Those who yearn to see me
with trust and noble intent
single-mindedly desiring to see the Buddha,
not hesitating even if it costs them their lives,
then I and the assembly of monks
appear together on Vulture Peak.
—LOTUS SUTRA, CHAPTER XVI
I kept hiking up the hill for what seemed like another hour, the day warming but still pleasant, the air clearer with each step I climbed. The path skirted the entrances to a couple of caves. I was about to explore when I noticed a wall, the edge of some structure half hidden by the peak above me. I continued upward. The path spiraled into stairs and then opened onto a spacious platform built into the mountaintop, surrounded on three sides by a low brick wall. In the center was a smaller enclosure, also framed by a ridge of brick. The space was empty; there was nothing to suggest how it was used. The weathered bricks might have been ancient. They reminded me of archaeological sites I had seen not far from our village, where brick foundations hinted at a rich and complex world that was now almost erased.
I’m describing what I saw, but it doesn’t explain the unutterable sense of peace that I felt in this place. The receding hills framed the long view of the valley below, its business dwarfed to invisibility. The silence was vast. I felt suspended in the sky and yet sheltered by the slope of the neighboring peak and the rocks jutting behind me. After the strangeness of the journey, a safe harbor. As if the earth embraced me. I had been propelled here by something I didn’t understand, but understanding it didn’t matter. It was enough to have arrived.
I sat there for a long time, giving myself over to the calm. The sun was growing hot and sleepiness came over me. The two nights on the road were catching up with me. I decided to go back down to the caves to find a place to sleep. I had made up my mind that I would be staying here. I would be a hermit and this would be my home.
Back at the caves I found a sign, rusting and barely legible, in the bushes. The Indian Archaeological Society was informing me that these caves might be the stone houses seen by the Chinese pilgrim Hiuen Tsang on Gridhakuta Hill in the seventh century A.D. Such cryptic notes were a familiar feature of the landscape, and might have launched a lecture from any one of the historians in my family. But I didn’t recognize the names and there was no one volunteering an explanation.
One of the caves was the very perfection of the idea of a cave: a smooth floor, a ceiling just high enough, a room just deep enough. I used my foot to scoot the dried cow dung out of my new home and sat on the ground. I leaned against the back wall and closed my eyes.
“Boy!” I jumped out of my skin at the shout. “What are you doing here?” The words were barked with authority by a man with a rifle standing in my doorway, wearing the khakis and beret of the Indian Forest Service. As I came out, the sunlight blinded me for a moment. A second man stood nearby, also armed.
I explained that I would be staying in the cave, living a hermit’s life. The first man told me that I was too young for that—though he spoke respectfully now, no doubt less in deference to my spiritual intentions than to the subtle markers of class and education that separated us. Besides, he said, there were snakes and wild animals in the area. There were even tigers not so long ago. It wasn’t a good place to be alone. But I should visit the temple on the other peak, and he directed me to a fork in the path below us. From there a second path zigzagged up the larger mountain and met the landing of the chairlift I had seen earlier. The Forest Service had a post there, and the temple was above it.
Another twenty minutes’ hike brought me to the site, and my first glimpse of a world unlike anything I had ever encountered. There was a huge white dome—a stupa, as I would learn—surrounded by terraces, with golden statues framed in arches on four sides. Beyond it was a smaller temple, also white. There are many buildings that one might casually describe as white, but in India it goes without saying that white is yellowed with age or streaked with the stains of bleeding concrete and spreading mold. This was a pristine, unblemished chalky white of stunning brightness, embellished with gleaming gold and bright yellow trim, that suggested unparalleled cleanliness, and a care in the maintenance of a physical place that was beyond anything I had ever seen.
As if in proof of this care, the only person I could find was a man busy cleaning. I tried to explain to him that I had been displaced from the cave, and was hoping to stay. He took measure of the situation and said I should talk to a person he called Baba, who was at another temple downstairs. “Downstairs” meant down the mountain, where I could get a horse cart to take me back into town to the hot springs. Then it would be a short walk from there. If I got lost I should ask for the Japanese temple. I was beginning to unravel from exhaustion and hunger, but as long as the next step was clear, I kept going.
