Breakfast with Buddha

by Roland Merullo

I find myself resistant to the type of

things Aunt Seese is into, as you probably know. They are not bad things, they are just not for me.

Outside the window the air machine hummed and swooshed and I felt the same small irritation inside me that I’d felt listening to Rinpoche give his talk. Or a cousin of that feeling, at least. I suppose it came simply from the world not being exactly the way I wanted it to be—my sister’s quirks, my own moods and failings, the harsh laws of business, the sting of seeing real poverty and knowing I was not doing much to fix it. It occurred to me that, if I made it to old age, the chances were good that these kinds of irritations would assume a larger role in my life. The teeth, the joints, the prostate, the hardened

bad habits, the behavior of those less experienced—wouldn’t the world disappoint me more and more often and more painfully? The sense pleasures would fade (not food, I hoped), as would the feeling of doing something productive.

to judge a person by the size of her wedding ring or the cost of her purse, or her license-plate frame or bumper sticker, or the newspaper she chose to read. Once you’d become aware of such things, whether they sent positive or negative signals running through you, how did you erase them from the thought process and see the world as it was, without labels and judgments?

“As to why one does good instead of doing bad, I guess it must have to do, partly, with wanting to be liked, to

be approved of by the people around you. We all crave social acceptance, don’t we? So I think it just makes life easier for most of us to act that way. And there might be a natural conscience at work—in good people, at least. Even in bad people in their better moments, there might be some inherent sense of right and wrong that urges them toward kindness or honesty or nonviolence, at least most of the time. Strange that there’s such a wide spectrum—from Hitler to Gandhi—but I suppose you’ll find that spectrum in nature to some extent, in weather extremes, in the sizes and shapes of animals within a species. Even some dogs seem so much kinder than others.”

Anyway, the point is, it seems to me that we’re already living the way we should live, and when I hear you talk, it sounds like you’re challenging that, saying we have to do better. It’s intrusive, for one thing, especially in the arena of religion, which, in this society at least, is a very

personal matter. For another, why would we want to change what seems already almost perfect?”

“Have you seen any person die?” he said at last.

“Some people die calm and others not so calm. Why is that?”

Tell me, why are you so good if you don’t know what will happen after, if you don’t believe that to be good will make a difference in what kind of thing happens in you after you die?” “I do what makes me feel good, I suppose. If it made me feel bad I wouldn’t do it.” “Exactly!” he said, as if I’d just solved the Hodge conjecture—or some other baffling mathematical puzzle. “What makes you move through this life is going for pleasure, yes? And going away from pain?” “Of course. I’ve had that thought many times. It’s hardly surprising.” “But I can show you a pleasure to make all the other pleasures be too temporary. Be like the little breaths that

some person takes from a cigarette. Little bit of pleasures, puff. Little bit of puffs then throw away.”

Show me, then, I almost said. Show me a thing like that, a pleasure to count on when the other pleasures fade, when the candle goes out. But I couldn’t. To begin with, what educated person would actually believe such an offer? It sounded too much like the advertisements on talk radio—for investments in gold, arthritis creams, jobs that paid you eight thousand dollars a month for working a few hours a day at home. Second, I could not open myself to him at that point, to anyone in that way. I paid him back then for his silences and just studied the water rushing below us, muddied in its frenzy: powerful, constant, even beautiful, but carrying a good load of dirt as it went along its preordained route.

So I said, “I suppose I believe in heaven.” “Me also,” he said. And then, “I have felt that heaven, here, before dying. As real as you feel the sound of this water. I can show you.”

He had been gardening again and held in one hand the kind of wide-bladed, lime-green grass that grows at the untended edges of sidewalks and lawns. He shook the dirt free, pulled out a half dozen of the longer strands, smoothed them, then twisted them into a flimsy green braid. “Time,” he said, holding up the braid to me. He indicated one end, then the other, “Maybe one thousand year.” He touched the individual stalks of grass tenderly. “Souls. Spirits. You see? You, your father, your mother, sister, wife, children, you see? Your spirit is together with their spirits like this, tight against each other. That is why you were born into this wife together.” He pulled one strand out and tossed it up into the sunlight. “Maybe one of these people, or two, not so close after this wife. But people you really love, spirits that are close to your spirit, you see? They tie around tight to you, wife after wife.” “Life,” I corrected him. “L.” He paid no attention. “You see them, you live with them, you meet them now as son or daughter, next as mother or father, next as friend, maybe sometime as enemy, you see? You go through time with them.” “A nice idea,” I said. “Comforting.”

“You have the good life,” he said harshly, emphasizing the l. “Easy life this time, Otto. Do not waste, okay?”

In the spirituality section, on the middle shelf, just at eye-height, stood three thin volumes with the words VOLYA RINPOCHE on their spines. One was titled, The Greatest Pleasure, so I bought it, asked for a paper bag, and then,

reason not clear to me, slipped it into the trunk of the car so the author would not see.

But when I listen a bit longer to the so-called Christians, it sounds to me as if their cure for what ails us is more and stricter

rules, more narrow-mindedness, more hatred, more sectioning off of the society, and 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.

“Anger, anger. Why so much in America, tell me.”

This is how I see many on the far-right, so much anger...and needing someone to blame it on.

“They think the country’s gone to hell,” I said. “They think America isn’t living right. They think God is going to punish us if we don’t straighten out, and that, until God himself arrives on the scene, they are the ones who can do the straightening.”

If you had your own talk show—God save America from that—what would you rant about? What do you care about most? Lying on the bed in the nice suite, with the hot Indiana day easing into evening beyond the curtained windows, I gave the matter some serious thought. And what I came up with, to my own surprise, was love. It was the only answer that held up.

