Though I felt in 1975 that I understood everything and that the great historical pendulum of yinyang had reached perigee in horror and in war and had begun to swing back to peace and to love, still the wars continued—in Southeast Asia, in Latin America, in Grenada, in Nicaragua, in Honduras, in Ecuador, in Panama. As a child in Cambodia, Ngor had been raised and educated as a Buddhist. Ngor survived imprisonment and torture in Cambodia and immigrated to the United States; in 1986 he won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his role in The Killing Fields, the stunning movie of the Cambodian revolution; and in 1996—in an irony I have again come to understand as a fundamental truth of life—Dr. Ngor was slain in Los Angeles by members of a street gang.
Dead.
I folded laundry, washed dishes, shoveled snow, marked and graded student essays. In my urgent reconsideration of the idea of the guru, the teacher, I was reading books—The Life of Milarepa, the Dalai Lama's Essential Teachings, and Krishnamurti's The Awakening of Intelligence—and articles on the subject. The concept of renunciation I found especially troubling. Among the thirty-seven practices of the bodhisattva listed by the Dalai Lama was renunciation of country, home, family, and friends: "[I]t is useful and sometimes necessary to leave our home and our country. This helps cut the natural attachment we have for those around us, our family and our friends." Though I believed I understood the rationale for the practice of renunciation, not just for Shakyamuni and his successors but for many sages—Moses, Jesus, Joyce, Einstein, Solzhenitsyn—it seemed impossible that as a husband, a father, and now a grandfather I could ever really travel the path of the bodhisattva.
I read the passage aloud to Ruth.
"Typical male," she said making a face.
"Explain."
"How would a mother ever be able to do that?"
I did not know.
I related her remark and my doubts and questions to Billy.
Women, too, Billy suggested, would do well to extricate themselves for a time from the house of mirrors and to look at who they are beyond the roles they play; he acknowledged, however, that the society of men does not make this easy for women. One helpful tradition, Billy explained, was the tradition of the tantric householder begun by Marpa the Translator, who had a wife and family and worked a farm. But even Marpa, Billy conceded, was able to go to India to study with his teacher. Billy and his wife—his second—called themselves yogi householders.
"Yes, the teachings on renunciation are hard," he agreed. "But renunciation is absolutely necessary. We have to see and to cut through our habitual reactive patterns of thought and behavior. The result," he explained, "is not supposed to be loving anyone less but rather lifting that love out of the realm of ego conditioning and into unconditional love."
I was discouraged.
The book had a glossary in the back; and for more help I went to the Shambhala website and read material by Khenpo Kharthar Rinpoche and then to the website of Pema Chödrön where I read some materials she had posted. One document was a translation of somebody's list of tips and advice. It appeared endless—on and on and on it went. By the time I wore out I was a real mess. The numberless stages, levels, slogans, practices, obstacles, and antidotes to obstacles all seemed to indicate that contrary to what I had believed, indeed, yes, there was, definitely, something to be attained and that I would never attain it.
Meltdown.
But Billy also described how he himself had at first thought that the purpose of meditation was some kind of transcendent, visionary state of altered consciousness and how he had been both surprised and disappointed when he had then learned of ordinary mind.
"But then what a relief," he exclaimed, "not to feel that I had failed because I couldn't stay high all the time!"
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