Breakfast with Buddha

by Roland Merullo

yet, from time to time a gust of uneasiness would blow through the back rooms of my mind, as if a window had been left open there and a storm had come through and my neatly stacked pages of notes on being human had blown off the desk.

And so, I suppose, 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.

flaky as a good spanakopita crust,

“But 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. Do you see?”

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.

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.

“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.”

“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.

“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.”

“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?”

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.”

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.”

“Love makes them run. That is not my lineage, my idea. That is a fact just like when water gets cold it ices. Like that. Some people cannot see this is a fact, but this is. They are blind in different ways but this is a fact: Love makes the atoms go where they go and stick where they stick. Everybody when they see a baby, a small boy or girl, they smile? Why? Because inside themself they know this fact. They know love made this baby, this boy, this girl. They feel this natural rising up of love in themself. Okay, yes? 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?

The world had not changed, not really. With all our impressive technological achievements—the book, the automobile, the airplane, the computer, the looping satellites bouncing TV shows into dry, well-heated homes—we were still the species described in the first parts of the Bible. Some of us murdered and stole and raped; some of us spent our lives chasing money or distraction or the so-called sense pleasures. The family, the village, the tribe, the nation—we still formed ourselves into units in the hope of escaping or softening or denying a kind of ultimate loneliness. And then, conversely, we still seemed to need to divide ourselves into “us” and “them,” liberal and conservative, black and white, native and immigrant, man and woman, believer and nonbeliever, Jew and Christian and Muslim and Buddhist and Hindu. We still laughed. We still faced death on a field of interior solitariness.