INDIA, 500 B.C.
Long ago, there was a tiny Indian village called Moosa.
Moosa was not an exciting or remarkable place in any way. In fact, the village and its people had a reputation for lacking any particular shining qualities. They were honest enough, and good enough, but generally not too bright, ambitious, charismatic, or lucky.
It was Milo’s fortune, good or bad, to be born in this place. He did not, predictably, stay there, and the thing that propelled him out into the world was a man named Horsa Chatturjee.
Horsa Chatturjee, true to the spirit of Moosa, was not a scholar or an athlete or a great warrior. He was not an inspiring man in any way. He was a man who fell into a hole and broke his leg.
This was a big, important event for the village.
The local elders had gathered around, and were discussing how the hole had gotten there and why Horsa hadn’t been looking where he was going, when someone suggested they actually lift Horsa out of the hole and carry him someplace where he could be helped. And that voice came from little Milo Raj Ram, who had a habit of offering unwelcome advice to his elders (Milo already suspected that Moosa was not the seat of a future empire. As he stood by and watched the older men treating Horsa Chatturjee’s leg, this suspicion deepened).
“Pull on his leg,” said the eldest, a shirtless old fart with a gray topknot, “until the bone slips back under the skin. Pull until it pops into place. Then pack goat shit around the torn flesh until the bleeding stops.”
Milo was pretty sure that putting goat shit on an open wound was a terrible idea. He tried to say so but was boxed on the ear for his trouble.
He went up a tree to sulk, as boys will do.
While he was up in the tree, three things happened.
One, some voices in his head told him not to mind the old men, who were foolish and stubborn. Milo had been hearing these voices for some time and understood that they were the voices of lives he had lived. He had great respect for them.
Two, he began to feel short of breath. This wasn’t uncommon; he’d been having these little attacks all his life. They usually abated once he quit running around, climbing, or feeling upset.
This time, however, he kept feeling worse and worse, until the world began to swim around and Milo fell out of the tree.
That’s when the third thing happened.
A traveling healer walked into the village.
The healer, a holy man, wore a beard so long it had to be braided into ropes and tied off in six places to his belt.
When Milo fell out of the tree and landed at his feet, the healer frowned and probed at him with a long, beaded stick. Milo stared up at him, blinking and catching his breath. At this same moment, a terrible cry arose from the eldest elder’s hut.
“Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaagaaaaah!”
“What’s that?” asked the healer.
“That’s Horsa Chatturjee,” Milo told him. “The elders put goat shit on his broken leg.”
“Ah,” said the healer. “This must be Moosa.”
By now others had noticed the healer and gathered around.
“I will examine your friend,” offered the healer, “if you like. In exchange for supper.”
“Aiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii!” screamed Horsa Chatturjee.
The healer was fed and made welcome.
Milo watched the procedure from outside the hut, peering over the windowsill.
The healer washed away the goat shit, revealing a very red, angry, evil-smelling leg. He burned the wound with a torch, nearly sending Horsa into orbit. Then he knelt at Horsa’s feet and prayed, waving a torch. Milo hunched at the window, enraptured, thinking, This is the way they do things in the big city!
He was still there when the healer shuffled out of the house and said, “Alas, a demon has been at work here. Someone fetch an ax. The leg will have to go.”
They fetched him an ax, and he performed the surgery himself.
After, the healer would accept no payment, taking only the goat that had produced the offending goat shit, saying, “I’m doing you good country people a favor.”
“With a teacher like this,” Milo mused, enraptured, “a diligent student could launch a golden age!” And he swore that when he came of age, he would seek out such a master, if it meant he had to search the whole wide world.
The day after his coming-of-age ritual, still wearing his yellow prayer cord, Milo showed up at his parents’ breakfast table and said, “Goodbye. I’m going off into the world to seek knowledge. God knows I won’t find it here.”
“Smart move, kiddo,” said his father, and sent him on his way with some bread and a new pair of sandals.
Milo hiked for weeks, through villages and across bridges and rivers. He talked with fellow travelers and slept by the fires of kind strangers. Just as he’d anticipated, things got bigger and less pointless the farther he went. Along the way, he heard of armies lurking beyond the mountains. He heard of a strange mystagogue called the Buddha, whose disciples were so holy they didn’t need to eat or drink. He heard of great floods and seas and ships and women so beautiful and skilled that the men who bedded them died from pleasure. The more he traveled, the more he heard and saw and the bigger his world became, which was just as he had hoped.
One evening, Milo was enjoying the hospitality of a rich beet farmer and his field hands, and the farmer asked him if his wanderings had a particular purpose.
“I am seeking a teacher,” Milo answered.
“A teacher of what?”
Milo shrugged. “I’m not sure it matters. Something new. Something wonderful or terrible.”
A murmuring around the farmer’s table.
“We can teach you about beets,” someone said. “That’s about it.”
The tallest of the field hands—a thoughtful-looking fellow—spoke up.
“I understand what you’re saying,” he said. “It’s something I want, also. Maybe the teacher you’re looking for isn’t a regular sort of teacher at all. Maybe he is, in fact, someone more like a farmer or a blacksmith.”
Milo knew wisdom when he heard it.
“I would like to come with you,” the field hand continued. “But I have promised my employer here to work through harvest time. Perhaps you could work with us until the beets are ready to pull, and then we can travel together and see what we find.”
Milo accepted, and became a beet farmer for a while, and was thankful.
He learned.
He learned about getting up early and carrying water. He learned about beets. Beets, beets, beets. He learned to fix things. He grew stronger.
