Enlightenment Town. Jeffery Paine

Father Dave did not have the luxury of such detachment. He had worked closely with Father William for thirty years, and what he once thought true now seemed a sham. Father Dave’s life work, his vocation, his belief in inherent goodness, everything he had trusted — the whole edifice — crumbled in an instant.

      His days now began not with a psalm book in the chapel but with the question, “Can I get out of bed?” His body was shaking, he could barely eat. Barely talk. He felt that if he remained in the monastery he was doomed and that if he left the monastery he was doomed. Besides, how would he support himself (not many ads run “Freelance Monk Wanted”)? The chaplain of Colorado College tried to encourage Father Dave, telling him he had much to look forward to. Dave understood the words separately — me. . . look forward . . . something good — but how did they apply to him?

      Needing to get away somehow, Dave rented Mark Elliott’s retreat cabin above Crestone. “Just one thing,” Mark joked. “Please don’t find God in a Buddhist cabin.” It felt good to be in a Buddhist atmosphere again and be reminded of its basic teaching of impermanence, that nothing, including his despair, lasts forever. That thought deepened into: if I want to be true to the essence, I may have to leave the form behind. The form had been his work at Nada with Father William, but the essence was faith in a goodness despite transgressions, at once within and independent of circumstances. With that realization, Father Dave moved to his new home, that cabin high on the mountainside, where the timelessness and impersonal emptiness of the desert — an experience of wordless existence beyond categories, beyond personal suffering — helped heal him. His was a Christian kind of story, of one returned from the dead.

      A few weeks after visiting his cabin, I stumbled on a clue as to how Father Dave can wear his deeply felt Christianity so lightly. The clue came, oddly enough, from a Buddhist teacher who was visiting Crestone. During the retreat he was leading, he said — it sounded odd, coming from a religious teacher — that leaving religion behind creates a paradise for certain people.

      This gentle teacher, Anam Thubten, described three levels to the religious life. The first level is belief: one assents to an ideal. At this level devotees “believe,” but their belief does not necessarily determine, or even much interfere with, their customary behavior (nor are they ruined if the belief turns out not to be true). This is religion as ideology, personal comfort, and grand thoughts.

      The next level, Anam said, is religion itself. And religion is a very serious business. You have a lot to think about now: What’s the morally right thing to do? Is it in accordance with divine law? Do I have a good conscience? You are shouldering grave responsibilities — enough to hunch you over as you bear so much dogma, duty, and goodness. It’s a 24/7 job, with good works instead of vacations; it’s a school in which ethical satisfactions take the place of recesses, and the homework assignment is for all eternity.

      The third level of religion comes after that, on the other side of Bible reading, temple attendance, and good works. Religion is not left behind, but your way of living now allows its truths or insights to materialize on their own. Sacred manuals are no longer necessary; you seem to know without trying to know. After continual striving and duty rendered, finally after age sixty, Confucius said, he could do what he wanted without going against the path. (How such a harmonious state of being comes about is investigated in part 3 of this book.) Father Dave appears today to be that kind of almost effortless Christian. As for Jesus’s teachings, they are no longer found only in scripture: effortlessly, automatically, they arise in his thoughts to meet whatever the situation is, and opening his eyes wide, he sees the teachings on display all around him. First thing after waking, Father Dave enters into contemplation, which is deeply gratifying, but for him the experience feels not all that different from when he cuts firewood or goes into town for groceries. Everything has become liturgy.

      Does Father Dave — open-minded and inquisitive, undogmatic, recognizing his religion’s kindredness to other faiths — augur a better future for humanity?

      Possibly not. Christianity is growing by leaps and bounds, particularly in Latin America and Africa, but often it is not Father Dave’s version but a narrower faith, shuttered against other possibilities, damning all forms of religious expression except itself. Dave attended a conference in the Northwest, where he was admiring a magnificent totem pole, a wondrous expression of folk art, full of potent mythic symbols, when a Christian delegate from the developing world sneered, “We should burn it to the ground. It’s the handiwork of Satan.”

      Still, the future may not be solely a question of numbers, of statistical majorities. The religious cast of mind, as noted, wears bifocals: it sees the relative and the absolute, or the historically conditioned and the unconditional, or the daily and the eternal. From that double perspective, the quality of a Father Dave’s open-mindedness and open-heartedness may spiritually outweigh the quantity of intolerance elsewhere. A relevant story in the Bible: in the sinful city of Sodom, if one honest man could be found, God would spare the whole metropolis. And in the town of Crestone — since we are not even through with this chapter — we may find a few other folks like Father Dave who lace their faith with honesty and generous understanding.

      Buddhism

       The fire scorches you yet suffuses no light, so your dim eyes cannot distinguish day from night, and it is always night. . . . The fire, burning hot like the sun, was created for no other purpose than your torture, the just reward for your shameless and unspeakable sins. ³

      To go from sampling the above hellfire and damnation sermon — once an ornament of Catholicism — to Father Dave’s accepting wide vision is like emerging from a claustrophobic cell into fresh daylight. Do other religions traverse a similar arc, too, from a somber older moralism into a more user-friendly contemporary ethos? What would, for example, a modern Buddhist be like?

      Beginning in the late 1960s the first Tibetan Buddhist gurus arrived in America. Even if they had spoken English (which usually they didn’t), their teachings would still in effect have been in Tibetan. For example: “Consider that every sentient being in the universe was at one time your mother” was a traditional teaching given in many talks. At one talk, restless after hearing that platitude one more time, first in Tibetan and then in English, I did the math: millions of species, billions of spawn, trillions of creatures — the numbers were off. Besides, half that American audience probably suffered troubled relations with their mothers. The woman next to me whispered, “What is he trying to do? Bore us out of our interest in Buddhism?”

      A generation ago the great Tibetan masters who traveled to America, Dilgo Khyentse and the 16th Karmapa, came to plant the dharma, but America itself did not really interest them. By contrast, our contemporary guru has something to give America but also something to gain: not wealth nor women nor fame but something even more intoxicating. Here was the chance to rewrite the age-old story of Buddhism in contemporary terms.

      Crestone is the official residence (except when he is teaching elsewhere, which is usually) of such a modern rinpoche. He is in America because he wants to be, and he wants to make Buddhism at home here, too. He is trying to figure it out, what from age-old Buddhism stays and what in the twenty-first century goes. With no-holds-barred openness and playfulness, too, he is an example of a spiritual teacher à la mode.

      It is Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, only in reverse. Tsoknyi Rinpoche III, reared in a monastery practically out of the Middle Ages, suddenly gets dropped into frenzied, futuristic America, knowing nothing about Americans and yet instantly having to plunge into teaching them. Something interesting was bound to happen.

      It is now twenty-five years later, and for Tsoknyi every occasion, even a frivolous one like, say, a party, is an occasion to teach.

      In