Breakfast with Buddha

by Roland Merullo

When you are a crank, you put yourself on the top of the list of people you make miserable.

Part of the ugliness in you is purely your own. But a portion of it is learned, or inherited. And, strangely enough, it seems immune to the scrutiny of your own conscience.

“Dying,” he said, as if it were obvious. “Family love is the best practice for dying. For understanding that you are part of something big, not just your one separate body.

if you care about your mind, you see, if you don’t stir up the energies of your mind by hurting some person or some animal, by using your body in a way that is not healthy way, if you meditate, or say prayers, if you have some quiet in your life instead of keeping all the time busy with noise and errands, if you cultivate good thoughts and feelings where you can instead of bad thoughts and feelings, if you do this then you will . . . what is the word?” Rinpoche glanced back at me as if I might offer it. “Compound. Is that right? Yes? You will compound your learning. Or increase, maybe increase is the word in your language. Do you see? It does not mean you are better person than the one who does not do these things. Do not think that. Thinking that will not help you. It means you will squeeze all the juice from this life that there is to squeeze. You will not waste your time here, that you have been given, that is so precious we do not realize until the moment we die. You will not waste this precious time, do you see? This is the best kind of being an environmentalist person. This is not misusing the gifts of this world.

“The purpose is life itself. This is what life is for, this education of the spirit inside you. Everyone says this. Every teacher in all religions. Life is for to learn, to make a progress, to make a movement toward—”

it has always seemed to me that, if Christ’s message could be distilled down to one line, that line would have to do with kindness and inclusiveness, not rules and divisiveness.

Isn’t mockery the province of the insecure?

I was back in the Midwest. Not so many good eating choices, maybe (I hoped that had changed), but there was a kind of ease and unself-consciousness between people that seemed to grow like corn in this soil.

“Work out your own salvation with diligence.”

Jesus Christ wanted not so much that you worship him but that you act like him, that you be like him inside. I think he came here to save us by showing us what we could be like inside. He said, ‘The kingdom of heaven is within you,’

enlightenment is a big shift inside your eyes, a different way to use your mind so you can understand some of God, some of Jesus. But it is maybe not one shift, but many small shifts. You change your spiritual condition—by prayer, by meditation, by the way you live, the way you decide to think, by the lessons you learn in living this life with a good intention—and then, when this happens, after a long times or a short times, the way you see the world changes.

you can clear this out of your mind a little bit—that you want to steal, that you want sex all the time, that you want to eat very much all the time, that you want to sleep many hours, that you so much want money, that you want to win the argument with someone to show that you are right, or be angry at someone because you know they are wrong, or that you are a bad person because you are not perfect—then your mind clears like a clear, clear water. When that happens, you have a small waking-up. You start to see the world as the world really is. And after many small waking-ups we begin to see the world a little bit, some little bit, the way Jesus sees it. You see? That is the ‘kingdom of heaven.’ You see? This, I think, is what he wanted and why he came to us here on this planet, to teach us this.”

“Sex, food, anger, violence, greed,” he said. “Dirt in the glass. Then if you give up sex and food and anger and greed and you feel so proud about giving these things up, better than people, all about you, you gave this up, you are good, other people are not as good as you. That is more dirt in the glass, that’s all. No big fuss, just that.”

What matters is how you treat people.”

“What difference makes what you believe? What happens will happen anyway, exactly same, no matter what you believe. What you do makes the important part, what you do.”

“All that we are is the result of what we have thought: It is built on our thoughts, it is made from our thoughts. If a man speaks or acts with evil thought, pain follows him, just like the wheel follows the foot of the ox that draws the . . . cart. . . . If a person speaks or acts with pure thought, happiness follows him, like a shadow that never leaves.”

“Not your mind, your ordinary mind that thinks so much all the time for no usefulness. What then? Then maybe you see something new. But you cannot do that because all the time you are thinking about food, about sex, about worries, about who is saying something in this radio, about who is rich and poor, who is smart, who is good, who is right. Good, think like that. Very good. Not bad. You do that all the day and even when you are at sleep. But what about a few seconds or a minute or a few minutes of not thinking? Then what happens? Then what do you see? But you don’t do that, my friend. You are afraid to do that,

it was difficult to sustain anger under the open sky.

