Even without Claire and Molly, I had been coming up against the Buddhist challenge. All during the seventies the New York cultural scene was saturated with Buddhism: benefit poetry readings with Allen Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, and John Giorno; concerts by Philip Glass and other musicians of tantric orientation; conferences at the New School on what Buddhist psychology had to offer Western psychotherapies. Writer friends of mine were conscientiously studying Tibetan grammar. There was a definite upscale chic attached to Buddhism, especially the Tibetan strand--a pedigreed intellectual respectability such as had never burnished, say, the Hare Krishna or Guru Maharaji sects.
The first Buddhist wave had been Japanese: the Zen of the fifties and sixties, introduced by Alan Watts and D. T. Suzuki. The next influx was Tibetan, dominated by the flamboyant, Oxbridge-educated Chogyam Trungpa, whose poet-disciples established the Naropa School in Boulder, Colorado. Molly and Claire looked askance at whiskey-drinking, philandering, bad-boyish Trungpa, preferring instead their aged, gentle lama, Dujam Rinpoche. The old man lived mostly in France; but his American followers had established a center in New York, and every few years he would visit it--to the immense excitement of his devotees.
Socially on the fringes of this scene, I would sometimes be pulled in by curiosity, the chance to witness one more Manhattan subculture. Once, Molly invited me to hear the Dalai Lama address a packed church. I could barely understand a word of His Holiness's talk, due to the thick accent of his translator and bad acoustics, and the little I heard sounded like platitudes about our need for love and world peace. Now, it may well be that platitudes ultimately contain the highest wisdom attainable. But I was looking for evidence to debunk the scene. I never doubted that Buddhist practices had great efficacy for Tibetans; I was only dubious that the beaming middle-class Americans in the pews around me would ever get beyond their consumerist pride in fingering esoteric traditions.
The American devotees I knew also displayed a parvenu fascination with Tibetan aristocracy (the Dalai Lama and his retinue, the ranks of lamas) that I can only compare to the way Texas moneyed society grovels before the British royals. One night I was taken to an event, at a Soho loft, honoring a group of Tibetan lamas who had just arrived in the States from India. The lamas sat on a raised platform and conversed among themselves, while an awed, handpicked, mostly Ivy League audience, kneeling and lotus-squatting below, watched them eat. What struck me was the determination of the devotees to wring spiritual messages from the most mundane conduct. If a lama belched, it became a teaching: "Don't take anything too seriously." If several lamas laughed (at a private Tibetan joke), the audience would join in gratefully, as though being taught the mystery of joy. Meanwhile, a bevy of dahinis, attractive young women chosen to serve the lamas, advanced with dishes and finger bowls. These American women, probably all willing to be identified as feminists, who would have been shocked if asked to perform such duties for their countrymen, were blushing with happiness at the chance to serve the robed contingent. Other women in the audience gasped as one of the tall young head-shaved priests stood up, his saffron robes leaving his muscled arms bare. The monks inspired rock star crushes.
Shortly after the feast had ended and the entire lama delegation had left to go to another party, those remaining milled about, still processing the privilege they'd been given. The Princess of Bhutan and her seven-year old son were pointed out to me. Much was made of the little boy's playing with a top, as though it were a precocious demonstration of spiritual powers; when the top skittered over the loft floor, everyone oohed and clapped. I wasn't sure whether the child was being drooled over because he had royal blood, because he was mischievous (high spiritual marks for that in this crowd), or because he was of an age when future Dalai Lamas are customarily detected.
I was glad not to be won over by this display; it saved me an enormous bother. On the other hand, I could not simply reject an immensely complex, sophisticated tradition just because of some sycophantic behavior on the part of certain followers. The little I knew of Buddhist doctrine actually appealed to me, by virtue of its insistence on the void, on mindfulness, and on the universality of suffering. In fact, I could go along with at least two of its four "noble truths": the first, that existence is suffering, I could accept wholeheartedly; the second, that the cause of suffering is craving and attachment, I was less sure about, but willing to concede. I balked only at the final two: that there is a cessation of suffering, called Nirvana, and that the way to Nirvana lies in dissolving the self and following the "eightfold path." As with Marxism, I agreed with the analysis of the problem, only not the solution.
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