Saturday, September 09, 2006

Hummingbird

Aggressive little critters, they are. I'm out on the deck, enjoying the sunlight filtering through the corner maple tree, and a hummer buzzes me. He is after the dried up remains of the feeder that hangs on a branch just above my left shoulder. Nothing in it, hasn't had anything in it in quite some time (we've neglected our duties as hummer parents this season; not sure why). Still, he hangs in the air within reach, his wings buzzing powerfully and a baleful eye cast down on his deadbeat provider. Sorry, Mr. Hummer, but sometimes life ain't easy. Sometimes the easy meals don't exist and you have to hunt them down in a different place and in a different way. Just stay true to who you are while you are doing it. Food tastes much better when eaten with a contented mind.


College Football Begins

First day of UVA football at home. Beautiful day, sunny in the low 80s. The pageantry begins. Bob and Betty next to us, Betty sitting primly next to the concrete abutment, her bottle of water next to her, and Bob stolidly observing with earpiece tuned in to the local radio station. We start with Wyoming, an out of conference game that is usually meant as a cream puff to warm up the Cavs. We'll see. They were crushed at Pittsburgh last week. Could be a long season. Nevertheless, it's about the colors and the roars and the good old song (if we ever get to sing it). Go Hoos!

Why Buddhism?

Because it has everything that appeals to me. First, I don't have to call myself a "Buddhist." As Stephen Batchelor said to us during a talk while he was traveling with us in India, Buddhism isn't "who you are, it's what you do." And that speaks to my American iconoclastic mind.

Second, it relies on the meditation techniques exploring the "mind"  accumulated by Hindu scholars over a period of 1500 years BEFORE the Buddha found the "middle way." Their studies and his conclusions presaged quantum physics in their exploration of the interior workings of physical space and mental processes. They peel back the layers of reality as though it were a metaphysical onion, revealing the "self,"in my case "Thunderstick," as nothing more than the accumulated experience rendered by my five senses that I mistake as an entity in and of itself. Once we understand that, particularly that there is no "there" there, we are free to roam within that "nothingness" unencumbered by all those delusions and pains and temporal pleasures that only distract us from the essential truth, or the "nothingness." Not a void or a vacuum, barren and cold, but instead a vast space free of obstacles that could divert you from the true path, or nirvana as it is commonly understood.

Finally, Buddhism fully accepts, in fact demands, that reason and logic have a seat at the table. As the Dalai Lama has said repeatedly (he's devoted to science and its rigorous analytical approach), if there is anything in Buddhism that doesn't make sense, that strains credibility as you know it, then discard it. Accept and apply only those theories and practices that make sense to your rational mind. Trying to do otherwise only adds internal conflict where none need be. Once you have applied all the reason necessary and are comfortable with where you are intellectually, let the rest reside on faith, by definition outside the area where logic prevails. In Buddhism, faith and reason make a happy marriage.

By happy coincidence to this little missive, I'll be traveling to Dharamsala next April to attend a private conference of the Mind Life Institute with about 20 western scientists, 20 Tibetan Buddhist scholars, and the Dalai Lama at his residence. He will be there for five days with us, each day a presentation of some scientific evidence commented upon by the Dalai Lama in an active give and take discussion. Don't ask how lowly me ended up with this opportunity....

Sunday, July 30, 2006

Corrosive Effect of Perceived Wisdom

I'm reading Victor Navasky's memoir about his life as journalist and, most importantly, the steward/editor of The Nation. Years ago, I was a longtime reader of that historically irreverant and antidote-to-perceived-wisdom journal until Alexander Cockburn, the Stalinophile whose glib estimates of his mentor's documented atrocities as only about "six million" instead of Western estimates of "20 million" constituted a defense of the monster, turned me away in disgust. That was about 20 years ago. During that time, its long history as a single-minded, clear aribiter of the "nation's" conscience (1865) subconsciously resonated with my history genes, so it's been in the back of my mind. I have missed it. Anyway, reading Navasky's account, I now know why. He talks about the homogenization of American journalism and its penchant for yielding to power (and that was a comment about the state of affairs THIRTY years ago). And today? Well, if journalism then was a stand of trees facing the bulldozer, it's now a pit mine that hit ground water and flooded to its rim.

