Breakfast with Buddha

by Roland Merullo

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