Late at night, when I went to bed, I closed my eyes and still saw all those faces. But one face in particular kept creeping into my consciousness, insinuating itself into my dreams. It was the face of Babukaji’s Buddha—all $666.66 worth.
And a damned good thing, I thought to myself miserably, that it wasn’t for sale.
I returned to Babukaji’s every day for a week, hoping he might get something else in, something even remotely comparable—and half the price—of that superb copper Buddha. Every day I asked to look at it again, and every day he patiently took it out of the back room, unwrapped it, and let me gaze at its perfect features.
One afternoon Babukaji said, “I must tell you something. I have learned, just yesterday, that this Japanese dealer has left town. He did not leave word with me, so I must assume he is abandoning this deal. And so I ask you: do you wish to buy this Buddha?”
I wheezed; I gulped; I asked the price, hoping beyond hope that Babukaji would have pity on the poor dollar. No chance; the price was fixed. By now, though, the rupee had slightly devalued. The Buddha would cost me $650, if I changed money on the black market.
“I gotta think about it,” I pleaded.
“Yes,” said Babukaji. “I will sell it to no one else until you have decided.”
17
No matter what’s going on in your life, if you walk down the streets in Kathmandu you’ll run smack into a metaphor for it. That’s what I love—and fear—most about Nepal.
I strolled down toward the Bagmati River, desperately confused. What to do? I was completely in love with that Buddha in Babukaji’s shop—but $650! It was a mind-numbing figure. My car cost less than that!
My face felt pale and wan. When was the last time I spent $50 for a nice shirt? I mean, okay, $300 is an exercise, a deep breath that you have to take. A plunge. And it’s true—staring at that $650 price tag, I felt like one of those Nepalis who were standing by the side of the escalator, daring themselves to jump on. Except that while the escalator was just a ride—and a free ride—this Buddha represented a small fortune. It cost far more than I earned during some of my leaner months as a writer.
Down at the river, the usual activities were in progress. People were bathing, washing their clothes, watering their buffaloes. I was just about to cross over the bridge to the other side when I saw something going on at a little temple by the bank. A man in a white breechcloth was sweeping, sweeping, sweeping the ashes off a circular pedestal, or ghat, upon which a cremation had just been completed.
At that moment I remembered something.
Months ago, while Karen was still visiting, we woke up early one morning and took a taxi out to Pashupatinath, a very important Shiva temple just east of the city. The grounds are bisected by the Bagmati River, which manifests directly from Shiva’s scalp up in the western Himalayas. It follows a twisting course across the Tibetan Plateau, down into Nepal and south to India, where it joins the holy Ganges.
There was a festival going on when we arrived. People were enjoying the beginning of a holiday celebrating the reawakening of Lord Vishnu from the four-month-long nap he requires each year. Garlands of flowers were strung across the Bagmati, and naked little boys chased each other around the small white shrines that line the river’s terraced left bank. Women on the temple side of the river were bathing with their saris on, rinsing their mouths with water, rolling onto their sides in the murky slow current.
Just downstream from all the fun, a half-naked priest raked through the embers of a smoking cremation ghat. We watched from a distance as he poked at something black and egg-shaped. When we came closer to investigate, I saw that it was a human head—and the black, roasted remains of a torso, tiny and twisted. The head seemed to be thrown back in a gesture that was both agonized and inspired. There was something triumphant and ultimate about it, like a face contorted during childbirth.
“Where is that soul now?” Karen wondered. I knew the local answer. The spirit, blind and helpless, would have begun its passage through the Rivers of Fire, clinging to the tail of a sacred cow. Ah, the imagination that goes into creating what comes next! And the aching sigh of mortality: our smooth, warm bodies crackling into ash, skulls bursting with a pop, limbs falling away. We stood still and silent, and watched the head in the flames, teeth grimacing at the sky.
“An inevitable turn of events, I’m afraid,” I muttered.
And then I realized that, if you take away the words “I’m afraid,” what I’d said was essentially Buddha’s primary teaching: death is inevitable. The whole trick lies in somehow coming to terms with that fear.
