Are you looking for me? I am in the next seat.
My shoulder is against yours.
You will not find me in the stupas, not in Indian shrine rooms, nor in synagogues, nor in cathedrals:
not in masses, nor kirtans, not in legs winding around your own neck, nor in eating nothing but vegetables.
When you really look for me, you will see me instantly—
you will find me in the tiniest house of time.
Kabir says: Student, tell me, what is God?
He is the breath inside the breath.
—KABIR
“Did you think that all religious people were saints? Or that Buddhism is so pure that it has no place for politics?” My mother’s words stung all the more painfully for the kernel of truth they contained.
The same summer that I traveled to Nepal, my father was transferred to New Delhi, which was the reason for the urgent phone messages from Okonogi calling me to return home quickly. The family’s move toppled my precariously balanced life and I lost my safe haven at the temple in Kolkata. In Delhi, I was living with my parents once again and they took the opportunity to raise the temperature on their campaign to disabuse me of religion.
This time I had no escape. I had found my way to the small Japanese temple located near Gandhi’s ashram in Delhi, but the welcome there was ambivalent. The nun in charge had been working for many years on a plan to build a stupa similar to the one at Rajgir, a complex and ambitious project that ran into constant bureaucratic obstacles in the capital. I was recruited to help with small tasks, moving paperwork through the system, which was not onerous in itself, but afforded me an uncomfortably close view of something I really didn’t want to see.
There was another Japanese temple in the city, attended by a monk who had similar aspirations to build a stupa. The slow friction of their years-old competition was masked by Japanese politeness, but revealed itself in slights and snubs, in backhanded interventions and subtle jockeying for advantage. It demoralized me utterly.
It shook me profoundly to realize that monks and nuns could sink to jealousy, one-upmanship, and the confusion that seems to follow money like a hungry dog. Those I had come to know up to that point—whom I revered as elders and teachers—all seemed immune to provocation, skillful at deflecting trouble without avoiding it, unshakeable in their equanimity, poise, and patience. I knew that the hostility I was observing was wrong, but that very judgment sullied me too with disrespect for those I should have been able to look up to.
Saddest of all was the irony that this small-minded feud had attached itself to the building of a structure meant to symbolize the Buddha’s mind: limitless, all-embracing, and unstained by such warped thinking. Again and again I asked myself: Was this so hard to figure out? They each wanted to build a stupa. Why couldn’t they just work together?
The phone rang and my mother answered. “Khilari, it’s for you.” She covered the mouthpiece with her hand and whispered, “It’s the nun from the temple.”
I shook my head. “I’m not here.”
In the tension that I couldn’t hide, the sadness and avoidance, my mother sensed an opening and she probed it. “So you thought religion was above petty politics? You thought your monks and nuns were enlightened beings?” Where my father might lecture on the inevitable corruption of religious systems, the exploitation of the ignorant by the priesthood, and the opiate of the masses, my mother was direct and personal. “They brainwash you until you don’t even see what they’re doing. You lose touch with reality and believe their nonsense.”
Our move to Delhi also meant that I was settling into a new high school at a critical time, coming up to the prelim exams to qualify for the national board exams the next year, and the ensuing cascade of college and career options. It was becoming clear that there would be no end to the forced march into the future that my parents had planned for me. When they weren’t holding forth with rational historicism, or how so-and-so was making his mother happy with professional success, marriage, and grandchildren, they could infuriate me with pronouncements that were Brahmanical in their resistance to questioning. “You can’t be ordained without our permission, so you’ll just have to wait until our death.”
The night before the exams were to start, the familiar arguments escalated into shouting and threats. “Why should I bother to sit for the prelims?” At the suggestion of passive resistance, my father’s eyes grew big with fear, and he lashed back with his old threat to have the Japanese monks deported.
Hours later I was still in tears, sitting alone on the tiny balcony that I had claimed as my shrine. It was barely a room, walled with fiberglass sheets, attached to the apartment but not of it; but it held my statues, my photograph of Fujii Guruji, and my precious books. There was just enough room to sleep on the floor.
