Sensei?” I am a plodding student, but I persevere.
“Oh, the ki can be sensed. Certainly. It is there. Always. In crowds, there is ki in great abundance.”
“And is this upsetting to you?”
He looked at me sharply. “Upsetting?” As if the idea had never occurred to him. “I think, no. The problem with crowds has nothing to do with ki.”
“Then what is it, Sensei?”
“Burke,” he said as if to a child, “too many people, too many intentions. It has nothing to do with ki,” A student bowed as he left the training hall floor and Yamashita bowed forward a fraction in acknowledgement. “Crowds,” he said to me finally, “make it hard to see someone coming at you with a short weapon.”
My master is a mystic with unique perspectives.
Changpa Rinpoche was scheduled to speak at the American Museum of Natural History as part of the opening for a traveling display of Himalayan artifacts. I should have been struck by the coincidence, but then it dawned on me that Yamashita probably knew this before he gave me the lama’s book. He’s full of tricks.
What was interesting was my teacher’s urge to see the Tibetan. I spent some time trying to figure this out. There were commonalities here. They were both probably about the same age. Both men were outcasts of a type—adherents of strange and foreign practices far from home. They labored in a foreign land to bring insights to people not always capable of understanding them. There must be a type of isolation in this kind of life. And loneliness. So maybe Sensei was drawn to him for this reason. It made me think of Yamashita in a different way. But then, again, they were old friends.
I wrangled some VIP tickets from a friend who worked in the research department there. His parents were farmers on Long Island’s North Fork, past Riverhead: stocky, perpetually sunburned people who made an increasingly difficult living growing potatoes and flowers in the sandy soil of Long Island. Their son, the archaeologist, labored indoors, digging in different ways.
Yamashita and I arrived the night of the holy man’s lecture and, if Sensei were a child, he would have been bouncing up and down on his toes. He looked, of course, totally placid when we got off the B train at the 81st Street subway station, but I had been with him too long to be fooled. We made our way up to the first floor toward the theater they were using for Changpa’s lecture.
I love this museum. I’d been there countless times and never get tired of it. We walked through the Theodore Roosevelt Memorial Hall—TR shot and donated much of the big game trophies here. Part of it may have been guilt, but maybe not. TR didn’t strike me as a guy with much self-doubt. Besides, his father had been one of the founders of the museum in the first place—a well-connected philanthropist probably responsible for getting Ulysses S. Grant to lay the cornerstone for the first museum building on the West Side.
But I could tell that Yamashita wasn’t really interested in the trivia I was sharing with him about the museum. He was anxious to see the Tibetan. And this revelation heightened my own curiosity about Changpa. So I guided him quickly through the exhibit halls. As we sat down in the packed auditorium, I began to ask Yamashita something. His hand came up. “Hush.” He was focused on his anticipation, enjoying it with a deep focus. Like a predator drowsing in the sun.
So I watched the crowd.
There was the usual mix of people: senior officials from the museum, a smattering of academics and graduate students. It was even rumored that the local real estate magnate who had largely funded the exhibit would attend. I wondered how a Tibetan monk would relate to that old gangster. The event had also drawn many people from the community: aficionados of things Asian. And others, some looking eager for enlightenment, others just looking for entertainment. It’s the lifelong bipolar condition of many Americans.
We sat on the end of one row toward the rear of the big room. Yamashita would put up with only so much, and he liked to be in a position that gave him some defensive options.
Changpa Rinpoche was ushered in with all the fuss of any prestigious visitor. He had been in the news lately, advocating for greater freedom for occupied Tibet and appearing at rallies outside the U.N. I suspected that the Chinese were not crazy about him. So I wasn’t surprised to notice that there were uniformed security guards as well as plainclothes people scanning the crowd. The audience was a typical jumble of voices and gestures, but I watched the mass of people with a seriousness not too different from that of the guards. My sensei’s habits are rubbing off on me.
Changpa was a teacher, a lama, dressed in the saffron and deep red robes of a Tibetan Buddhist monk. His title, Rinpoche, was an honorific meaning “Precious Jewel.” He was thicker than I had imagined, more energetic looking. It’s a bias, but I tend to picture noodley, pale bodies when I think about the effects of long periods of seated meditation. I’m sure I wasn’t alone—everyone expects him to be a clone of the Dalai Lama. But he wasn’t. He looked more like a wrestler—solid and competent. But he had the same calm, gentle look as his more famous colleague.
He mounted the stage to applause. A small platform with cushions had been set up for him to sit upon. A simple vase filled with flowers stood next to it, echoing the yellow and crimson of his robes. Behind him, a large banner with calligraphy hung down against the stage’s curtain.
“Can you read that?” I murmured to Yamashita. It looked like Sanskrit, with curves and angles and diacritical marks.
He shook his head. “No. I believe it is Tibetan script.”
A young guy with a scraggly beard next to me leaned forward. “It’s the mantra, Om Mane Padme Hung,” he said with smug self-satisfaction. He had the bright-eyed look of a true believer.
“Ah,” I said.
The Rinpoche stayed standing and began speaking. His voice had a clipped, British accent to it. It wasn’t a surprise. Most of the lamas abroad today had made the tough hike across the Himalayas to India, the Chinese hot on their trail, and the cadences of the Raj still lived on in their English.
He was an engaging speaker; I’ll give him that. Changpa seemed comfortable on the stage, with the audience. I had studied enough about Buddhism and its varieties—Theravada, Mahayana—and had been exposed to enough over-informed enthusiasts to know, however, that it was anyone’s guess how the night might turn out. Especially with all the hype about Changpa’s “powers.”
I was really dreading an evening of mystic mumbo jumbo. I knew, deep down, that most people here hungered for a revelation of the powers of the mysterious East. But I thought they were doomed to disappointment. Revelation for me has always been a subtle thing, and as an object of desire is much like trying to grasp smoke. There are probably better ways to spend your time.
As the evening progressed, however, my fears were quieted. Changpa was pretty much what he appeared. Instead of a hyped-up mystic, what you came away with was the impression of a sincere man advocating the teachings of the Buddha and the benefits of belief and compassion. His voice was calm and clear. It had a cadence to it that gathered the audience in. You could almost feel the heightened intimacy, the sensation of the room growing physically closer, and of being gently drawn in upon a still center. Where Changpa stood.
I had experienced this before, with my own teacher Yamashita, when he chanted the warrior’s mantra and showed me the ways to draw an ancient grid of power. Now I could sense a similar event unfolding. On one level, I was observant enough to see this. But the knowledge of what was happening did not prevent it from affecting me. What we were experiencing was
