The Dalai Lama's Cat

by David Michie

“They told me what happened,” he murmured, reaching over to where I was dozing nearby. “Sometimes our instinct, our negative conditioning, can be overpowering. Later we regret very much what we have done. But that is no reason to give up on yourself—the buddhas, they have not given up on you. Instead, learn from your mistake and move on. Like that.” He turned out the bedside light, and as we both lay there in the darkness, I purred gently in appreciation. “Tomorrow we start again,” he said.

At that moment, I knew what the Dalai Lama meant about prisons of our own making. He hadn’t been talking only about physical circumstances but also about the ideas and beliefs we have that make us unhappy. In my own case, it was the idea that I needed another cat’s company to be happy.

Mrs. Trinci walked toward the door as though to leave. But before opening it, she hesitated. “May I ask you a question, Your Holiness?” “Of course.” “I have been coming here to cook for more than twenty years, but you have never tried to convert me. Why is that?” “What a funny thing to say, Mrs. Trinci!” His Holiness burst out laughing. Taking her hand gently in his, he told her, “The purpose of Buddhism is not to convert people. It is to give them tools so they can create greater happiness. So they can be happier Catholics, happier atheists, happier Buddhists. There are many practices, and I know you are already very familiar with one of them.” Mrs. Trinci raised her eyebrows. “It is the wonderful paradox,” he continued, “that the best way to achieve happiness for oneself is to give happiness to others.”

By letting go of the unhappiness-creating belief that I needed another cat, I would convert my jail into a monastery.

On a broad shelf, there was an empty space between The Times of London and The Wall Street Journal. It was here that Franc placed me, as delicately as if I were a very fine piece of Ming dynasty porcelain.

I looked up as Chogyal pushed back from his desk. “I like this definition of mindfulness,” he said to Tenzin, reading from one of the many manuscripts received each week from authors petitioning His Holiness to write a foreword. “‘Mindfulness means paying attention to the present moment deliberately and non-judgmentally.’ Nice and clear, isn’t it?” Tenzin nodded. “Not dwelling on thoughts of the past or the future, or some kind of fantasy,” elaborated Chogyal. “I like an even simpler definition by Sogyal Rinpoche,” said Tenzin, sitting back in his chair. “Pure presence.” “Hmm,” Chogyal mused. “No mental agitation or elaboration of any kind.” “Exactly,” confirmed Tenzin. “The foundation of all contentment.”

“Half the time, people aren’t focusing on what they’re doing. But the really interesting bit is the correlation with happiness. They found that people are much happier when they’re mindful of what they’re doing.” “Because they only pay attention to things they enjoy?” asked his wife. He shook his head. “That’s just it. Turns out that it’s not so much what you’re doing that makes you happy. It’s whether or not you’re being mindful of what you’re doing.

The danger is that self-development can lead us to more self-cherishing, self-absorption, self-infatuation. And these are not true causes of happiness but the opposite.”

I also discovered that I felt a lot happier not being jealous. Envy and resentment were demanding emotions that had disturbed my own peace of mind. For my sake, too, there was little point in being consumed by unhappy and irrational feelings.

Buddha himself summed it up best when he said: ‘The thought manifests as the word; the word manifests as the deed; the deed develops into habit; and habit hardens into character. So watch the thought and its ways with care, and let it spring from love born out of concern for all beings … As the shadow follows the body, as we think, so we become.’”

“We don’t stop thinking about ourselves the whole time. Even when this makes us unhappy and uptight. If we focus too much on ourselves, we make ourselves sick. We have this constant inner chatter going morning, noon, and night, this inner monologue. But paradoxically, the more we are able to think about making other beings happy, the happier we become ourselves.”

If you have customers, think of every one of them as an opportunity to practice loving kindness. You can serve them a coffee, or you can serve them a coffee and a smile—something that makes them happier for the moment they are with you.

But like it or not, a writer betrays herself subliminally, not just in the words on the page but by leaving behind other subtle clues. A trail of psychological breadcrumbs, if you will, or perhaps, more accurately, a trail of flaked salmon. Ideally garnished with dill, or drizzled in a light but tangy dijonnaise.

There's no thrilling anticipation of the day’s first cup of coffee, something I see written on the faces of Café Franc customers in the mornings. Nor the eye-closing delight of that first swallow of sauvignon blanc in the evening. We cats have no access to everyday mood-enhancing substances. Apart from humble catnip, there is no pharmaceutical refuge if we’re suffering from boredom, depression, existential crisis, or even an everyday headache.

You may have imagined that we cats never get caught up in such cognitive complexity. Maybe you believed that existential overload is the unique preserve of Homo sapiens.

Bhutan is a small country east of Nepal, south of Tibet, and a bit north of Bangladesh. It’s the kind of place that might have escaped your attention had a flake of smoked salmon fallen from your bagel onto just the wrong spot on the map.

There is a rare minority of humans who possess an innate understanding of the changing moods of a cat: how what we might want at one moment may be quite different from what we wished for only moments before. Some people know that they should not keep stroking a cat until we are forced to turn around and deliver a sharp, incisive warning—usually focused on the index finger. A small proportion understand that just because we wolfed down a can of grilled turkey with lip-smacking relish one day it does not mean we have the slightest interest in even looking at the same food the next. Was it not Winston Churchill who said that a cat is a riddle, inside an enigma, inside a delightful pelt of cuddliness? No? I could have sworn that just recently I read something to that effect in an article about him. And if he didn’t say it, he almost certainly thought it. Wikipedia should be told! And then there’s Albert Einstein, who reportedly said that music and cats offer the only escape from the miseries of life. Note that on the subject of other species of domesticated animals, the greatest thinker of the 20th century remained curiously mute. I will leave it to you, dear reader, to draw your own conclusions. We cats are not robotic beasts who can be conditioned to jump up or sit down or salivate at the utterance of a command or the press of a bell. Did you ever hear of Pavlov’s cat? My