My father pushed open the door and sat on the floor beside me. We both faced the shrine, our backs to the wall, as if we needed some mediating force, not quite ready to face each other. In the dim glow that the city night diffused through the fiberglass, I could see that tears were streaming down his cheeks. So often I had seen him smolder and flare, or turn to silent stone, but I had never before seen him weeping. “I don’t know what you want to do.” His voice shook. “I would like to support you in your endeavors, but I cannot, you understand, because of the family’s social status. And because I cannot, you are shortening my life.”
Those words stayed with me through the night. They hung in the shuffling quiet of the exam hall and pushed my pen across the page for long hours. I was in two places at once, pulling answers out of some reluctant but automatic portion of memory, and standing on the edge of a deep hole, looking down into darkness. The whole point of Dharma was to bring an end to suffering. Yet everything I was doing was creating suffering for the people closest to me.
The temple offered no relief from home and home was no escape from the temple. It didn’t matter which channel I turned to, there was a drama playing that wanted to suck me in. On each side I could see that the histrionics were unnecessary and unhelpful, the subplots were taking us in repeated circles, each and every one of the characters was creating their own misery and blaming it on someone else. I could see that it was all unreal—I was disillusioned in the truest sense of the word.
A few days after exams finished, I lay restless, unable to sleep. In the darkness a faint sound reached me and for a moment it silenced the pounding of my mind. It was music. Not the tinny blare of a transistor radio or a temple loudspeaker—these were unfiltered human voices, far enough away that the melody wouldn’t have been audible over the traffic noise of daytime, but intermittently clear in the late-night lull. As if, through some luck of acoustics, clarity glanced off the back-alley walls, beckoning: Come just a few steps closer.
I got up, slipped out of the house in kurta and pajamas, and followed the sound through the shadowy alleys, the padlocked night face of the Karol Bagh neighborhood. Block by block it grew clearer, layered: the throb of a drum, a phrase repeated, voices conjoined, then one spiraling off. I stood in front of a large house, the upper story pulsing. The door was unlocked. The voices swept me in and up the staircase, into a high-ceilinged room that boomed with the praises of Krishna. Some forty people, men and women, were singing and dancing in a swaying sea of orange. I sat in a corner and let the chanting soothe me, relaxed into the ebbing, flowing unison. The rhythm of the mridangam accelerated in a brief frenzy, paused, signaled a shift. A lone voice began the familiar phrases of a Bengali devotional song, and the many voices echoed, the harmony swelling beneath them. Within moments I was carried off, swaying and singing, rising on the waves of sound.
I was flotsam and jetsam on a happy sea. My feet were pounding the rhythm, I was leaping from side to side, my arms flung wide, a simple bliss dragged out from some hiding place by the centrifugal force of the dance. The cymbals shook dust from my bones and my voice rose loud with the rest of the crowd.
How many hours was I bobbing, light and empty, on those waves of praise? Maybe four, five? It ended at the edge of dawn. I sat for a moment to catch my breath as the room was emptying, and a man who had caught my eye again and again in the swirling crowd came up to me. He was tiny, almost elfin, elderly by the evidence of his wrinkled face, but his bouncing endurance called that into question. His eyes glittered with glee under the bold V of the tilaka painted on his forehead, and he said to me: “Tomar dharmo de eto anando pabajai ki?”
The words were Bengali and I understood them: Is there so much joy in your religion? As I walked home through the alleys that were pink with dawn, feeling lighter than I had in months, the question turned over and over in my mind. The very asking, the very shape of the words on the tongue, seemed radiant with joy. The question took a grand somersault over the roof of circumstance—it was true that joy had abandoned my home and was conspicuously absent from the temples in Delhi. And yet here it was welling up inside me. Nothing had shifted on the horizon, and yet everything had shifted inside.
