Breakfast with Buddha: A Novel

by Roland Merullo

I wasn't addicted to anything (well, good food, perhaps), I had devised a strategy of my own, a weaving together of favorite pleasures-food, family time, sex, work I enjoyed, tennis, vacations, TV, reading. They made a harmless enough tapestry, a pretty landscape of pleasure speckled with moments of selflessness, annoyance, worry, fear. But it was a strategy all the same, and it had started to wear thin, and then my parents' dying had punched a hole in the worn section. That night, I had the feeling there might he something on the other side, waiting to show itself to

Here is a lesson I learned long ago, and which my kids remind me of whenever I need reminding: When you are a crank, you put yourself on the top of the list of people you make miserable.

"Dying," he said, as if it were obvious. "Family love is the best practice for dying. For understanding that you are part of something big, not just your one separate body. This is why you are such a good man."

And then, in the midst of this somewhat irreverent reverie, I wondered what my own religion might be. If I defined it that way, that broadly, as the primary focus of my thoughts and passions, what would it be? Family life, perhaps. Our sacred rituals would include eating meals together, going to Anthony's piano recitals and Natasha's soccer games, walking jasper by Sprain Brook, the annual trips to the Green Mountains in winter and Cape Cod in summer; like the so-called Christians on the radio shows, we were engaged in a continual debate about rules and transgression. Or maybe I belonged to the First Church of Good Eating. Or work. Or sex. Or money. What occupied the very center of the stream of thoughts that ran through my gray matter night and day? What was the

Isn't mockery the province of the insecure? Isn't that what you do with Rinpoche and Cecelia, in your heart of hearts, make fun of them because something in their way of thinking threatens you, or at least challenges your

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."