Maya (49 page)

“Happiness is . . .” I ventured, “it's what everyone wants. All people want to be happy.”

“And nobody want suffer and pain. Is it not so? Everybody fear pain. Push away.”

I nodded.

“I give more advice now. Okay?” He considered. “Look close at happy time. Happy time is always something welcome. You see? That is all. Very simple.”

He examined my face and frowned.

“You not understand. Listen more close. Welcome is
enough
for happy. Reason not important. Whatever time is welcome, that is happy time. All other is suffer and pain. Suffer and pain is only that—what you
not
welcome.”

“But of course,” I shot back. “Pain is never ‘welcome.' Nobody wants pain.”

He studied me in silence, clearly evaluating my response. “You ever try?”

“Try what?”

“Try welcome pain.”

“Rinpoche, why would I want to welcome pain?”

“Very simple answer: because pain is best teacher. That is why make pain welcome. Self never want welcome pain. Self always run from pain, run toward happy. Always make big difference pain from happy. Self always welcome happy, push away pain.
Fear
pain. You know?” He held up both hands between us, palms facing me, and turned his head back and forth, looking from one hand to the other. “Want happy. Not want pain. Want happy. Not want pain.” He did this several times, looking from one hand to the other and repeating the same line, then he turned his eyes toward me again. “Self
made
from ‘desire happy' and ‘fear pain.' Self always judge. You know what means ‘judge'?” He squinted at me, cocking his head to one side.

“Judge,” I repeated the word. “It means to decide one thing is better or worse than another.”

“Yes.” He nodded vigorously. “That is meaning. First judge, then choose: Want or not want. Desire or fear. Self always must judge and choose. So everything very simple: No judge—no self. No self—no suffer! You see? Need only to stop judge and choose. Sit quiet, welcome pain and pleasure equal, like two stranger come for visit. No need for invite—guest come and guest go. Guest come, you be nice. Guest go, you be nice. Very simple.”

He did a kind of Marcel Marceau routine, pretending to open a door between us, then bowing formally to his guest, welcoming his visitor: “Come in. Sit down. Drink chai. Good
bye
!” He delivered all this in a singsong voice, tipping his head to one side and then the other, pronouncing the final syllable of “goodbye” with distinct irony while supplying a cute little wave with the fingers of one hand. “You see now? Self is finish.” He caught my eye, his expression suddenly becoming grave. “
Tsa
!”

His hand chopped down through the air like the blade of an ax.

“Finish! Like tree cut off at root.”

Back in the shadows something moved its teeth along the edge of a crate. Nortul studied my face, assessing my reaction.

“I . . .” My voice faltered.

“Yes?”

“I, uh, I still don't understand.”

“What you not understand? Very simple.”

“How am I supposed to just stop judging and choosing? It's not that easy, Rinpoche. People can't just make themselves stop wanting one thing and not wanting another. I can't just
do
that.”

He shook his head. “Not do.”

“But you said . . .”

He interrupted me. “Nothing you must
do
.”

“Then,
what
?” I was losing patience.

Nortul was charming, no doubt, but this whole pantomime about “welcoming pain” struck me as somehow disingenuous. It was fine in theory—I understood the theory—but I didn't need more theory. I suddenly felt very much like I'd had more than enough theory to last a lifetime. Several lifetimes. All those classes and seminars at Chicago, reading the texts, arguing about grammar and syntax, writing papers so that Abraham Sellars could flood the margins with his vicious red scrawl, using his words to open wounds that would never heal because they weren't
supposed
to heal. That was the idea—right?—the arguments must never end, the words must never, ever be allowed to stop. All those massive intellects on parade, endlessly churning the soup of reason.
Words, words, words
. Words in Sanskrit. Words in Pali. And here I was trying to learn Tibetan when it should be blindingly obvious that all the words in all the languages on earth translate into nothing but more tears.

So why was I here? It seemed, at that moment, like a relevant question. A question worth asking. What exactly was I looking for?

“If there's nothing I can
do
,” I said, “to make myself stop judging and choosing, then I . . . well, then I guess I'm lost. I don't see the point.” I'm sure he heard the frustration in my voice, which I was no longer even trying to disguise.

