Breakfast with Buddha

by Roland Merullo

Turn your eyes away from the good life for just a second and there it was: not depression as much as an ugly little doubt about everything you had ever done; not confusion, exactly, but a kind of lingering question.

such a state of mind left me perfectly primed for my extraordinary adventure. If I can risk a sweeping observation, it seems to me that life often works that way: You ask a certain question again and again, in a sincere fashion, and the answer appears.

But, in my experience, at least, that answer arrives according to its own mysterious celestial timing, and often in disguise. And it comes in a way you’re not prepared for, or don’t want, or can’t, at first, accept.

The monks in Buddha’s time stood out in the road with a rice bowl. If someone put food in the bowl, they ate. If not, they didn’t. If you live in good faith like that, with an open heart, God provides.”

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.

IT’S NOT ABOUT RELIGION. IT’S ABOUT RELATIONSHIP.

If you want to see the life as it is in a true way, then you have to make the water very pure, very clean. This is not easy in this world but it is what you have to. You cannot upset the mind.”

“Family love is the best practice for dying. For understanding that you are part of something big, not just your one separate body.

“Love makes the water in the glass clean,”

I’d started to get a bit excited about showing my great country to the Rinpoche from Russia. It was what Cecelia had asked me to do. But even if she hadn’t asked, it was the kind of thing I would have wanted to do anyway, because I have a tremendous fascination with the United States of America, the grand, swirling variousness of it, the way it siphons off the ambitious, the poor, and the abused from so many other nations, the ability we seem to have to be noble and heroic at the same time as we are being arrogant and stupid. I love my country. But I love it the way you love a wife of many years: not because you have some sentimental notion of her perfection, but because you know her thoroughly, from the courage of the maternity room bed to the pettiness of her morning moods; from seeing her sit for weeks by her dying mother’s bedside, to watching her worry about which shoes to wear to a cocktail party given by a person she does not like. You know she has the capacity to get up at five in the morning and make you pancakes before you set off on a particularly arduous business trip, and you know she also has the capacity to say things, in the heat of an argument, that she should not say, to sneak the last piece of chocolate cake, to lose track of time and keep the rest of the family waiting for an hour, at the beach, on a burning hot afternoon. You know everything from what flavor of lip gloss she likes to what books she would bring with her to the proverbial desert island a...

EVERYONE SHALL GIVE ACCOUNT OF HIMSELF TO GOD (How do you know? I wanted to shout out the window as we passed. How is it that you claim to know?),

I did not have a book or newspaper to read and was, I admit, afraid of taking a walk. It was a fear I encountered every week on my trip to the Bronx, even though the tutoring sessions were early on Saturday morning and even though, in the course of six years, nothing untoward, nothing of any significance, at least, had ever happened to me there. Still, I was a well-off white man in a poor black neighborhood, my social standing stamped on my car, clothes, face, and posture as clearly as any mark of poverty, and I felt disliked, guilty, and vulnerable. Something like that feeling had attached itself to me almost as soon as we crossed the Youngstown line on Route 7. I don’t know if anyone else has ever felt this; I assume so.

I realize I am on treacherous ground here. I realize I am generalizing and tiptoeing along the edge of the territory into which we never venture very far in the American national conversation: The fact that there are whole neighborhoods into which cabdrivers refuse to take a fare; that there are people among us who live in circumstances we are ashamed to talk about, children who live that way; the fact that there are huge quadrants of our cities where people like me—and not just white people like me—simply do not go, places we do not see, do not want to think about as we are sipping our designer martinis in swanky downtown bistros where dinner for two costs what these other Americans earn in a week. We excuse it by citing the laws of capital, or by telling ourselves we work harder, or that it is social inequality that serves as the motivation for our national wealth.

Illness, failure, sorrow, success. Yes. It is not necessary to have any particular spiritual path in this life in order to learn from these things. It is not essential to have guru, to eat this way or not eat this way, to talk this way or any way. Some part of this education of the spirit in you will happen to you in this life. That is so for every soul.”

