Snake Lake by Jeff Greenwald

Author:Jeff Greenwald
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Counterpoint Press
Published: 2010-10-28T04:00:00+00:00

19

Heaven and Hell

I’D COME TO the Saturday teaching early, as the Rinpoche had advised. There were no other shoes at all. I placed my sneakers in a corner, covered them with my daypack, and entered Chokyi Nyima’s assembly room. I felt sheepish; only three days had passed since the Lhosar celebration and my inexplicable anxiety attack.

Appropriately or not, my display of fragility embarrassed me. Up until Lhosar Chokyi Nyima had viewed me, I imagined, as a self-assured professional, walking the razor’s edge of prerevolution politics, taking my dharma on the fly. But I’d blown my facade, betraying a shaky inner core and revealing myself as a potential candidate for the dreaded diagnosis that Dr. Dan was occasionally forced to stamp onto the medical forms of certain trembling, bug-eyed tourists just before they were airlifted back home: PUTTIA. Psychologically Unfit To Travel In Asia.

Chokyi Nyima was sitting alone at his dais, perusing a sutra and sipping tea. When he saw me he wagged his head backward. I walked up to him, knelt down, and presented a kata scarf. He held it between his hands, intoned a prayer, and slipped it around my shoulders.

“So. Better?”

“Much better. Thank you, Rinpoche. I don’t understand what happened to me the other day. I saw a dead person lying on the kora, just a body. And I lost it. I can’t explain why.”

“Better not try explain. In Tibet, some people believe seeing dead person good luck. Maybe some other religion bad luck. For you, maybe, bad luck.”

“How so?”

Again, he studied my eyes. “Sometimes a lot of things to say, no good to say. Sometimes a lot of things to say, no need to say. Sometimes no need to say, but good to say. This time, no good to say. Understand?” I nodded dubiously.

“Okay,” Chokyi Nyima continued. “What I want to tell you is this.” I backed off my knees and settled into a trampled lotus. “In Buddhism we have what we call the ‘auspicious conditions.’ When these things happen together, it is quite good. Quite . . . rare. Understand?” I made an agreeable noise.

“First auspicious condition: You have human rebirth. So many possible rebirths! Can be reborn as dog; as fly; as bird; even as tiniest, tiniest, what call? Amoeba! Every living thing must be reborn. But a human rebirth? Very, very rare.”

I nodded, familiar with this reasoning. Most East-leaning Westerners take it on faith that any half-decent person will reincarnate, automatically, as a human being. But Buddhist scriptures suggest otherwise. Unless one has practiced the necessary skills and developed an instinctive grasp of the complex dance steps required to transit the Bardo, there are no guarantees.

“Second auspicious condition,” Chokyi Nyima continued. “To be born in a time, and place, where Buddha dharma is available. Many other times, many other places, not available! Not so easy to find! Understand? One hundred years before, even you live in America, maybe impossible to find Buddha dharma. One hundred years from now, maybe also impossible. Born in Africa, China, North Pole, South Pole, also not easy to find.

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