school visit

There were these posters up in school. Visit by local Buddhists. It was in a series of talks run by one of the R.E. department. Mainly just Christian groups. Mark was surprised they hadn’t had a Jedi in. They say more people put Jedi for religion on their census forms than anything else.
Dan and Mark had been in the same classes throughout school, although Mark had been more distant since he started the “programme”. They used to hang around together, making up stories about the teachers. They’d be there, under the stairs in a dark corner of the science block, dreaming up these elaborate sagas. Mr. Douglas was our History teacher in year 9. Dan had a strange link with him; he could often finish sentences Douglas had started. He used to whisper long streams of interpretation to Mark, who would listen in wonder as Douglas repeated what he had said. One day he was having trouble with a video-recorder. He asked us if anyone had a screwdriver. We thought he was joking, but by some fluke Dan had brought a small blue-handled one to school that day – just right for the job. Inspired by the weirdness of all this, Mark and Dan invented “The Mythos”. Douglas was actually Japanese and unbelievably old. When he was a boy tending the oxen by the winding river a couple of miles from his parents’ farm, he had seen a cloud of dust descend upon his home. Bandits. When he returned everything that could not be carried away was dead or burned. Douglas wandered for days, the trauma almost destroying his childish mind. The one day he stumbled into a clearing before a cave, high in the mountains above his parents’ small-holding. Here an ancient-looking man sat motionless. Douglas was taken in and the man taught him secret martial arts and magic. In time he killed every one of the bandits who had attacked his family. Embittered by his experience, he moved to the west, educated himself, had plastic-surgery to appear like a middle-aged Caucasian history teacher. He had modified the air-conditioning system into a boy-mining apparatus. They would be spared so long as we remained his faithful servants.
Anyway, Mark saw Dan going into the library, clearly bent on attending the thing.
“Hey, Dan.”
“Greetings, human scum.”
“Are you going to this thing?”
“No. I was planning to eviscerate myself this lunchtime and the damn librarians have double-booked the room.”
“Well, I thought it looked interesting – real live Buddhists …”
“Precisely. Also the title intrigued me – ‘Milarepa, a Buddhist saint,’ sounds rather cool.”
“Huh? I didn’t know they had saints.”
“Well, now we’ll find out.”

Richard and Ananda were getting their material ready and watched the empty library become slightly less empty. There were a few interested-looking ones. A couple who’d clearly been told it would help them to get a better grade at GCSE or A – level. Richard felt a bit uncomfortable, but also excited. He started to think about how this would probably be the first contact for some of these people with the Dharma. Here they were going to get the chance to inspire and illuminate.
The teacher made a few pleasant words of introduction and mentioned their names. When she said “Ananda”, a boy’s hand shot up:
“Are you a Buddha?”
Richard cringed inwardly. But Ananda seemed unruffled –
“Not yet.”
Ananda outlined the main stages of the saint’s life. The magic with which he had killed thirty-five people. The hailstorms he’d summoned to destroy the crops of his enemies. Then his decision to follow the Dharma. His teacher, Marpa, has made him suffer lengthy ordeals, building towers and then tearing them down, until his back was raw and infected – all to cancel the bad karma he’d accumulated through his sorcery. Then the pay off – he meditates loads and gains enlightenment – occasionally using his magic powers to defeat the priests of the local nature religion or to impress an audience during a teaching session. What was very cool was the way he meditated up in caves in the mountains, turning green because he ate only nettles, surviving in the cold with very little to wear because he’d mastered the ability to warm his body with “tummo” some kind of inner warmth that yogis can produce.
Richard went next. He showed a few slides and talked about some things that he particularly liked about Milarepa – stuff that made him relevant to westerners. He was quite iconoclastic, telling people they should meditate four times a day instead of making “figurines” – not all Buddhism is about prostrating to nice statues. He had his eye on what you might call “spiritual materialism” that holier than thou attitude people take. He said get rid of everything you call Buddhism but actually use to impress people and which therefore attaches you even more to the worldly life. Through his life, Milarepa’s relationship with his “evil” aunt caused him difficulties – getting him into the magic in the first place. Milarepa learnt to be thankful for his aunt – after all she’d also lead him onto the path of the Dharma – if he hadn’t needed to atone for his crimes, perhaps he would never have achieved so much. And Milarepa had a sense of humour; when thieves came in the night, he said: just try to find anything in the night, I can’t find anything in broad daylight. Even more hilarious, he told his followers on his death-bed that there was gold buried in his cave, but actually it was a note that said: if anyone says Milarepa possessed any gold, fill his mouth with shit! This was what he loved about Buddhism, the richness, the humour, the symbolism. Things that entered the heart, like Milarepa’s advice to wear the Dakini’s deep breath like a cloak. People found all kinds of ways into Buddhism; there’s a story that one man became enlightened just by seeing the smile on the face of an image of the Buddha. Were there any questions?
Mark had seen something that interested him in the images of Milarepa. Often he was depicted sat on a strange thin white cushion.
“Yes – what’s the question?”
“What is he sitting on?”
“Oh – it’s a moon mat. Many Buddhas and Bodhisattvas are shown sitting on them.”
That was Mark’s way in. His connection to the teaching. The moon mat was “the smooth”.

After the session Richard kept thinking about something Milarepa had said: “I don’t need to read books; everything that appears to my mind is a Dharma book. All things confirm the truth of Buddha’s teachings and increase my spiritual experience.” He thought about it a lot. It chimed deeply with his own anxieties about books. He was beginning to realise that his love of reading and learning was a kind of attachment. He was actually very proud of the amount of books he had read, of his academic knowledge, his knowledge of the Dharma. But none of this would help him towards enlightenment, only his actions would.