There was still so much to be grateful for, so much to look forward to, so much happiness waiting there in the bright American future, shelves and shelves of sugary treats in colorful wrapping.

way that he hadn’t seemed to notice the hostess’s breasts at Alberini’s the night before. Maybe he just hadn’t been in America long enough to read the code, to understand what a Mercedes meant that a Chevrolet did not, to know what kinds of people went through the door of a Smith Barney office and what kinds of people did not, to judge a person by the size of her wedding ring or the cost of her purse, or her license-plate frame or bumper sticker, or the newspaper she chose to read. Once you’d become aware of such things, whether they sent positive or negative signals running through you, how did you erase them from the thought process and see the world as it was, without labels and judgments? “I want to do both,” I said, over the noise of the cascading water. “I want to try to answer the question you asked me last night, and I want to ask a question that

seems connected to it.” “Good,” he said. “Okay.” “As to why one does good instead of doing bad, I guess it must have to do, partly, with wanting to be liked, to be approved of by the

“Time,” he said, holding up the braid to me. He indicated one end, then the other, “Maybe one thousand year.” He touched the individual stalks of grass tenderly. “Souls. Spirits. You see? You, your father, your mother, sister, wife, children, you see? Your spirit is together with their spirits like this, tight against each other. That is why you were born into this wife together.” He pulled one strand out and tossed it up into the sunlight. “Maybe one of these people, or two, not so close after this wife. But people you really love, spirits that are close to your spirit, you see? They tie around tight to you, wife after wife.” “Life,” I corrected him. “L.” He paid no attention. “You see them, you live with them, you meet them now as son or daughter, next as mother or father, next as friend, maybe sometime as enemy, you see? You go through time with them.” “A nice idea,” I said. “Comforting.” And in response I received a hard look and felt the power in his eyes, in his being. It made me think of the power in the hands of a gentle-seeming karate master,

or daughter, next as mother or father, next as friend, maybe sometime as enemy, you see? You go through time with them.” “A nice idea,” I said. “Comforting.” And in response I received a hard look and felt the power in his eyes, in his being. It made me think of the power in the hands of a gentle-seeming

He glared at me fiercely for a three-count, then smiled. But this time the smile was only a thin coating of velvet over stone. “You have the good life,” he said harshly, emphasizing the l. “Easy life this time, Otto. Do not waste, okay?”

nonetheless. To the northwest, the clouds were angry and swirling, and we saw great spidery fingers of lightning flashing there. But the territory we traveled was untroubled. There were farms by the side of the road, uniform and flat and fertile, a sign at the edge of one field that read, GET U.S. OUT OF THE UNITED NATIONS. The John Birch Society. On the radio, the so-called Christians were going

But when I listen a bit longer to the so-called Christians, it sounds to me as if their cure for what ails us is more and stricter rules, more narrow-mindedness, more hatred, more sectioning off of the society, and 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.

North Carolina for the big football weekend, and the drawings of Father Mahoney hall, or whatever, summoned memories of the good old years. It occurred to me in one of my many fruitless musings that if the term religion were defined more broadly—and I believed it should be—then

Lying on the bed in the nice suite, with the hot Indiana day easing into evening beyond the curtained windows, I gave the matter some serious thought. And what I came up with, to my own surprise, was love. It was the only answer that held up. Love—of Jeannie and the kids, of Jasper, our wonderful mutt, of work, of eating. There was my next career. I would be the national radio voice of the Love Party, somewhere left of the Democrats

and those adults, whose futures consisted only of more work like that, came home and tried to drink away the memory of the day, and so they lived their lives hour by hour, just getting by, getting through, finding any way to kill the pain of it. It is hard to be a child in a home like that and then grow up to be kinder and gentler and cherish the idea that people are basically good.

