Upon arriving, the emperor asked Gaspar, “What have I attained for all of my good deeds?”
“Nothing,” said Gaspar.
The emperor was aghast, thinking now that he had been generous to his people all these years for nothing.
He said, “Well then, what is the essence of Buddhism?”
“Vast amphibians,” said Gaspar.
The emperor had Gaspar thrown from the temple, at which time the young monk decided two things; one, that he would have a better answer the next time he was asked the question, and two, that he’d better learn to speak better Chinese before he talked to anyone of importance. He’d meant to say, “Vast emptiness,” but he’d gotten the words wrong.
The legend went on to say that Gaspar then came to the cave where the monastery was now built and sat down to meditate, determined to stay there until enlightenment came to him. Nine years later, he came down from the mountain, and the people of the village were waiting for him with food and gifts.
“Master, we seek your most holy guidance, what can you tell us?” they cried.
“I really have to pee,” said the monk. And with that all of the villagers knew that he had indeed achieved the mind of all Buddhas, or “no mind,” as we called it.
The villagers begged Gaspar to stay with them, and they helped him build the monastery at the site of the very cave where he had achieved his enlightenment. During the construction, the villagers were attacked many times by vicious bandits, and although he believed that no being
should be killed, he also felt that these people should have a way to defend themselves, so he meditated on the subject until he devised a method of self-defense based on various movements he learned from the yogis in his native India, which he taught to the villagers, then to each of the monks as they joined the monastery. He called this discipline kung fu, which translates, “method by which short bald guys may kick the bejeezus out of you.”
Our training in kung fu began with the hopping posts. After breakfast and morning meditation, Number Three Monk, who seemed to be the oldest of the monks, led us to the monastery courtyard where we found a stack of posts, perhaps two feet long and about a span’s width in diameter. He had us set the posts on end in a straight line, about a half a stride away from each other. Then he told us to hop up on one of the posts and balance there. After both of us spent most of the morning picking ourselves up off the rough stone paving, we each found ourselves standing on one foot on the end of a pole.
“Now what?” I asked.
“Now nothing,” Number Three said. “Just stand.”
So we stood. For hours. The sun crossed the sky and my legs and back began to ache and we fell again and again only to have Number Three bark at us and tell us to jump back up on the post. When darkness began to fall and we both had stood for several hours without falling, Number Three said, “Now hop to the next post.”
I heard Joshua sigh heavily. I looked at the line of posts and could see the pain that lay ahead if we were going to have to hop this whole gauntlet. Joshua was next to me at the end of the line, so he would have to hop to the post I was standing on. Not only would I have to jump to the next post and land without falling, but I would have to make sure that my take-off didn’t knock over the post I was leaving.
“Now!” said Number Three.
I leapt and missed the landing. The post tipped out from under me and I hit the stone headfirst, sending a white flash before my eyes and a bolt of fire down my neck. Before I could gather my wits Joshua tumbled over on top of me. “Thank you,” he said, grateful to have landed on a soft Jew rather than hard flagstone.
“Back up,” Number Three said.
We set up our posts again, then hopped up on them again. This time both of us made it on the first try. Then we waited for the command to take the next leap. The moon rose high and full and we both stared down the row of poles, wondering how long it would take us before we could hop the whole row, wondering how long Number Three would make us stay there, thinking about the story of how Gaspar had sat for nine years. I couldn’t remember ever having felt so much pain, which is saying something if you’ve been yak-stomped. I was trying to imagine just how much fatigue and thirst I could bear before I fell when Number Three said, “Enough. Go sleep.”
“That’s it?” Joshua asked, as he hopped off his post and winced upon landing. “Why did we set up twenty posts if we were only going to use three?”
“Why were you thinking of twenty when you can only stand on one?” answered Three.
“I have to pee,” I said.
“Exactly,” said the monk.
So there you have it: Buddhism.
Each day we went to the courtyard and arranged the posts differently, randomly. Number Three added posts of different heights and diameters. Sometimes we had to hop from one post to the other as quickly as possible, other times we stood in one place for hours, ready to move in an instant, should Number Three command it. The point, it seemed, was that we could not anticipate anything, nor could we develop a rhythm to the exercise. We were forced to be ready to move in any direction, without forethought. Number Three called this controlled spontaneity, and for the first six months in the monastery we spent as much time atop the posts as we did in sitting meditation. Joshua took to the kung fu training immediately, as he did to the meditation. I was, as the Buddhists say, more dense.
In addition to the normal duties of tending the monastery, our gardens, and milking the yak (mercifully, a task I was never assigned), every ten days or so a group of six monks would go to the village with their bowls and collect alms from the villagers, usually rice and tea, sometimes dark sauces, yak butter, or cheese, and on rare occasions cotton fabric,
from which new robes would be made. For the first year Joshua and I were not allowed to leave the monastery at all, but I started to notice a pattern of strange behavior. After each trip to the village for alms, four or five monks would disappear into the mountains for several days. Nothing was ever said of it, either when they left or when they returned, but it seemed that there was some sort of rotation, with each monk only leaving every third or fourth time, with the exception of Gaspar, who left more often.
