Breakfast with Buddha

by Roland Merullo

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.

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

I was starting to feel there might be something I had been missing all along, some primary color of the interior world that had simply been—and still was—just outside the spectrum visible to my inner eye.

“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.”

like a sad clown with a grenade launcher.

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.

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.

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.

If you listen very careful to your heart going, if you meditate just on that, you can see that it runs because of this love.”

Here’s my love coming through the phone line.” “I feel it.”

“Good, pass a piece of it on to the two troublesome miracles, okay?”

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.