Beyond the Sky and the Earth_ A Journey Into Bhutan - Jamie Zeppa [116]
There is no privacy, no place or time to talk alone. I do not invite him to my house and he does not come on his own. We rely on these meetings in open corridors, trying to finish one last thought before the bell rings. They are not always happy or satisfying conversations. On the subject of the Situation, for example, we end up talking in circles, which Tshewang says proves his point, his point being that there is no point in talking about it.
“Anyway,” he tells me, “I hate talking about politics with you. I haven’t read what you’ve read. I haven’t been where you’ve been. You always argue me into a wall, and I can never be right.”
“That’s not true,” I say, hurt. But I fear it is. We bring too much with us into these conversations, it seems impossible to make a statement that is free of our separate pasts and upbringings and political cultures. My arguments arise from a culture that has named its own values as the highest aspirations of humanity. The fact that governments and corporations and individuals pay lip service to these values, the fact that there are grave inequalities and injustices and abuses of every sort in Western society, does not stop us—me—from pontificating in other places.
No, they are not always easy conversations, but each one adds to the ground we stand on together. In the evenings, I fall into dark fits of despair, asking myself where this can possibly go. It can’t go anywhere, I tell myself. Scalar—having magnitude but not direction. Then I wonder if I just shouldn’t give in and let it happen. Perhaps one night would quench this awful desire and then we could be free of it ... no, no, no. One night would not be enough, and it is not one night that I want. Throw out those little scraps of paper, I tell myself. What you want is impossible.
Nima has decided to leave secular school after class XII and go to a Buddhist college in southern India, where he will become a monk. His mother, he says, is disappointed, but he has his father’s blessing. “You know, miss, in Buddhism, we say that life is like housekeeping in a dream. We may get a lot done, but in the end we wake up and what does it come to, all that effort? I want to study what is really important.”
“Are you sure about this, Nima?” I ask, thinking of the rigorous monastic discipline, the long periods of isolation from his family and friends.
He pulls out a book from his gho, A Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life, and reads me a quote:
Suppose someone should wake from a dream
In which he experienced one hundred years of happiness,
And suppose another should waken from a dream
In which he experienced just one moment of happiness....
“It’s the same, isn’t it, miss? One hundred years or just one moment. It’s still a dream.”
I can do nothing but nod. He is many lifetimes ahead of me in wisdom and maturity, and in my heart, I bow to him as my teacher.
We go to the temple one afternoon, bringing offerings of incense and vegetable oil for the butter lamps. A long-haired gomchen opens the door and we leave our shoes outside and enter the main room. The floor is cold beneath us as we prostrate in front of the altar on which a single butter lamp burns before a statue of Guru Rimpoché. We pause to look at the paintings on the wall, and Nima points out the six realms of existence in the wheel of life. The realms form the continuum of cyclical life, and rebirth in the worlds of gods, demi-gods, humans, animals, hungry ghosts, or hell, occurs