My parents were up already when I got home. I explained that I couldn’t sleep and had gone for a walk. The mood at breakfast was oddly calm and easy, as if we had all simply exhaled and started afresh. I tried to nap for a while, but I was wide awake, electrified, brimming with energy.
Is there so much joy in your religion? The question spun me around. That beaming smile was an affirmation, a welcome, a knowing wink, but the question was also a gentle chiding. What had become of the joy, that most delicate tuning of the heart, that I encountered at Rajgir? My mind had turned brittle with ritual and righteous adherence to rules. Stubborn determination had been driving my practice for a long time. What was the point of religion if it was joyless and tiring? And where was this joy coming from now—not the kinetic discharge of the dance, releasing long-impacted tension, but the calm, clear feeling that lay underneath it? It was as if the music and dancing had popped the top off a bottle, and after the fizz had subsided I could see into it—there was no container at all, just a bottomless pool of light.
A teacher who could say so much with so little, who could crack open the world with a single question, was a teacher I needed to talk to. A question would be the beginning of a conversation. There would be more questions, and there would be someone to hear these groping intimations, and understand. I had to return to the temple and find him.
The alleys were transformed by the midday glare. Anticipation played tricks with distance as I retraced my steps uncertainly until the face of the house came into view, entirely familiar. The door was unlocked as it had been the night before. I slipped inside, blinded for a moment in the dim. The halls were silent, even as I could hear the song echoing in my mind. I walked up the stairs. Which door was it?
“Yes? You are looking for something?” He stood on the landing, had followed me up. Not a face I could remember singing, not one of the dancers.
“I was here last night. In the temple. At the kirtan.”
“Not possible. There was no one here last night.”
“But the temple is here?”
He opened the door as if in affirmation. Yes, this was the room, but empty. “We were not doing kirtan last night.”
“There was a swami-ji. Very small. He was bald. He spoke Bengali.”
“It is only me here today, no one else.”
I scanned the room. There was no doubt: the statue of Krishna, deep blue and smiling in his niche, the faded orange bunting, the tile floor cool under my feet, the photographs…Hung high on the wall at the far side of the room were three framed portraits—photographs, though one, the largest, oldest, most imposing, was so retouched as to seem a drawing. But beside it was a fresher face, the eyes creased, as if with laughter, under a bald dome. “That’s him!”
My guide look startled. He shook his head vigorously. “Not possible.” His head kept shaking, as if he were trying to dislodge something from his ear. “Not possible.”
“Where is swami-ji? I need to see him.”
“Are you sure it was him? Not possible.”
His repetition was exasperating.
“Yes, it was him. I want to talk to him.”
“Maharaj-ji passed away five years ago.”
I felt my hair stand up.
I was right in my intuition that the mysterious Bengali’s question about joy was the beginning of an important conversation, one that continues even today. It doesn’t matter that he hasn’t been present to hold up his half of the dialogue. I should have known by then that teachers come and go on their own schedule. From Fujii Guruji’s first uncalled-for appearances to the anxious tedium of my long vigil with Shinozaki, I clearly wasn’t in charge of the timetable and it wasn’t my place to specify how a teacher should teach.
That simple question had taken me by surprise. Not only was joy absent from my life at that time, the possibility that there might be an essential bond between joy and religion had not entered my young mind. In my map of the world, the path that led to enlightenment traversed a terrain of vows and discipline and devotion. I had tasted joy, certainly, but it wasn’t on the map. Something had just happened—invisible lines now popping into focus—which might not have happened if the swami had not appeared.
Meanwhile my interlocutor had vanished into thin air, as if to say, with that impish grin, “Forget about me! You have your question.” I had only that single brief and ephemeral encounter with him, in the midst of an experience that was somehow unmoored from the physical world. My memory can barely reconstruct a visual image, but the sound of his voice remains perfectly vivid, and that lone question has served as a koan. In that sense the man I danced alongside that night was as truly a teacher as any other individual I have encountered.
