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By Root 1345 0

he mainly remembered about the class was this guy who used to show up wearing baggy secondhand suits and beat-up shoes, sort of a drunken preacher or Tom Waits look. He carried a black briefcase with metal edges, the kind of thing that might have contained fifty thousand in cold cash instead of a paperback volume of the Upanishads edited by Mircea Eliade and a half-eaten blondie wrapped in a paper napkin. What Leonard liked about this guy was his manner of gently correcting the untutored opinions offered around the seminar table. The entire class was full of co-op types, vegetarians in overalls and tie-dyed T-shirts. The bias of these kids was that Western religion was responsible for everything bad in the world, the rape of the earth, slaughter houses, animal testing, whereas Eastern religion was ecological and pacific. Leonard had neither the desire nor the energy to argue these points, but he liked it when Young Tom Waits did. For instance, when they were discussing the concept of ahimsa, Young Waits offered the observation that the Sermon on the Mount made roughly the same point. He impressed Leonard by mentioning that Schopenhauer had tried to interest the European world in Vedantic thought back in 1814, and that the two cultures had been mixing for a long time. His point, again and again, was that truth wasn’t the property of any one faith and that, if you looked closely, you found a ground where they all converged.

On another day, they’d gotten off topic. Somebody brought up Gandhi and how his belief in nonviolence had inspired Martin Luther King, which had led to the Civil Rights Act. The speaker’s point was that it had actually been a Hindu who had made America, a so-called Christian nation, a more just and democratic place.

At which point Young Waits spoke up. “Gandhi was influenced by Tolstoy,” he said.

“What?”

“Gandhi got his philosophy of nonviolence from Tolstoy. They corresponded.”

“Um, didn’t Tolstoy live in like the nineteenth century?”

“He died in 1912. Gandhi used to write him fan letters. He called Tolstoy his ‘great teacher.’ So you’re right. Martin Luther King got nonviolence from Gandhi. But Gandhi got it from Tolstoy, who got it from Christianity. So Gandhian philosophy really isn’t any different from Christian pacifism.”

“Are you saying Gandhi was a Christian?”

“Essentially, yes.”

“Well, that’s wrong. Christian missionaries were always trying to convert Gandhi. But it never worked. He couldn’t accept stuff like the resurrection and the Immaculate Conception.”

“That’s not Christianity.”

“Yes, it is!”

“Those are just myths that grew up around the core ideas.”

“But Christianity is full of myths. That’s what’s so much better about Buddhism. It doesn’t force you to believe anything. You don’t even have to believe in a god.”

Young Waits tapped his fingers on his briefcase before replying. “When the Dalai Lama dies, Tibetan Buddhists believe his spirit gets reincarnated into another baby. The monks go all over the countryside, examining all the newborns to see which one it is. They bring personal effects of the deceased Dalai Lama to dangle over the babies’ faces. Depending on how the babies react, by a secret process—which they can’t explain to anyone—they choose the new Dalai Lama. And isn’t it amazing that the right baby’s always born in Tibet, where the monks can find him, instead of, say, in San Jose? And that it’s always a boy baby?”

At the time, infatuated with Nietzsche (and half asleep), Leonard didn’t want to get into this argument, the truth of which wasn’t that all religions were equally valid but that they were equally nonsensical. When the semester ended he forgot about Young Waits. He didn’t think about him again until two years later, after he started going out with Madeleine, when, looking through a packet of snapshots Madeleine kept in her desk, Leonard came across quite a few where Young Waits appeared. A disturbing number, in fact.

“Who is this guy?” Leonard asked.

“That’s Mitchell,” she said.

“Mitchell what?”

“Grammaticus.”

“Yeah, Grammaticus. I was in a religious