The Translator

“Have you done any meditation before?”
“No. I don’t know how.”
“How much do you know about Buddhism.”
“Not much. We did some in RE in year 10. That talk on Milarepa.”
“Why did you ask for me?”
“Why did you come looking for me?”
“I don’t know. Will you teach me.”
“You killed someone I care about.”
“Milarepa killed a lot of people.”
“Yes, and Marpa refused to teach him for a long time. He had to change a lot before he was ready for the Dharma.”
“I’ve changed. I’m in here. I’m accepting my punishment. I did some very bad things. I want to change.”
“You think prison will counteract your bad karma. Like Milarepa building his towers.”
“Do you believe in karma?”
“Not really.”
“I just mean I’m here. I can’t escape what I’ve done. Normal life is over for me. I am a monster. I can’t face my parents, anyone.”
“But you summoned me.”
“Yeah.”
“This is not easy.”
“For you?”
“I feel like you are challenging me; challenging me to forgive you.”
“No. I just want to learn about Buddhism, how to meditate. You can hate me if you want.”
“I don’t want to be consumed by hatred.”
“Okay, send someone else.”
“Well that would be too easy, wouldn’t it? What do you want from me? I’m not a saint.”
“Okay. Then it’s pretty hopeless.”
“What do you mean?”
“I thought you were some kind of saint. You said you aspired to be. A bodhisattva.”

“What attracted you to Buddhism?”
“The moon mat.”
“That’s interesting.”
“Yeah, something about it just seemed so pure, clean.”
“Alright, I will teach you.”

“Tell me about special powers.”
“I don’t think there are any.”
“No magic.”
“I’m a western Buddhist. I don’t believe in magic. I find reincarnation hard to swallow. Karma causes me problems – some people use it to say disabled people did something bad in a past life. I take my inspiration from the bodhisattvas. I try to make the practices part of me.”
“I can make myself invisible.”
“Go on then.”
“I can’t do it here. Not in prison. Not with you watching me. Not to order. But when I’m really focused. In the zone.”
“When you are about to kill.”
“Yes. I was invisible when I killed Brian. I didn’t cast a shadow. In the riot, too. I’ve read about the powers, the siddhi.”
“Gaining powers should not be the aim of our practice.”
“But they are real.”
The room they sit in is roughly a cube. The green-blue paint is peeling. Richard looks down at the steel table, bolted to the floor. Opposite him is a killer. Is this guy insane? Most of us would assume that you’d have to be mad to do the things he did. And he’s talking about special abilities – invisibility. The siddhi. All schools of Buddhism acknowledge the existence of magical powers.
“Well, there are lots of stories.”
“Milarepa – he performed magic.”
“Yes – if you mean the thunderstorms he used to kill his enemies. But that was before he began to meditate. The texts tell us not to care about any special abilities that arise. They are distractions. The highest siddhi is enlightenment. All others should be thought of with … disgust.”
“What powers are there?”
“Well, there are stories of monks multiplying their bodies, touching the sun and moon like fruits on a tree, diving into the earth like a kingfisher plunging into water. Some of the major figures of the Vajrayana used magic. Padmavajra used it to subdue the Bon spirits of Tibet.”
“So my abilities don’t mean anything.”
“You can’t make yourself invisible, Mark. You killed people. It wasn’t that they couldn’t see you, it was just that they weren’t expecting it; they didn’t notice you. You were just a young person in a park, on a street. They were ignoring you.”
“The Buddha remembered his past lives.”
“You’ve got to remember the cultural context. Reincarnation was as natural to them as the rice in their bowls.”
“And you can’t just cherry-pick.”
“The Buddha taught that we should trust our own experience. You don’t have to believe in re-incarnation to be a Buddhist. You don’t have to believe in supernormal faculties. We are translating the Dharma for our context.”
“I knew what he was thinking - Mr. Lawrence: my teacher who killed five people. I knew what he was thinking. I could finish his sentences. It was subtle hearing. Mind reading.”
“Okay. Let’s accept that you have powers. They are a sign that you are waking up. But they are not the reason why you practice. Your aim is to free yourself – all beings – from the prison of samsara.”