Teachers don’t come to us on our own terms. The teaching—what we need to learn—does not come to us on our terms. It’s hardly an exaggeration to say that the entire Buddhist tradition, everything that has been passed down in lineage from teacher to student for two and a half millennia, is encapsulated in that. The whole point is that our preexisting notions are a voice crying from inside the distorted worldview that needs to be unlearned. As long as we insist that the lesson plan has to proceed according to our expectations, nothing a teacher says or does will make a difference.
The tradition remembers countless stories of students who endured tests of patience and fortitude to engage with a teacher. A student meditates for twelve long years to be rewarded, once, by a single visitation. Atisha sails from India to Sumatra to find his teacher, surviving storms, shipwrecks, and sea monsters. Marpa refused to teach Milarepa until he first built him a tower, stone by hand-hewn stone. Then Milarepa had to tear it down and rebuild it three more times at the teacher’s whim. And the teacher refused to accept even that fourth and final construction—a tower so sturdy that it stands today, ten centuries later, as if in witness that this was no fairy tale—until Milarepa had hauled out its cornerstone from underneath it and replaced it with another.
It’s easy to misplace the heart of these stories. If we read them as advertisements for the rarity and preciousness of what is to be gained—anything that demands so much effort must surely be worthwhile—we are applying a cost-benefit analysis in a domain where that logic is irrelevant, not to mention the deterrent of a bar set so high it seems the stuff of legend. The same calculation applies if we read Sisyphean endurance as a performance of devotion, proof that the student is worthy. We are bringing a transactional mindset to the spiritual project when we say that sacrifice is “rewarded,” that the prize is “worthwhile,” the student is “worthy.” There is fallacy built into the very structure of habitual thought and the language we default to. As if there were some comparable scale of value by which one could weigh worldly patience against unworldly outcome. As if the bean-counting arbiter who keeps the ledger in the back of our mind were the final authority.
The whole point of the exercise is that we can’t set the terms.
If we frame our terms in the language of psychology and read the student’s submission to the teacher’s demands as a protocol for breaking down the ego, it seems to make sense, but the translation is not entirely accurate. Western students who try to recreate a student-teacher relationship in the image of Eastern tradition too often misinterpret giving up control as giving up responsibility, as permission to regress. Far from dismantling the ego, the ego looms childishly large. Out come the shadow projections that reshape the entire idea of what a teacher is: the missing father, the parent to be pleased, the surrogate of all and everything. The transactional expectation, the quid pro quo, kicks in at a child’s level: I’ll submit, but only if you comfort and care for me. The student then values the relationship in proportion to access and proximity. Membership in the inner circle is the prize. Aside from the fact that the dynamic is ripe for abuse, it’s ineffectual. Ego’s voice undermines every experience, every interaction, demanding the comfort of belonging and identity. It’s a setup for the kind of disappointment that will lead us to walk away from the half-built tower.
We’re still dictating our terms, setting artificial conditions that sabotage the project. It never occurs to us that these terms could collapse. Indeed, they must collapse.
There is another lesson too, hidden in the teacher’s absence, another very simple message embedded in the old stories of patient devotion, the uncomplaining eons that Milarepa spent moving stones from one spot to another. The muscles of self-reliance grow stronger as the tower rises, while the surrounding fields are slowly cleared of stones. Patience isn’t passive, or it would never move us any closer to being ready. As long as the teacher is unavailable, refusing to babysit or otherwise follow the script of our expectations, we will have to figure things out for ourselves. If we wait to be spoon-fed, we will go hungry.
What if all this effort, the clearing of stones and the building of spiritual muscles, could somehow be done with joy? We think of joy as the culmination of religious experience, but perhaps joy is also a key to its cultivation.
When the student is ready, the teacher appears. The statement is no less true for being apocryphal to the Buddhist canon and comfortably at home on the Internet. Teachers have a way of showing up when we are primed and ready to learn. Traditionally, the turning point of renunciation is the moment of readiness, and in the Buddhist universe renunciation is more or less synonymous with dis-illusion—the loss of certain illusions about life. It’s the moment when the terms we have been clinging to collapse. Everything falls apart.
