Shopping for Buddhas Read online

1

  Lord Buddha said,

  “This is true suffering; this is true cause; this is true cessation; this is the true path.

  “Know the sufferings; give up their causes; attain the cessation of suffering; follow the true path.

  “Know the sufferings although there is nothing to know; relinquish the causes of misery although there is nothing to relinquish; be earnest in cessation although there is nothing to cease; practice the means of following the true path although there is nothing to practice.”

  —BUKKYO DENDO KYOKAI, The Teaching of Buddha

  On the morning of Monday, 19 October, 1987, I woke up at a place called Gosainkund—a pocket of sacred lakes, dedicated to Lord Shiva, some 4,380 meters high in the Nepal Himalaya.

  I’d made the trek up to this holy site with Karen, my stateside lover, who had flown from California to visit me in Nepal for a few weeks. We spent the first spectacular evening performing a kora—a devotional, clockwise circuit around the lake—pausing every few minutes to stare west, over the panorama of cloud-shrouded mountains that emerged into the sky. “It looks like Heaven,” Karen said. I could see what she meant; how the bolts of sunlight pierced through the clouds and spread like an oriental fan across the spine of the Himalayas, illuminating the vapors trapped below.

  Our accommodation in the one-room Gosainkund Lodge was basic: straw mats on a stone floor. We inflated our air mattresses, ate some Chinese noodles, and climbed into our bags to sleep.

  Sometime during the night, the wind picked up. It began as a low drone, rising and falling with an ominous cadence—like the voices of monks in a tantric choir. We felt icy particles alight and melt on our cheeks and noses, exposed from the maws of our mummy bags. Once during the night I woke up, bladder twitching, and felt around. It was weird—everything seemed wet and cold. I flopped back down, damned if I was going to go outside to piss.

  I remember the fatal moment when I opened my eyes and saw that the lodge was full of snow. It had blown right in under the roof and covered us, our gear, our bags, everything. Karen went outside and shrieked—the place was buried waist deep in snow, and it was still falling, blowing in furiously, gusting through the shutters and under the roof, an icy, biting, relentless blizzard.

  What to do? Wait at Gosainkund, this tiny way station at over four thousand meters, and risk being marooned forever? Or attempt the descent, along cliff-hanging mountain trails, in a blinding snowstorm?

  Our porter tried leaving, dressed in sneakers and Karen’s socks, with a woolen blanket wrapped around his shoulders, and returned after five minutes. Saakdaina—“Impossible.” The path was utterly invisible, totally snowbound. An hour or two later another Nepali came staggering in. He brought horrible news. There was a dead woman on the trail, he said. Frozen. She’d been on her way to Gosainkund last night, when the storm hit. . . .

  But Gosainkund was no place to hang around. Here it was, 6:30 a.m., and we already felt as if we’d been stuck in that cramped, frigid little stone hut forever. The storm might let up in ten minutes; it might rage for a week. In the latter case, we could just as easily die of sheer boredom. . . .

  Clearly, there was no alternative. So, joining forces with a similarly marooned Swiss couple—two beefy, strapping Aryans—their porter, and ours, we bundled ourselves up in every last bit of clothing we had brought and set off down the mountain.

  The first hundred steps were sheer panic. Snow up to our crotches; stumbling, falling, trying to follow the deep blue footprints left by the Swiss couple plowing on up ahead. The path had been so magnificent yesterday morning—now it was Death’s cakewalk. Karen was nearly hysterical at first, blindly blundering along, an L.A. girl consummately out of her element. As were we all.

  But the worst was yet to come. Rounding the edge of the lake, we found ourselves on a high, unprotected ridge. The wind howled furiously, blinding us with ice needles, trying with all its might to blow us off the mountain, over the sheer drop that lay some two meters to our left. Left hand frozen, eyes frozen, frozen snot cracking off my face, I clung desperately to the back of Karen’s pack as the wind shoved her pitilessly toward the edge of the universe.

  In the distance, beyond a white haze, I could see the hardy Swiss couple vanishing from sight. They plowed determinedly onward—followed by our pathetically attired porter, whose meager blanket whipped uselessly across his thin shoulders.