We need life jackets. We need The Nation.

Monday, June 26, 2006

The Buddha Takes No Prisoners

Tibet appears to most of the world as a docile, isolated country that succumbed meekly to the historical imperative of Chinese domination. It stands to reason. Tibet is the most Buddhist of nations, one whose spiritual traditions go back thousands of years and whose leader, the Dalai Lama, espouses non-violence with mirthful humility. But appearances do deceive, and in fact the Tibetan people, making peace with their own karma, fought the hated Chinese with a level of rage, tenacity, and savage violence one can hardly associate with Gautama's "middle way."

In a gripping account that covers the period post-WWII to the present day, Buddha's Warriors by author Mikel Dunham describes Tibet's slow descent into war, first baited into infighting by China's divide and conquer strategy and then, realizing China's true intentions, discarding their ancient tribal loyalties to join together as a nation and resist. They mounted warhorses, stockpiled arms and money in Tibet's once vast network of monasteries, and countered a Chinese slaughtering machine with their own.

Dunham spent seven years researching his book, basing his story on first-hand accounts by the Tibetan warriors who fought the Chinese and the impassioned CIA operatives who believed so much in their cause. This is not a tale for the squeamish; Dunham describes in detail unbridled, widespread, and programmatic Chinese sadism that takes ones breath away, and a Tibetan response to the barbarism that shatters the Shangri-la myth. They took no prisoners. What becomes abundantly clear in this story, and is truly troubling, is that even in the heart of Buddhism violence finds a home.

Four key players drive this drama: Mao Tse-Tung, India's Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Tibetan General Gompo Tashi Andrustsang, and the CIA. Mao echoed the ancient Han dynasty's obsession with the Motherland and simply couldn't countenance an independent Tibet. He skillfully manipulated Nehru whose dream about leading a new Pan-Asian bloc made him blind to Mao's machinations. Gompo Tashi led the Tibetan army (Chushi-Gangdruk) for years, using his charisma and wile to inspire his warriors and inflict frequent defeats on the Peoples Liberation Army. And the group of dedicated CIA case officers coordinated U.S. air drops and covert support for the Chushi-Gangdruk and, over time, became committed to the Tibetan nation and the heroic Tibetans they trained as covert agents.

Note that the Dalai Lama, who wrote the foreword to Buddha's Warriors, is not on the list. Revered by his people then and now, the Dalai Lama's obvious dilemma offers an interesting undercurrent that runs throughout the book. Dunham, perhaps because it is a delicate subject, touches upon it only obliquely: committed to non-violence in a place where only malevolence, revenge, and relentless brutality were the language, the Dalai Lama could only be a pawn in the much larger power game played between Mao, Nehru, the United States, and his own people. In one of the most poignant passages of the book, one can hear the despair in His Holiness's voice, not only for what was happening to his country, but for his inability to do anything about it. "By then, I could not in honesty advise them to avoid violence. In order to fight, they had sacrificed their home and all the comforts and benefits of a peaceful life. Now they could see no alternative but to go on fighting, and I had none to offer."

Dunham describes in vivid detail and offers dramatic testimony how the Tibetan's incandescent love for the Dalai Lama unleashed a passion for his safety that gripped every Tibetan man, woman, and child. The fighting raged, causing horrific carnage. Dunham tells of the many monks, inspired by the revered warrior-King Gesar who had waged war in the eleventh century to protect the dharma in Tibet, who "give back their robes," or renounce their vows, to join the fight. Dunham writes of the reasoning behind the monks' decision that "violence was never a good thing, but an inevitable phenomenon along the savage journey to Enlightenment – war against the enemies of the dharma was a personal choice and not to be judged." Ironically, the monks made excellent warriors with their austere lifestyle and dietary discipline, and the 6,000-plus monastery network provided a "pony express" of sorts, allowing information and arms to flow surreptitiously throughout the country and support surprise victories against the unwary Chinese.

But Tibet was doomed, no matter how hard it fought. Two things worked against it: the high-level corruption, incompetence, and outright treason by some key officials in the Tibetan government; and the multitudes of PLA of which Mao had a seemingly unlimited supply. The Tibetans simply could not fend off the the swarms of Chinese soldiers that filled their valleys.