All that my parents ever wanted for me, all they longed for with their loving hearts, was that I should flourish and be happy. As far as they could see, I was determined to fail miserably at the business of flourishing and happiness. And my own misery in the face of their resistance was no less loving and generous than their misery. I really did want them to be happy. After all, I had taken this great vow to make all sentient beings happy, to do my utmost to free them from suffering. And yet I was pounding my head against a wall; I not only couldn’t make Ma and Papa happy, it seemed I was hell-bent on making them suffer.
Our disconnect was in the definition of happiness. The happiness they were arguing for, and begging me to accept, was the notion of happiness that is contained entirely within the domain of conventional reality—not just the superficial happiness of sensory pleasures and material wealth, but also success, honor, earned recognition, a worthy legacy. The comforts of home and a relationship that embraces you for better or for worse. All the rainbow colors that cloak the illusion of security.
In some vague sense I understood this at the age of ten when I ran away. I had developed vairagya, the dispassionate detachment that turns away from conventional sources of happiness and self-validation, and recognizes pleasure as another category of suffering. I knew that pursuing a spiritual life meant turning my back on worldly concerns. I was standing at the gateway of renunciation, which is not a single threshold to be crossed but comes in stages. As we step gradually deeper into its stream, disillusion washes away both glitter and grime, not all at once but in layers.
I had become very heavily invested in renunciation. It was an essential part of who I was, an identity I was hanging on to for dear life. For four years I had soldiered against my parents’ defenses, their ambushes and attacks, their vastly superior power to recruit spies and allies. I had somehow managed the most tenuous of victories, to live the life of a renunciant as I understood it, to make my home in any spiritual sanctum, from temples to charnel grounds, rather than in the bosom of family. The recognition that the life I had so idealized was as corrupt as anything else in this corrupted world came to me as the direst disillusion. My world was crumbling. In the words of a fourteen-year-old, everything I held dear was all “just another piece of crap.”
When one reality comes tumbling down we conjure up another to fill its place as quickly as possible. We’re grasping, one move to the next, hand over hand, but we don’t ever let go of the rope. Here was the end of my rope. There was nothing left to grasp. I was in free fall. But somehow that strange kirtan in the night was a turning point. There was nothing left to grasp and I was fine with it. Into that opening, joy came rushing.
In America the narrative of renunciation is often linked to failure. When the market has crashed, when a marriage is betrayed, when the bottom falls out of denial, religion comes unbidden. With failure comes a surrender of the ego that has invested all its capital in the marks of mundane success, and from that ground-level view, renunciation holds the key to redemption. The spiritual life is a last resort.
In India, renunciation is traditionally seen as a last resort of a different kind, a retirement plan. In my parents’ eyes I was upsetting the social and natural order by making religion a priority too early in life. “We are fully supportive of the spiritual life,” they insisted, “but there is a right way to do this. A Brahmin should study for the first twenty-five years of life. The next fifty years are for doing productive work and providing for a family. Then, in your last twenty-five years, you can go live in the forest as a sannyasi and lead a spiritual life.” (I could have argued that that rule excluded many of India’s most prominent spiritual figures—Shankaracharya and Vivekananda both died in their thirties.)
Proximity to death powerfully evokes a last resort. Whether it’s the prospect of the final curtain on a long life, or a startling brush with mortality at any time, death illuminates how illusory are the trappings of success, and rapidly realigns our values.
But what if renunciation calls to you not in the dregs of life but at the peak of possibility? The Buddha’s own renunciation came at a time of wealth and flourishing, with a young family and a kingdom to inherit. Turning his back on all this is framed as a recognition of the fragility of human life and the suffering inherent in the human condition. But it also implies that enlightenment is genuinely possible, a viable endeavor, and deserves our best shot, not the diminished capacity of old age, illness, or depression. It implies that renunciation is worth a king’s ransom, paid joyfully.