“Now, we will sit here for two hours about. If your legs hurt, or if you have to, you get up and walk a little bit, but don’t get up at the first time you feel like it. You will be thinking about food. Every time you are thinking about food, now and tomorrow, I want that you think about the feeling that food gives you on your tongue. Think about exactly that feeling, the food on your tongue, in your mouth. Take one breath thinking about that feeling, and then let that feeling go away when the breath goes out. That is what meditation is: You see the thought and you let it float away, see the thought and let it float away. Maybe you say to yourself, That is only a thought. . . . After a while, listen again to the bird, to the refrigerator, feel again the sofa on your back and your legs, feel the pain in your legs. You will think about food again. Breathe in and breathe out. You will think about your family, your work, about me sitting beside you, about many, many things that are interesting to think about. This is like the bird knocking. You cannot make a home in those things. They are not bad, they are just not the right home for Otto. Do not get upset because your mind thinks about them. Do not push the thoughts away like they are bad things. Let them go away from you but do not push them, yes? But always come back to the feeling on your mouth, and breathe in and breathe out. Yes?”

I was in control of my spiritual situation, not God; that we had been given the tools for an expanded consciousness and it was up to us to use them, not simply wait around for death and salvation.

“Because to live without the cup means you must feel the world as the world really is. People make the armor from their smartness, or their anger, or their quiet, or their fear, or their being busy, or their being nice. Some people make it from a big show, always talking. Some make it by being very important. Many people do not make it, though, and those people can begin to see the world as it is. You do not make it too much, Otto.”

I have a regular meditation practice, that’s all. I’m not really so much of a Buddhist, I guess, just a person looking around for a belief system that makes sense.

It’s like he takes something from a bunch of different traditions and mixes in some of his own. It’s hard to put a finger on exactly what he believes or doesn’t believe.

“There are people,” he said, “who are past being hurt, beyond being hurt. You should know this is true. You should try to become one of those people, to make an understanding with yourself that you are not your body, that you are something bigger. That is your work on this earth, do you see? Every experience here is to teach you to do that. Living, dying, every experience.”

“You should try not to kill to stop killing. Try. It is very hard. Sometimes I think it is not possible for many people. Only to try is important. Even not to have violence in your thoughts is important.”

“This is not a world for easy.”

“Every day,” he said, “many times every day, you can go one way or the other way. You can go with anger or not go. Go with greed or not go. Go with hate or not go. Go with eating too much or sexing too much, or not go. Two ways.”

Inside the big world that you cannot control, you have the small world of you that you can control. In that small world, if you look, you can see whether to go this way toward good, or the other way toward bad.”

To me, to my lineage, it is not the case that God is up in the sky looking at you and judging you. It is more easy than that, and more hard. God is God, the Divine Intelligence is the Divine Intelligence, the One With No Name is the One With No Name. But God is just giving out love and giving out love and giving out love, like a . . . like a very nice music always playing. If you hurt people you make yourself deaf to this music, that’s all. Not God’s fault, your fault. Not God’s judgment, your choice, you see? You make yourself no chance to feel God, or the moon going up, or any good love. Life after life you make yourself no chance, and then one life maybe you start to change, and be a little quiet inside, and listen to this music that is always there—for you, for the bad people, always there. Even the most bad people live in their trouble for thousands of lives, and then, one moment,” he clapped his hands together hard, “they chose a different way. They go this way and not that way. One choice, another choice. They start to come on the long trip home.”

I like this view

if you saw the creatures and objects around you as pieces of a sacred whole, everything temporary, just playing out a role in a dream, then things would be funny a lot of the time, kaleidoscopic, comically absurd.

Hills that went brown color in the summer. You hear the train go by from many miles, and you walk up the hill and see very far, and in the winter there was deep snow, and wind.” “A Siberian North Dakota.” “He used to say the land there made your mind big. Perfect land for meditation.”

I felt an unexplained nervousness rising up in me, that’s all. And I noticed that I had the urge to fall back on old habits and cover over the nervousness with a cute little remark.

You know how dreams are—the day’s thoughts seasoned with hope, fear, and memory, cooked into an illogical stew and served in an upside-down bowl.

there was another dimension to this life as surely as the earth turned; that there were people, there had always been people, who sensed that dimension and made some kind of leap of faith to be in harmony with it. And there were others who did not. It was about choosing between A and B, yes and no, and sometimes those choices were petty, and sometimes they were of enormous importance. It was about cruising along in the comfortable vehicle of old habits and ways, old thought patterns, old conceits, or sensing some new truth and setting off on foot. Sure, there were phonies and charlatans claiming to know The Way. But at some point you had to stop closing yourself off because of them. At some point you had to risk the ridicule of the mob, of your own internalized voices, and try to see clearly what had been set in front of you in this life, and try to act on that as bravely and honestly as you could, no matter what kind of rules you’d previously been living by.

Sure, there was a bit of a mocking voice squeaking out its familiar song, but all you had to do, really, was just watch it like you’d watch any other thought float past. Watch life do its thing, watch the end of life do its thing, and try to go toward the good side when you could see it.