In the end, the shifting alliances and national interests of China, India, and the U.S., which were at times both poison and antidote to Tibet's desire to be left alone, almost certainly ensured that it will never be its own country again. Buddha's Warriors tells us why that happened, and how this tragedy forced Tibetan Buddhism out of its isolation to engage the world with its deepest truths.

A Spring Morning


The morning was silk, soft on the skin, and just before dawn. The early spring air carried the season's first hints of warm moisture. A light breeze brushed my closed eyes, and a quiet but lilting birdsong began to tease awake the silence. In that brief moment between sleep and full lucidity, I felt a boundless peace that I hadn't felt for some time.

In the year leading up to this Easter Sunday in 1984, my wife Jackie and I had been fighting her leukemia. We had gone to Seattle for a bone marrow transplant. For someone her age and health and with a perfect donor match in her brother, Jackie's prognosis was good. We were going to beat this.

We were wrong. Jackie's transplant failed. We tried again. Failed. After 6 months of pain and radiation and dialysis and tubes and corpses hauled out on gurneys every day in this "research" center, a doctor shook his head somberly and told us there was nothing more they could do. Jackie sat propped up in her bed, her skin cracked and green, a urine bag hanging limply on a hook nearby. She gazed calmly at the doctor and, as was her style, analyzed the situation clearly and resolutely. She then said quietly, "Well, I certainly don't want to die here. I want to die in my home."

And that's what she did. We traveled back across the country to live out her life in our house in New Jersey. I was her nurse. Medical paraphernalia crowded every corner of our bedroom. We knew that she was going to die, but we didn't know when. So we spent the last three months of her life together in a surreal netherworld, somewhere between a life we had lost and death we could not know. Friends and family helped and watched.

Ordinary sounds and colors of life took on a menacing tone. Their simple beauty – which I was only now beginning to comprehend – stood in stark contrast to the horror we were enduring, enlarging and intensifying it. And I only knew the one Noble Truth: the suffering that had crept up incrementally, and that would soon come rushing headlong with terrible, overpowering force. If you're not ready for it – and I wasn't – it will gouge out a hole so deep inside that its vacuum sucks the breath out of your lungs and all reason out of your brain.

Two days before Easter, Jackie felt well enough to have dinner with friends. But her body finally said "no more." She lost bowel control at the dinner table, and I got her home before pain sent her into convulsions. Mercifully, she drifted into semi-consciousness. As the hours passed, I sat powerless, exhausted, numb. She held me with a look that was an odd blend of anticipation and uncertainty, but very nuanced, composed, unruffled. She no longer spoke, nor seemed to understand anything I said to her. She looked beyond me, and then she closed her eyes and began her death rattle. I feel asleep to that raspy sound.

Then, that Easter morning. Jackie lay beside me, quiet. At once, the sweet silence that had momentarily soothed me turned cold and real in its meaning: she was dead. In a panic, I reached for her arm. It was cold up to her elbow. She was gone, freed. The morgue truck took her body away.

In the ensuing years, I teetered on the brink of a bottomless maw in my soul, but dragged myself back to life by establishing certain truths as handholds. First: my young daughter Corey needed me. I had to survive for her. Second: the irony of suffering. We never seek it. We tremble at its approach. But every horror and degradation and shame that it visits upon you will yield in its wake – if you survive it – a strength grown out of a profound joy and understanding of the rhythms of life.

I didn't realize in those early days that as I finally drew free from the black hole inside me I was beginning to practice and understand the dharma. I would mouth cheery comments like, "hey, we're going to be dead before we know it!," not really understanding why others didn't find that humorous. Then, about a year ago, I found that the name of such existential insouciance was "dharma" and it is giving shape and direction to my own personal truths. Its simple tools – like seeing every single moment for the unadorned truth that it is – help daily living but, more importantly, are building a framework in which I'm learning how to coexist peacefully – even graciously – with that 800-pound gorilla named Samsara.