  Above our heads, dead birds, wings broken and shredded, flew through the air like shrapnel. I gripped Karen’s hand with numb fingers as we cut down from the ridge and turned directly into the blinding snow, tripping and falling with every other step. At one point I just lay there, spread-eagled, like a drowning man—ready to give it all up. To just surrender, stop fighting this terrible deluge.

  But no—we hauled ourselves up, convinced that we could reach the first teahouse, another half-hour away at most; we could see it, a safe haven of boiled water and shelter, far, far below.

  We stumbled onward, praying and rolling down the mountainside, and arrived just in time to see the roof blowing off, and the little family that lived there fleeing for their lives, with all their belongings—including three children—strapped to their backs.

  There was no more path, no more objective reality at all. I watched, stunned, as the Sherpa family leaped into the river—a raging, muddy torrent—and ran with it. They knew, in their infinite mountain wisdom, that it was flowing down, down—and down was where we wanted to go. We followed them, running blindly, slipping over frozen stones in animal panic.

  An eternity later, we arrived in the village of Sing Gompa. We had dropped thousands of meters; it was pouring with rain. There were two rooms left at the lodge. We fell in out of the storm, into the dining hall, and immediately met the dazed, disbelieving stares of thirty Israeli trekkers, who were drinking rakshi and singing Hebrew folk songs. The Swiss couple vanished immediately. Karen and I drank tea and ate chocolate, finally building up the strength to crawl down the hill to our room.

  Not a single thing in our packs had remained dry: socks, cameras, Band-Aids, batteries—everything was drenched through and through. We hung our soaking wet clothes over every surface and collapsed, utterly spent, onto our cots.

  Lucky, so very lucky to be alive.

  “Goddamit!” I hollered.

  “What’s wrong?!” Karen looked at me in a panic.

  “Look at the foam pads they put on these cots! Jesus—they’re thin as shit! We had such nice, thick ones in that upstairs room, two days ago. What a rip-off! How do they expect us to sleep on these?!”

  As soon as we got back to Kathmandu, we heard about the stock-market crash. It had occurred on Black Monday, the very same day that we had almost lost our lives in the storm—one of the worst storms to hit Nepal in recorded history.

  At that moment I was enlightened, and realized: “Life and wealth are transitory. The only way to protect yourself against these implacable truths is to invest in Buddhas. That way, even if the stock market tanks, you have something real; something that will continue to appreciate in value. And even if that fails—if the market for Asian art dries up completely, if there’s an apocalypse or something—well, then, you still have the Buddha, and you can learn non-attachment from it.”

  I’ve always had a hard time buying things. Anything. I grew up in a family where I was taught that anything bought simply for pleasure, for the sheer enjoyment of life, was a waste of money. Not a sin exactly—Jews don’t really believe in sins—but an unforgivable self-indulgence, worthy of crippling guilt. There was always some distant, abstract “future” when I might need that money—as if the $1.50 I spent on a James Bond souvenir program would cripple my retirement fund.

  The situation in my family was so bad, for so long, that only recently did my mother finally break down, go out to the store, and buy herself the one thing she has desperately desired since she was a little girl—and the one thing she didn’t even pretend she could afford while my father was alive. This item
wasn’t a Buddha; almost the opposite. It was a mink coat.

  Shopping itself, as we all know, can be a very liberating experience. It is a measure of our self-esteem that we allow ourselves to shop; a measure of even greater self-esteem if we shop for something expensive. In Western civilization, of course, this is taken even a step further, and the truly respected people are the ones who can spend money hand over fist on the utterly useless, or the wildly extravagant. My father was fond of saying that ours is the only society where people actually go out and spend three or four dollars a week for plastic bags to throw out their garbage in.

  The point is that, aside from the value of a stable financial investment and the various spiritual benefits that might accrue from owning my very own Buddha, there was the liberating idea of shopping to get excited about. It was just what I needed to give this particular trip to Nepal a focus of sorts.

  And at the end of it all—at the climactic moment, if I ever did find the Buddha of My Dreams—I would perform the ritual of “Letting Go” of a fairly large amount of money.