After the beets were in, he and the field hand—whose name was Ompati—set out to find a teacher, and it was one of the most pleasant times in Milo’s life. They hiked long roads, and met other travelers, and traded stories and songs. Once, they spent a night in a brothel, where Ompati was robbed of his wallet. Twice, bandits tried to rob them at knifepoint, but Milo and Ompati had done farmwork and had knives of their own. They swam in rivers. They slept under the stars. They saw strange and wonderful things: a leper with no legs, who had determined to crawl to Calcutta. They saw a magician who could separate himself from his shadow. Staying overnight with a holy man in a village called Moon Smoke, they drank the blood of a snake.
Milo came to understand that a great many holy men and others who seemed wise were, in fact, just out to get your money.
Don’t let that discourage you, said the old voices in his head. There are real teachers out there. Keep looking.
“All right,” said Milo softly. “I will.”
Once, Milo and Ompati marched alongside a mighty army for several days, trading jests with the soldiers and marveling at the great war elephants. On the fifth day, they began encountering men with shaved heads, in orange sashes, who laughed and waved at the soldiers as they passed.
“Pilgrims,” Ompati explained.
As the sun continued to rise, they saw more and more of these holy madmen.
“Disciples of the Buddha are teaching nearby,” came the rumors and whispers, down through the ranks.
That evening, the army came to an unexpected stop.
News rushed like a weather front: not just disciples of the Buddha, but the Buddha himself! He and his entourage had met the army at a crossroads up ahead, and the army had stopped to let him pass.
“I don’t understand all the excitement,” said Milo.
“Maybe his teachings haven’t traveled as far as Moosa,” said Ompati, “but in places of consequence, they say he is the greatest soul that ever lived. They say he defeated the demon lord Mara in single combat, without even standing up. They say he just touched the earth with his hand and beat Mara back with pure wholeness.”
“Which means what?”
“I don’t know. No one does.”
Milo and Ompati got a nasty surprise the next morning when messengers came riding down the lines, shouting to the sergeants and marshals. They looked excited.
The sergeants and marshals, in turn, screamed at their units.
“Quick-march, forward!” shouted the marshals.
Before them and behind them, soldiers, elephants, chariots, and armored horsemen all moved with purpose, looking tough.
“I propose,” said Ompati, “that we will only be in the way here.”
So they left the army behind and waded away between trees.
Arrows started falling around them. One stuck in the ground, nudging Milo’s ankle.
“We seem to have wandered toward the fighting,” observed Ompati.
Milo struggled to breathe. Red-hot terror had a grip on him. He was pretty sure he’d peed himself. Up ahead, and all around, he heard battle cries and shrieks and brave little speeches.
Soldiers rose out of the underbrush. Mean-looking guys in leather armor.
Milo wheezed and blacked out facedown in some kind of Asian raspberry bush.
Warm rain.
Milo came awake painfully, feeling sticky. Nearby, someone shuffled in the grass.
Lifting his head and looking around, he discovered an elephant standing over him.
Milo wasn’t startled or afraid. It was clear from the very first instant that the elephant wasn’t going to hurt him. In fact, it seemed sad and confused and stared down at Milo with a peculiar lost look in its eyes.
“Oh, God,” Milo whispered. The elephant’s trunk was half severed. The warm rain that had awakened him was blood misting in the air as the beast exhaled.
A single tear welled in one great eye and rolled down its cheek.
The surrounding forest looked as if it had been stepped on. Everywhere, broken trees, smashed people. Milo wondered what had happened to Ompati.
Focus, said the old voices in his head.
Milo pried a saber from a dead soldier’s hand and took a step toward the elephant.
The elephant met him halfway. With a heavy grunt, it knelt in front of him.
Milo patted its head. Then he cut the elephant’s throat.
A sheet of blood covered him. The elephant gurgled, rolled its eyes, and died.
Birds called out. Wounded soldiers moaned.
Milo sensed eyes on him and slowly turned.
A figure stood nearby. Slightly uphill, a silhouette against the morning sun.
“That was compassionate,” said the silhouette.
Milo nodded. He would have said something, but he hadn’t quite recovered his breath yet.
A cloud passed over the sun, and Milo saw that the figure was an old man. He was bent like a gwaggi vine, with a beard like a whip. Like other old men, his skin hung loosely, but under the hanging skin, muscles stretched like old harp strings. His simple wrap, a worn robe, hung on him like a second skin.
That was all Milo saw at first—a poor old man—until the eyes captured him.
X-ray eyes, whispered his many voices.
Milo didn’t know what an X-ray was (not in this life), but he got the idea. The old man looked at him as if he could see his naked bones and the atoms they were made of.
“Namaste,” said Milo, bowing.
The old man bowed in return.
A sudden chorus of shouting from the hilltop.
“Bodhi!” someone cried, followed by a chorus of voices. “Bodhi! Here he is!”
Milo looked uphill to see several young bald men in simple robes hurrying toward them through the trees, hopping over the dead and wounded.
“Mmmmm,” murmured the old man. “Here we go again.”
The young men arrived in a breathless little herd.
“It’s okay,” the old man told them. “I’m having a good day.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said the tallest, “if you’re having a good day or a bad day. You’re not supposed to wander off without telling Ananda.”
“Shhh,” said the old man, kneeling to help a bleeding soldier. “Be useful.”
He unwound his simple robe until he stood in their midst wearing a homespun loincloth, and he began to tear the robe into strips. His students—as Milo deduced them to be—did exactly as he did, without question or hesitation.
