It was this general sense of discombobulation, I later theorized, that set me up for what was to happen next.
On the northwestern rim of the Kathmandu Valley, there is a high, knuckle-shaped peak called Jamachok. It’s a long hike to get there—up through the Nagarjun Forest, picking your way through brush and trees—but worth it. From the bald crest of the peak, a rusting metal tower provides a giddy panorama of the entire valley, and the Himalayas beyond—from the dark pyramid of Everest in the east to the rugged Ganesh Range in the west.
On the patchy, littered grass just below the tower, a few whitewashed shrines pay homage to ancient Bipaswi—the first of all the human Buddhas.
Eons ago, when the Kathmandu Valley was a placid lake inhabited by Snake Gods, Bipaswi settled down in deep meditation on Jamachok Peak. One night, as the full moon of April rose over the eastern foothills, he took from the folds of his robe a tiny seed and tossed it into the water.
Moonlight bent into ripples. By morning, a thousand-petaled lotus had blossomed on the lake’s surface, cradling a miraculous flame that attracted pilgrims from all over Central Asia. These devotees included the bodhisattva Manjushri, who finally drained the great lake and prepared the valley for human habitation.
I spent an entire morning hiking up through the Nagarjun Forest to Jamachok, sweating buckets in the inexplicable November heat. My water bottle, pathetically inadequate, was drained long before I reached the summit. In order to survive, it would be necessary to cultivate a lizard mentality: dry, still and watchful, in need of nothing but the most occasional sustenance.
Now that the primary distraction in my life—shopping for a perfect Buddha—had been tamed, I felt I had very little to concern myself with. There were, I must admit, the usual questions on my mind: questions about my career in general, and about my eternally postponed novel in particular. But these could wait.
What I craved was an afternoon of easy contemplation in the vivid valley sunlight, high above the push-come-to-shove of urban Asia. It might loosen things up in me. Who could tell? After all, this peak was a mythically famous chakra-sharpener: extraordinarily fertile ground for action, growth, explosion. Long ago, Bipaswi had sown a fateful seed from atop Jamachok Peak; perhaps the pollen of inspiration was still in the air.
To make myself more receptive to these subtle influences, I had brought along a single pipe full of potent Nepali hashish, grown in the shadow of the towering Annapurnas, along the banks of the wild Kali Gandaki River. It was holy herb, impregnated with the same deep molecular structures of Himalayan air, water, fire and soil. I had obtained it from the son of a village lama in exchange for a Star Trek T-shirt.
Arriving at Jamachok Peak, I immediately climbed to the top of the lookout tower. Lines of colorful Tibetan prayer flags, webbed between the tower’s legs and the trees below, fluttered in the breeze.
The air was unusually clear, and standing on the edge of that spindly tower far above the city, I experienced a sudden surge of vertigo. I felt as if I were suspended in a hang-glider, soaring over the foothills and swooping down into the vast, bowl-shaped valley. Far below, I could make out the tiny spindle of Bhimsen Tower, and the sugar cube of the Royal Palace. Swayambhunath gleamed upon its hillock like a gold-capped tooth. Searching further east, I found the white dome of Bodhnath stupa and watched the leisurely ballet of takeoff and landing at Tribhuvan International Airport.
And then my gaze was pulled outward, upward, toward the ragged white profile of the infinite Himalayas. The sight of those mountains struck a chord that resonated in the back of my head and the center of my chest. I longed for them, awed and aching, utterly seduced by their cold and perfect mountain-ness.
This was it. This was all there was. My entire life had conspired to bring me to this particular point. Sitting down on the tower’s graffiti-covered deck, I pulled out my wooden pipe and sprinkled a few chunks of ganja into the bowl.
I watched the clouds. They were unlike anything I’d ever seen, unlike any clouds that had ever appeared over the Western world. Tiny meringued peaks, curled at the tip, golden against the electric blue sky. Like the stylized flames in a Tibetan thangka painting. They were the kinds of flames that I had often seen surrounding the dreadful Bhairab—the wrathful, bloodthirsty guardian deity with huge eyes and gleaming fangs, who dances in a halo of gold-tipped fire.