  How much money? Good question. A hundred bucks might not buy me much, even in impoverished Nepal. No, this had to be brazen, wanton, cathartic. I would go all out, push my finances to the limit, and spend as much as $300 for a flawless little statue of the Buddha.

  2

  Every time I get off the plane in Kathmandu—right after climbing down the rollaway stairs and stepping onto the runway at Tribhuvan International Airport—I let out a whoop of jubilation. Something in the air is so immediately exotic, so full of the promise of liberation from the veneer of bullshit slopped onto my soul by Life in the Western World, that the moment of contact releases a shock of energy. I see it now as a kind of grounding: like touching a brass doorknob after shuffling around on a rug.

  The very first time I went to Nepal, in the summer of 1979, I didn’t actually whoop. The circumstances surrounding my arrival there were uniquely screwy. I had just spent three months in Greece, shoveling cement dust on a huge construction site on Crete in order to save up enough money to travel to Nepal and rendezvous with a beautiful American doctor I’d fallen in love with on one of the Aegean Isles. But you know how those things go. Two days before leaving Athens, I stopped in at the American Express office and picked up a letter stating that I would travel to Nepal at my own peril. Dorothy had fallen in love with another man.

  Argh! I was crushed, but decided to go anyway. What the heck! Some kind of momentum was pulling me there, toward the foothills of the Himalayas; any decision to resist would have been futile—or even dangerous. Plus, my ticket was already paid for. Non-refundable. It was off to Asia or slink back home in disgrace.

  I flew to Bombay, took a train to Patna, bought a ticket for the hour-long hop over the border, and landed in Kathmandu—a total unknown to me—on the morning of 7 June 1979. At lunchtime—with no clues or preconceptions, nothing to go on but the smell of the air on that damp monsoon runway and a jarring, fifteen-minute taxi ride to the Kathmandu Guest House—I pulled out my journal and penned my first entry in the Kingdom of Nepal:

  This may be paradise, but it’s too soon to tell. Soft raindrops fall from a sky free of humidity. In a corner of this gentle, flowered yard, a man with oak skin and a tattered rag of a shirt sets a pump into motion. Hungry, exhausted, deliciously alone. Welcome home. . . .

  As things turned out, Dorothy and I were reunited and actually did fulfill our original fantasy of living together in Kathmandu for a while. Remembering those days, a line from John Updike comes to mind: “Reality is the running impoverishment of possibility.” Somehow, her betrayal shattered the magic of the storybook infatuation that Dorothy and I had manufactured on the pheromone-buttered beaches of Greece. The romance sputtered and died. But sometimes these strange meetings and hellfire affairs are actually, we later discover, just catalysts for greater encounters. Dorothy introduced me not only to Nepal, but also to a rather singular character named Lalji, who I’ll be mentioning later.

  During that first trip to Nepal—which lasted five months—I shopped naively, buying a bunch of silly souvenirs and third-rate statues that have moldered in various attics around the San Francisco Bay area for the past decade, waiting for a cataclysmic earthquake to put them out of their misery. But there was more. I managed to write the first two hundred pages of a novel, based on my experiences working at that hellish construction site on Crete. At that point Kathmandu had but a single photocopying machine. The cost was so high (about 75 cents a page) that I was forced to make a choice. I could afford either to stay another month in Nepal, or make a backup copy of my manuscript to mail home, in case something happened to the one I was carrying. In a fit of professional common sense, I chose the second option, and began to make my way back to the shiny shoes of Western civilization.

  Realizing that I could write in Nepal (something I didn’t seem to be able to do anywhere else), I wasted no time in engineering a way to get back there. My second trip to the kingdom began in the summer of 1983, when I received a generous twelve-month grant from the Rotary Foundation International to write what I had promised would be the “great Nepali-American novel.” Instead I wrote lots and lots of letters, which ended up being compiled into a very different kind of book that I called Mister Raja’s Neighborhood. The novel was relegated to the back burner—where it has been bubbling and brewing in my brain, taunting and haunting me, ever since.