Training sequence with Mark and Richard.
Use siddhis to break out of jail. Taken to solitary retreat centre. Three months. Seculsion. Welsh mountains. Check against Yoda section of “Empire Strikes Back” perhaps.
Diet. Sack of rice, sack of lentils. Canned veg. Flour. Bake own bread. Meditation. Prostrations.
Work / exercise
Does Richard ever talk about his wounding of himself.
It’s a caravan. Two bedrooms. The living room dominated by a shrine.
Writing is making me want to meditate. Writing is meditation. It’s a practice.


“We’ll use a wrathful bodhisattva practice.”

A thrill of excitement like opening and slamming your door in a moving car. There’s a fear that you might lose control. It’s dangerous to keep going with that door not shut properly. So you grip the wheel tight. Your right hand eases the door open. But what if a sudden gust takes it out of your control. You’re only holding the door with the release handle, not a good hold, not easy to close the thing using that. And you’re travelling at speed, trying to watch the road, keep the wheels pointing the right way. Is a motorcyclist going to come past you, ripping the door off its pintels and smearing himself all over the tarmac. No. It’ll be okay. Let it open up, feel the shaky danger. Pause. The car is going straight forward. No problems. Pause seems to last a long time. It’s a stretch, but you can enjoy this. As if waiting for something to get out. Like in space when you get your ship contaminated. Hold your breath, open the air lock, grab onto something. The hard vacuum sucks everything out. Air, anything not tied down. That photograph of your child you brought with you into orbit. You reach out for it, almost lose your grip on the bulkhead. With tears in your eyes you clamp yourself back onto the inner skin of the ship. The deadly spores are flushed out too. If you could see them they’d be green. Bluey-green. Furry spiky balls. They’re gone. Now slam the door. Soon you will be able to breath again.

An alarm rings at 6am. The silent freshness of morning. It’s cold in the caravan. The rough felt-like blankets are a little damp. Like when you have a fever. The first sit begins at 6:15. They have a routine. Richard gets to use the bathroom first. Mark pours two glasses of water. Richard lights incense, bowing deeply. On the low table is a terrifying figure.

All the Bodhisattvas show us a way to enlightenment. We follow one with whom we feel a connection. The wisdom of Manjushri: the flaming sword he carries, cutting through delusion. The fearlessness of Amoghisiddi: serenely halting all enemies, his palm held up like a cosmic policeofficer on traffic duty. Tara: for the nuns a female embodiment, for the monks – well perhaps sexual attraction helps to draw them towards her form of enlightenment. The magic of Padsambhava. I see him coming to Tibet, facing down the Bon shamen. Their spirits are cowed before him. He’s painting the sky with visions. He can fly. The demons bow down before him. Their priests want to learn this new magic
And sometimes you have to be the beast. If you already are a beast. The Buddha sits on his cushions. He’s beautiful. Like Keanu in the film. A prince. Long, oiled hair piled on his head in that cone-shaped style. His body is beautiful, lucent. That isn’t me. I am ugly. I can’t be like Gautama.
I want to be a monster. I am huge. I want a blue-black body with six arms. My teeth shine like evil knives. I am wearing a necklace of skulls. I’m not sure where those skulls came from. Human skulls. Perhaps collected when meditating in the burial grounds – but there’s a suspicion that I might have killed each of them and eaten their flesh. I eat corpses. Your ignorance infuriates me. I will help you get enlightened if I have to kill you to do it. My eyebrows coruscate like lightning-bolts. I shout and whistle as I bear down upon you. In one of my six arms I am counting beads on a rosary. But this mala is made of skulls. Telling each near-sphere of bone, counting out the beings I liberate with every stamp of my foot upon the sun-disc. No moon-mat for me, no peaceful repose. I’m pounding the raging fire of the sun, battering the enemies of the dharma under foot. Pig-like ignorance, pulverised by the cadence of my manic pogoing. All I need is space to dance. Selfishness shivered to pieces by the shuddering of my pistons on the anvil of fire. Greed ground to powder and burnt to zero in the nuclear flames.
I have weapons. In one of my hands I hold a vajra. In another I grip a phurba. A demon dagger. Stolen from a demon? Witchblade? Fight fire with fire. Shaped from a demon’s bones? The phurba, the thunder nail. Like a rough nail, tent peg, wedge. Point it to gather and direct the mantra power. Use it to pin down the demon. Bang the demon energy into the earth. Move it out of the body. Like a vampire stake. Fight fire with fire. A three-sided blade that tapers to a point. The handle is the face of Dorje Phurba – wrathful Padmasambha. A vajra shaft. Nagas twine the blade which emerges from the mouth of a garuda.


