“Get up, you idiot. You have a life, a wife, a child.”
“You already know about family. It’s not an answer, it’s a trap. Of course I love them, I love them more than life, and that’s the problem: they drag me more and more into flesh until I feel so heavy sometimes I can hardly get out of bed. The responsibility is hard to stand, and worst of all is the worry that something might happen to them. And they always want more. And more and more. It’s all exactly as the Buddha said: Took, Anija, Anata.”
“Say again?”
“Took, Anija, Anata,” I repeated with a touch of exasperation: these were pretty basic Buddhist concepts, after alclass="underline" suffering, impermanence, lack of substance.
“That’s the way you pronounce those words in Thailand?”
“How do you pronounce them?”
He replied with the same three words, which I could just about recognize from the Pali root. “Anyway, the answer is no.”
Still on my knees I put my palms together in a wai. “I am asking.”
He stared angrily at me. Then as he stared his features softened. He was looking into my eyes when a great sadness seemed to come upon him. “Get up.”
“Is it because I’m not Tibetan? Or because I’m made of inferior stuff, the magic wouldn’t take with me?”
“No, none of the above. There is no magic. Only science of the mind. I told you, I spent seven years, from the age of eight to the age of fifteen, in a monastery, subject to disciplines that would stagger grown men. Even then, the initiation I was given was too powerful for me. Look what happened.” He waved the stump.
“There’s something you’ve just seen? Your features just altered. Am I really that lost? Will something bad happen to me? I don’t care. I want to reach the Far Shore. That’s what you said.”
“Serves me right for being so damned sanctimonious. It’s a virus you pick up in monasteries the way you pick up staphylococcus in hospitals.” He paused, then said in a patient voice, “You’re supposed to take a slow ferryboat to the Far Shore, not an unstable kayak you’ve never learned to paddle.”
The moment hung for a while in an electric atmosphere. We both knew why. There was a rule here. When a sincere aspirant asks three times, the master cannot refuse. I made another wai. “I am asking for the third time.”
He blew out his cheeks, shook his head, but said, “Okay, get up. You win. But I need a drink first.” He limped to the door and yelled something in Tibetan. We waited in silence until the woman who ran the tea shop appeared, wearing a long donkey-brown dress with striped apron, her hair in thick braids; she brought chang, a barley-based alcohol.
We drank in silence for a long while. The chang didn’t seem very strong and had a sweet and sour taste with some fizz, as if it were still in the fermenting stage. When Tietsin finally started talking it was in the voice of a very ordinary, humble man.
“They tortured me for seven days. I was fifteen years and ten months old. My comrades in arms were tortured to death before my eyes, and I didn’t know why I was surviving. Nor did my Chinese tormentors. They couldn’t believe it. Neither could I. We had all fantasized about it, of course: how we would react under torture. My comrades had ordered me, Don’t hold out, you’re still a kid, no one expects you to resist. You don’t know anything important about the resistance, you can’t compromise any of our operations, just tell them everything you know. Promise? A couple of beats passed. “So I did promise, eagerly. I didn’t think I’d last an hour under that kind of agony. Then, when they caught us and took us back to Chamdo at gunpoint, I felt such fear in the back of that van I couldn’t move. I was frozen. My comrades had to carry me to the prison, I was so out of control, pissing and shitting in my pants, vomiting. But the next day, when the torture started in earnest, something happened. It’s as much a mystery to me as it was to the Chinese and everyone else. The pain they inflicted seemed to be happening to another body. I hung above it all, watching myself twitch when they touched me with their cattle prods. I literally put all my consciousness in a sixty-watt lightbulb, if you can believe that. I can’t. But it’s what happened. When we got to day seven and I still wasn’t dead, I finally understood why my master had given me such a powerful initiation. He had seen that I was going to need it.” Another pause. “And that, my friend, is the only permissible reason for passing it on. I’m not sharing it with you because you followed some arcane formula by asking three times. I’m passing it on because in asking three times you’ve told me that you are going to need it as much as I did. And may all the Buddhas have compassion on you.”
He turned his eyes away from me, as if he could not stand to look at my future suffering. Of course, that is an observation of hindsight; in the heat of the moment I felt only excitement.
“Go back to your guesthouse. Tomorrow morning someone will come to start the preparation. It takes seven days-you know how weird the gods are about the number seven. I don’t know if it’s really necessary, but we may as well follow the system while we can.”
From the cab on the way back to the guesthouse, I called Vikorn to say I was sick with giardia and wouldn’t be back until after the weekend.
I can’t tell you about the initiation, farang, it’s against the rules and they made me swear not to. I can give you something of the preparation, though. The nun who came to my suite at the Kathmandu Guest House, thereby shocking the whole establishment, was the same woman who had begged from me at the stupa on the first day. She looked just as decrepit as she had at the stupa; her face was terribly lined and shaggy and a number of teeth were missing from her mouth, but her mind was as sharp as a razor and she spoke perfect English, with a UN accent. The conversation went like this:
Nun: Do you ever wake up scared in the early hours of the morning?
Me: Almost every night.
Nun: And does this fear seem to originate somewhere in the area of the navel?
Me: Above the navel, somewhere between the navel and the solar plexus.
Nun: And what do you do about it?
Me: My mind finds specific things to worry about, and the fear gets absorbed.
Nun: These things you worry about, are they to do with recent acts, statements, events you have set in motion?
Me: Always.
Nun: Good. We want you to develop that. Soon you’re going to be worrying about things that happened a long time ago. Then you’re going to be worrying about the unbelievable atrocities you committed in previous lifetimes. You’re not going to understand immediately, but this vulnerable area around your navel is the only thing about you that is fully human. The rest is animal and devil. We’re going to increase the fear to make you more human. It is going to turn into a karma blade wheel which will tear your ego apart. We don’t expect you to survive psychically without outside help. You might be on medication for years afterward. Don’t blame us. You have insisted and the master cannot refuse you.
Me: It almost sounds like you’re going to divide me in half and set the two sides at war against each other. It sounds like schizophrenia.
Nun: Exactly. When we’ve finished with you, you’re going to live in mortal terror of entertaining a single ego-based thought, because one ego-based thought will be enough to land you in a mental institution for the rest of your life. That’s why this path is only for the terminally desperate-spirit-starved fanatics, the suicide bombers of the internal world. D’you want to change your mind before the master tells you the mantra?
Me: No.
10
On the plane back to Bangkok, with Tietsin’s mantra clattering around my skull like a broken bell, I asked myself the question, Why am I a crook? Because my wife whom I loved convinced me that my son whom I loved even more needed an expensive education to keep him from ending up as a bent cop like his dad; but my noble sacrifice of integrity only made me feel like I was drowning in a sewer. I blame the version of capitalism which is destroying the world: you have to be a shit to survive, but your spouse and kids will hate you for turning yourself into a shit and failing to protect them from-yourself. Being born rich may be the only solution, except they always find a way of getting you on taxes. But why Tibetan Buddhism, and most of all, why Tietsin? I didn’t really have an answer except for the rather lame one that good old Theravada was fine for rice farmers, but it didn’t seem strong enough medicine for stressed-out cops. Now I couldn’t complain about the strength of the medicine.