Can I even begin to describe the joy of spiritual disillusionment? The fact that it sounds like an oxymoron hints that language is vainly tossing a net into the ocean of the ineffable. Kirtan in essence means “praise” and although Krishna danced in the words that we sang that night and his flute reeled us, spinning, praise flowed from me without aim or boundary, not stopping at Krishna. It went beyond any object, a centrifugal force of love cast out to my entire world and beyond. But the center, the eye of this happy storm, was utterly calm. That sense of centered joy—still, poised, balanced—would stay with me for many days, weeks even, before it slowly receded, the wave washing back. If the ocean was no longer within view I knew its general direction: A stream inside me still flowed to it. Even if it would dry to a trickle in some seasons, that taste of joy remains available to memory.
I can say what it’s not. It’s not just another rung on the ladder of sensory pleasure and conventional notions of happiness. It’s not eudaemonia, that pinnacle of human flourishing that the Greeks debated, and it’s not the apex of Maslow’s hierarchy. There are Buddhist commentaries that analyze fine gradations of joy at the edge of imagining that may seem far beyond any relevance to our lives, distinctions of bliss and great bliss and ultimate bliss. The tradition also warns us in no uncertain terms that joy is not the goal, and if we make it the focus of our efforts, it becomes a distraction and a trap. It’s not to be sought. It arises only when you’re not chasing it.
The joy of disillusion tastes like freedom. It has overtones of fearlessness, and an absence of impurities—bias of any kind—that might cloud its clarity. And yet it’s not remotely uncaring, indifferent, or in any way sociopathic. Its disillusion is a disenchantment, which is only to say that some spell of illusion has been broken. It doesn’t look unkindly on those who remain in the bonds of that spell. On the contrary, it’s deeply compassionate. The Bodhisattva returns voluntarily, again and again, into the world of suffering to offer whatever relief is possible. The capacity to do that requires a lifeline to an infinite storehouse of joy. Indeed, perfecting the practice of joyful effort is one of the “perfections” that defines the path of a Bodhisattva. How else to meet infinite suffering face-to-face and not be defeated?
Indeed, the joy of disillusion is so profoundly connected to the human condition that it spills contagiously on anyone with whom it comes in contact. Our psychology is exquisitely sensitive to this overflowing joy. I have been blessed to meet individuals who seem to live in that state much of the time, who sustain it without exhaustion, and whose joy is effervescent, radiant, and uncontainable. A few moments spent in their presence leaves an unmistakable trace. Every one of them has been a teacher. Not every one has shared a lesson that was articulated in words, not even in a cryptic question. Sometimes the mere presence of a powerful model is all the lesson that’s needed.
So the Bengali swami dropped his question on me and disappeared. Perhaps he had urgent business elsewhere, other seeds he needed to plant while the earth was freshly plowed. There was an irony in this strange encounter that was not lost on me. After chasing dreams and teachers across the subcontinent and into the Himalayas, navigating railways, bus lines, and border crossings by horse cart, immersing myself in the language of medieval Japan—all of this far-flung quest was brought up short on my home turf, a few blocks from my parents’ very ordinary civil service apartment near the noisy markets of Karol Bagh, with the simplest of questions posed by a figure who, if oddly ephemeral, was of our homegrown faith. I wasn’t inclined to interpret it literally, abandon Buddhism and settle into my parents’ life plan. Instead, in the spirit of a monk’s commitment to homelessness, I took it as a metaphor for self-reliance. I would have to trust in my own discernment.
In any case, I had my assignment: Is there so much joy in your religion? I would continue to ponder his question for years to come, but in all the myriad reflections, the many facets that have shone at different times, one answer is consistently clear. Joy lies at the very heart of spiritual practice. We would be wise, therefore, not to invite misery into this realm. There is no place here for pious demonstrations of imperviousness to pain. There is no purpose to self-inflicted martyrdom. There are so many avenues, so many places for suffering, let religion not be one of them. Its only purpose is the end of suffering.