Breakfast with Buddha

by Roland Merullo

“The flower is the good inside every person,” he said. “The cup is like a wall, to protect. Many people have that wall.”

“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. You do not make it too much, Otto.”

We’ve tried to do that with each other, as well. To live unarmored.” “This is why you are a good man,” he said, with a twinkle.

“And your sister,” he said, “has none. An open soul. Why she is the special person.”

“You’re in love with Cecelia, aren’t you,” I said. “I just realized that.”

“If a person could really see it,” Rinpoche said to me in a quiet voice, “really see the thing that we just saw as it is truly, without putting a name between his mind and the fact of what you call, in your language, the moon, then that person would have no cup over his good. Do you understand? No armor. That person would not be afraid. That person could love and that person could let another person give him love, and he could feel the ground he walks on like love, and the air he breathes like love.”

But I also knew that, at work, and with Cecelia, and with almost all of my friends, and with my parents before they died, there was a way in which I’d hardened myself just slightly. My personality had solidified. I’d learned to react by habit instead of really being present. With my parents, for instance, I’d taken to playing the role of college-educated son, the executive from back East, leaving Cecelia to take on the role of flake.

“How is he in person?” “Funny. Odd. Easygoing, except when he’s playing one of his tricks. He had me fasting for a whole day yesterday, and I’m not like that, believe me.” “People say he’s actually the incarnation of the Buddha. Or some kind of Jesus-Buddha-Moses combination.”

“Really? Do you know what kind of blessing you’ll get for letting him use your land? If he is the Buddha, or some great being like that, I mean? You’ll be set for eternity.” Jane laughed when she said it, and I laughed, too. But I have to say I felt a small chill along the sides of my arms. She might have been touching the nerves that ran there, I don’t know. But I know I felt a chill, or a sense of . . . I don’t know exactly what to call it. Three or four times now in the past few days I’d felt it. Seese would have

called it a premonition, or an “energy message.” But I did not deal in energy messages, and so it was strange to me, a sort of intermittent knocking at the door of my house of belief.

“There are people,” he said, “who are past being hurt, beyond being hurt. You should know this is true. You

should try to become one of those people, to make an understanding with yourself that you are not your body, that you are something bigger. That is your work on this earth, do you see? Every experience here is to teach you to do that. Living, dying, every experience.”

Only to try is important. Even not to have violence in your thoughts is important.”

“Okay then, why are there evil people in the world? Why are there people who rape and kill and abuse and steal from other people and fly jetliners into buildings? Why is it all set up this way?” He lifted his hands, as I’d seen him do before, and let them fall back to the tops of his thighs. “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.”

!!! This is a great quote. It’s all about choices. What I’ve told my kids a million times.

“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.”

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. 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.”

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.

“Kisses. Bohling. Golf. Outside swimming. Now America is my favorite place, and you are my favorite friend. Thank you, Otto!” “Not a problem.” “Thank you for showing me fun.”

They did not spend a lot of time embracing us, kissing us, telling us what a blessing we were in their lives. Something happened to me then, in the midst of this memory, some small internal tremor. I could not, at first, find any reason for it. Looking at Rinpoche, I felt an unexplained nervousness rising up in me, that’s all. And I noticed that I had the urge to fall back on old habits and cover over the nervousness with a cute little remark. I resisted.

Otto is growing

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? See in your life, in Otto’s life, how many times every day you help. Me, you help. Your wife, your children, people you don’t know that you see walking by, you help them. And every day maybe somebody helps you. What is this help? It is love. Okay?”

“Good. And so, now, bigger idea . . .” He made a large circle with his hands. “Sometimes, many times, the strongness of love in this universe—” “The strength of love.” “Yes, the strength of love in this universe, it comes very much all at once into some bodies on this planet, the way air comes sometimes very much into a wind. And those bodies, they are a saint, a great teacher, what we call a god. Really it is a piece of God, the way you can have a big wind be a piece of the air on the earth but by itself it is not really separate.” He considered this a

moment, then went on. “The way you can have light in a line coming through a window,” he pointed to his left where a ray of sunlight was angling in and splashing on the pale wood of a table. “Pie...

“But what runs the world is that source. Sometimes when a country, when a place on the earth, needs help, or when the whole of the earth needs help, then this love becomes into a human body like a Buddha, a Krishna, a Muhammad, a Mary, a Jesus, a Moses, and so like that. Why at that time, why in that place, that culture, even my father says, ‘...

others do not see, don’t know. But if you look with a clear mind, you know that the world works like this. If you listen very careful to your heart going, if you meditate just on tha...

