Enlightenment for Idiots by Anne Cushman

Author:Anne Cushman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-40744-3
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2008-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

[WHOLE SHEET TORN OUT, CRUMPLED UP, THEN SMOOTHED OUT AND STUCK BACK IN NOTEBOOK WITH DAB OF CHEWING GUM.]

* * *

I CLOSED MY notebook with a snap. Two Tibetan boys in maroon robes ran by, holding plastic airplanes and making motor noises with their mouths. “Look at those kids. They can’t be more than eight years old. How can they be monks already?”

“For Tibetan families, it’s common to send one child to the monastery to pray for the whole family.” Devi Das sat down on the bench next to me. “Sometimes a child is even recognized at birth as an incarnation of a high lama.”

“Wow. I wonder how they can tell?” I pictured a posse of lamas arriving at my door in San Francisco: Amanda, we have good news! Your child is the next Dalai Lama! I could pack him off to a monastery and get back to hooking up with guys in yoga class. I wouldn’t have to worry about getting him into preschool. He’d visit me on vacations and I’d take him to the park. He’d be the only kid on the monkey bars in robes. I looked at the young monks again. Did they ever cry for their mothers at night? Did their mothers ever cry for them?

We walked toward the temple, pausing outside its massive walls. I looked up at a frieze of Buddhas and saints, garlanded with marigolds, butter lamps flickering on a ledge below them. Their serene faces gazed back at me. I could practically see them shaking their heads in despair. The temple, I’d read, had been abandoned for centuries when Buddhism died out in India—swallowed in forest, buried in silt. When British archaelogists had stumbled on it in the nineteenth century, local farmers were using it as a place to keep pigs.

We walked around the end of the temple and there—suddenly, unmistakably—was the Bodhi Tree. I had been wanting to come here ever since Matt showed me one of its leaves, the night we first slept together. Its massive, papery white trunk was surrounded by a stone fence with a locked iron gate. Over the fence spread a canopy of delicate, heart-shaped green leaves. Seated in the courtyard below, several dozen Tibetan monks chanted in a sonorous rumble, punctuated by the clang of cymbals and the steady beat of a drum. A pack of Sri Lankan women recited devotional texts in a high, nasal singsong.

“So this is it. This is where it happened.” Devi Das put his palms together and bowed. “Right under this very tree, the Buddha liberated himself from all desires.”

“It can’t be this very same tree.”

“Well, no. But pipal trees do live for hundreds of years. New ones spring up in the same place from their roots.”

We peered through the stone fence at the tree trunk, swathed in yards of bright orange silk, its branches strung with white plastic flowers. Next to us, a Thai monk was pressing pieces of gold leaf on the stone fence as a Japanese monk took his picture with a digital camera.

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