My eyes shifted to the prayer flags. Most were all but transparent, worn down to bare gauze. Only the gossamer essences of their forms and colors remained. As I watched them shiver in the breeze, watched them point and snap, I thought I could see the prayers themselves rising up, radiating outward with that same shimmering ripple effect that had flowed from my fingers during Lalji’s exercise.
It seemed to me that there was some mystical secret in there somewhere—some profound link between power and prayer that I might be able to grab the tail of. But it jumped around like a kite, and I couldn’t get a grip on it. Maybe in writing, I thought. Maybe if I try to write about it, everything will sort itself out.
I reached into my pack, found my journal, and opened up to a blank page. But when I tried to write, all that emerged from my pen were big, bubble-shaped letters, as huge as deformed cells. After a single, cartoony sentence I temporarily abandoned the effort.
I leaned back against the tower, shivered, and closed my eyes. When I opened them again, the line I had written was pulsing within a neon nimbus of color. It was beautiful, but somehow terrifying, and before I got halfway into my second sentence my hand just slid spastically off the paper. And then I was off—crashing through the cerebral ceiling into the highest, scariest place I’d ever been.
Flaming, multicolored dragons battled in the clouds above my head, and the gentle galloping of the prayer flags had become a stampede.
Where was I? What was going on here? I was panting, and my heart was hammering in my chest. My tongue flopped around in my mouth like an unpeeled banana. Panic symptoms. There was no point fighting; I had to roll with it, find a channel for the wild energy that was pumping pure adrenaline through my veins. Suddenly I knew what I needed to bring me down—exercise! I jumped to my feet and stretched my arms upward, breathing deeply as my whole body shuddered.
Stretch, stretch, stretch . . . ooof . . . to the limit. Ooooh, it felt good. I could hear my joints cracking, the muscles shuffling into place. But then I spread my legs apart, as far as they would go, and I immediately had this horrible, vivid image of Bhairab grabbing me by the legs, and splitting me in half like a wishbone!
Aieeeeee! An electrifying current went ripping up through my body, groin to skull, and zoomed toward outer space. Before I knew what was happening, my entire body began to shake violently, vibrating uncontrollably.
And then the wind picked up. That’s the only way I can describe it. But this wasn’t the same wind that was flickering through the prayer flags, or sculpting the clouds; not even close. This was a violent and inexorable wind, supernatural, as if gravity itself was being reversed. It was a solar hurricane, and as it got stronger and stronger, I realized that I was about five seconds from being blown right off the lookout tower and into empty space, a mile above the sprawling Kathmandu Valley!
I grabbed the window frame of the lookout tower and hung on for dear life, legs flailing out behind me. This was what it must feel like to be sucked out of a commercial airliner—clinging desperately to the arm of a tourist-class seat as your body flaps toward eternity like a giant wind sock.
And as I hung suspended, arms wrapped desperately around the tower, I was struck by an almost comical sense of déjà-vu. Gosainkund! This was just like that awful storm at Gosainkund! Because I knew, I knew, that if I dared to let go I would simply blow away—and explode like a trillion tiny pieces of confetti, raining down all over the mountains and valleys, never to be put back together again.
Then, just as suddenly as it had started, the mysterious wind died down. All was still. I found myself on my knees, gasping for breath, T-shirt clingi
ng to my back. Slowly, gingerly, I released my hold on the tower—and in a desperate bid to reach terra firma I stood up and staggered, on rubber legs, down the metal steps.
I flopped myself on the ledge of one of Bipaswi’s small white shrines, utterly spent. From atop the little stupa, the painted eyes of Buddha gazed benevolently out over the hillside. It certainly seemed a safer home port than the tower. Trying to calm myself, I took one breath . . . another breath . . . everything was going to be all right. I closed my eyes, and pressed my fingers against the bridge of my nose—when Boom! Off went my brain, right over the crest of another hair-raising roller-coaster ride!
WWWHHHHOA!