Muttering "Mutton" in Mongolia


Twenty hours in the air and a half-planet away from home, Mongolia's Ulaanbaatar finally reveals itself in a treeless valley surrounded by the four sacred peaks of Bogd Khan, Bayanzurkh, Chingeltei, and Songino Khairkhan. It's 10 p.m. when we land, yet only sunset in this northern latitude. Burnt orange light streaks the ground between long shadows. The darkening sky and the treeless plain squeeze between them the last minutes of day. On the horizon, an iridescent thunderstorm pours torrential rain down its mushroom stalk. Soviet-era helicopters sit in the weeds and rust under sagging rotors.

My brother Grant and I have come to this historically Buddhist land to see the state of the dharma ten years after the end of Soviet rule. For centuries, the country has had strong ties to Tibetan Buddhism—indeed, before the Soviet "repression time" beginning in 1921 some estimates counted more than 98% of the population as Buddhist though recent studies suggest that has dropped significantly.

At baggage claim, we see why: a battalion of well-groomed Mormon missionaries wearing black suits and gold name tags. They are cheery, polite, relentless. We soon learn that they are the dharma's main competition for the hearts and minds of Mongolians. More troops to the front lines.

Before heading into the country, we spend two days here. Almost half the country's population of Mongolia crowds into this capital city of one million. Deep potholes and broken streetlights reveal the surface state of a crumbling infrastructure. Broad avenues teem with a human succotash of ancient style and urban culture. Young girls queue up for water at public pumps. One-horse wagons dodge buses and cars that careen wildly in no-rules driving. Young toughs in L.A. Dodgers caps play pool on tables sitting out in the open air. Exhaust fumes, dust, and cook smoke hang in the air. Animal bones litter the ground, some still clinging to remnants of flesh and fur. Dirt streets meander throughout, bordered by ramshackle fences that shield from random theft the family gers, the traditional round tent of the Mongols.

During their rule, the Russians imposed a command economy on a nomadic people. When they left, the economy sputtered to a halt. The Russians had also destroyed 700 monasteries, forced thousands into slave labor, and slaughtered 17,000 monks and 10,000 citizens. Many lie buried in mass graves with bullet holes in the backs of their heads. The Russians forced the surviving monks to abandon Buddhism, marry, and enter secular life. Even so, many continued to practice in secret while hiding sacred objects for a time when the dharma could reemerge.

That time came in 1991, when a peaceful revolution led to a democratic government. The Mongolian dharma emerged from seven decades of subjugation severely weakened. Christian missionaries—particularly Mormons—have swarmed into the spiritual vacuum seeking converts while the consumerist din of Mongolia's emerging Western-style market economy threatens to drown out the quieter clarity of the dharma.

But the dharma is adapting. Prime Minister Enkhbayar is a practicing Buddhist (and, yes, a Communist in a democratic republic) who is keenly interested in preserving Mongolia's Buddhist heritage. Many provincial governors and members of parliament share his passion. We visited Gandan monastery in Ulaanbaatar, Erdene Zuu and Shankh Khiid monasteries in the ancient capital Kharkhorin, a temple in Dalanzadgad, and talked to abbots, lamas, and monks. Speaking to us in their rhythmic, whispering language with soft, glottal inflections, they showed us their reconstruction efforts and where they restored to their spiritual place the relics and statuary their predecessors hid during the Soviet era.

Out in the country, the endless blue sky and undulating hills exude a primeval magic almost unbearably moving. In a jeep, it's unbearably moving, too, as in teeth-chattering, organ-jarring, head-banging bumpy. Mongolian "roads," well, aren't.

In Kharkhorin we drink airag, fermented mare's milk that tastes like salty cream and quinine water. Nice buzz. From Dalanzadgad, we drive through the minimalist majesty of the Gobi, dodging sand devils and camel carcasses while skimming over the trackless plain like speed boats. A white vulture soars above us in a Yol Valley canyon. I slip on an ice flow in the summer heat of the desert. The Flaming Cliffs lick the horizon at sunset. And later that night under glimmering starlight at Three Camels Lodge, traditional singers Nara and Eata sing a Praise to Altai Mountain. And all the while we eat dried mutton, and mutton patties, and boiled mutton, and mutton meat sauce, and mutton soup, and never wonder why we don't see any sheep. We've eaten them all.