What, I asked myself, is $650 if it can help me sizzle those two words—“I’m afraid”—out of my life? What price enlightenment? Is it a bargain-basement commodity, or do you get it when and where you can, and damn the expense?
I hailed a taxi and rushed back to the Oriental Art Emporium, full of conviction.
“Let me see the Buddha once more!” I cried. Babukaji handed it to me.
For a moment I was the happiest man in the world. But then it began: the inevitable slide into the various hells! What was that discoloration under the eye? Why was there an uneven section on the stomach? Hey, I didn’t realize that it rocked a little bit! The base is uneven! Who ever heard of a Buddha that wasn’t completely steady!?
SHADDUUP!
I stood there trembling, clasping my bulging wallet, poised on the brink of Actually Doing It.
“You know,” Babukaji sagely declared, “this Buddha is a thing of very special beauty. It is worth many times what you are paying. I tell you this: if at any time in the future you wish to part with it, I will buy it back from you for the very amount you are spending today. So you need never fear that you have acted rashly.”
Was I dreaming? A perfect $650 Buddha, with a money-back guarantee? I counted out the rupees—all fifteen thousand of them, in impressively large bills—and left the store with the prize under my arm.
18
Oh, my mind! Why do you hover so restlessly over the changing circumstances of life? Why do you make me so confused and restless? Why do you urge me to collect so many things? You are like a plow that breaks into pieces before beginning to plow; you are like a rudder that is dismantled just before venturing out on the sea!
Oh, my mind! Once you caused me to be born as a king, and then you caused me to be born as an outcast, and to beg for my food. Sometimes you cause me to be born in the heavenly mansions of the gods and to dwell in luxury and in ecstasy; then you plunge me into the flames of hell.
Oh, my foolish, foolish mind! Thus you have led me along different paths, and I have been obedient to you and docile. But now that I have heard the Buddha’s teaching, do not disturb me any more or cause me further suffering. Let us seek enlightenment together—humbly and patiently.
—BUKKYO DENDO KYOKAI, The Teaching of Buddha
By 1987, Lalji had moved away from his chicken farm along the Bagmati River—the place where he had made his hasty pronouncement concerning the future of my mental health—and into an old Rana palace not far from Nag Pokhari. The Ranas, a greedy breed of fattened aristocrats with European pretensions, leeched Nepal for all it was worth from 1846 until 1950, at which point they were booted out of power by the current regime. Their most obvious contribution to the Kathmandu Valley was a smattering of hideously self-indulgent “palaces” that boiled up, replete with Greco-Roman columns and porticos, chandeliers, fountains, marble mosaic floors and countless other manifestations of tasteless rococo madness, between the subtle brick houses and vegetable gardens of Kathmandu’s inner-city neighborhoods.
Lalji’s flat was the lower-left-hand corner of a relatively modest Rana atrocity. A plaster statue of a horse, right front leg, head and tail broken off, stood by the entranceway steps. It was meant, I supposed, to face regally over the broad front lawn, now overgrown with weeds, and a large artificial pond that, carpeted in algae and percolating ominously, looked like a chemistry experiment gone horribl
y awry. The setting had the crumbled, post-apocalyptic feeling of a Planet of the Apes film.
I found Lalji inside the house, casually attired in a blue Adidas sweat suit. He was washing his face and rinsing out his mouth with long, meditative gurgles, not to be interrupted. But I was ready to supply my own entertainment. Using a rather bedraggled lawn chair that sat out in the front yard, I set to work with the props I’d brought along: a regulation daypack, a long-burning candle that I’d picked up from a sowji down the street, and my brand-new Buddha.
While constructing my assemblage, I reflected on my previous visit, four years earlier. I had spent, if you added it all up, a fair amount of time performing the exercises he had recommended. My attempts weren’t totally lame. Although I hadn’t been able to envision actual flames, I thought I did perceive a kind of dull rippling effect, like what you might see across the surface of a road on a hot day. I was obsessed, though, with Lalji’s promise of actual light and, producing none, could only jiggle these ripple effects with limited enthusiasm.