Something enormous grabbed me by the scruff of my neck, and before I had any idea what was going on I felt myself being dragged off—pulled up an endless, magnificent stairway—to meet God.
God. The name sounded familiar. . . . Then I remembered: four years ago, trekking alone through the Arun Valley in far eastern Nepal. It was one those perfect spring days, the grass Oz-green, the sky like Earth’s own blue eye, strange birds darting over the terraced hillsides like fighting kites. I was hiking back to Tumlingtar, high as a kite myself, carrying a full pack and listening to Kitaro’s Silk Road on my Sony Walkman. The music had that hypnotic, canting rhythm of religion to it. I found myself singing. Not songs; psalms. I hiked along the empty trail inventing psalms, addressing them to the Divine, as tears of absolute infant happiness rolled into my beard.
About forty-five minutes later—just as the tape ran out—I came around a sharp corner and stopped in my tracks. A perfect bouquet of wildflowers lay in the center of the trail, tied neatly with a piece of red string. I knew exactly who they were from.
God! The big G! I was hauled relentlessly upward in a dizzying spiral, my feet dragging behind me. Huge mandalas and dancing thunderbolts loomed on the edges of my vision, racing through kaleidoscopic riffs. Fireworks exploded around me with bicentennial frenzy, seeming to come from every direction. I kept trying to blink, forgetting that my eyes were already closed.
And how did I feel as I was being pulled like a sacrificial goat into the Holy Presence? Ashamed! Underdressed! Who would ever think of meeting God in tattered shorts, sneakers and a sweaty T-shirt? It was like one of those dreams where you have to give a big speech to a roomful of VIPs and realize too late that you’ve left the house in your underwear.
Up and up we went—until at last, somewhere up there, high on some breathless level of the collective consciousness, we stopped. A golden doorway in front of me burst open. I cried out, reeling back from the blinding, shimmering light—but was thrown into the chamber like a rag doll, stumbling to my knees.
There was a gigantic burst of wind and flame, and a mighty voice coming from inside and outside of everything roared,
“So, Mr. Jeffrey—what do you have to say for yourself?”
Say? What to say? I went spinning through my brain for the right words, the right prayers, the right questions, because I knew that this was it: my long-fantasized chance to have a tête-à-tête with God, to collect the Ultimate Blessing right from the Source! It was the opportunity of a lifetime, and I didn’t want to blow it—but my mouth was dry, so dry that all I could do was croak, in a small, pathetic voice: “Thank you!”
It sounded right, so I said it again—and again—realizing, as I continued to utter those two words, that I had lit on a great secret, had collected a fabulous blessing, entirely by chance. I had discovered my personal holy mantra; the incantation that would save me whenever I felt tempted by the luxury of self-pity, or distracted by the affectation of self-doubt. Not only was it my mantra; it was the ultimate, the highest mantra of all!
Not only was it the highest mantra; it was the only mantra.
“Well, you’re welcome!” God roared.
That was it! Time to go! Without a moment to spare for an autograph or a handshake, I was torn from the Presence—and opened my eyes, astounded to find that I was still leaning against old Bipaswi’s shrine, facing directly into the sun.
At that very point—for reasons that might be obvious to the greenest psychologist, but which continue to elude me—I decided to do a very insidious thing to myself. From that high ground of insight and spirituality, fresh from my apocalyptic encounters with Lalji and God, I decided to ask myself
The
Big
Question.
Nothing less than a direct confrontation about what ultimately emerged, at that moment, as the single, central and most crucial decision of my life. I mean, as long as I was in the neighborhood. . . .
“Okay, Mister. So what about it?” I asked myself. “Are you going to write this great big novel of yours or not? Hunh? Hunh? Hunh? Because if you are, man, just say yes and do it—right now—starting this minute!”
In one fell swoop, all the demons of impatience that had been percolating in me for years came bubbling to the surface. I saw myself as an old man: pathetic and hobbling, with nothing of any enduring value accomplished. No marriage, no children, that damned novel I’d been promising myself I’d write still unwritten, death racing nearer by the instant.
“Hunh? Hunh? Yes or no?”