“Buddha,” Milo whispered to himself.
The old man heard him. Gave him an X-ray wink.
Milo tore his uniform into bandages and went about the forest, binding wounds.
Milo found himself working with Balbeer, the oldest of the students. They rigged a series of tents at the top of the hill—the beginnings of a field hospital.
Milo asked, “What does it mean when you said Buddha has good days and bad days?”
“We don’t call him ‘Buddha.’ That’s a generic term for someone who’s enlightened. Buddha is something everyone has inside them, if they can get to it. So we just call him ‘Bodhi.’ Wise one. Teacher.”
“And the good-days-and-bad-days thing?”
Balbeer handed him some firewood. “Be useful,” he said.
Milo went off to heat some water.
So, Milo thought, this is what it’s really like to be a healer.
He put pressure on wounds that were bleeding. He tied splints around crooked arms. Once, he cut off a ruined leg. He gathered firewood. He cleaned things that needed cleaning.
One day, Milo saw the Master making his way out of the hospital with a pail full of shit, going to dump it in a latrine that he himself had dug.
“That’s the teacher I’ve been looking for,” Milo said to himself, “if he’ll have me.”
“Could you at least take the arrow out of my throat,” coughed a soldier at his feet, “before you leave the third dimension?”
Milo’s eyebrows shot up.
“Ompati!” he cried. “I’m so pleased you’re not dead!”
Ompati started to say something but gagged instead.
Milo made him be silent.
He made himself useful.
The next few days passed in a blur. Milo worked in the makeshift hospital and did what the Buddha people around him were doing. He slept wherever there was space. Ate whatever came his way, which wasn’t much. Surprising, thought Milo, when it came right down to it, how little a person needed.
The students seemed happy in a way Milo had trouble understanding. They weren’t like other people. Most people had a kind of unhappiness they carried around with them. You saw it in their eyes or heard it in the way they talked. They were always a little bit mad about something, or worried, or sorry. This nagging unhappiness was a way of living that most people had gotten used to.
The Buddha people didn’t have this unhappiness. They seemed to have a way of doing rather than fretting. Doing what was in front of them at that moment, whether it was talking to you or stitching a wound or drinking a cupful of water.
As he was noticing this, thinking about it, he realized that Balbeer was standing beside him. Balbeer put a friendly arm around his shoulder and said, “You’re already enlightened, Milo.”
Milo blinked.
“I don’t see how that could be,” he said. “I haven’t—”
“You haven’t had an explosion of light inside your head, or seen the future, or had fire shoot out of your nose?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“That’s not what enlightenment is. It’s not some mystical explosion. It’s noticing what’s going on around you, here and now, and you do that.”
“Not always.”
“Well, you’re not always enlightened.”
“So then basically everyone’s enlightened, probably, at least some of the time. Like this guy whose leg I had to cut off. He screamed so hard he was drooling, and his eyes rolled back in his head.”
Balbeer squinted, thinking. “I don’t know,” he said.
Milo was surprised. He had never heard a teacher or a serious student say “I don’t know.” It sounded frightfully intelligent.
“Why does a rhino have horns on its face instead of up on top of its head?” Milo asked.
“I don’t know,” said Balbeer.
“That’s wonderful. How come wood burns? Why do our armpits stink? What does it mean if I dream about being naked in the marketplace?”
“I don’t know. I thought I was the only one who had the ‘naked’ dream.”
“I think everyone has it.”
They went and got something to eat.
Not long after, there came a morning when all the Buddha people got up and started walking away, down the road. Milo and Ompati got up and went with them. Milo discovered suddenly that he had nothing in the world to his name. A primitive kind of robe, one set of underclothes, and a pair of leather sandals he’d borrowed from a dead mahout.
Ompati picked up a stick from the side of the road.
“It feels good to have something,” he said, “even if it’s just a stick.”
They walked in silence for a time.
“I haven’t seen the Master for a week,” Ompati said. “Is he even with us? Maybe he has gone on ahead.”
“He’s old,” Milo answered. “They say he has good days and bad days.”
“Doesn’t everybody have good and bad days? What does that mean?”
Milo shrugged. He didn’t know.
That night, they found out.
They were sitting around a fire at twilight, cooking some beans they’d begged from a passing caravan, when Milo was struck with energy.
“I’m going to go ask him,” he said.
“Ask who what?” asked Ompati and a couple of pilgrims who had joined them.
“About the dream I have, where I’m in the marketplace and I suddenly realize I’m naked.”
“Everybody has that dream.”
“Yeah, but I wonder what it means.”
And he was up and gone among the many fires, looking for the Buddha.
The Buddha didn’t have a huge, fancy tent or anything. He wasn’t easy to find, camped among his followers, because he slept on the ground just like the rest of them. But Milo reasoned that wherever the Master sat down and made his fire, a lot of his people would try to sit down near him. So he went where the fires and talking and laughter were thickest, and there, indeed, was the Master.
Milo expected to find some of the elder disciples sitting in a circle, with the Master sitting in the middle, staring into the fire. But what he found was confusion. There were several disciples, older men Milo recognized from the Master’s inner circle, whispering loudly at one another. In the middle of them stood the Master, crying and looking pissed off.
Other pilgrims, at fires nearby, busily pretended not to see.
Milo advanced, anxious to see what was wrong. If someone had hurt the Master…
“Why would you say something like that?” the Master was sobbing. “That’s cruel, is all. What’s wrong with you all?”