At the entrance to the temple grounds was an imposing gateway where a small group of laborers sat on strike, chanting slogans half-heartedly. I couldn’t decipher their demands from the words, but I hesitated. Crossing a picket line seemed sacrilege. One of the elders of my family, Basawon Sinha, was a father of India’s labor movement. He worked alongside Jai Prakash Narayan (popularly known as J.P.) to found trade unions in the coal mines, railways, and sugar mills of Bihar. Basawon Sinha could make speeches for three or four hours at a stretch without losing the crowd’s interest, and he transferred that skill to enthralling me and my cousins with his stories—of leaving school as a boy not much older than I was now to answer Gandhi’s call to fight for India, of the years he spent in a British prison, with hunger strikes and a daring escape, of traveling in disguise through Afghanistan, which meant growing a beard and going to the mosque and praying five times a day…
“You didn’t eat beef, did you?” I teased him with mock horror.
“Do you think I’m going to tell you all my secrets?”
He had passed away just a few months earlier, and though his was a long life well-lived, I was sad that the stories had slipped away with him. Whatever the strike at the temple was about, I decided that he would have wanted me to find my own adventure, and not stop at the gate when it had hardly begun. In any case, the strikers didn’t seem concerned whether I crossed or not. To them I was just a kid.
I entered into another version of that alien world I had glimpsed atop the mountain. The temple here was much larger but in a similar style, pristine white trimmed with yellow-gold, approached by a white marble staircase guarded by gold-painted lions. In front of the temple stood a huge stone monolith carved with Japanese characters in gold. They seemed far more complex than any other kind of writing I had ever seen, vibrating with an intense beauty. And again the cleanliness, the attention to detail.
I had seen countless Hindu temples, from the small shrines where Hanuman’s red banner waved on a bamboo pole planted in holy basil in almost every village in the region to the teeming complexes that drew thousands of pilgrims on holy days. I’d visited several of the great temples with my family as part of the preparation for my thread ceremony, and found them disturbingly dirty. The filthy environment was not only unpleasant but felt wrong, as did the priests who would fold a request for money right into their mantras without even a pause for breath: Om Kali, maha Kali, takadin, takadin…I could do an imitation of their shameless begging that would make my sisters laugh.
In my own village there was a small temple dedicated to my family’s lineage. It contained nothing more than seven small mounds of earthen clay. No statues, no painted images, no color at all other than smudges of red powder that people would rub on the mounds. One of those faceless lumps was called by the name of the goddess Bhu Devi, Mother Earth. Family and neighbors would come together in the morning to the well that my grandfather had dug right next to the temple. They would draw water to wash themselves, and then light a stick of incense and offer a prayer in the temple before going out to the fields or wherever their work took them.
So I had experienced, without giving it too much thought, a broad range of possibilities of what a temple might be or how the divine might be represented, from the humblest abstraction to the full Technicolor satin-and-sequins extravaganza. But there was nothing in my experience to compare to the very particular flavor of what surrounded me here. A calm intensity, an extremity of care, a mastery of detail. And holding it all like a heartbeat was the deep, booming sound of a drum beating a perfectly steady rhythm.
I followed the sound up the stairs and into the temple. The room was huge, a pillared hall of gleaming white, with an elaborate altar as high as the ceiling that glittered with gold. But my eyes were fixed on the drum, bigger than a barrel, which boomed to the rhythm of two polished batons in the hands of a man with a shaved head, wearing a white tunic and bright yellow robe. He was chanting along with the rhythm, but I couldn’t make sense of the words at all.
I walked the length of the hall and opened the gate of the low wooden barrier that separated the drum and altar from the rest of the room. The drummer looked startled but he didn’t stop beating until I sat down on the floor beside him. The sticks rested in his lap as he looked at me. He must be Japanese, I guessed.
“We’ve been expecting you,” he said. He spoke in Hindi, very softly. His words startled me but they were of a piece with so much else that was profoundly strange that day. I didn’t dare ask what he meant, whether for fear of breaking the spell or of seeming rude, or just the uncertainty of finding myself in a universe that worked by unknown rules. For all I knew, this was a routine greeting among such people. So I said simply, “I’m here.”
“Have you eaten yet?” I shook my head. “Let me finish the prayers and then we’ll eat.” He raised the sticks and brought them down on the drum head, then began chanting steadily and forcefully with the rhythm. The sound vibrated through my bones.
While he continued, my eyes were drawn to the altar. A canopy of dangling gold ornaments hung above an array of statues, flowers, lamps, bells, and much else that filled the wall. In the middle of all this, dwarfed by the dazzling complexity that surrounded it but unmistakably at the very center, was a framed photograph. The elderly man staring out across the room was the one who had appeared to me so many times.
