were made for him by his teachers. It was they who decided if he could study another meditation method, if his mother could come and see him. A year previously, they had given him permission and money to spend the winter in a Buddhist monastery in Penang.
We soon got round to talking about my Hong Kong fortune-teller. The fact that I had decided to heed the warning and spend a year without flying did something to narrow the gap between Chang Choub’s existence and my own. Like him, I had entered an order of ideas that was anything but Florentine. I too had let myself follow the paths of Asia, and so he felt I understood him a bit better.
Of course, he said, monks with great meditative powers can see the future, but that is not their aim in meditating. They are reluctant to say what they know because they do not want to become like fairground freaks. The truly enlightened ones, like Buddha and Christ, did not like to perform miracles just to convince unbelievers. The ability was there, obviously enough, but they used it only when it was absolutely necessary.
I have always liked the story of Buddha arriving at a river and the people asking him to cross it by walking over it. He pointed to a boat and said: ‘That’s the simpler way.’
Many Tibetan monks have developed special powers. The Dalai Lama himself has a personal oracle who helps him predict the future and make decisions. It was his previous reincarnation, back in 1959 when Mao’s troops were entering Lhasa, who told the Dalai Lama exactly when to leave and in what direction to go. The flight was successful. That same oracle, it is said, is now convinced that the Chinese will soon lose control of Tibet, and that the country will regain its independence.
It amused Chang Choub to speak of his life as a monk. He gave the impression that he saw the whole story from the outside, with the irony with which a Florentine would look on a man like him, a Westerner who becomes a Tibetan monk: an anomaly, a contradiction in terms. The first years, he told me, were very hard. Weakened by the diet and the cold, he was often ill. One thing that he never got used to, and indeed found more and more unbearable as time went by, was the sound of the long horns that woke the monks at three in the morning. ‘If it had been Beethoven, Bach, you’d have got up gladly, but that booooo…booooo – on a single note that never changes, day after day, booooo…booooo – puts a strain on all my hard-won detachment from the things of the world.’ He said this almost with anger.
Even in speaking about the religious aspect of his choice, his tone was detached. ‘Buddha said we were to question everything, question the teachers and Buddha himself.’ He seemed to be justifying a deep uncertainty which, even after so many years, had stayed with him. What sounded strange to me was his way of speaking about the teachers he had studied under. Of one of them he remarked, ‘Of course, he is very advanced, he has more than two hundred years of meditation behind him.’ Of another whom he wanted to meet he said, ‘He is only nine years old, but in his last life he was one of the greatest, and this could well be his last reincarnation.’
I have lived much of my life among the Chinese, Buddhists, for the most part, who find it natural to believe that a man passes through a long series of lives, each time occupying the body of some living being; but that idea had never really engaged me personally. Talking with Chang Choub, who took reincarnation for granted, I at least understood the underlying concept of the belief. Our existence is merely a link in a long chain of many lives and many deaths. Each new birth brings, along with the body, a sum of tendencies and potentialities which result from the spiritual path followed in former lives; this is our karma. With this baggage we resume the journey where it had been left off, sometimes moving forwards, at other times backwards. The baggage of wisdom, as it were, has nothing to do with the everyday knowledge of the world which everyone must accumulate from scratch for himself. Even the reincarnation of a great guru must learn again that fire burns, that one can drown in water, and so on.
Some very advanced teachers can remember details of their previous lives with great precision. A classic anecdote tells of a child, the son of peasants, who said, ‘It’s mine, it’s mine,’ when he saw the rosary of the late Dalai Lama in the hands of a monk who was travelling Tibet dressed as a beggar in search of the Dalai Lama’s reincarnation. He found it in that child. The little boy was taken to the Potala, where he stopped outside the wall, wanting to enter at the exact spot where there had been a door during his previous life – a door that had since been walled up.
Believers also tell the story of a child who saw some Tibetan exiles in India perform an ancient ritual dance. Suddenly he cried: ‘No, no! Not that way!’ He ran among the monks and in a trance began to move like an experienced dancer. They all prostrated themselves, recognizing in him the reincarnation of a great teacher, the Karmapa. Then he became a child again, and returned to his mother’s arms.
Talking about these things with Chang Choub – I called him by that name, to emphasize my acceptance of him as he wished to be – felt like going on a long journey, while remaining seated on the veranda of Turtle House. It was like taking a holiday from normal life.
‘But surely you can’t believe in reincarnation in the strict sense,’ I said. ‘The population of the world is constantly increasing, millions more are born every minute. From whom are they all reincarnated?’ The question was banal and prosaic, a bit like asking a saint to prove the existence of God by performing a miracle. But Chang Choub did not perform miracles – far from it. He had learned countless techniques of meditation, he had been a pupil of great teachers, he had spent months as a hermit in a cave; but he admitted, with some sadness, that he had not achieved a great deal.
‘What is it you are aiming at?’ I asked. ‘What are the dreams of a monk like you?’
And for the first time I heard the word: ‘Satori.’
‘Meaning what?’
‘A moment of great clarity. The moment when you rise above everything.’
‘A moment. And you haven’t managed to get there even a moment?’
No, he said, and it was like admitting a great defeat. I was left to wonder why twenty years of effort, sacrifice, fidelity to so many vows, years of silence, cold, rice with nothing but vegetables, and the horrible sound of the horns at dawn, should have yielded such a meagre harvest. Chang Choub told me that a monk he knew had had satori one day after barely two years of exercises – suddenly, just like that, while driving along a freeway in California.
In the morning Chang Choub would sit in our salà, the small wooden pavilion over the pond, meditating with closed eyes, motionless and withdrawn. Watching him from a distance, I could not, try as I might, shake off a feeling of unhappiness which his presence conveyed to me. Between the colour of his skin and that of his robe there was a deep contradiction; I felt it too in his pose as he sat cross-legged on the floor. In him, so Western despite his Asian clothes, there seemed to be something discordant, out of kilter. I imagined that one day, surrounded by monks who are his brothers in name only, speaking a language not his own in a place where not one sound or smell was of home, Chang Choub might feel terribly lonely, lonelier than ever. I asked myself if at the end of his life he would find himself wondering – as perhaps he already does at times – whether he had not spent his days pursuing someone else’s goal, prey to an illusion that was not even his.
The crisis that Stefano Brunori had undergone twenty years previously was clear enough. It was one that sooner or later affects everyone in some way. As soon as you start asking questions you find that some of them, especially the simplest, have no obvious answers. You have to go out and look for them. But where? He chose the least expected direction, a difficult one. Perhaps he was attracted by the exotic, by the strange. Those alien words, new to his ears, appeared much more meaningful than the old familiar ones of his own language. Satori seemed to promise so much more than ‘grace’.
And