But at that moment, surrounded by a German-Americana of smells and sights that had been as familiar to me as the quilt on my childhood bed, I felt a physical sensation of another world having been opened up to me. A thick layer peeled away. An obvious truth revealed. Strangely enough, the feeling was vaguely familiar, and after a few seconds’ consideration I realized it was a cousin to the feeling I’d known when I had watched my children being born.

I’d prepared a whole lecture for him on the history of the Great Plains, the blood and slaughter and hardship and sacrifice lying beneath the placid landscape like karma in a soul—

It had been a holocaust, some people said.

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.

What if the secret architecture of it all was just as Rinpoche claimed: some cosmic unity there beyond our false identification with the individual body? a love beyond imagining that hid in the molecules of a trillion shapes, causing hearts to beat and rivers to run and lovers to find each other? What if the plain old Protestants had it partly right—that you could have direct access to that breath and pulse of love without the official intervention of the church fathers? More than that, what if, throughout ...

merge with it, rather than simply touching it once in a while, with a handful of close souls, in our best moments? What if earth was just a violent stopping place on the highway to some saner, sweeter home, and there were teachers who saw that and had come to help us on the journey? And if there really were such people, what would be the consequence of ignoring them?

TRUE SPIRITUALITY- not religion

A line of electricity that came directly from the Great Spirit itself.

“We were good in a past life, must be.”

troublesome miracles,

Also “little storm clouds”

I felt as though my real life was standing on the other side of the door, raising a fist to knock. I liked that life, loved it even. But the gravitational field of Volya Rinpoche and the American road had knocked me out of my usual orbit, and I needed to take a breath or two before re-entry.

The larger picture, the big questions, had been submerged in an ocean of duties and moods and the mundanities of survival.

What I wanted to take hold of then, sitting on that stone beside the parched streambed, was a dependable method by which a person could lead an ordinary life, cherishing the ordinary comforts and pleasures, fulfilling the ordinary familial and professional duties, and still be able to make the transition from here to who-knew-where when that time came. And make it at peace. I had wanted to find that method, it seemed to me, for

many years. In some buried, secret, papered-over place inside myself, from the hour of Grandma May’s death, I had wanted that. And I knew, sitting there, that if I had the courage to reach down beyond all my strategies, my pride, my clever humor, my busyness and wants and penchant for distraction and judgment, my resistance to Cecelia’s odd enthusiasms, and arrive at the place where intuition and intellect joined forces—the place where a person came as close as humanly possible to seeing the world as it was—in that place I would have to admit to myself that Volya Rinpoche knew a secret about living and dying in peace and might be able to pass that secret on to me. On our strange trip, I had caught a glimpse of that truth. I could no longer deny

it. The only question now was: What did I intend...

there was another dimension to this life as surely as the earth turned; that there were people, there had always been people, who sensed that dimension and made some

kind of leap of faith to be in harmony with it. And there were others who did not. It was about choosing between A and B, yes and no, and sometimes those choices were petty, and sometimes they were of enormous importance. It was about cruising along in the comfortable vehicle of old habits and ways, old thought patterns, old conceits, or sensing some new truth and setting off on foot. Sure, there were phonies and charlatans claiming to know The Way. But at some point you had to stop closing yourself off because of them. At some point you had to risk the ridicule of the mob, of your own internalized voices, and try to see clearly what had been set in front of you in this life, and try to act on that as bravely and honestly as you could, no matter what kind of rules you’d previously been living by. At some point before

the blue pickup ran the stop sign on an ordinary, cold morning, you’d be asked to believe in some possibility that transcended newspaper headlines and TV shows and the opinions and assumptions of your friends. And how you responded to that would have a greater impact on your life than anything else you’d ever decide to do, or refrain from doing. I could see that. Sitting ther...

all you had to do, really, was just watch it like you’d watch any other thought float past. Watch life do its thing, watch the end of life do its thing, and try to go toward the good side when you could see it.

I went part of the way across the room toward him, and then I stopped and got on my knees and bent down and touched my forehead to the old pine boards in front of him and stayed like that for a while with my sister watching. Because that seemed like the right thing to do.

I think the best way to approach it is with a sense of humor and without trying to convince anyone of anything.

For all but the most conceited or desperately insecure, it seems that you get wiser as you age, and that wisdom and humility go hand in hand. I know it isn’t that simple, and I know some older people are far from humble. But it seems to me that life is a kind of boot camp, designed to break you down and build you up in a different way—if you let it. So you lose your ability to sprint a hundred yards, but maybe you gain something more important in the process.

What really bothers me, and what I went after in American Savior, is when religion, instead of being something that a person uses to become more loving and considerate, turns into something people use to justify their own hatred or close-mindedness. That tendency has been part of human psychology for thousands of years, but the form it takes here, now, is abhorrent to me.