“Honey, these aren’t words he understands, you can see that.” “I thought he might intuit,” Matthew said. And at that I could not stop myself from saying, “He speaks eleven languages.” Matthew drew his head back in surprise, actual or feigned, I could not tell. “Really. Say something, then, in Italian, or Russian, or Greek. Or are they languages none of us might know, your eleven?” Rinpoche looked at him for a long moment, until the silence grew awkward around us, and then he said, “Kindness is one language I know.” And he spoke the phrase kindly, too, as if it were simply a statement of fact.
