way to do it was to present his royal chum with a portrait of the Buddha.
Buddha, we are to believe, agreed. He thought it was a great idea and instructed King Bimbisara’s painters to bring along a large piece of silk. Early in the morning, the bolt of cloth was draped on one of the palace’s outdoor walls. Buddha stood so that the rays of the rising sun threw his shadow directly onto the fabric, and he told the painters to trace his form exactly. He then dictated which colors were to be used and indicated which of his teachings were to be inscribed alongside the completed figure.
“As soon as King Udrayana sees this painting,” the Buddha declared, “he will develop faith in my teachings and perceive the true nature of reality.” This esthetic feat, we duly note, anticipated, by some twenty-five centuries, a somewhat less ambitious goal expressed by Pablo Picasso: “I wish to see art evolve to the point where a painting can cure a toothache.”
Whether or not Udrayana existed, the fact remains that there just aren’t any surviving Buddha images made earlier than the first century A.D.—at which point there was an obvious shift in the wind. Buddhism was spreading, like a flood of spilled honey, far beyond India’s bustling hive. Artists influenced by the heroic traditions of the Greco-Roman school, working in the regions that we now call Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan, knew an open field when they saw one. They grabbed the Buddha ball and ran with it, producing images of a youthful, vital champion modeled after the classical heroes of Western mythology—especially Apollo, the sun god.
At the same time that this process was taking place, it was becoming disconcertingly clear—to people whose livelihoods depended on it—that feet, empty thrones and even flaming pillars were not holding their ground against fantastic images of dancing elephants, grinning bulls, ferocious monkey-headed gods, blood-drinking demons and melon-breasted river nymphs. People just couldn’t identify with a wheel . . . and the virile and voluptuous deities of Hinduism were elbowing their way back into style. If Buddhism wanted to remain attractive to the large lay population of India, it had to bend.
Slowly, slowly, but in ever-increasing numbers, artisans lowered their defenses and began creating statues, pa
intings and friezes of the Buddha in all his most famous and enchanting moments. They must have seemed overwhelmed by the possibilities; there were, after all, five hundred years of accumulated legends that had been hiding gleefully in the shadows, anticipating their opportunity to burst upon the temples and altars, pillars and caves, mountainsides, monasteries and manuscripts that waited across the steaming breadth of Asia.
There was baby Siddhartha’s conception, accompanied by Princess Maya’s dream of a six-tusked white elephant; his miraculous birth, popping out of Mom’s right side as she waited patiently in a grove; the Great Renunciation, when the prince snuck out of Kapilavastu Palace on his trusted steed, Kanthaka, vowing never to return until he had found the “deathless state.” There was the silent battle beneath the Bodhi tree, Buddha versus Mara, culminating in the moment of enlightenment; Buddha’s first reluctant sermon in the Deer Park at Sarnath (the gods, it is said, had to persuade him to teach); and everything in between that first lesson and the End—the Buddha reclining easily on his right side, giving a final pep talk to his monks before passing into nirvana at the ripe old age of eighty.
And all these scenes were drawn, and carved, and drawn again, over and over and over, all through the parade of years—across the reign of emperors and inquisitors and tzars, through the click-clacking lifetimes of astronomers and inventors and racing-car drivers—until one day, late in the twentieth century, one basically well-meaning marsupial sahib stomped from a souvenir shop in Patan, leaving a fuming sowji behind.
While somewhere on high, in the golden cloudy realms of the Tushita Heaven, the Buddha himself—who knew well in advance about the various brands of grief that these images could and would cause—observes the situation with characteristic detachment, twines his fingers into the teaching mudra, and whispers,
“. . . Even this dirty day will wash away. . . .”
16
Nancy and Rick left Nepal at the beginning of December, attempting to get a running start on the riot of holiday festivities hosted by their respective families. They departed clear-headed and content, gleaming with fine memories, traveling light, and bringing home—as I was painfully aware—a nearly perfect, signed Sidhi Raj.
During the next few weeks, alone in Nepal, my life took on a frighteningly narrow focus. The only exercise I got was shopping for Buddhas; cycling maniacally downtown, zipping along recently paved and unnaturally broad roads and into the half-dozen shops that had become my veritable opium dens for the daily Buddha fix.
It was truly aerobic. My heart rate and adrenaline skyrocketed every time I threw back a curtain and walked into one of those dimly lit back rooms, hoping beyond hope that today, today, I’d find it—the Buddha of my Dreams, reasonably priced, beatific, of a decent size, with none of the galling flaws that seemed to crop up in Buddha after Buddha. Because, even though I might agree to buy a filing cabinet with a few surface scratches, or take a discount on an irregular pair of sneakers, I somehow could not reconcile the thought of buying a seriously flawed Buddha—even for ten percent off list price. The whole concept seemed a loathsome compromise of the goal I had in mind: spending money generously and without regret for an object that had no real use in the occidental scheme of things.
For once in my life, I was going to buy retail.
And so, at last, after having eaten up uncounted hours with repeated visits to all the rest, I decided to try the best. I stopped in at the finest, most expensive art gallery in Kathmandu: the Oriental Art Emporium, owned by a black-eyed and cerebral young man named Babukaji.
To enter Babukaji’s shop was to step into a world utterly removed from the familiar chaos of the ambient street scene. The impudent orchestra of New Road—shouting, honking, whistling and mooing—faded into oblivion as I closed the door behind me. It was almost as if the interior of the gallery created a zone of silence around itself. I blinked, waiting for my brain to adjust to this subdued new esthetic.
