The Dalai Lama's Right Hand Man
04/26/2004 10:22 a.m.

Everyone jumped when the drum sounded.  I didn’t.  Maybe it was my treehugger upbringing, but when I walk into a room and there is a bigass drum in one corner and a gong in the other, I just assume that they aren’t part of the décor. 

I look around at my classmates, seated on those hard metal foldout chairs that are manufactured for the sole purpose of making the poor souls who have to sit in them feel penitent.  I’m pretty sure I’m the only student in the room not fretting over my socks.  Everyone seems to be concentrating very hard on his or her feet, absorbed in a sort of self-conscious sock meditation.  I don’t understand this.  I’ve already nearly strained my neck trying to take everything in.  Of course, it is a rather smallish room; perhaps they had just been faster on the uptake than me and are now trying to concentrate on the ceremony. 

The student beside me is so intensely uncomfortable that I can nearly taste it.  I sneak a quick look at him, enough to discern that it’s not physical discomfort, apart from the wretched chairs.  He looks intent enough, but I get an intensely capitalist vibe from him that seems offended, as if the whole experience were an affront to his Americanism. 

I remember feeling gypped that we didn’t get to sit on the floor.  I had even remembered to wear my most comfortable drawstring stretchy pants especially for the occasion of attempting a lotus position.  Besides, those cold metal chairs were probably far less comfortable than the ergonomic yellow zafus that had been cleared out of the way quite unceremoniously.  If I were seated on the floor, maybe I would have felt less like a spectator and more like a sort of Buddhist for a day.  The service felt a little like a pageant and less like a religious devotional. 

I was proud of myself when I entered into the temple, shoes in hand.  I had practiced my one and only Vietnamese phrase the night before and I just couldn’t wait to test the waters.  “Chuc mung nam moi,” I say to the first person I see who looks even remotely Asian.  The beaming smile on that woman’s face faltered, she gave me that look that you give the McDonald’s drive thru speaker box when all you hear is muffled static.   I only hope that the Vietnamese I just butchered means Happy New Year.  I was just going to apologize for my pompous assumption that all persons of Asian descent speak Vietnamese when a light bulb seemed to click on behind the woman’s searching eyes, the beaming smile made an encore and she gave me a quick reflex bow.  I duck my head a little in response and suddenly remember that I know another Vietnamese phrase, which is di di mau.  I’m reasonably sure that it means “get the hell out of here.” 

I had been expecting more formality and age.  And I was definitely expecting more heat.  I had a picture in my mind of an ancient hall filled with hot, heavy air and great clouds of incense that never stir.  This place was meat-locker cold and not much more than a glorified pole barn. 

But the people, they far outstripped my imaginings.  I came in fully prepared to be intimidated by a line of stooping, saffron-robed cronies and drilled on how all of life is suffering and there’s not a damned thing we can do about it but close our eyes and shut out the world. 

As quite frequently is the case, I was wrong.  My initial response to Thich Hang Dat is that he was very upright, and quite possibly the most beatific being I’d ever seen.   He kind of floats in and I am so taken off guard and utterly consumed with his presence, that I haven’t much concentration to spare on anything else.  I can’t remember now if he introduced himself or just went straight into the bell-ringing, drum thumping chants.  Somewhere in there I remember feeling embarrassed that I actually wanted to read along, when all anybody else seemed to want to do was mumble. 

I haven’t slept in 30-something hours and Thich Hang’s broken English is sounding more and more abstract.  I’m drifting.  I noticed that when he smiles, which is often, he’s missing an incisor in his bottom row of teeth.  Otherwise his teeth are perfect, a real Hollywood smile, except that it’s genuine.  I latch onto only a few concepts.  “The Loving-Kindness and Compassion,” he says, and when he says it, you can just tell that it’s meant to be capitalized.

When the electricity went off, he came alive.  The candles on the altar that had been drowned out by the harsh halogen lighting now leap out of the suddenly dim corner.  It looks almost like the entire altar is suspended from these two points of light.  The whole room becomes infused with an intensity emanating from a central point—a little man in saffron robes still holding a useless microphone as if it were an extension of his hand.  I don’t think he noticed that the power failed.   

A young novice flitters back and forth, creating little currents in my concentration.  I’m not really absorbing what’s being said, but I’m soaked in the atmosphere of the place.  I stare at the somewhat murky light coming in from the window and am shocked to see Indiana woodlands out there.  I admire the musculature in the back of the beautiful young novice through his airy robes when he sank into a full bow, wishing I too could bury my face in my knees.  I discern a pattern in the blocks of color on a banner hanging over a heating duct.  I imagine that pattern repeating into infinity and it occurs to me that if you take the smiling Buddha down off the altar and put up a crucifix and you’d probably still achieve the same effect.  The Loving-Kindness and Compassion.  Yeah.

             It seems like an ancient memory now, glimpsed illicitly from the fog of some former life.  Well, if you believe in that sort of thing.  Some days, while drifting through my workday, I would stare into space and wonder if it weren’t just all a dream.  The chime on the elevator sure sounds a lot like that little hand bell.  Surely there wasn’t really a rather impressive drive up a horrendous hill, no perpetually smiling man.  Was he old?  Young?  Who could tell.  Ageless.

           The Loving-Kindness and Compassion. 

(This will be ammended at a later date and reworked into a reading peice for the next Bean Street.  Stop by if you're in the area.  It will be at 7pm, www.tellchristian.com/beanstreet for directions)