Yet I had, inevitably, returned to Lalji’s once more—bent on proving that in 1987, eight years after his first brash comments about my work, I could at least answer his challenge to create a non-neurotic work of art. And so, while awaiting his appearance, I hastily fashioned a sort of conceptual sculpture, satisfied that even my limited progress with his dynamic form of finger-focused meditation had empowered me to create a work of art that was neither neurotic nor critical, but a bright and true reflection of the enlightened being that, with the help of Lalji and my new Buddha, I was bound to become.
Lalji finished his morning ablutions and greeted me, carrying two cane chairs. He spared only the briefest glance for the weird contraption that I had assembled. Before we even sat down I felt compelled to draw his full attention to it.
“This is the answer to your challenge,” I said, certain that he would know exactly what I meant. “It’s a sculpture I just made. It’s called ‘Mr. Jeffrey’.”
I pointed to the lawn chair. My daypack, bulging with a mysterious load, was looped over its back. On the chair’s right armrest, the candle I had brought—handily attached with a few drops of wax—burned almost invisibly in the morning light.
“Inside that daypack,” I informed Lalji, well satisfied with my own imagination, “I have concealed something: a perfect statue of the Buddha that I bought down on New Road yesterday. The Buddha in the pack—so near to me, yet so hidden!—is within, concealed in the midst of the excess emotional baggage I carry around day after day. Ironic, eh? Because as long as I keep groping blindly in front of me, I’ll never find that hidden Buddha-nature!
“And the chair, of course, symbolizes relaxation. Perfect relaxation. Complete relaxation. While the flame, as you have instructed, serves as my personal cleansing element.”
Lalji studied the assemblage, nodding thoughtfully, and we returned to our cane chairs. I carefully described my progress with the finger-flame exercises. He laughed with glee as I bemoaned my inability to produce actual, visible flames.
“But those waves, that rippling you perceive, are exactly what you are supposed to see!” His mustache curved upward, toward the rim of his woolen skullcap. “You can’t expect to see real flames from sporadic practice! Those will come maybe after six months or one year of absolute diligence! What you are seeing is exactly right. Your progress thus far is superb.”
I was doubtful, to say the least.
“You say that I can easily let go of my neuroses,” I stammered, “yet I feel that they are weights that are somehow chained to me. Of course I would love to just be free of them—but they constitute memories of my childhood, of my parents, about sixty percent of my life and memory! It’s not that easy!”
“It is easy,” he said. “You just continue with the flames, and all your garbage will be consumed. What is the garbage, eh? It is broken plates, wasted rice, shit, scraps of flesh or wood? It makes no difference: just light a flame and they will all burn away. Your problems are like ledges of wax inside of you, blocking and diverting your energies. When you purge with your flames, they will simply melt away. And do not matter that the flames are small, just from your fingertips! Even a single match has the power to put all of Kathmandu in flames!
“And when your garbage is burned up, what need you carry?”
With these words, Lalji rose from the straw chair and strolled, in no hurry, over to the construction I had assembled in his front yard. He regarded it with supreme disdain.
“Nothing!” He seized the daypack off the back rest, turned it upside down, and shook my new Buddha statue out onto the ground! I leaped from my seat.
“This pack that you have placed on this so-called sculpture”—he held it away from himself, as if it were a dead rat—“what does it contain? What does it hold? Nothing but the garbage of your past and the garbage of your future!”
With an accurate swing of his arm, he hurled the tattered rucksack into the fetid little pond, which swallowed it up with an obscene sucking noise. I could only gape in amazement. And then he picked up—the Buddha!—my proud, priceless Buddha with the money-back guarantee!!
“Even this Buddha—this too is garbage! It is not Buddha!” He weighed it in his hand, like a chicken. “It is just molded metal, dirt, paint, nothing but trash! Stop carrying this garbage around with you everywhere!”
I croaked, certain he was about to do the unthinkable—and I would have dived in right after it—but instead he heaved the Buddha, underhand, in my direction. I caught it and held it protectively to my chest.