Two disciples—one fat, the other short but thin, like a dormouse—were having a spat of some kind, off to the side.
“Why did you argue with him?” asked the fat disciple. “You know you’re not supposed to contradict him when he’s like this! He doesn’t understand. It just upsets him.”
“I know!” whispered the dormouse, looking pained. “But he was fine, that’s the thing. One second he was breezing along, saying mountains are like rivers, only slower, and he was having a great day. Then he said, natural as you please, ‘I must remember to ask Yi if he still has that bit of volcanic glass,’ and before I could catch myself, I said, ‘Master, Yi has been dead now for seven years. Remember the tiger?’ and he came unglued.”
The fat disciple seemed to calm himself.
“We have to be careful,” he said. “I know you would never upset Bodhi on purpose.”
Strong hands grabbed Milo by the shoulders and spun him around.
Fuck! The Buddha had goons! Who knew?
Balbeer.
“Milo,” said Balbeer, his eyes sad, “just go and eat. You can’t help here.”
“But what’s wrong?” he sputtered.
Balbeer steered Milo out of the woods. Behind them, the Master’s voice rose angrily.
“He’s old,” said Balbeer. “Old people get confused sometimes.”
“But he’s—”
“He’s not a god.”
Milo found his way back to his own fire and sat down.
“Did he have an answer?” asked Ompati. “About the dream?”
Milo sat with his shoulders hunched.
“I couldn’t find him,” he said.
He tried to sleep, and couldn’t.
Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the Buddha in tears, frightened of his own friends.
He closed his eyes and tried to meditate. Maybe that would help.
Meditation was something the Buddha people did. It seemed to help them be cool about things. He had been trying but without much luck.
“See and listen to what’s happening in your mind,” Balbeer had told him.
“My mind is noisy,” Milo had answered. “I can’t see or hear.”
Balbeer had shrugged and closed his eyes and appeared to ignore him.
Milo tried again now.
Breathe in. Don’t think of anything. Breathe out. Notice that you are breathing.
What’s wrong with the Master? his mind asked.
Milo noticed the question.
Do people live on the moon, wondered his mind. No matter how hard he tried, random shit just kept floating up.
My ankle hurts. I haven’t had an asthma attack in a long time; maybe I’m cured? Do Buddhists have sex? What was that noise?
Shut up, he thought. Shut up, shut up. Breathe! Stillness…breathe…
I can feel my hair growing.
“Fuck!” he roared.
“Shhh,” admonished some nearby pilgrims. “We’re meditating.”
The next afternoon, the travelers reached a place called Sravasti.
Sravasti was a town. The Master had been there many times. A long time ago, they had built a whole complex of monasteries there. It was one of the main places people went if they wanted to learn the Master’s teachings. Some of his best students and disciples taught there, and the town was sort of an ongoing Buddha-fest. You could hardly go downtown to buy bread without stumbling over meditating pilgrims.
When the Master himself came to town, it was like Jesus entering Jerusalem, except Jesus hadn’t been invented yet.
The traveling throng became a parade, showered with blossoms and song. They were all bowed to and knelt to and touched with reverence. Part of this was because the Sravasti crowd was primed to honor anything remotely associated with the Buddha, but it was also because they didn’t know which of the travelers was the Buddha.
Like most people, these spirit tourists expected to know the Master on sight. He should be ten feet tall, with flames shooting from his eyes. This, they said, was the man who had made a rice bowl float upstream just by asking it to. This was the man who had slain a horrid jungle monster by permitting it to eat him and then burning his way out with Perfection rays. This was the man whose soul was one with all time and the universe.
Yet he passed before them, a hunched old man like any other old man. He had the X-ray eye thing, true, but that was hard to see if he wasn’t looking straight at you.
“They don’t recognize him,” muttered Ompati, picking magnolia petals from his hair.
Milo nodded.
“It’s just as well,” whispered one of the travelers, walking nearby. “He’s been asking about the wedding preparations all day, especially the belly dancers.”
Milo frowned. “Whose wedding?”
“His own.”
“He’s getting married?”
“He got married. It didn’t work out.”
“Oh,” said Milo. “Sorry.”
“Also,” added the disciple, “it was sixty years ago.”
That night, amid the soft lawns and simple walls of the monastery complex, torches were lit. The thousands came and sat, waiting to hear the Buddha, buzzing excitedly.
It’s like an outdoor rock concert, said a voice in Milo’s head (the voice was from a future life).
The elder disciples emerged from the central monastery, plopped a big, fancy pillow on the grass, and sat around it in a semicircle, looking nervous.
Out came the Master. One step at a time, assisted by Balbeer.
The crowd hushed. Insects chirped. Bats zipped between torches.
The Master sat on the pillow, forming the mudra with his fingers.
Some time passed.
The moon rose.
The Buddha looked up. His eyes were bright but distant, like faraway fires. Milo recognized the lost look.
Oh, no!
The Master started talking about the wedding.
“I’m getting married,” he announced softly, with a slippery kind of grin. “It will be at my father’s palace, to my love and my destiny, my cousin Yasodhara. There will be belly dancers.”
Looking around, Milo saw the crowd nodding to itself, to one another. They listened and tried to follow.
“You have to admire a good belly dancer,” the Master continued. “They don’t dance so much as they flow. They’re like truth, or a river. Like a wave. Think about that. We’re going to ask them to wear emeralds in their belly buttons.”