“Not
do
,” he said again emphatically. “
Do
mean
think
. No need for think. Only
see
.”

“See? See what?”

“No, no!” He shook his head. “You not understand. Not see some
thing
. See mean
be
. See mean not come from any place, not go any place.” He held his hands up, palms toward me, gently smoothing the air between us. “See mean
rest
.”

After a moment he dropped his hands and wound the rosary around one wrist. He tugged on the wisp of straggly gray hair that hung from his chin like Spanish moss, all the while still studying my face. Then he began picking his nose. Once this task was complete he sat absolutely motionless, staring straight ahead into space. He appeared to have forgotten all about me. I thought for a second that he might actually have slid into some kind of trance. The corners of his lips were drawn up in an enigmatic smile that
was collecting momentum as I watched. He reminded me of the Cheshire cat from
Alice in Wonderland.

“Tibetan people have
muhavrah
,” he announced from out of nowhere, using the Hindi word. “You know what is
muhavrah
?”

I nodded. I remembered learning the word in class, back in Chicago. A
muhavrah
is something like an English proverb, a saying.

“Tibetan people have famous muhavrah. We say ‘better never begin.'” He looked at me expectantly. “You understand? Better
not ever begin
Buddha path. ‘But if begin, better you finish!'” His head bobbed with unrestrained merriment. “Once begin,” he repeated, “better you finish!” He started to giggle. “Better
never
begin. If begin, better you
finish
!
Hahahaha hee hee
! Big joke, no?”

I managed to crack a weak smile, but this time he really had lost me.

At first he seemed to assume that my uncomprehending expression was a bluff, but then his laughter faded into another silence and he frowned. “Why you not laugh? Very funny muhavrah. But maybe you know this joke from before. No? Someone tell you before?”

“I don't think so . . .”

He studied my expression for a moment, then leaned toward me. “When you begin Buddha path?”

In a flash, I recalled the conversation with Margaret, that afternoon in the Fulbright lounge when I'd wanted to tell her about my undergraduate years reading Herman Hesse and Alan Watts and Aldous Huxley. All that acid and mescaline. Throwing open the doors of perception. Judith and I sitting zazen with Kapleau's students. The whole long story of the spiritual quest that had brought me to graduate school and then to India. But I no sooner opened my mouth to spit it out than Nortul cut me off short, like some Zen master ringing the bell.

“Now.”

He looked at me, thoroughly deadpan.

“You begin now.”

I felt a prickly sensation all over my scalp, and I involuntarily shivered.

He continued to hold my eyes. “And when are you finish? You know?”

I shook my head. Something about the way he spoke was not right. Something about the way he looked. In fact, something about the way
everything
looked was suddenly not quite right.

“I tell you.”

He leaned forward across the desk, beckoning me closer, as if about to
take me into confidence on a matter of extreme delicacy, something of considerable importance to the two of us, and the two of us alone. Once again I obeyed, drawing my head close to his.

He whispered in my ear, “You are finish . . . now.”

The moment he spoke these words, I became intensely self-conscious, fiercely aware of how I appeared in his eyes. It was as if I were seated across from myself, looking at myself in a mirror, seeing myself as he saw me. It was as if I were looking into my own mind from some outside vantage point. All the pathetic games, the insecurity, the desperate need for validation, the fantastic panorama of yearning and fear. My whole life stripped naked under the brutal white glare of the incandescent bulb that hung over us like some unearthly fruit. Only now I had swallowed the fruit and it was inside me. It wasn't even him seeing me, or me seeing myself—there was only this immense
seeing
, this boundless light where thoughts, feelings, and sensations were unmoored and drifting like clouds in open sky. And in the midst of this Great Seeing the light coalesced and took form, crawling up over the horizon of consciousness like the fiery morning sun, absorbing my attention and focusing it on a single astonishing realization:

This is a dream.

This subterranean chamber stacked with books, this strange Tibetan man in robes with his creepy text. All of it suddenly felt exactly like the dream where I was driving the bus—not real, and yet at the same time impossibly, undeniably, vibrantly
present
. Or like the dream
after
the driving one—the dream where I dreamed I'd actually woken up. It felt like something I had once imagined, the dream of a memory, or the remembering of a dream I did not want to remember.