The Mongolian dharma, frail as it may appear now, seems poised to transcend this moment in history. I see it comfort an old woman turning a prayer wheel and sustain the monks rebuilding their cherished sites. I feel it riding the Gobi wind and steeped in the very rock strata of these old mountains. Certainly, the men in black and the clangorous western marketers will paint their colors here and there, but their brushes cannot take them deep to where the dharma lives.

Thursday, June 22, 2006

A little torture down at The Corner

I try to read The Corner. I really do. I want their perspective on some of the big issues of the day because I think it important to hear all sides of an argument, distill them in my own mind, and then make a rational judgment about where I stand. But I have to say that their vacuous approach to the torture debate, not to mention their glib tone, is infuriating. The many straw men in their arguments could field a few of the new brigades we need in Iraq, and their false dichotomies define reductio ad absurdum. Here's James Robbins:

So why is it that My Lai has become a byword for brutality while Hue is a footnote? Why will Menchaca and Tucker be forgotten while incidents like those under investigation — or the grotesque theater of Abu Ghraib — will persist, fester, be written about, analyzed, become vehicles for critiques of U.S. policy, the military, or the whole of American culture?

Why? WHY!? Because My Lai was a rarity that repulsed the nation, that's why. And if Haditha proves true, then we again feel our principles under assault, as well we should. As Americans, we expect better, and when some of our soldiers fall below our standards, it becomes a major story. The massacre in Hue by Viet Cong of their own citizens? Ho hum, like we should expect something else from them? Or barbarity from the thugs in Iraq? The essential question here completely eludes Robbins and seemingly the other Cornerites. We're not equating our soldiers with their thugs or our actions with theirs; we're outraged that there was any incident at all for us to be ashamed of. And if, but hopefully not when, these stories of alleged U.S. atrocities become commonplace and the press treats them "fairly" according to the standards sought by the Cornerites, then we have turned our righteous outrage into the banal rationalizations that are the root of all evil. We will have become them, so there won't be any story at all.


Monday, June 19, 2006

Birthers

The traditional definition of "family," used by every culture during every age of humanity, includes only the various permutations of father, mother, child, and sibling. Every familial relationship derives from those four categories, whether it be the sibling of the father, or the mother of the mother, or the child of the sibling, or any other combination (I purposely put aside adoptive, same-sex, and in-law relationships, not because they aren't equally valid but because they, too, rely on the same categories, albeit created legally...or not) But aren't we missing another one, the one that links each of us to a unique cohort of people all over the world beyond race, religion, sex or any of the other EEOC categories? I'm talking about the one category that no family can replicate, even twins: our age. Our birthday, even better, our birthsecond frames our existential awareness on a daily basis. We share that with no one, other than the millions of our -- coining a new word here -- "birthers" around the world.

All of my birthers (6/21/51/12:01am) all over the world look at the day after tomorrow as their 55th birthday, the tail end of their sixth decade on the planet. My birthers and I work and play through the day and sleep through the nights. Some will die on the morrow, some have... just died. May you rest in peace...and you, too. Our group continues to shrink as time moves on, through, and over it. My cohort mulches the existential landscape with some wonderful successes, some incandescent failures, and its gravestones and funerary urns. The younger cohorts struggle with adolescence or colic or the charismatic allure of the next Charles Taylor. My father's cohort is loosing its teeth, walking with canes, wincing and reminiscing. Each cohort passes through its own existential filter every second of its life. Some of my birthers get caught up in it and don't make it through to the next moment, others do. What appears immutable is the growing density of that filter as the cohort ages. Eventually it becomes impervious and the last birther in my cohort will die...at the exact same moment as the first death of the newest cohort. That is as certain as the sun rising tomorrow morning. And if it doesn't, even more so.

Saturday, June 17, 2006

Referee Blues

The US just tied Italy in a game destroyed by an incompetent referee. He tossed two Americans and one Italian, leaving it a 10-9 man contest that exhausted everyone. The Italian was rightfully tossed (accusations of jingoism rejected) because he threw an elbow into the face of McBride in a flagrant foul, but the other two Americans were the victims of an erratic and inconsistent referee who will likely not work another game in this World Cup, if ever. Good riddance.