The crowd ate it up. Truth! A river! Unity! Impermanence! No idea that the Buddha was wandering the undiscovered country of his own memory.
His closest disciples watched him with genuine love and awe. But their glances shared a question they dared not voice.
How much longer, they were thinking, can we get away with this?
That night, the first of the monsoon rains arrived.
The Buddha’s thousands rolled up their mats and crowded into the huts and monasteries. In the morning, several young pilgrims woke everyone with a great shouting: “Come quick! Something wonderful! Something strange! The Master has to see!”
So the Buddha and his thousands followed the young men down to the shore of a nearby river. The Master wasn’t hobbling, Milo noticed. He looked sharp and quick.
The river had swelled, like a boa constrictor swallowing a horse. It plunged and thrashed, gripping whole trees and great branches.
“Look!” cried the young pilgrims, pointing, jumping up and down.
They all looked.
“A monster!” they cried.
Some distance from shore, a single jujube tree stood against the flood, its branches beaten and stripped, and in its highest reaches something awful crouched. Something wet and bad. Something toothy and glaring but also, clearly, something frightened.
“A devil,” murmured some.
“A demon!” said others.
“Nonsense,” said the Buddha. “It’s a tiger.”
So it was.
Soaked and muddy, baring its teeth at the flood, it looked ready to fight, if only something attackable would present itself. As Milo watched, it took a big green terrified shit.
Everybody looked at the Master, expecting something.
“Someone bring me a rope,” he said. “The longest rope you can find. Long enough to reach the top of the tree.”
A hundred pilgrims pelted back to the monastery and into downtown Sravasti, without hesitation or a single question.
Milo leaned closer to Balbeer and asked, “What…?”
Balbeer shook his head, frowning.
Noise and shouting—they were back with the rope! A hundred ropes! The Master selected one and tied it into a wide, lazy lasso.
“No way!” said Ompati. His sentiments were echoed up and down the shore.
Even the tiger took an interest. He watched the Buddha without blinking, licking his chops.
The Master whirled the lasso over his head…slowly at first…and cast it like an arrow over the water. It settled neatly over a broken branch just behind the tiger.
He tugged the lasso tight and pulled.
He meant, it became obvious, to pull the jujube tree down to the shore, allowing the tiger to leap to safety. But he was, after all, an eighty-year-old man, and…
The tree started to bend.
The thousands muttered and gasped.
The tiger knew something was up, but he wasn’t sure if he liked it or not. He shifted, glaring.
The Master’s hands began to quiver.
“Please be useful,” he said to those around him.
Disciples and pilgrims piled onto the rope. Balbeer began a chant, which got them all pulling together. “Ahn!” they chanted, and pulled. “Bastei!” they chanted, and pulled, and the tree bent closer, until at last the roots tore free and its top branches hovered just ten feet from the bank.
At this point, a couple of things happened very quickly.
The tiger leaped through the air.
Everyone saw the tiger flying toward the shore and let go of the rope and ran.
Everyone but the Master, who had secured the rope around his wrist.
The tiger flashed its teeth and fangs and went crashing away through the trees without eating anyone.
The jujube tree came loose and went rolling downstream with the flood, yanking the Master off his feet, into the raging river, and out of sight.
As fast as this happened, Milo was faster. He was in the water before he even knew he was going to go, reaching for the Buddha’s old bare feet, the last part of the Master to vanish.
The water swirled around him. Branches and gravel and floating dreck scraped at him, but his groping hands found what they were looking for, and down the river they went, the tree and the Master and Milo.
Milo pulled himself up the Master’s body, almost climbing him like a tree, until he reached the old man’s wrist. Once he had the wrist in his grip, he did what the Master could not, which was to use both hands to unwind the rope.
The tree rolled away toward the ends of the Earth.
Milo and the Buddha bobbed up into the air, gasping. They fought together for the shore, grabbing for weeds or branches, clawing at the mud.
A tall figure splashed toward them. Big, strong beet-farming hands grasped Milo—Ompati!—pulling him, pulling the Master free of the current, until all three of them beached themselves and lay there with their legs in the water, gulping air.
Pilgrims and disciples came running, surrounding them, shouting with joy.
Milo realized then that the flood had yanked their clothing away. He and the Master lay there naked before the growing crowd.
“I’ve had dreams like this,” said Milo.
“Everyone has that dream,” said the Buddha.
The Great Tiger Rescue had predictable results.
The story of the Buddha’s supernatural strength and compassion flashed across the jungles and villages. Within hours more pilgrims started thronging into Sravasti. A new fable! A new miracle!
The story of how the Buddha had been dragged into the river and had to be fished out did not flash anywhere. It was hushed up, on a solemn and voluntary basis.
You can’t blame them, said one of Milo’s past-life voices. Imagine if Jesus had been eaten by ferrets. It wouldn’t work well, fable-wise.
The disciples and pilgrims didn’t even want to talk about it that day. As they sat around in the thousands with their rice bowls, eating the midday meal in a light, cool rain, Ompati said, “Man, I thought it was all over. You guys were underwater for a long time—”
And everyone around them got up and left.
“They don’t want to hear it,” said Milo.
“You saved his life,” insisted Ompati.
“We saved his life, I suppose. That doesn’t change the fact that he isn’t like a normal person. He’s more like a story that lives and breathes. Sometimes the story has to be edited.”
“You’re starting to sound like a wise man,” Ompati remarked.
Balbeer approached and knelt beside Milo.
“He wants you to come and see him,” he said. “Both of you.”
Oh. Cool.