The first practice of the day: prostrations.
“Why are we bowing to this ‘idol’? I thought we didn’t worship a god?”
“We don’t. Prostrations are to show our respect for the Bodhisattvas, our veneration of those who have gone before, our acknowledgement that we have a long way to go.”
“I’m not very comfortable with it.”
“That’s because you are arrogant.”
Mark watched his mentor bow low, hands clasped together in front of his solar plexus. Namaste. The good in me salutes the good in you. Or in this case, the murderous rage in me salutes the transforming fury in you. He drops to his knees before the monster, huge feet trampling on the skulls of the enemies of the dharma. He stretches forwards, wriggling his whole body out flat until he lies abased, on his belly, like a snake before a snake-god. Toes, knees, chest, forehead all contact the floor. Arms push forward. Richard clasps his hands together. With elbows pressed into the ground, he brings his hands over his head. Axe-like in this gesture. Greeting the monster of rage, the spirit of anger, this embodiment of violent change. Mark copies the action, parallel to Richard. He does not resist the practice. The figure

There is a big open space. It’s a large field. It’s quiet here. Richard wanders for a few minutes.
“Okay. Now pick a space. Just walk about twenty paces, then turn and walk back. Be aware of your body, everything. Let all your thoughts drop away.”
Mark begins to pace out the distance. His knees are stiff, creaky. He allows his mind to circle them, feeling the tightness dissolve. Like bending metal. A sheet of something. At first it’s stiff, unyielding. You repeat the motion, faster, faster. Now it starts to ease up. At the bend the metal gets warmer. Now there’s hardly any effort needed. The sheet’s opening and closing like a very thin book. A crack appears, about a third of the way down the piece. Your hands are moving faster now, fluttering like butterfly wings. And the sheet breaks in two in your hand. You touch one hot ragged ripped edge to your lip and pull it away fast – it burns.
Mark’s knees feel smooth like hot metal hinging towards fatigue and disintegration, but knees don’t crack apart like steel. He allows his awareness to open up. Still focused but wide. His hips, his ankles. He holds it all there. Shoulders. He can hear sheep somewhere in the next field.



‘Richard, I want you to record the visualisation on to this for me.’
‘What?’
‘You can record voice onto this MP3 player.’
‘So I can run. It’s like the walking meditation, or … for me running is like meditation anyway. I want to become Vajrapani. I’ve got music on there that’ll help me. Angry music.’
‘I don’t know how it would work. Usually you do sadhanas in an actual sit. Walking meditation is like a break from the sitting, it’s not a way to get deeper. Running meditation, I don’t know – you’ll be using a lot of you attention just …
‘We’re translators, remember.’
So they start to build the practice. It’s like making a mix-tape for someone. One track you’re sure they’ll like, on that you hope is new to them, a bit of a challenge. He speaks slowly into the machine.
‘Everything fades into the emptiness of the blue sky. Now picture a huge sun-disc. The heat flowing out of it is malicious, enraging you. Now allow yourself to materialise there as Dorje Phurba. You are Padmavajra’s dark side. The face on the handle of a phurba. Bodhisattva as spiritual weapon. You are the shock troops of the dharma. The Bon deities were just the first step. You have vowed to destroy ignorance. Fight fire with fire. Like a series of explosive charges within a burning forest. Your arms are huge, thick things. You brace them, allowing muscles to show in sharp definition. You have six arms. Three heads allow you to look in three directions. Like three warriors backed together, fused into one. The enemy surrounds you on all sides, but you have no fear: your brothers have your back. You are swinging the skull-mala in one of your hands and it becomes a coruscating ring, slicing through everything it touches. You yell and stamp each of your four feet into the sun-disc. Other weapons in each of your other hands: a trident; a burning sword, a vajra-axe. You are yelling an inarticulate ululation.’
Mark synchronises the practice with songs: System of a Down; At The Drive-In; Rage Against the Machine; Marilyn Mansun; Manic Street Preachers. The smash of each of Dorje Phurba’s four feet meshes with the four-to-the-floor rhythm of the tracks. Machine beats: Public Enemy; Nine Inch Nails; Peaches; Iggy Pop; The Clash; Slipknot. Segue song to sadhana. Sequence the music like a DJ. Like a set which builds tension in the dancers: expectation; excitement. Teasing with samples of what’s coming. Take it out on the dance floor. It’s a beast.