“What about a blessing then?” He said to Rinpoche. “You know. For good luck. What about it?”

Rinpoche let go of the man’s hand and looked at him, moved half a step closer—I was going to try to stop him—and then he put his palms on the man’s shoulders and started in on some kind of a prayer in some language—Ortyk, it must have been—that sounded like a cold Siberian stream running over stones. No one understood

it, of course, but that didn’t matter. What mattered was the tone, and the tone was like honey, like love made into a song, a quiet, utterly fearless little chant that would have calmed a wolf with her back to the cliffside and three pups on her teats. It went on for maybe twenty seconds. When it was finished, Rinpoche took a step backward and bowed. The man with the snake tattoo stood frozen in place. And then across his jagged features bloomed the smile he must have had as a young boy, before anything had been taken away from him by what he saw and heard, before the world had shown him its teeth and bitten him.

He just sets up, between him and the next level of piano playing—the next level of his interior life—a kind of invisible barrier. He makes a limit where there is no actual limit. This is not bad. He is not an evil man. Just the opposite, he is a good man, but he builds this limit the way you would build walls around a room, and then he lives there, within that room, not completely satisfied but not knowing what he can do about his dissatisfaction.

This is Otto

This is just the way life is, he says to himself. This is as good a player as I will ever be. He would, in fact, like to play the piano better, but what keeps him from venturing outside that room is a kind of fear, the idea that he might fail, that people might mock him for his ambition, or that he would then not be the person he believes himself to be. But where did this idea of who

he actually is come from? In the spiritual realm, or, if you prefer these words, in the emotional or psychological realm, what is he denying himself by staying inside these walls?

“He’s not God?” “Yes, yes, of course. God. Yes, he is. You are God, too. I think Jesus Christ said that you are God. He said that his father is your father, yes? That makes you his sister, yes? I think Jesus Christ wanted not so much that you worship him but that you act like him, that you be like him inside. I think he came here to save us by showing us what we could be like inside.

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.

!!!!! Agree

“And if you are a person who has had bad things happen with you, and who is angry,” Rinpoche went on, resting his eyes on her, “then you are always seeing in the world reasons for you to be angry about. You see? Even, you get angry at yourself when you are not perfect.

Good explanation for why so many in US are angry

There, on that highway, I felt something change inside my mind, and it was a physical sensation, though very small, as if four tiny walls had been moved

outward a few inches, or a door cut in one of them, a sliver of light peeking through, nothing more.

“What difference makes what you believe? What happens will happen anyway, exactly same, no matter what you believe. What you do makes the important part, what you do.”

“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.”

When the waiter left us, Rinpoche said, “If you want to know why this life is like it is, you should know that it is because of your last life. If you want to know what your future life will be, you should look at the way you are living in this life.”

!!!!!

that means you were a bad person in your last life.” “Absolutely not,” he said, and for once he was not smiling. “It means you are given that for your practice in this life.” “Practice for what?” “For your next life,” he said.

“I can’t make those things be sense in words, in the logic way of thinking, so I play Zen game. But it is not a game. It is the only way to begin—begin—to understand. I am trying to teach you, but you don’t want to accept the teaching. You are very proud. You have a good life, you have worked hard for that life, you are very

intelligent man, and in this society, intelligence like yours gets a good job, a good house, a good life for you and your family. “There is nothing wrong with that. But you should try now to stop using so much that kind of intelligence, and stop thinking about punishment and sin and good and evil. I am telling you that your kind of intelligence makes you have a good job, but your kind of intelligence does not make you able to answer these questions. For that, you need a different kind of mind. And I am telling you there are people—maybe like that man in the doorway, maybe like that man sweeping the street in the city where your sister lives, or that man sitting outside the gas station the other day, or a woman we will meet soon—

who can answer these questions better than you can, though maybe they do not have the fancy words. I am trying to tell you this, but you are proud of your intelligence, and your good job, and you will not let me teach you, so I play ...

“All right, my question is this: Assuming I wanted to find out about the greatest pleasure, as you call it . . . assuming I was open to that . . . what would the next step be?”

“Not stupid at all,” I agreed, quietly. “All right. I’ll try to show you America in four days. You try to show me enlightenment.” “Maybe a little enlightenment. Maybe one piece.”

“I think there’s something to what he says,” I told her then, in a different tone, and she noticed it, naturally—we’ve been married long enough for her to detect that small change in my voice—and there was a silence. “It’s not bad,” I added, foolishly.

“He’s made me think about things from a different angle, that’s all. Life and death, you know.”

I don’t know what to call it . . . another dimension of the interior life, I guess it would be.”

“I know. I just have a feeling there’s something I’m not paying attention to, and I’m willing to spend a couple of days exploring it.”

Something I’m not paying attention to....spirituality?

“How does one get one’s mind that clean?” “That is the very best question, my friend. The answer is a simple answer, but very hard also: Live a good life. Help people. Meditate. Live another good life. Meditate some more. Don’t hurt. Don’t hurt. Don’t hurt.” He chuckled and sampled his soup, smacking his lips loudly.

After another few words she turned and looked at me, searching my face with her chocolate eyes. She shifted the gaze to Rinpoche, who nodded, and then the woman bowed to me with that same reverence, that same otherworldly calm. No, no, I wanted to tell her. I wanted to take her by the shoulders and say, No! Wrong guy! This is Otto Ringling. Look, I can take out my wallet and show you my tennis club membership. I like sex. I like food very much, too much probably. I yell at my kids once in a while and I have opinions, very judgmental opinions, about everything on earth. This is a mistake. I don’t know what he said about me but it wasn’t true. It’s a mistake!