“If I were to grab your pack out of that shitty lake,” he said contemptuously, “then I would have in my hands a true sculpture: completely garbage! But at this point you can only sculpt illusion and conflict; not even full garbage!
“But supposing you continue with these exercises. What if, after a while, you are cleansed? What need then of the candle or the flame? You may dispense with these as well!”
Lalji reached down, snapped the candle from its moorings and threw it—thrulp—into the pond. “What need for cleansing if you are already clean?”
“Guh, guh, guh, guh, guh. . . .”
“And once you have reached this point, look!” He stretched his arms toward the lawn chair, an expression of mock astonishment on his face. “You have only an empty chair! But now you won’t even need a chair to relax! You will be relaxed anywhere, in any position! You won’t need to be sitting down on something!”
He picked up the chair, got a grip on it and, spinning around like a shot-putter, hurled it off to the side of the yard.
“So then what?” he cried. “You can come to me and say, ‘See, Lalji, there is my sculpture! There it is!’ ” He gestured at the empty space where the chair had been. “ ‘It’s right there!’
“And if I can perceive it, fine! And if not—well, at least you have created something truly reflective of your cleansed mind and your cleansed body. At that point I withdraw my challenge. At that point you will be, one hundred percent, a complete man—and a complete artist.”
19
Shortly before taking my leave of Nepal, seeking an evening’s diversion, I called up my friend Elliot—he manages the SEVA Nepal Blindness Program—and asked if he felt like stepping out on the town with me. He was more than agreeable. We conspired to drive down to the Soaltee Oberoi and squander a few rupees in the evil Casino Nepal before steeping ourselves in the hotel’s luxurious sauna. Then we’d head out to a Chinese restaurant and round off the evening at Flo’s Place—a private club catering to members of the U.S. community abroad—for some homegrown entertainment.
At Elliot’s request, I telephoned Flo’s and asked the Nepali receptionist which video would be showing.
“Donée,” he replied.
“Hmmm. Is this some French film?”
“No, no, no, American.”
“Oh, yeah? Gee, it must’ve come out since I’ve been away. Can you spell it?”
“Yasss. D-U-N
-E.”
Elliot picked me up in his indefatigable Volkswagen bug. We spent a moment contemplating the crow—by now utterly wretched, indescribable, an apparition out of H. P. Lovecraft—and set off for an evening of high jinx on the highways and byways of Kathmandu: the Clumsy Cosmopolis. The Sudden Metropolis. We gambled away nickles and dimes in the slimy Casino, sweated meditatively over salted lemon sodas in the Soaltee Oberoi’s steam room, and dined on hot and sour soup at the Hotel de l’Annapurna’s Chinese restaurant. We wound up our night on the town at Flo’s and sat through as much of Dune as we could stand, treating ourselves to imported Budweisers from the commissary-stocked bar. Elliot drove me home around 1 a.m., and stopped in for a slice of pumpkin pie before chugging off into the night.
It was not until late the following day, running around town on some semi-official errand, that I made the horrible discovery. Sometime during the previous night—somewhere between the Casino, steam room, restaurant and Flo’s—disaster had struck. I had lost my brown nylon neck pouch, and with it my passport, airline ticket and vaccination record.
The search that ensued was desperate, complete and fruitless. I grilled the staff at the Soaltee, lifted cushions at Flo’s, tore apart Elliot’s Volkswagen and reduced my room at home to a no-man’s-land of jumbled clothing, books and camping gear. Nothing. This was impossible. It couldn’t be happening to me. Scheduled to leave in less than a week, and all my documentation gone!
It was classic. I eventually passed through all the stages—denial, anger, grieving, resignation—all the steps attendant to lethal loss that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross describes in what might be called the “American Book of the Dead.” Finally, having abandoned all hope, I found myself engulfed by a misty feeling of . . . nothingness. Of blurring at the edges. My very identity seemed to be at stake. It was as if I’d been hurled into the Bardo, the nether world, a naked man without a planet.
Shopping for Buddhas Page 13