Finally I worked up the courage to ask Gaspar what was going on and he said, “It is a special meditation. You are not ready. Go sit.”
Gaspar’s answer to most of my questions was “Go sit,” and my resentment meant that I wasn’t losing the attachment to my ego, and therefore I wasn’t going anywhere in my meditation. Joshua, on the other hand, seemed completely at peace with what we were doing. He could sit for hours, not moving, and then perform the exercise on the posts as if he’d spent an hour limbering up.
“How do you do it?” I asked him. “How do you think of nothing and not fall asleep?” That had been one of the major barriers to my enlightenment. If I sat still for too long, I fell asleep, and evidently, the sound of snoring echoing through the temple disturbed the meditations of the other monks. The recommended cure for this condition was to drink huge quantities of green tea, which did, indeed, keep me alert, but also replaced my “no mind” state with constant thoughts of my bladder. In fact, in less than a year, I attained total bladder conciousness. Joshua, on the other hand, was able to completely let go of his ego, as he had been instructed. It was in our ninth month at the monastery, in the midst of the most bitter winter I can even imagine, when Joshua, having let go of all constructions of self and vanity, became invisible.
I have been out among you, eating and talking and walking and walking and walking, for hours without having to turn because of a wall in my way. The angel woke me this morning with a new set of clothes, strange to the feel but familiar to the sight (from television). Jeans, sweatshirt, and sneakers, as well as some socks and boxer shorts.
“Put these on. I’m taking you out for a walk,” said Raziel.
“As if I were a dog,” I said.
“Exactly as if you were a dog.”
The angel was also wearing modern American garb, and although he was still strikingly handsome, he looked so uncomfortable that the clothes might have been held to his body with flaming spikes.
“Where are we going?”
“I told you, out.”
“Where did you get the clothes?”
“I called down and Jesus brought them up. There is a clothing store in the hotel. Come now.”
Raziel closed the door behind us and put the room key in his jeans pocket with the money. I wondered if he’d ever had pockets before. I wouldn’t have thought to use them. I didn’t say a word as we rode the elevator down to the lobby and made our way out the front doors. I didn’t want to ruin it, to say something that would bring the angel to his senses. The noise in the street was glorious: the cars, the jackhammers, the insane people babbling to
themselves. The light! The smells! I felt as if I must have been in shock when we first traveled here from Jerusalem. I didn’t remember it being so vivid.
I started to skip down the street and the angel caught me by the shoulder; his fingers dug into my muscles like talons. “You know that you can’t get away, that if you run I can catch you and snap your legs so you will never run again. You know that if you should escape even for a few minutes, you cannot hide from me. You know that I can find you, as I once found everyone of your kind? You know these things?”
“Yes, let go of me. Let’s walk.”
“I hate walking. Have you ever seen an eagle look at a pigeon? That’s how I feel about you and your walking.”
I should point out, I suppose, what Raziel was talking about when he said that he once found everyone of my kind. It seems that he did a stint, centuries ago, as the Angel of Death, but was relieved of his duties because he was not particularly good at them. He admits that he’s a sucker for a hard-luck story (perhaps that explains his fascination with soap operas). Anyway, when you read in the Torah about Noah living to be nine hundred and Moses living to be a hundred and forty, well, guess who led the chorus line in the “Off This Mortal Coil” shuffle? That’s where he got the black-winged aspect that I’ve talked about before. Even though they fired him, they let him keep the outfit. (Can you believe that Noah was able to postpone death for eight hundred years by telling the angel that he was behind in his paperwork? Would that Raziel could be that incompetent at his current task.)
“Look, Raziel! Pizza!” I pointed to a sign. “Buy us pizza!”
He took some money out of his pocket and handed it to me. “You do it. You can do it, right?”
“Yes, we had commerce in my time,” I said sarcastically. “We didn’t have pizza, but we had commerce.”
“Good, can you use that machine?” He pointed to a box that held newspapers behind glass.
“If it doesn’t open with that little handle, then no.”
The angel looked perturbed. “How is it that you can receive
the gift of tongues and suddenly understand all languages, and there is no gift that can tell you how things work in this time? Tell me that.”
“Look, maybe if you didn’t hog the remote all the time I would learn how to use these things.” I meant that I could have learned more about the outside world from television, but Raziel thought I meant that I needed more practice pushing the channel buttons.
“Knowing how to use the television isn’t enough. You have to know how everything in this world works.” And with that the angel turned and stared through the window of the pizza place at the men tossing disks of dough into the air.