At a Pittsburgh Airport Bar

Trying to pull from life...still.
Trying to sketch in lines...peace.
Seeing the glass hold air
Will I know I was there?

Friday, June 16, 2006

Love is a Ball


A Shift Among the Evangelicals

Meanwhile, here in Wolftown...

...our eldest daughter (ED) is about to become engaged to my future son-in-law (SIL). She doesn't know it yet, but we do. Just last weekend, ED called us up from NoVa, where she lives near SIL, and asked if we could meet at a restaurant in between our two homes for dinner. She loves her family deeply and sometimes misses us and the home she grew up in to the point of near despair. We miss her, too, and so we hopped in the car and joined them at Lucio's, trendy little place in Culpeper. Nice dinner, great big schooner-sized glassfuls of ice-cold and limed Grey Goose (our YD drove home while I and LW smiled crookedly). As we were leaving, ED went to the ladies room and we waited for her on the front porch of this converted Victorian home. SIL, looking slightly relieved, said "I never thought she would leave us alone!" It was very unlike him, and then looking around to see if ED was coming, he blurted out "I want to ask for your permission to ask ED to marry me." Well, we love SIL and we knew this was coming sooner or later but, when it did, the relief and joy we felt was boundless. He is a great guy, very traditional (who asks such permission nowadays?), very smart and responsible, good job, top secret clearance in DC and being paid well, and absolutely adores and loves ED.

He plans to do it tomorrow during what he calls "the perfect storm:" at the Nationals game at RFK when they play the Yankees (ED is simply MAD about her Yankees). He wanted to do the scoreboard request ("ED, will you marry me?"-- SIL), but in these modern, corporate, 24/7 info graphic overload days of electronic excess, they don't do those anymore. So, just the ring, the game, and his love presented to her on a lovely summer day at the ballpark. Very fitting for the start of a new team.

UPDATE: Affianced! SIL proposed on bended knee, offering ED a 2 1/2 carat diamond ring! Holy cow, is that love or what! But unfortunately for ED, the Yankees caved with a 9-6 lead, losing 11-6. But something tells me that disappointment is distinctly NOT what she is feeling right now. We're all so happy for her and for SIL that were the ring 100 carats it wouldn't glow as much as we are right now.

The Circle Will be Unbroken

U.S. military opens probe of three deaths in custody

Meanwhile, here in Wolftown...

...lovely wife (LW), youngest daughter (YD), and I took a blanket to the town commons last night to hear the bluegrass gospel group Jesse Jenkins & The Blue Valley Boys [you want a link? are you kidding?]. Dozens of local families dotted the commons stretching out in front of the old library building, a wide and lush lawn of thick grass surrounded by towering elms. They stood around the edges, sat in old lawn chairs. and lay clustered on blankets. A cool breeze delivered the sweet gospel melodies to men in ball caps with calloused hands and suspenders arcing around generous bellies, ladies in print dresses and support hose, and the aging crunchy hippies who could smoke their clothes to get high. Children and dogs cavorted between the distinct groups while polite applause, its sound muffled in the open air, thanked the Boys in the bandstand after each tune. I took in the ebb and flow of quiet chatter, distant laughter, and nods of recognition to friends in the crowd; minor details without significance if they were just about this particular moment. But, they weren't; they were part of the unbroken conversation of humanity that began with our first words. Being in that dialog and comprehending its full richness is a gift indeed.

Thursday, June 15, 2006

Buddha Deconstructed


Because a piece I wrote for Tricycle remains buried somewhere behind their firewall (I have yet to find it despite the editor's statement that they were going to post it), I'm posting it here where I have monolithic editorial control. I had written it on assignment, but the magazine felt it wasn't suitable for the print publication. I think I know there specific objections, but I'll let it speak for itself. And, they paid me, so I can't really complain. Also, next April, I'll be traveling to Dharamsala with my bro to attend a private conference led by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. The conference will be exploring the the empirical effects of meditation on the science of the mind. Very cool.

Anyway, here's the piece.....