Richard had taped a programme about Buddhism that was on TV the night before. Usually there was no TV on a retreat. No books (except Dharma). No music. No news. No contact. No talking. But this was different. He woke first and, this morning, went to the machine first, to check the thing had taped okay. He set it to rewind. He tuned his hearing to the whir of the VCR, filtering out all other sounds: the tick and swing of the pendulum clock; the rattle and pulse of refrigeration units; Mark’s sleep noises from the second bedroom; the hysterical singing of light bulb filaments; bird arguments in the field. The erratic scoop and stutter of the rewind seemed disconnected from the regular countdown of the LCD display. The machine slowed automatically as it neared the end of its long backwards spooling. Richard picked up the remote and prepared to press the button embossed with a right-facing triangle. The programme was there. Richard settled himself to watch it. The reception was no good. He could see the man and his TV ghost, reflected off the mountains. White noise instead of his message. He was talking about reincarnation, about karma. Richard picked up some phrases. He was applying the ideas to attitudes to people with disabilities. Impossible to follow his argument. Richard became irritated: another invented controversy.
Richard turned away from the television and picked up his acolyte’s MP3 player. A new spiritual technology. The place where modern gadgetry allows ancient techniques to blossom. The lotus pushing up out of the mud. He puts on his trainers and some shorts, leaving on the t-shirt he slept in. He judders down the caravan’s steel steps and rolls into a run across the bumpy unploughed field.
The years strip back and part of him is exposed like the tender fruit revealed by the peeled skin of a banana. Running as escape. Running as control. He used to go round and round his local park. Out of the cage, on the rampage, teenage rage. His feet feel elastic, there’s a spring in his stride. In those days he had a heavy tape-walkman – seemed a marvel at the time. Mainly white, it had swivelling black strap holders on the back. The machine came with a length of grey webbing which ran through the loops, secured by a pair of grey plastic buckles. As he ran the machine flapped against his hips. He tried it in different positions: against his stomach, behind the back. The machine bashed against him, interfering with the rhythm of the running – forcing a different cadence. The music drove him on with an urgent energy.
Richard was pounding along. Heavy footfalls. Don’t care about impact. Don’t care about the worms in the soil. Destroy the worms in the soul. He’s shouting. Wordless scream. He is Dorje Phurba. Bring it on! The spiritual life not a hobby – all or nothing. 4 real. He raises his arms, shaking with fury. Violence is a choice. Prejudice is a choice. To allow suffering is a choice we all make every day. We are all in prison. The house is on fire. He passes the torsos of trees. Post-op black paint on surgery stumps. Venus de chainsaw, beautiful amputee. If your hand offends you et cetera. This energy will be reborn until all beings have been freed from the prison. It’s not reincarnation, it’s angst, it’s rage, it’s the sense of injustice. We are all potential Padmasambhava, nailing fear to the floor, leaving it to be devoured by the vultures. To dry out, to disintegrate, to be ripped apart. We are all Jesus smashing the tables of the money-changers. We are all Marx.

Post-modern koan: what is the Buddha-nature of a murderer?