“Why, Raziel? Why do I need to know about how this world works? If anything, you’ve tried to keep me from learning anything.”
“Not anymore. Let’s go eat pizza.”
“Raziel?”
He wouldn’t explain any further, but for the rest of the day we wandered the city, spending money, talking to people, learning. In the late afternoon Raziel inquired of a bus driver as to where we might go to meet Spider-Man. I could have gone another two thousand years without seeing the kind of disappointment I saw on Raziel’s face when the bus driver gave his answer. We returned here to the room where Raziel said, “I miss destroying cities full of humans.”
“I know what you mean,” I said, even though it was my best friend who had caused that sort of thing to go out of fashion, and not a moment too soon. But the angel needed to hear it. There’s a difference between bearing false witness and saving someone’s feelings. Even Joshua knew that.
“Joshua, you’re scaring me,” I said, talking to the disembodied voice that floated before me in the temple. “Where are you?”
“I am everywhere and nowhere,” Joshua’s voice said.
“How come your voice is in front of me then?” I didn’t like this at all. Yes, my years with Joshua had jaded me in regard to supernatural experi
ences, but my meditation hadn’t yet brought me to the place where I wouldn’t react to my friend being invisible.
“I suppose it is the nature of a voice that it must come from somewhere, but only so that it may be let go.”
Gaspar had been sitting in the temple and at the sound of our voices he rose and came over to me. He didn’t appear to be angry, but then, he never did. “Why?” Gaspar said to me, meaning,
Why are you talking and disturbing everyone’s meditation with your infernal noise, you barbarian?
“Joshua has attained enlightenment,” I said.
Gaspar said nothing, meaning,
So? That’s the idea, you unworthy spawn of a razor-burned yak.
I could tell that’s what he meant by the tone in his voice.
“So he’s invisible.”
“Mu,”
Joshua’s voice said.
Mu
meaning
nothing beyond nothingness
in Chinese.
In an act of distinctly uncontrolled spontaneity, Gaspar screamed like a little girl and jumped four feet straight in the air. Monks stopped chanting and looked up. “What was that?”
“That’s Joshua.”
“I am free of self, free of ego,” Joshua said. There was a little squeak and then a nasty stench infused us.
I looked at Gaspar and he shook his head. He looked at me and I shrugged.
“Was that you?” Gaspar asked Joshua.
“Me in the sense that I am part of all things, or me in the sense of I am the one who poofed the gefilte gas?” asked Josh.
“The latter,” said Gaspar.
“No,” said Josh.
“You lie,” I said, as amazed at that as I was at the fact that I couldn’t see my friend.
“I should stop talking now. Having a voice separates me from all that is.” With that he was quiet, and Gaspar looked as if he were about to panic.
“Don’t go away, Joshua,” the abbot said. “Stay as you are if you must, but come to the tea chamber at dawn tomorrow.” Gaspar looked to me. “You come too.”
“I have to train on the poles in the morning,” I said.
“You are excused,” Gaspar said. “And if Joshua talks to you anymore tonight, try to persuade him to share our existence.” Then he hurried off in a very unenlightened way.
That night I was falling asleep when I heard a squeak in the hall outside of my cell, then an incredibly foul odor jolted me awake.
“Joshua?” I crawled out of my cell into the hall. There were narrow slots high in the walls through which moonlight could sift, but I saw nothing but faint blue light on the stone. “Joshua, is that you?”
“How could you tell?” Joshua’s disembodied voice said.
“Well, honestly, you stink, Josh.”
“The last time we went to the village for alms, a woman gave Number Fourteen and me a thousand-year-old egg. It didn’t sit well.”
“Can’t imagine why. I don’t think you’re supposed to eat an egg after, oh, two hundred years or so.”
“They bury them, leave them there, then dig them up.”
“Is that why I can’t see you?”
“No, that’s because of my meditation. I’ve let go of everything. I’ve achieved perfect freedom.”
“You’ve been free ever since we left Galilee.”
“It’s not the same. That’s what I came to tell you, that I can’t free our people from the rule of Romans.”
“Why not?”
“Because that’s not true freedom. Any freedom that can be given can be taken away. Moses didn’t need to ask Pharaoh to release our people, our people didn’t need to be released from the Babylonians, and they don’t need to be released from the Romans. I can’t give them freedom. Freedom is in their hearts, they merely have to find it.”
“So you’re saying you’re not the Messiah?”
“How can I be? How can a humble being presume to grant something that is not his to give?”
“If not you, who, Josh? Angels and miracles, your ability to heal and comfort? Who else is chosen if not you?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I wanted to say good-bye. I’ll be with you, as part of all things, but you won’t perceive me until you
become enlightened. You can’t imagine how this feels, Biff. You are everything, you love everything, you need nothing.”
“Okay. You won’t be needing your shoes then, right?”
“Possessions stand between you and freedom.”