Yes, I had come to the right place. He was real, not a figment of my imagination. I could guess now that he was Japanese, though in the dreams and visions I had not recognized that he was foreign. In any case, I would surely meet him very soon now.
There was a small kitchen where the drummer, whose name I learned was Reverend Nabatame, made chai. We sat at a table just outside the kitchen and ate a breakfast of chai with chapatis and a little honey. By that time I was starving. Simple as it was, no meal has ever tasted quite so good.
I waited for Nabatame to say something, or ask a question, but he volunteered nothing in the way of conversation. I’ve never been shy. Even as a child I could talk easily with strangers: ask a farmer how the crops are doing, like a grown-up would. But it seemed wiser to follow Nabatame’s example and say only what was necessary. So I said what felt urgent: “I would like to stay here.”
“The laborers are on strike. If you stay, you will have to help me do the cleaning as well as the prayers.”
“That’s fine.”
We ate quickly and nothing more was said. That would be the way all our meals were shared. Right after breakfast the cleaning started. Nabatame changed into a T-shirt and an orange robe that he wrapped like a skirt, and we got down on our hands and knees to clean the marble floors with a wet cloth. Eventually I learned that the laborers who normally did the cleaning were striking because they wanted their jobs made permanent, as government employees, but the temple didn’t have authority to offer such jobs. Nabatame dealt with both the laborers and the convoluted bureaucracy with unshakeable calm. Meanwhile he was content to do the cleaning himself as long as necessary.
That floor was my challenge for many hours, many days. I had never done manual labor before. To be honest, I’d never had to do routine household chores either, as there were always servants to take care of such things at home. So there was an element of novelty in cleaning the floor, though it wore off long before the job was finished. It seemed the work would never end, and yet I enjoyed it. The perfection of the brilliant white marble offered its own pleasure, but even more, I was eager to belong here and to make myself useful. And I was spurred on by the photograph on the altar, excited with the anticipation of meeting this person. I kept a watch out for him, alert to the sound of footsteps on the stairs, a car pulling up to the gate. But he didn’t appear all that day; few people came and went for that matter.
After a quick silent lunch of more chai, chapatis, and some vegetables, we continued cleaning until it was time for prayers again. Nabatame changed into his robes and sat at the big drum. I sat beside him. He gave me a hand drum and I followed along with him. The rhythm was very simple; there was really nothing to learn. The chanting was also simple, just seven syllables repeated endlessly: namu myoho renge kyo. Nabatame made an effort to enunciate clearly until he was confident that I could say it correctly.
That was the sum total of the lessons offered. Nabatame didn’t explain what the Japanese words meant, or what the purpose was for drumming or chanting. And I didn’t ask. It wasn’t that I felt intimidated. At school I was never shy to ask my teachers questions when my curiosity ran ahead of the lesson plan. At home, when the adults’ conversation turned to history or politics, they welcomed questions. They were proud when you asked a good question, and if you didn’t ask, they would frame the questions themselves that they thought you should be asking.
But I sensed that things were done differently here, and I trusted that explanations would come in their own good time. Or maybe I had to earn them? A spiritual quest would involve learning, but it would be a different kind of learning: not just information but learning that changed you. In the meantime, I was happy to sit beside the big drum and give myself over to the giant heartbeat and the vibration throughout my body. The endless repetition of the chanting and drumming seemed to echo the careful monotony of wiping the wet cloth over the marble floor. Perhaps something inside me would be very slowly polished, made to shine.
At one point Nabatame stopped the chant to recite a long text in Japanese, marking the rhythm by hitting a round wooden block carved like a fish, which made a piercing tak-tak-tak sound. I just listened. This recitation also would become familiar with repetition over many days, until certain phrases jumped out from the jumble of sound. And sometimes we would sit still for a long time, and I understood that it was important not to wiggle or scratch or brush away a fly—not to move for any reason at all. But again, there were no explanations.
I slept that night in the guest room, deeply and soundly, until the drum boomed out in the darkness. I found my way back to the temple and sat down beside Nabatame. We chanted and drummed together for a couple of hours as dawn crept up and my marble floor glowed pink at first under the windows, with blue shadows, and then the pink and blue faded into white.
Over breakfast, I couldn’t hold back any longer. “Where is that…person?” I hesitated because I didn’t know what to call him, but even as I said it, it sounded rude.
“Which person?”
“In the photograph, on the altar.”
“Ah. He is a monk. We call him Most Venerable Fujii Guruji, our dear teacher.” He was correcting my rudeness gently, without a hint of scolding, in much the same tone as one might use to draw a young child’s attention to some small wonder of nature.