Balbeer led them through the crowd to the Master’s central hut. It was a modest home with a brick foundation and a roof of fresh green pwaava leaves, as if the Master lived beneath a huge salad.
Inside, the Master sat cross-legged, eyes closed. When Milo and Ompati sat across from him, his eyes opened.
“Thank you,” said the Buddha, patting Milo on the knee, nodding at Ompati.
“You’re welcome,” they whispered.
“Of course,” said the Master, “a life is like a wave in the river. It rises and then disappears back into the river. It rises again somewhere else. The rising and falling doesn’t make a lot of difference.”
“You mean it doesn’t matter,” said Ompati, “if Milo saved your life.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said the Master, fixing his eyes on Ompati, “to the river.”
Ompati looked at the ground, corrected.
“Now,” said the Master, “meditate with me.”
Eyes closed again.
Milo closed his own eyes and tried.
Tried not to think about chickens, and why rocks were hard, and a bare-breasted woman he had glimpsed once, and string, and his belly button, and snow…
The Buddha and his traveling disciples left Sravasti in the middle of the night.
“We’re going,” whispered Balbeer, awakening Milo. “Before he has another bad day.”
“I don’t think they’ll talk about it,” yawned Milo, “even if he does. They don’t want to see it, so they don’t.”
“They’ll see it,” said Balbeer, “if it happens enough.”
They were on the road for days and days, begging food along the way. Every night, Milo and Ompati joined the Master in quiet talk and meditation. The rest of the Buddha world might want to forget the almost-drowning, but the Master himself obviously considered the young men to be good and worthy friends.
“I suck at meditating,” Milo blurted one evening. He wanted to meditate so badly, the failure was giving him stomach cramps.
The Master raised a quieting hand.
“Meditating is mostly breathing,” he said. “Breathing is our most intimate contact with the world outside ourselves. We bring it in”—the Master inhaled—“and we push it out”—and exhaled. “When we do that, the world outside becomes part of us.”
They breathed together, the three of them. In, out. In, out.
“So,” said Milo, “it doesn’t matter that I can’t help thinking about monkeys or my big toe?”
“The mind can’t help being noisy. Last night, trying to meditate, all I could think of was cats.”
“Oh,” said Milo, surprised. “What about them?”
“Nothing. Just cats, cats, cats, cats, cats, cats.”
“Cats, cats, cats, cats, cats, cats, cats,” repeated Milo. Ompati joined in.
“We’re meditating, aren’t we?” asked Milo.
“We were,” said the Master.
“I don’t get it,” said Ompati. “You’re supposed to clear your mind, but it’s okay to think about cats. You’re meditating if you think about cats, but not if you think about meditating.”
The Master closed his eyes and appeared to weigh this.
They waited awhile for him to continue, until he began to snore softly.
Sitting with Ompati at their own fire, later, Milo was silent for a long time.
Not meditating silent, just silent. Thinking.
“They say the Master has achieved Perfection,” said Milo eventually.
“It’s kind of obvious,” Ompati replied. “You know it when you see it.”
“Yeah, but it’s not what you’d expect. I mean, sure he’s all spiritual and everything, but he also has the practicality thing going on. He has trouble meditating, like me. But he makes a success of it. His mind is falling apart, but he makes a success of that, too. And then things like the tiger. That was amazing!”
The fire popped. Sparks rose, whirled, and died.
“Is there a point?” asked Ompati.
“There is. It’s this: I want Perfection.”
“Doesn’t everyone?”
“No, I don’t think so. I think most people want a little bit of it but not the whole package, where they leave the cycle of life. I think—no, I know—that I have lived thousands of lives. I may be the worst meditator ever, but I’m beginning to know things. Almost like my other lives are slipping me notes. Don’t look at me like that. Anyhow, they have been telling me—I think—that until now I never wanted real Perfection, because I never saw it in the flesh. Not like this. It’s something I’ve been rebelling against for a long time.”
“Rebelling? Against Perfection?”
“Yes. But not anymore. It’s necessary somehow. I can feel it. I’ve been fighting against becoming part of the Oversoul. But now I want that more than anything.”
Milo could hear the voices in his head dancing around and singing.
“Let me get this straight,” said Ompati. “You’ve been rebelling against Perfection, but now you’ve changed your mind because the Master is perfect but in practical, groovy ways you can understand?”
“Yeah. That’s what a teacher does, right? Gets you to understand? Well, I understand.”
The voices in his head presented him with some cool dancing lights and sitar music.
Milo hadn’t known they could do that.
“Wow,” he said. “Beautiful.”
He reached down and touched the Earth. For a moment, he could feel it turning beneath him.
“What in hell are you doing?” asked Ompati.
“I’m not sure. Something wonderful. It’s making me have to go to the bathroom.”
And this felt quite Buddha-like to him, and quite perfect, and maybe it was.
After that, a string of bad days.
If you weren’t part of the Master’s inner circle, you might not even know. If you were one of his old disciples or one of his new friends, though, it meant more work.
Balbeer dropped back through the ranks of marching pilgrims and took both Milo and Ompati by the arm. “Can you do something for the Master? He’s not at his best today.”
“Anything,” said Ompati.
“We’ll reach a village soon. Take his food bowl, and when you beg for food, fill his bowl, as well.”
They bowed. “Happily,” they said.
At the edge of the village, the disciples stood in a tight circle around the Buddha and smiled at the pilgrims as they passed with their food bowls.
“All is well,” said those smiles.
