Reality by Other Means. James Morrow

had often haunted me, namely, why has there never been a good movie about a yeti? Man Beast is atrocious. Half Human is risible. The Snow Beast is a snore. Only the Hammer Film called The Abominable Snowman of the Himalayas is remotely watchable, although everyone involved, including star Peter Cushing, writer Nigel Kneale, and director Val Guest, went on to make much better thrillers.

      “During the first half of your sojourn here, you will experience intimations of the primordial Buddhist vehicle, the Hinayana, keyed to purging mental defilements and achieving personal enlightenment,” said Chögi Gyatso as we connected, hand to paw, on the steps of the New Ganden Monastery. “During the second half of your stay, you will taste of the plenary vehicle, the Mahayana, which aims to cultivate a person’s compassion for all living beings through the doctrine of sunyata, emptiness. In the fullness of time I shall introduce you to the quintessential vehicle, the diamond way, the indestructible Vajrayana.”

      “Diamonds Are Forever,” I said.

      “Probably my favorite Double-O-Seven. But let’s not delude ourselves, Taktra Kunga. Whether Homo sapiens or Candidopithecus tibetus, a seeker may need to spend many years, perhaps many lifetimes, pursuing the Hinayana and the Mahayana before he can claim them as his own, and yet without such grounding he is unlikely to attain the eternal wakefulness promised by the Vajrayana.”

      “Given the immensity of the challenge, let me suggest that we begin posthaste,” I said. “There’s no time like the present, right, Your Holiness?”

      “No, Taktra Kunga, there is only a time like the present,” my teacher corrected me. “The past is a tortoise-hair coat. The future is a clam-tooth necklace.”

      I passed the next seven days in the Tathagata Gallery, contemplating the canvases, four completely white, four completely black. His Holiness’s expectations were clear. I must endeavor to fill the featureless spaces with whatever random notions crossed my mind — imperiled mountaineers, tasty yuppie brains, voluptuous yeti barmaids, crummy Abominable Snowman movies — then imagine these projections catching fire and turning to ash, so they would cease to colonize my skull. Despite my initial skepticism, before the long week was out I succeeded in slowing down the rackety engine of my consciousness, the endless kachung, kachung, kachung of my thoughts, the ceaseless haroosh, haroosh, haroosh of my anxieties, or so it seemed.

      “I’m a much calmer person,” I told my teacher. “Indeed, I think I’ve achieved near total equanimity. Does that mean I’m enlightened?”

      “Give me a break, Taktra Kunga.”

      My second week in the New Ganden Monastery confronted me with a different sort of sunyata, the bare trees of the Dzogchen Arboretum, their branches bereft of leaves, fruit, and blossoms. This time around, my instructions were to focus my drifting thoughts on the here and now, the luminous, numinous, capacious present. Once again I profited from my meditations. Within twenty-four hours a sublime stillness swelled at the center of my being. I was truly there, inhabiting each given instant, second by millisecond by nanosecond.

      “I did it,” I told His Holiness. “I extinguished the past and annihilated the future. For now there is only today, and for today there is only now. I see nirvana just over the horizon.”

      “Don’t crack walnuts in your ass, Taktra Kunga.”

      My troubles began during week three, which I spent in the Hall of Empty Mirrors, alternately meditating with closed eyes and contemplating with a rapt gaze the twenty-one ornately carved frames, each distinctly lacking a looking-glass. I was now swimming in the ocean of the Mahayana. It would not do for me simply to still my thoughts and occupy the present. I must also shed my ego, scrutinizing my non-self in the non-glass. Good-bye, Taktra Kunga. You are an idea at best, a phantasm of your atrophied awareness. No person, place, thing, or circumstance boasts a stable, inherent existence. Earthly attachments mean nothing. Nothing means everything. All is illusion. Flux rules. Welcome to the void.

      “I don’t like the Hall of Empty Mirrors,” I told His Holiness at the end of week three, from which I’d lamentably emerged more myself, more Taktra Kungaesque, than ever. “In fact, I detest it.”

      “You’re in good company,” said Chögi Gyatso. “When the Buddha first spoke of the quest for sunyata, thousands of his followers had heart attacks.”

      “Then perhaps we should omit emptiness from the curriculum?”

      “A person can no more achieve enlightenment without sunyata than he can make an omelet without eggs.”

      “I don’t want to have a heart attack.”

      “To tell you the truth, I never believed that story,” said Chögi Gyatso. “Although it’s always disturbing to have the rug pulled out, the fall is rarely fatal.”

      “But if everything is an illusion, then isn’t the idea that everything is an illusion also an illusion?” I asked petulantly.

      “Let’s not stoop to sophistry, Taktra Kunga. This is contemporary Gangtok, not ancient Athens.”

      Having acquitted myself so poorly in the Hall of Empty Mirrors, I anticipated even worse luck in the locus of my fourth and final week, the Chamber of Silence, reminiscent of the padded cells in which Western civilization was once pleased to warehouse its lunatics. My pessimism proved prescient. Much as I enjoyed meditating amid this cacophony of quietude, this mute chorus of one hand clapping, no foot stomping, thirty fish sneezing, forty oysters laughing, and a million dust motes singing, I was no closer to deposing my sovereign self than when I’d first entered the New Ganden Monastery.

      “I’m discouraged, Your Holiness.”

      “That is actually good news,” he replied.

      “No, I mean I’m really discouraged.”

      “You must have patience. Better the dense glacier of genuine despair than the brittle ice of false hope.”

      O hairless ones, I give you my teacher, Chögi Gyatso, the Charlie Chan of the Himalayas, forever dispensing therapeutic aphorisms. And if His Holiness was Chan, did that make me his nonexistent offspring, his favorite illusory child, his Number One Sunyata? Raised by the Antelope Clan, I’d never known my biological parents, who’d died in the Great Khumbu Avalanche six months after my birth. In seeking out His Holiness, was I really just looking for my father? The more I pondered the question, the more mixed my emotions grew — a hodgepodge, a vortex, an incommodius vicus of recirculation, to paraphrase a Joycean scholar I’d once assimilated.

      Chögi Gyatso bid me farewell. I left the New Ganden Monastery and headed for the Lachung Pass as fast as my limbs would carry me, sometimes running on all fours, eager for a sensual reunion with Gawa. Midway through my journey I again encountered the corpse of Robin Balaban, the NYU film professor. His gutted cranium taunted me with the void I’d failed to apprehend in the monastery. I averted my eyes and howled with despair.

      My indifference to Professor Balaban’s fate, I realized to my infinite chagrin, was equaled only by my apathy toward his bereaved loved ones. With crystal clarity I beheld my benighted mind. I would never awaken. Buddhahood was as far away as the summit of some soaring Jomolungma on another planet. And so I howled again, wracked by a self-pity born of my inability to pity anyone but myself, then continued on my way.

      While Chögi Gyatso doubtless regarded me as a difficult pupil, perhaps the most exasperating he’d encountered in his present incarnation, the primary menace to his tranquility in those days remained his bitter, restless, firebrand brother. Although Dorje Lingpa had kept his promise to spend the whole of Mönlam Chenmo in profound meditation, his efforts had proved abortive, and he was now more determined than ever to strike a blow against the Han Chinese. Unenlightened being that I was, I framed Dorje Lingpa’s failure in egotistical terms. If His Holiness’s blood relatives had difficulty attaining sunyata, then I shouldn’t feel so bad about the absence of emptiness in my own life.

      The intractability of Dorje Lingpa’s anger became apparent during our