Breakfast with Buddha

by Roland Merullo

At the same time, though, I was determined to be civil and decent to my traveling companion. Here is a lesson I learned long ago, and which my kids remind me of whenever I need reminding: When you are a crank, you put yourself on the top of the list of people you make miserable. So I would be decent, I’d be perfectly polite. I’d give Mr. Rinpoche a taste of solid old midwestern American hail-fellow-well-met.

of Yuppies, to use a word I dislike. And then, strangely, two rows of people with

to weigh all sides of an issue, and if something didn’t

house Italian dressing that went beautifully with the warmed rolls. The Pinot was just tart enough, plummy and rich. The duck was perfectly cooked, if soaked in a

there were even enough pillows for me because it was

No, to me, 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. Physically. I think that if you are a bad person, maybe a thief, then the way you see the world is What can I steal? You see everything that can be stealed. And that changes the way your mind works, and makes you blind to see what is really there, all the good things you cannot steal—the sun, the hearts—and so on.” He paused and laughed, as if he was about to make a fine little joke. “And if you are a person who loves sex very much, then you are always seeing sex in the world, always looking at bodies and thinking about sex.

“But if 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.”

“Do not worry so much all the time, my friend, about the other people, what they say. And do not have so many strong opinions, so many strong judgments. What you do matters. And what you think matters. . . . Here is Buddhist prayer,” he said, and he rolled off a few sentences in what must have been Ortyk, then struggling just a bit, translated them. “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.” “So you can control your fate, then, to some extent.” “To every extent.” “So is there a life after death, then, in your belief system?” “Not a system,” he said. “But there is what we call an afterlife?” “After this, yes,” he said. “How could there not be?” “Well, plenty of people think it’s obvious how there could not be. You die, your body rots, end of story. Couldn’t that be the way it’s set up?” “Of course.” “You’ve just contradicted yourself. You’re playing Zen games with me. I hate that.” “When your mind is clear you see it, that’s all. You know what is and what is not, what will be and what will not be.” “You sound like my sister.” “I like very much your sister,” he said. “Very, very much.” “But she claims to see the future.” “In some way she does see it. In some way yo...

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. I thought about this in my moldy motel room—just what Rinpoche had advised me not to do. Thought and considered and pondered and held the idea up to the light so I could examine it from several angles. I couldn’t stop myself from approaching the question this way because, after all, thinking and learning had been my path out of the unadorned monotony of Stark County, North Dakota.

“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

“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.”

it. “This is not a world for easy.”

“Okay then, why are there evil people in the world? Why are there people who rape and kill and abuse and steal from other people and fly jetliners into buildings? Why is it all set up this way?” He lifted his hands, as I’d seen him do before, and let them fall back to the tops of his thighs. “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.” “The digital universe.”

“These feel like small things, small choices, but every day, across one life, across many, many lives, if you choose the good way, again and again and again, in what you are thinking and what you are doing, if you choose to go away from anger not toward, away from hate, not toward, away from armor, not toward, away from falseness, not toward . . . then you become this person like you—good, not stealing, not hurting. Some people made good choices

in their past lives and so, like you, they are given maybe an easy life for this time. Not the perfect life, not the life with no trouble or pain in it at all, but a life where it is easier to turn the mind to the spiritual part. You, my friend, you have work that you like not hate, a wife that you love and live with by peace, children that are good not bad. Is this true?” “Yes.” “So you have a small quiet space in your mind from that. And that quiet space gives you a chance to see deep, deep into the world if you want to. Another choice, yes? You can take that choice and look deep, or no. But if a person goes the other way, little choice and little choice toward the bad and the selfish, life after life, hour after hour, then this spirit does not have the good incarnation, so does not have the quiet space. Sometimes that person becomes the one who kills, who rapes, who hurts. Other times, in this life, they maybe make a big change to the good. Do you see?” “But why must the bad hurt the good? Why did you go to prison, for instance? Why did they kill Jesus, and Gandhi, and Martin Luther King, and so on?” “I don’t know the why. I know the is. This is the world and always the world.

I found myself thinking about Oz, that kingdom of illusion, that place where you came to understand that you’d had everything you needed all along—good witches to call on in an emergency, all the courage, brains, and heart that was necessary in order to manage your way through this life. 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. Oz was that dreamlike place you returned from and couldn’t tell anyone in your old life about, because none of them believed it existed. And the Hong Kong Garden was that place where

in the midst of this memory, some small internal tremor.

“Yes, the strength of love in this universe, it comes very much all at once into some bodies on this planet, the way air comes sometimes very much into a wind. And those bodies, they are a saint, a great teacher, what we call a god. Really it is a piece of God, the way you can have a big wind be a piece of the air on the earth but by itself it is not really separate.” He considered this a moment, then went on. “The way you can have light in a line coming through a window,” he pointed to his left where a ray of sunlight was angling in and splashing on the pale wood of a table. “Piece of the sun, yes, but not the sun really, you see?”

“But what runs the world is that source. Sometimes when a country, when a place on the earth, needs help, or when the whole of the earth needs help, then this love becomes into a human body like a Buddha, a Krishna, a Muhammad, a Mary, a Jesus, a Moses, and so like that. Why at that time, why in that place, that culture, even my father says, ‘Don’t know.’ Why only some of the peoples there see that these saints are pieces of God and others do not see, don’t know.

But if you look with a clear mind, you know that the world works like this. If you listen very careful to your heart going, if you meditate just on that, you...

tried to let that truth sink in, tried to meditate on my heartbeat for a moment, on the heartbeats of the people I loved. I tried, with a bit of success, I must say, to contemplate the source behind the movements of the atoms in stone and air and water. It was strangely, eerily frightening. Rinpoche did not seem to feel the need to say anything more. I excused myself, got up and went to the bathroom, trying to give myself time to come back to my ordinary way of thinking about the world. But that way, safe and familiar and protected by a thick armor of intellectual acuity, seemed almost criminally superficial all of a sudden. There was the familiar DAMEN and HERREN on the bathroom doors, there was the water coming out of the faucet, and cells and atoms within that water, and ordinarily that was as far as I would have gone with it. As if those cells and atoms had simply materialized one fine day, out of nothing. As if my children had. As if a college chemistry text was all the explanation anyone needed for

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