“We’re going to be late for the elephant races,” called the Master, from inside the circle.
The villagers were generous. They were always generous. Especially when Milo raised the Master’s bowl and said, “One more, if you please, for the Buddha himself.”
Afterward, he and Ompati sat among the disciples around the litter. The Master crawled out on his hands and knees to join them. They passed him his food bowl, and he ate without relish, as if eating were an afterthought. His eyes, Milo noticed, seemed far away but not empty or lost. He was working on something in that brain of his.
After a while, the Master turned to Balbeer.
“I wonder,” he said, “if you would do something for me?”
“Of course,” said Balbeer.
“When we have finished eating, will you go upstairs and tell my mother I wish to see her?”
Milo’s heart sank and took his appetite with it.
“Of course, Master,” said Balbeer, looking as if he might cry.
They rested all day at the village. Milo found a dignified old bo tree to sit under and meditated his ass off for three hours.
Cats. Rain. Trees. Love. Dogs. His penis. Night.
His mind was noisy. Nothing he could do about it. But the breathing part, that he could manage.
In. Out. Be aware of the air and the world coming in, going out.
There was something familiar about the exercise. Not because he’d been breathing all his life but because he had breathed this way before. Expertly. Consciously. He had a mental flash of his naked body floating in space….
Perfection. In some other life. But he had lost it. He didn’t recall how.
Groovy. And tragic. This time he wouldn’t lose it.
He opened his eyes. There was a noise but not a jungle noise. Voices in distress, from the outskirts of the village. Milo jogged out of the woods, to find the Master’s disciples fluttering around like panicked storks.
“What is it?” he called. “What’s wrong?”
“He’s missing,” answered Ompati, appearing at his elbow.
“Maybe Heaven has taken him!” one of his elderly disciples was saying, nearby. “Look, his robes are here. All his things are here. I tell you, he has been taken up.”
“Let’s go,” said Milo, tugging Ompati’s sleeve, and they joined a number of pilgrims to spread out through the village, searching.
It didn’t take long to find him, and, again, noise was their clue. Raised voices from down the road, from the village center. Milo and Ompati ran and discovered a small crowd gathering in the marketplace.
Peace, thought Milo. He feels better and has come to the village to teach.
The crowd parted. Milo excused his way through and found the Master standing at a market stall. He held a pomegranate in one hand, inspecting it closely.
He was stark naked.
The crowd, now that Milo glanced around, didn’t look awed or spiritual or even curious. They wore the faces of a schoolyard crowd, the faces of children who have found an injured bird to torture.
“Perhaps it is wash day,” someone suggested.
Laughter.
“It’s awfully hot,” said someone else, and someone said, “He is in the market for a tattoo!” and then someone threw a stone at him. It bounced off his shoulder.
Milo didn’t see who had thrown the stone, but Ompati did. He grabbed the young man’s arm and threw him to the ground.
Several other young men stepped forward.
Milo, who had raised his hands, lowered them.
“Peace, friend Ompati,” he said. “This isn’t what we’ve learned. It isn’t what we teach.”
He breathed in. He breathed out. The air and the crowd and the town were part of him.
He turned to the Buddha and took him by the arm, saying, “Our friends are waiting, Father.” He didn’t call him “Master.” Maybe the crowd didn’t know. They didn’t need to know. This wasn’t a story the future needed.
“I want this pomegranate,” griped the Master.
“I don’t have any money,” Milo whispered in the Buddha’s ear. “Neither do you. I’ll bring you one later.”
The Master subsided. “This one,” he said, putting the pomegranate back. “I want that one.”
“Fine. But for now we have to go.”
Ompati took the Master’s other elbow, and they steered through the crowd. The young men noticed the look in Milo’s eyes, which was a look of peaceful power he had gained, like an ocean wave, and they parted before him. Some even bowed and looked ashamed. They noticed the look in Ompati’s eyes, as if he wanted an excuse to kick someone in the balls, and they made way for that, too.
After they dropped the Master off with his old friends, Milo went back into the trees, alone. He found the bo tree again and sat down to think.
You wouldn’t call it meditating. Meditating didn’t look like this, with the furrowed brow and the dark eyes. It was the look of a man who is trying to find courage.
The Master needed help.
The kind of help he needed was so, so difficult. He needed an act of Perfection.
Milo meditated on that for a while.
Part of meditating was knowing when to put meditation aside and get up and go do something.
So he got up. He left the trees, carrying his food bowl. He asked Balbeer for the Master’s food bowl and walked into the village.
“Wait up,” called Ompati, running behind him.
They begged enough food for themselves and the Master. Milo made a pitch for some coins, too, and their last stop was the marketplace, where they bought the Buddha his pomegranate.
Sitting around the litter an hour later, Milo noticed a brighter look in the Master’s eye.
“How do you feel, Master?” he asked.
The Master didn’t answer right away. He looked at Milo for a long time, without blinking. Then he looked at the sky.
“I feel good, Milo,” he said. “Thank you. It is an excellent evening.”
They all felt good. The evening was warm and filled with birdsong. Flying clouds laced the sky like shredded cotton, turning gold at the edges as the sun slipped away.
“I won’t preach tonight,” said the Buddha. “Let’s have music instead.”
So they had music. Villagers came with rudra veena and lyre.
The sunset colors spun from gold into pink and purple and dark. The stars brightened and began to turn, and the Master ate his pomegranate. Half of it, anyway. The other half he handed off to Ompati.
Green eyes surrounded them, glowing in the brush. They moved and came closer. Shadows like tiny people.