Buddha Deconstructed

By Cullen Couch

Night falls here in the cold/dry season of northeastern India. Dung fires and kerosene lamps radiate light and warmth into countless mud huts. The acrid smoke stings my eyes and deepens a cloying darkness no starlight can penetrate. Our bus, filled with 27 pilgrims following in the “footsteps of the Buddha,” bumps and lurches on a narrow dirt road. Its headlights barely illuminate the hundreds of cloaked figures, oxcarts, Tata trucks, cows, dogs, and rickshaws streaming by in the gloom. Far ahead, I see oncoming headlights burn a corona around the dark shape of a distant wagon.

The stream parts to our singsong horn – only one part in the larger road symphony of honks, toots, and shouts – and then fills in behind us. In this intricate dance of steel and flesh we avoid each other by scant inches. During the two weeks of our travel here, our bus kills just three dogs.

My brother invited me on this journey some six months earlier. It was a daunting prospect. India’s myth had never much appealed to me, and the thought of enduring typhoid and hepatitis vaccines, and downing anti-malaria and “traveler’s diarrhea” pills didn’t help. As a lifelong skeptic of organizations of any stripe – be they travel groups, corporate paradigms, or multi-mandala’d schools of Buddhism – and a devotee of single malt scotch, I feared having to endure too much of the former with too little of the latter.

That doesn’t turn out to be a problem. I smuggled some fine, peaty Ardbeg into the sangha and enjoyed a nightly wee dram. And our group turned out to be intrepid, gentle, and solicitous. In fact, these are among the nicest people I’ve ever met. But I didn’t anticipate the intense sensory overload India levels on the uninitiated, of which I truly am one. And I worried I would miss the Buddha in this addled state.

We had begun the pilgrimage in Patna, the run-down former capital of the ancient Maghadan kingdom and a two-hour plane ride east from Delhi. There, we met the bus and crew who carried us over the Gangetic plain to Rajgir, Bodh Gaya, Varanasi, Kushinigar, Kapilavastu, Sravasti, and Lumbini just across the border in Nepal. We didn’t retrace the Buddha’s steps chronologically; that would have taken months in this travel-challenged land. Instead, we followed a tilde line across Bihar state, walking randomly on Buddha moments as though they were film frames on a cutting room floor.

But now the night is deepening and a bed many hours distant. I’m sitting next to Shantum Seth, an ordained teacher in the tradition of the Vietnamese master Thich Nhat Hanh. An elegant, endlessly patient man, he steers our group through the mysterious chaos of this complex country while telling the story of the living Buddha who walked here. Shantum’s bemused love affair with his own India shines through in his every interaction with it. “It’s not important what you do, but who you are,” he says, impish dark eyes glittering over a gentle grin. “It’s a miracle that it works.”

Exactly.

This is a squalid place, often revolting in its filth and detritus and the people scratching out a meager, crowded existence. I can’t help but wonder how so many can live together in such relative harmony. But that must be my own western conceit, because why do swarms of smiling, happy children crowd around us at every stop? How can shopkeepers in such makeshift booths make a living? Why aren’t they all beat down miserable?

My fellow pilgrims come from all over America; California, Texas, Utah, New York, and elsewhere. An arduous trip by western standards, it bonds us to a shared experience. We’re all holding up quite well, various ailments notwithstanding.

Stephen and Martine Batchelor help Shantum lead the group in the tour and the teachings. Martine, a former nun in the Korean tradition and author of a number of Buddhist works, dispenses her spiritual ministrations, not to mention her scheduling suggestions, with clarifying certainty. Martine leads our meditation sessions (which for our group can happen anytime, even rockin’ and rollin’ on the bus), and she’s delightfully direct and exquisitely funny when mirth sends her high chuckle into a Gallic growl.

Stephen’s smile hangs easily on his face. He is unhurried, deliberate, even-paced. His keen wit and intellectual lucidity commands a vast body of scholarship, from the Pali canon to 20th century existentialism. He unwraps Buddhism using a scientist’s logic, unrolling his sentences with droll aplomb and lyrical dexterity. When he says, “Buddhism is something you do, not something you believe in,” it resonates.