But now Nortul was laughing again, rocking back and forth in his seat, cackling like a hyena. His face was contorted with mirth, one hand slapping the table. I felt myself carried aloft by the frenzy of his rapture, a laughter so riotous, so insane and all-encompassing, it was impossible to resist. And when I, too, gave myself over and began to laugh, there was no turning back. Soon we were both laughing so hard, we began to weep. I saw myself lean backward, gripping the table with both hands. I saw myself wipe my eyes and struggle to breathe.

“Better never begin!” He pulled himself slowly up onto his elbows, as if his body were a slab of warm taffy, then wiped his eyes with the back of one pudgy hand. “Yes, yes!
Now
you see, Mr. Tsan-lee!
Now
you
understand! Once begin, better you finish!” This cracked him up all over again. “
Hahahahaha hee hee!
Some funny muhavrah, eh?” Gradually his laughter subsided, and he mopped his eyes and nose, using the ragged hem of his robe as a handkerchief.

I took a deep breath and straightened up and said to myself: Now it is over. Now I will wake up. This is what I wanted. Or what, in that moment, I thought I wanted, for it immediately occurred to me,
What if the alarm actually sounds? What if I really do wake up and find myself lying in bed somewhere?
But there was no bell. We continued on, just as we were.

Just as we are, just as we shall be.

Sicut eramus in principio, et nunc, et semper, et in sæcula sæculorum.

And I thought, this is how it is: there are only the stories. Stories we tell to ourselves and to each other. Stories about ourselves in a world.

There is only this endless layering of memory and imagination.

Nortul finished swabbing his nose and grew calm. When at last he spoke, his voice was resolute. “Many things change after Chinese enter Tibet. Old ways dying. Old way of teaching no longer suitable. We live in . . .” He stumbled, searching for the right word. “We live in
eunuch
time.”

Somewhere in my brain a switch flipped: where had I heard that word recently?

An image presented itself to me: the jungles of Assam, 1959. A refugee camp somewhere near the Tibetan border. Nortul Rinpoche and Dorje Sherap are sitting together in a missionary's tent, both of them learning English from the same old British Memsahab, both of them memorizing the same new vocabulary, testing and shaping each new sound in conversation with each other. Now this was funny. So why wasn't I laughing?

I want only warn you. Big yogi power.

“What did you say? What kind of time are we living in?”

He frowned. “Eu-nuch, eh? Means strange. Crazy.
Very danger
.”

“Un
ique
,” I said, fighting to control the anxiety rising in my voice, for I abruptly sensed that I was in over my head, that the alarm clock might yet ring—that Nortul would somehow
make
it ring—that he was making it ring right now, and if I didn't very quickly find some way to shut it off, I really would wake up in Banaras—or somewhere else—Agra,
Chicago
. And if that happened, if I woke up, there would be no escape from the dream. No more dreaming of escape. And no way back into my old life with its habits of thought and reason, its perpetual conflict between the fear of loneliness and the fear of love, and all the other familiar certain
ties that make it possible to know who I am. I knew without the slightest doubt that to wake up in this dream—to truly see it for what it is—would leave me in ruins. It was the last thing on earth I wanted. It was altogether beyond wanting.

“The word is pronounced yoo
-neek
,” I insisted, my heart pounding. “With the stress on the last syllable, not the first. And it doesn't mean crazy. Or dangerous.” But he wasn't paying attention.

“Very danger time,” he continued. “Old way of teaching too slow.”

40

T
HE YOUNG MAN
wore loose khakis and a white khadi shirt. He was obviously a foreigner—an American with shaggy, reddish blond hair and blue eyes. He climbed the stairs that led up and out of the storage facility and walked quickly through the stacks toward the front entrance, eyes down, as if he were making an effort not to attract attention. A guard sat at his post near the main door. He saw the pale foreigner coming from some distance off and stood up and saluted him effusively with joined palms as the man passed by and stepped through the door into the glare of the north Indian sun. The heat was ferocious, the air so dry it sucked the moisture from the young man's pores. Just outside the door he stopped dead, as if he had slammed into a barrier. He raised both hands to his forehead like a visor, shielding his eyes.