“Monkeys,” whispered Ompati. As soon as he said this, an old grandmother baboon walked out of the dark and sat gazing at him in the firelight. She reached out with a thin dark paw and let her fingers rest on his knee.
The stars turned. The rudra veena sang.
“It’s okay, friend Ompati,” said the Master. “You’ve taken no vow of celibacy that I recall.”
The disciples’ laughter drowned the music for a time.
In the morning, the Master felt unwell.
“I think we will stay here another day,” Balbeer announced.
At noon, the Master felt worse.
“Say prayers,” asked Balbeer. To Milo, he said, “Take the Master’s bowl and see if you can bring back some kale, some aloe, and some didi juice. Something bad has got into him. We need to get it out.”
Balbeer’s voice was calm and even, but Milo saw real fear in his eyes.
He did as he was asked, and when Milo returned, Balbeer and the disciples were sitting in a loose circle around the sleeping Master, looking grave.
“Set it down,” said Balbeer. “He won’t take anything.”
They all pretended to meditate.
The sun crept down the sky.
Ompati mixed leftover fruits and greens into a salad and split it with Milo for a snack.
The Master stirred after a while. He sat up and then, despite Balbeer’s remonstrances, stood. Hunched at first, and looking a little green, but then he straightened up and peered around at them all with his cosmic eyes.
“I am going to die,” he announced.
Voices clamored, but the Master raised a hand and silenced them all.
“Why should this bother you?” he chided. “I’m eighty years old. My soul is going out into the Everything. Be happy for me.”
His stomach made a horrible noise.
“If you would,” he said, “please ask in the village if they would bring some blankets and pillows and make for me a bed in that grove, just there.” He pointed to some sal trees, not far away. Then he excused himself and made for the woods at an awkward trot.
By late afternoon, they all knew. Every last pilgrim and student and hanger-on had gathered in the sal-tree grove, in concentric circles, with downcast eyes. The Master had arranged himself on a mound of simple blankets, resting his head on a nice tasseled pillow. His face was greener than before, but he appeared composed.
“Listen,” he said. “I just want to clear something up, so there’s no confusion when I’m gone. I haven’t chosen anyone to take my place. I don’t want you guys to keep hiking around India; we look like a circus. Split up. Go home. Spread what you’ve learned.”
“What does Perfection feel like?” cried a desperate voice, somewhere in the grove.
“How do you feel right now?” asked the Buddha.
“Sad,” answered the voice. “Scared.”
“That’s what Perfection feels like,” said the Master. “Don’t worry. In a while, it will feel different.”
Soft voices, confusion.
“Listen,” said the Master, coughing. “Don’t search the ends of the Earth looking for your happiness. Perfection is being happy with what you are right now.”
“What if you’re an asshole?” someone called.
The Master offered a weak smile. “I doubt very much,” he said, “that many happy people are assholes.”
Then he died.
Ompati stared off into space. His eyes glazed with shock.
“His last word was ‘assholes,’ ” he observed.
“I don’t think he would have minded,” said Milo. Then he said, “Look!” and pointed. Lots of people were pointing.
Flowers were dropping from the sal-tree branches. Light red blossoms fluttered like moths on their way to the ground, drifting over the dead Master, over the grass, and over the pilgrims.
“That’s better,” said Ompati.
Milo found his bo tree once again and had a seat.
He would meditate. What else could he do?
He could go back to Moosa. Why not? No one needed to hear the teachings of the Master more than the idiots of Moosa.
Ducks, he thought, closing his eyes. Cats. The moon. Death. The wind.
He could hear the villagers at a distance, gathering over in the sal-tree grove. They would let the Master lie there for some time that way, so that he could be seen. In three days, like it or not, they’d have to cremate him.
Maybe they’ll let me have some of the ashes, he thought.
Did he deserve that? He still didn’t know.
He hoped his older voices and past lives would offer some kind of remark, but the voices had gone eerily silent. He was left with a feeling that they had been super-happy with him and that he had screwed this up.
“Open your eyes,” said Ompati’s voice. “You know you can’t meditate for shit, so just open your damn eyes.”
Milo opened his eyes.
Ompati stood before him.
“You did it, didn’t you?”
Milo squinted. He looked up at the sky.
“I don’t know…” Milo began.
“Don’t dishonor yourself!” Ompati shouted.
“All right,” said Milo. “Yes. I did it. I found a mushroom in the woods before I went to beg for his dinner. A certain kind of mushroom. I mashed some of it into the pomegranate I brought him. There you are. That’s your answer.”
Ompati trembled visibly. “Why?” he asked.
“You know why. His story is more important than his life. He knew it. We all know it. I did something that was necessary. I am, perhaps, his greatest friend.”
Was this true? He felt doubtful. He could hear his soul voices, darkly muttering.
He would meditate on it, he decided, all the way back to Moosa.
“I’m sorry,” said Ompati.
“Sorry for what?” asked Milo.
“I’m afraid I mixed the uneaten half of the Master’s pomegranate into a salad.”
Milo’s stomach gave a seasick lurch.
“Yes?” he asked.
“The salad we split for a snack, earlier.”
A bird called. Milo watched the moon among tree branches.
“Ah,” he said. “Well, the wave returns to the river.”
“Indeed,” said Ompati, sitting down beside him.
Together, they waited, meditating about beets and monsoons and gods and brothels and other fine things they had known.
They breathed in. They breathed out.
“Cats,” said Milo.
“Shhh,” said his friend.