All I had to do was mutter one syllable. Yes or no. Yes, and no more stalling; or no, and no more self-torture about the When and the If. This was it—do or die—now or never. Face to face with myself and no turning away.
But I sat there, paralyzed. I could not make a sound. And from that nadir of shame, right in the middle of that potential betrayal of all my illusions of literary greatness and self-importance, something caught my eye.
I looked up—
—and saw a tiny scrap of something that looked like confetti, drifting down from somewhere on high. Drifting down like a little wing, and coming to rest among the candy wrappers and empty cigarette boxes and scraps of toilet paper on the sloping grass, about three meters from where I was sitting.
I stood up and walked over to it. And then I realized: it wasn’t a scrap of litter. Not at all. It was a tiny prayer, in Tibetan, printed on a little salmon-colored piece of paper. Just a tiny prayer flag, hardly recognizable in the midst of all that trash.
I peered at it, stunned.
“That scrap of paper,” a voice whispered, “is all that you are: one small pink note against the endless expanse of clutter. So make a big question out of your book, or make a little question out of it. But never forget one thing. When it all comes down to dust, nothing that you or anyone else on Earth can create is anything more or less than a gasp in the wind: one prayer scattered among billions of others, all equally holy, and all eaten at last by the rain and the wind.”
20
People call one phase of the moon a full moon, they call another phase a crescent moon; in reality, the moon is always perfectly round, neither waxing nor waning.
Buddha is precisely like the moon. In the eyes of men and women, Buddha may seem to change in appearance but, in truth, Buddha does not change.
—BUKKYO DENDO KYOKAI, The Teaching of Buddha
Tribhuvan International Airport. A week before the shortest day of the year. Late afternoon and it was already dark and cold, and as I checked in at the pissy-smelling old terminal, it was impossible to believe that a sleek, hi-tech jetliner would shortly taxi up the runway and whisk me off to some highly efficient, consummately industrialized society.
It had been next to impossible to get my ticket from Bangkok to America re-issued—I learned what would be my last lesson about flying Korean Airlines—but it finally did come through, after a few phone calls made on my behalf by the unusually sympathetic U.S. Embassy.
I paid my departure tax, displayed my passport—brand new, issued only days before—and brought my carry-on luggage over to the customs table. I yawned; there are few things more satisfying than knowing you are clean, totally and indisputably legal.
“What do you have in that sack?”
“Oh, daju, not much. Some film; a couple of cameras; and a
statue of the Buddha.”
“May we please see it? The Buddha?”
“With pleasure.” I fetched it out and gave it over to the officer to admire. Who could fail to be impressed by this work of art? By its complacent expression, its demure smile, its remarkable workmanship?
He turned it over in his hands a few times, then gave me a look of deep sympathy.
“I’m sorry, sir! This statue has no clearance tags!”
“Eh? What?”
I turned white. He was right! Amid all the confusion over my lost passport and ticket, I had neglected to stop in at the Archaeology Department to pick up the necessary stamp!
The irony of my situation was so extreme—so Asian—that I instinctively looked on either side of me, trying to find some other Westerner to share it with. Since ancient art, as well I knew, was being smuggled out of Nepal left and right, the government has mandated that all antique objects must be cleared by the Department of Archeology before they can leave the kingdom. The process is simple: you simply haul your purchase to the D of A office, pay a minuscule fee, and receive a wax-sealed stamp certifying that the object is less than a hundred years old.
One of the first things my art-smuggling research revealed, of course, was that the procedure is a big joke; anybody with money or influence can get a clearance stamp faster than you can say torana.
“Aw, come on,” I sputtered, feeling myself about to slide into some Felliniesque drama. “Come on, now; you can see that this Buddha isn’t old! It’s brand new! Look, it’s by Sidhi Raj!”
“How do I know that? Where is the signature?”
I turned the statue over, hoping beyond hope that Nancy’s Buddha had not been a fluke; maybe the Patan craftsman had begun to make a practice of signing his works. But no—there was nothing on the base but the impression of a little lotus.
Shopping for Buddhas Page 14