sweet memories of love. It had been loud in the capital, I’d gotten sick. And then, in Mazatlan, we’d shared our hotel with a bunch of beer-guzzling Yanquis, down for a week of sun and superiority. Still, something about the people we met there, the real Mexicans we went out of our way to meet, had touched us in a certain way. Some of them seemed, to Jeannie and me both, to live by a different set of assumptions.

schools were for making kids think it was okay to be “selfish” and “do selfish things with their bodies” when sex was supposed to be “a selfless act for the pleasure of husband or wife.” I was, by that time, squeezing the steering wheel with both hands and wondering who it was we were talking about, which twelve-, fourteen-, or eighteen-year-old boy or girl on American soil—bombarded with erotic images from every angle—who was

had once been, their own guilt and regrets ballooning as they aged, who insisted on telling the young to abstain? And why was it that the loudest and most public religious types always sooner or later circled around to sex: talking about the “filth and whoremongering,” and the evils of birth control, and going on about abstinence, and then

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.” “You’re talking about the golden mean,” I said hopefully. “The middle way.” “Middle,” he repeated.

“Middle,” he repeated. “Little this side of middle, little that side of middle. No fuss. What matters is how you treat people.” “Not what you believe about what happens after death?” He laughed. I had made a joke, apparently. “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.”

“And this always thinking about the next pleasure, this is not so bad. Except it keeps your mind from how it could be calm in this moment. This can happen on a very subtle level, or not so. If you don’t eat for a little while when you can, or don’t sex for a little while when you can, then you see better the way the mind makes the world for you.”

“Unlearn. You learned already too much. Don’t think so much now, just whenever you want to think so much take a nice breath, listen to the tires’ noise on the road, look at the trees, look at the lake, look at the other cars, feel inside when you are breathing, feel the pain in your muscles. That is what yoga does for anyone, makes you to pay attention, not to think. Do not force information into your mind. You are smart now, you will always be smart, but if you think too much it pushes you from God.”

It seemed to me that Rinpoche was making the opposite point: that 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.

“The flower is the good inside every person,” he said. “The cup is like a wall, to protect. Many people have that wall.” “Armor,” I said. He nodded. “Why?” “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.

“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.”

Oz was that place where the God you were going to for help could not help you, not really. All he could do was turn your eyes to what you already were and ask you to see it differently.

I was thinking that, maybe, 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.

Before, I said to you about God’s music that is playing all the time, for everyone. God’s music is this love. And this love that runs our world, sometimes it means that there is help coming from that love, from that . . . source you would say, yes? See in your life, in Otto’s life, how many times every day you help. Me, you help. Your wife, your children, people you don’t know that you see walking by, you help them. And every day maybe somebody helps you. What is this help? It is love.

What if the secret architecture of it all was just as Rinpoche claimed: some cosmic unity there beyond our false identification with the individual body? a love beyond imagining that hid in the molecules of a trillion shapes, causing hearts to beat and rivers to run and lovers to find each other?

More than that, what if, throughout history, there had been people—grand spirits in human form—sent to show us the route out of this mess, a way to embody that love, or merge with it, rather than simply touching it once in a while, with a handful of close souls, in our best moments?

The core of my life was Jeannie and the children, I knew that. Nothing could change that, I thought, at first. And then I realized that, of course, something would change it: Our family love wasn’t immune to the subversion of time. Something was changing us with each breath, each second. The delusion of youth was that you believed you’d never reach middle age, and the delusion of middle age made you believe you could go on more or less indefinitely the way things were. Yes, the kids would grow up. Yes, you’d grow old and eventually pass away. But, really, there were so many pleasures to be had between now and then, so many tennis games, so many meals, so many weeks at the Cape and the ski lodge, so tremendously much to do before that other stage of life eventually set in.

What I wanted to take hold of then, sitting on that stone beside the parched streambed, was a dependable method by which a person could lead an ordinary life, cherishing the ordinary comforts and pleasures, fulfilling the ordinary familial and professional duties, and still be able to make the transition from here to who-knew-where when that time came. And make it at peace.

that 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.