“Where is he?” My question seemed to surprise him.
“He died four years ago.” It was my turn to be surprised, and more than a little disappointed. But even though the news was confusing, something else was suddenly clear. Bhikshu. The Hindi word for monk that Nabatame had used to describe his teacher was vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t have said exactly what it meant. And yet, now that I had a word for these people, my decision was made in almost the same moment. Bhikshu. That’s what I wanted to be.
I had no awareness then of what a monk’s life was, beyond the days that I shared with Nabatame. I knew nothing of rules or monastic community. My romantic notions of a spiritual quest might have been colored by comic book epics where rishis lived in caves and heroes disappeared into the forest for years to meditate so that the gods would grant them superhuman powers in battle. But I held no such fantastic illusions. I wasn’t here to gain magical powers. And yet those stories held a kernel of truth, an urgent pulse inside an old metaphor that was leading me somewhere I had no choice but to follow.
I knew that part of the story was a sacrifice. I had to give up my ordinary life. As I swiped the damp cloth back and forth on the floor, I thought about what I was leaving behind—all that I had.
And I had everything. I had parents who were strict but loving and gave me far more credence than most kids got. I had sisters who were allies, seventy cousins—no lack of playmates—and grandparents who doted on me. I had orchards of mangoes and lychees and guavas that stretched to the horizon to play in, and in some remote calculus they actually belonged to me. I had Balram Bhaiya, the noblest of sidekicks, an employee in name, but in spirit my beloved elder brother. He knew every inch of our land, and which trees would ripen when. He could make a bow that was not just a toy, and arrows that flew straight, and he taught me how to shoot down mangoes from the trees. He was Drona to my Arjuna and our story ran from morning till night. He may have been the one who gave me my nickname—Khilari, the player, the sportsman. Always in motion. I was Priyadarshi at school and Priyadarshi was how Nabatame knew me, but at home I was Khilari, and when the old Ambassador pulled into Vishnupur Titirah, and I ran to kiss my grandparents’ feet and then ran out looking for Balram Bhaiya, the shout would go up from house to house, “Khilari’s in the village!”
But that was child’s play and I had put it aside. The journey that had brought me to the temple at Rajgir was not make believe. I was learning silence and solitude, the skills of a recluse. Khilari was learning how to sit still.
I was eager to show Nabatame that I would be a good apprentice, that I was serious and hardworking, that he should let me stay. He was not one to reveal his feelings—he always looked stern but spoke gently when he spoke at all—but I sensed that I was a puzzle to him. He was used to dealing with Indian laborers and local businesses for the temple’s practical needs, and sometimes young people would come to ask advice about studying or working in Japan. Most of the visitors to the temple were Japanese, whether tourists or pilgrims who were traveling to Buddhist holy places, or hippies hoping the temple might have a hostel. I didn’t fit into any known category.
After lunch we would often take a break from the cleaning. Sometimes Nabatame had other business to take care of. Whenever there was time I took the opportunity to go “upstairs.” A car might be headed up for some reason, and I would ask for a ride, or else find a horse cart. I didn’t linger at the stupa or the small temple. The haven of peace on top of Gridhakuta—Vulture Peak—was where I wanted to be.
There was something special that drew me here, a serenity that was vibrant and charged, nothing sleepy about it. After hours of drumming and chanting, or the endless rhythm of polishing the floor, the stillness at the peak came as a jolt that wiped the senses clean and held the world suspended in clarity. I watched, barely breathing, as the slow shadow of a cloud drifted across the hills. A hawk rode the currents above the valley, almost motionless for long minutes. A thorn bush etched pale angles and edges over dusty ground, where an ant threaded its way through the sparse leaves of dry grass.
In the solitude there was a fullness. It wasn’t lonely. On the contrary, I felt protected, embraced. There was company here even if I couldn’t see them. When I learned from Nabatame that it was here on the peak that the Buddha, surrounded by listeners, first taught the sutra we were chanting day in and day out, the feeling made sense. There was something still powerfully alive here centuries later, echoes that the centuries hadn’t erased.
Every time I returned to the peak, the feeling overwhelmed me again. I was home. I belonged here. I knew it with a certainty like the last piece of a puzzle clicking into place. This was where I felt complete, in a way that I had never felt anywhere else in my short life.
It was one such day, when I had come back from Vulture Peak to the temple downstairs and just started working on the floor again, that everything fell apart.
“Khilari!” a voice shouted. I froze where I knelt with the rag in my hand.