Babukaji sat behind a wide desk cluttered with bills and letters. He was on the phone, speaking in imperative whispers, and nodded briefly to acknowledge my presence. It was impossible to guess his age; he could have been anywhere from twenty-one to forty-five.
Babukaji’s shop seemed to combine the best qualities of both gallery and shrine. The artworks, displayed in polished and well-lit showcases, were extraordinary. I found my materialistic frenzy loosening, dissolving into puddles of reverence and supplication. I began to suspect what it would mean—in terms of responsibility—to own a truly potent work of devotional art.
There was a macabre Tibetan ritual cup, fashioned from the silver-lined cranium of a long-dead lama. . . .
There was an enormous bronze Tara, at least four centuries old, as lithe and athletic as a yoga instructor. . . .
There was a fabulous bejeweled Manjushri, flaming sword held menacing and true, whose eyes seemed to follow me around the room. . . .
There was a gilt statue of Padmasambhava, the great mystic and magician who brought Buddhism to Tibet twelve hundred years ago. The scepter in the saint’s hand displayed three impaled heads, demonstrating the seer’s complete mastery of the Three Realms of Existence. . . .
There were yogic saints and dancing Ganeshas; singing brass bowls and Tibetan bells made from long-forgotten alloys; prayer beads carved from human bones; ritual daggers with demonic faces engraved on their hilts.
There was everything anyone could possibly wish for, except a statue of the Buddha.
“How may I help you?”
Babukaji had ended his conversation and crept up silently behind me, catlike, catching me off guard. In a lame attempt to sound casual, I began to prattle uncontrollably.
“Well—gee, I don’t know. You’ve got some beautiful stuff here, no doubt about it, but I’m frankly sort of disappointed by the selection. I mean, aren’t you a bit short on Buddhas? After all, this is Nepal, Buddha was born here, so I guess I figured you’d have at least a couple of really top-notch statues; nothing sloppy, mind you, but a really sweet little—”
“Wait.”
Babukaji raised his palm, and I screeched to a halt. “Allow me to show you something.”
He walked behind a low display case, parted a maroon curtain, and vanished into a back room. I heard a drawer squeaking open; the jangle of keys; the snap of a lock; another creak. Then Babukaji reappeared, carrying a small parcel completely mummified in rice paper and tied with string—like a Nepali Maltese Falcon. He set it down on a countertop and removed the wrappings.
The chemistry was immediate, complete and devastating.
For several minutes I could not speak. My ears were ringing; the shop seemed to go soft-focus around me. I felt like a kid at Christmas time, staring through a frosted windowpane at the Flexible Flyer of his dreams. Images of coasting fearlessly across the thin ice of this particular lifetime, my new Buddha by my side, danced giddily in my head. I dreamed of the ease and speed with which we would sleigh, the Buddha steering, around the stumps and moguls of samsara—illusion and suffering—that lay all along life’s twisting path.
“I’ll take it,” I said.
There was a brief, strained silence. I turned around to face Babukaji and repeated my claim.
“I’m so sorry.” The shopkeeper folded his hands and seemed to bow slightly. “But that particular Buddha is not for sale. It is by the hand of Sidhi Raj himself and is being held in reserve for a very important Japanese collector. Besides,” he added gently, eyes glancing down at my tattered sneakers, “I think maybe this one is a little too expensive for you.”
This was the very moment that I’d been waiting for: the chance to cast off an entire childhood of operant conditioning with a single, devil-may-care gesture. A little smile crossed my lips. “Ah, c’mon, tell me. You might be surprised. How much?”
Babukaji smiled as well. “Fifteen thousand rupees,” he said evenly.
My mouth dropped open. I barked out a laugh; there had to be a mistake. Numbers, I knew, were always a po
int of confusion for non-native speakers.
“Write it down,” I insisted. And he did, slowly and carefully: a one, a five, a comma and three zeroes.
“Fifteen thousand rupees,” he repeated.
I whipped out my pocket calculator and divided by 22.5, the going exchange rate.
“But—but—that comes to $666.66666! I’d have to be sick to spend that much money on a Buddha! Whew! Hey!” I slapped my forehead, feeling much like the fall guy in some dumb situation comedy. “You’ve got to be kidding!”
I paced around the shop as Babukaji rewrapped the statue, dividing the figures again and again in the hope that I had made some grievous error with the mathematics. But no—that devilish row of sixes continued to display itself, with an impassivity that was itself almost Buddha-like.
“Heh!” I croaked. The wisest thing to do, without a doubt, was to put this insane temptation behind me as quickly as possible.
But not quite yet.
“Listen,” I muttered imploringly. “Let me just have one last look.”
Babukaji did not blink an eye; he calmly unwrapped the Buddha once more and placed it in my hands. Although barely 20 centimeters high it was, truly, a marvelous work of art. Babukaji knew; he knew that I knew. At one point I took a breath, right on the verge of bargaining. But when our eyes met, Babukaji gave his head the merest shake. It was sufficient; I said nothing.
The Nepalis have such beautiful features: so refined. So sculpted. After spending a month looking at statues, you realize that everyone you see on the street resembles one of them. The university co-ed sitting sidesaddle on the back of her brother’s motorcycle must have been the model for the Tara I’d passed up a couple of days ago; that rotund fellow lounging in the glass-bead necklace stall could only be Ganesh; that little boy ringing the bell on his father’s bicycle was the baby Krishna. . . .
Shopping for Buddhas Page 12