“Sounded like a yes to me. Do me one favor though, okay?”
“Of course.”
“Listen to what Gaspar has to say to you tomorrow.”
And give me time to think up an intelligent answer to someone who’s invisible and crazy,
I thought to myself. Joshua was innocent, but he wasn’t stupid. I had to come up with something to save the Messiah so he could save the rest of us.
“I’m going to the temple to sit. I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Not if I see you first.”
“Funny,” said Josh.
Gaspar looked especially old that morning when I met him in the tea room. His personal quarters consisted of a cell no bigger than my own, but it was located just off the tea room and had a door which he could close. It was cold in the morning in the monastery and I could see our breath as Gaspar boiled the water for tea. Soon I saw a third puff of breath coming from my side of the table, although there was no person there.
“Good morning, Joshua,” Gaspar said. “Did you sleep, or are you free from that need?”
“No, I don’t need sleep anymore,” said Josh.
“You’ll excuse Twenty-one and I, as we still require nourishment.”
Gaspar poured us some tea and fetched two rice balls from a shelf where he kept the tea. He held one out for me and I took it.
“I don’t have my bowl with me,” I said, worried that Gaspar would be angry with me. How was I to know? The monks always ate breakfast together. This was out of order.
“Your hands are clean,” said Gaspar. Then he sipped his tea and sat peacefully for a while, not saying a word. Soon the room heated up from the charcoal brazier that Gaspar had used to heat the tea and I was no longer able to see Joshua’s breath. Evidently he’d also overcome the gastric distress of the thousand-year-old egg. I began to get nervous,
aware that Number Three would be waiting for Joshua and me in the courtyard to start our exercises. I was about to say something when Gaspar held up a finger to mark silence.
“Joshua,” Gaspar said, “do you know what a bodhisattva is?”
“No, master, I don’t.”
“Gautama Buddha was a bodhisattva. The twenty-seven patriarchs since Gautama Buddha were also bodhisattvas. Some say that I, myself, am a bodhisattva, but the claim is not mine.”
“There are no Buddhas,” said Joshua.
“Indeed,” said Gaspar, “but when one reaches the place of Buddhahood and realizes that there is no Buddha because everything is Buddha, when one reaches enlightenment, but makes a decision that he will not evolve to nirvana until all sentient beings have preceded him there, then he is a bodhisattva. A savior. A bodhisattva, by making this decision, grasps the only thing that can ever be grasped: compassion for the suffering of his fellow humans. Do you understand?”
“I think so,” said Joshua. “But the decision to become a bodhisattva sounds like an act of ego, a denial of enlightenment.”
“Indeed it is, Joshua. It is an act of self-love.”
“Are you asking me to become a bodhisattva?”
“If I were to say to you, love your neighbor as you love yourself, would I be telling you to be selfish?”
There was silence for a moment, and as I looked at the place where Joshua’s voice was originating, he gradually started to become visible again. “No,” said Joshua.
“Why?” asked Gaspar.
“Love thy neighbor as thou lovest thyself”—and here there was a long pause when I could imagine Joshua looking to the sky for an answer, as he so often did, then: “for he is thee, and thou art he, and everything that is ever worth loving is everything.” Joshua solidified before our eyes, fully dressed, looking no worse for the wear.
Gaspar smiled and those extra years that he had been carrying on his face seemed to fade away. There was a peace in his aspect and for a moment he could have been as young as we were. “That is correct, Joshua. You are truly an enlightened being.”
“I will be a bodhisattva to my people,” Joshua said.
“Good, now go shave the yak,” said Gaspar.
I dropped my rice ball. “What?”
“And you, find Number Three and commence your training on the posts.”
“Let me shave the yak,” I said. “I’ve done it before.”
Joshua put his hand on my shoulder. “I’ll be fine.”
Gaspar said: “And on the next moon, after alms, you shall both go with the group into the mountains for a special meditation. Your training begins tonight. You shall receive no meals for two days and you must bring me your blankets before sundown.
“But I’ve already been enlightened,” protested Josh.
“Good. Shave the yak,” said the master.
I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised when Joshua showed up the next day at the communal dining room with a bale of yak hair and not a scratch on him. The other monks didn’t seem surprised in the least. In fact, they hardly looked up from their rice and tea. (In my years at Gaspar’s monastery, I found it was astoundingly difficult to surprise a Buddhist monk, especially one who had been trained in kung fu. So alert were they to the moment that one had to become nearly invisible and completely silent to sneak up on a monk, and even then simply jumping out and shouting “boo” wasn’t enough to shake their chakras. To get a real reaction, you pretty much had to poleax one of them with a fighting staff, and if he heard the staff whistling through the air, there was a good chance he’d catch it, take it away from you, and pound you into damp pulp with it. So, no, they weren’t surprised when Joshua delivered the fuzz harvest unscathed.)