  Toward the end of 1984, my grant money ran out (having been stretched, you can be sure, to the utter limit). I moved back to San Francisco and joined my friends in the desperate dog paddle for economic survival that characterized the Reagan era. Ferreting with the industry of a truffle-hunting boar, I managed to drum up a more-or-less steady stream of interesting freelance writing jobs, exotic photography assignments and irritating-but-well-paying P.R. stints. There was always an excuse to put off that novel, but what to say? You gotta make a living.

  When I bought my ticket to go back to Nepal for the third time—in the summer of 1987—I had a particular agenda in mind.

  To begin with, I had landed an assignment for Mother Jones magazine to write an investigative story about antiquities smuggling. This is a serious problem in Nepal; over the past few decades, somewhere between thirty to fifty percent of the kingdom’s ancient art treasures had been stolen from their shrines and sold to dealers, collectors and museums around the world.

  The second part of my plan—which would actually come first, chronologically speaking—was to visit Tibet with my good friends Rick and Nancy. The three of us had met in Kathmandu in 1983; I was on my fellowship, and they were teaching English to high-school-aged Nepalis at the American Cultural Center. They lived in a Western-style, multilevel brick house in the Chhetrapati district of the city—a location that soon became famous for cutthroat weekend poker games (if you can call rupee-ante poker “cutthroat”) followed by wanton dancing-til-dawn to the tune of vintage Grateful Dead tapes.

  I moved in with them in early 1984. We shared one of those perfect cohabitations that occurs maybe once every two or three lifetimes. I remember it as a constant stream of intelligent fun, punctuated by crippling stints of eye, nose and throat infections, worms, amoebas and boils. We took care of each other. We fell in love. Rick and Nancy moved back to Chicago and found a flat together; I returned to California alone. But the connection never slackened, and we ultimately decided to return to Asia and trek, with me as a third wheel, through the mountains of Tibet.

  Another motive for this return trip—not too loudly, please—was to try and make some headway on that novel I’d planned to write in 1983 and 1984. Maybe work on the outline, sketch out a chapter or two, develop a couple of characters. No commitments, no pressure, nothing to get neurotic about; oh no no no, just a little heat to keep that original inspiration, now over three years old, on a low simmer.

  All the above is, of course, a gross simplification. There are deeper reasons to travel—itches and tickles on the underbelly of the
unconscious mind. We go where we need to go, and then try to figure out what we’re doing there. It took a surprisingly long time for me to realize that all these trips to Nepal and environs were united by a single, fundamental theme: the need to steep my cerebral cortex in the culture and religion of the region, in the hope that as much of it would soak into me as possible.

  It was like heaving my brain into a fathomless lake—an unpredictable pool that sometimes seemed as clear and clairvoyant as a crystal ball, but at other times rippled black and opaque, like octopus ink—and hoping it could swim.

  The depth of the place! They call it the World’s Only Hindu Kingdom, but that goes nowhere toward explaining the fantastic shades of animism, Hinduism and Buddhism that have marbled, over the millennia, in the umbra of Earth’s most mind-boggling mountain range. No one knows exactly how many gods and goddesses, how many saints, sages and bodhisattvas are worshiped in Nepal. Nobody has lived long enough to make an accurate count of the benign and demonic deities who reside in the roaring peaks and glacial rivers, in the stones and trees, snakes and bumblebees. Mary Anderson, author of the indispensable Festivals of Nepal, writes that an old Hindu text puts the figure at an even three hundred million—enough to assign every little girl in the kingdom (and every little boy, and all their friends and family) eighteen guardian deities all her own.

  Hinduism (but let’s call it Brahmanism, as savvy scholars prefer, since the word Hindu was a Western invention) was likely the wellspring of this fantastic pantheon. The source gods are Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva: the Hindu trinity. It is from these three central figures that nearly all the countless others have taken form.

  Despite the fact of these three main gods, and the added fact that each one of them has divided and subdivided into a cast of thousands of others, male and female, animal and monster, and despite the fact that each one of these gods and goddesses, no matter how obscure, holds some kind of final sway and is celebrated in a unique and individual way, devout Brahmans will clear their throats and remind you, Sir, that they are, bottom line, strictly monotheistic. All these other gods are themselves nothing but manifestations of the One. We speak now of Brahmana, the formless, all-powerful prime mover at the dead center of all creation.