At each stop and after Shantum tells its story, Stephen helps strip away the allegory obscuring its historical and political context. As the sun sets on Vulture Peak and village fires twinkle in the hazy twilight below, Stephen riffs on the Heart Sutra. In the Bamboo Grove in Rajgir, he unravels the Buddha’s “soap opera” life and the political component to the Buddha’s “middle way.” Sitting snug inside the hotel on a chilly Nepalese night, the occasional scream of a jackal filtering through the stone walls, Stephen handles reincarnation theory deftly, turning this central tenet of Buddhism into a mere footnote of mild interest; and karma, its lock box, into a straightforward model for individual responsibility.

Some days we rest, meditate, or walk through ruins dating as early as 300 BC. Other days we ride the bus (or, rather, it rides us), for as long as 10-12 hours averaging at best 25 kilometers per hour. At every stop we climb down and a chorus of beggars humming like bees close in, angling for attention. Cow dung patties dry on sun-drenched brick walls, each a perfect circle carrying the imprint of the human hand that put it there.

From Rajgir to Bodh Gaya we follow a road along granite quarries below a tall jagged ridge line. Men, women, and children old enough to hold a hammer pound rock by hand into smaller chunks of gravel. Green fields of lentil and mustard stretch to a distant horizon. Cattle, pigs, roosters, hens, and children amble, squeal, crow, peck, and giggle amongst thatched huts, bodhi trees, and well basins.

In Bodh Gaya, we sit under the bodhi tree amid surging crowds, cacophony, and splendiferous statuary that saturates the Mahabodhi temple complex. Nearby, we cross the dry, wide riverbed of the Niranjana and trek several kilometers along rice paddies, climbing to the cave in the Dungasiri mountains where Buddha emerged to end his ascetic period. I sit on my mat high above the savannah, a sharp escarpment to my left. Gentle breeze. Bright sun. Hard rock. Soft mat. Clear mind. The beggars line the path below. Their hum and the wind-snapped prayer flags add to the discordant sound of India.

Inside the gates of the massive and beautiful ruins of Nalanda University, the center of Buddhist learning for 700 years beginning in the 5th Century AD, I sit on a rampart in a soft breeze, transfixed by the lone figure of a boy fishing the river rhythmically in the distance. Refreshed, I follow my fellow pilgrims outside to face the din of hawkers and beggars. I taste dung dust in the back of my throat. A bout with “Delhi belly” sphincters my tolerance; the fresh mountain air of my Virginia and the sweet taste of her clear water seem so far away right now.

And as the days go by, it becomes increasingly apparent that something is missing. Here in the birthplace of Buddhism, where are all the Buddhists?

For nearly 1,800 years after his death, Buddhism flourished in India, culminating in the magnificent Nalanda where thousands of monks studied and taught the dharma. But in the 12th century, invading armies destroyed this holy place, ripping the heart out of the tradition and leaving spectacular ruins that today only hint at its former grandeur. Without Nalanda, Buddhism withered in its native country. Today, it is all but forgotten.

Except for Bodh Gaya, Buddhist sites draw only modest crowds, often in spite of government efforts to boost them. In Lumbini, by most accounts the Buddha’s birthplace, a half-dozen nations working under UNESCO began constructing in the late 70s an international pilgrimage and tourism center using a “build it and they will come” approach. Only, they don’t.

Buddhist statuary appears haphazardly on the Gangetic plain, sometimes sitting lonely in a lentil field, sometimes housed in a makeshift shrine. Had the Buddha’s followers honored his wishes not to worship him as an icon, not even these modest shrines would mark his presence; just his teaching would remain, and only as a faint echo of chants heard from other parts of the world.

And my early worry is bearing out; I still can’t sense the Buddha. With the madness of India so much louder than its muffled reverence for him, and the scattered shrines bearing such forlorn witness, I haven’t been able to crack through the idolized facades that only hide him from me.

But then I do. He is here in the early morning quiet at Muktabandhana, the stupa housing his ashes. Mist shrouds its unadorned silhouette and limns its isolation. It whispers humility, transcendence, peace.

A lone monk emerges from the fog; just a man. Just like the Buddha.