Dinner with Buddha Read Free Page A

left this life a long time ago. I can’t go back.”
    â€œAnd Aunt Seese drives you nuts, right?”
    â€œI love Aunt Seese. I admire her. I’m happy to see her so happy.”
    â€œBut . . .”
    â€œBut she can drive me crazy, still, yes.”
    â€œHave you ever really looked into that, Dad?”
    â€œAs a matter of fact, I have. Many times.”
    â€œAnd?”
    â€œI think it’s because she refuses to see the world as it actually is. She believes that if she eats carefully and prays a lot and is devoted to Rinpoche and Shelsa—all good things, by the way—then she’ll escape pain and death, she’ll somehow come to inhabit another earth where people don’t cheat and murder. We were just talking about it, as a matter of fact. She dreams of a different world, which is all fine and good, except that, as far as any rational person knows, that world doesn’t exist. She’s been that way since she was a girl. She hasn’t changed.”
    â€œShe thinks,” my daughter said, in a measured, thoughtful tone that was new to her, “that if she clears her mind down to the deepest level then three things will happen: she’ll never be afraid; it will be easier to love people; and it will be easier to die.”
    This, coming from a girl who’d recently watched her own mother die, stopped me in my tracks. Not literally—we kept walking; we were going past the solitary retreat cabins now, tidy and small, with unpainted wood siding and metal roofs. In my better days—only a few years earlier—I’d made a three-day retreat in one of them. I marked that as the end of my optimism, the high point of my spiritual attainment. Since then I’d been gliding down, slowly, almost without noticing. Down and down. My dog had died. I’d grown a belly. Even with the meditation practice, on certain days, in certain difficult hours, my mind was a circus of despair.
    â€œYou say that,” I told Natasha, then I paused, “you say that in a way that’s different from Aunt Seese. She sounds like she hopes it’s true, you sound like you know it’s true. Is that just what Rinpoche tells you, or—”
    â€œRinpoche is enlightened, you know that, Dad, right?”
    â€œI believe I do, yes. I’m not sure what it means, but I believe it.”
    â€œIt means that he doesn’t identify with his body and his personality, his
I.
His mind has exploded out into something much bigger. In Christian terms it’s like Jesus saying, ‘Not I, but the Father who lives in me.’ ”
    â€œI can feel something like that from him. I’ve always felt it. I just don’t see it happening to me. Your aunt calls me his ‘disciple.’ I think that’s absurd. I’m his brother-in-law, his friend, his admirer. Period.”
    â€œEnlightenment happens in stages, Dad. You have your ups and downs and then, if you keep trying, it comes over you when you least expect it.”
    â€œEven if you don’t pursue what you call ‘the spiritual life’?”
    â€œEventually. Sure. Just living makes it happen. The act of being alive is, in and of itself, spiritual evolution, unless a person purposely resists it. All the pain and pleasure, it’s all a lesson. But a spiritual practice is like . . .” she twisted her lips to one side the way I’d seen her do five thousand times. “It’s like the difference between a kid who goes to school and learns and a kid who goes to school and learns and comes home to parents who are reading to her and talking to her about the world, showing her things, teaching by their actions. Like what you and Mom did for us.”
    I couldn’t speak.
    â€œIt’s the difference between somebody who wants to be a good tennis player and goes out and plays once a week and somebody else who wants to be a good tennis player and takes lessons, practices, reads up