X-ray eyes, whispered his many voices.
Milo didn’t know what an X-ray was (not in this life), but he got the idea. The old man looked at him as if he could see his naked bones and the atoms they were made of.
“Namaste,” said Milo, bowing.
The old man bowed in return.
—
A sudden chorus of shouting from the hilltop.
“Bodhi!” someone cried, followed by a chorus of voices. “Bodhi! Here he is!”
Milo looked uphill to see several young bald men in simple robes hurrying toward them through the trees, hopping over the dead and wounded.
“Mmmmm,” murmured the old man. “Here we go again.”
The young men arrived in a breathless little herd.
“It’s okay,” the old man told them. “I’m having a good day.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said the tallest, “if you’re having a good day or a bad day. You’re not supposed to wander off without telling Ananda.”
“Shhh,” said the old man, kneeling to help a bleeding soldier. “Be useful.”
He unwound his simple robe until he stood in their midst wearing a homespun loincloth, and he began to tear the robe into strips. His students—as Milo deduced them to be—did exactly as he did, without question or hesitation.
“Buddha,” Milo whispered to himself.
The old man heard him. Gave him an X-ray wink.
Milo tore his uniform into bandages and went about the forest, binding wounds.
—
Milo found himself working with Balbeer, the oldest of the students. They rigged a series of tents at the top of the hill—the beginnings of a field hospital.
Milo asked, “What does it mean when you said Buddha has good days and bad days?”
“We don’t call him ‘Buddha.’ That’s a generic term for someone who’s enlightened. Buddha is something everyone has inside them, if they can get to it. So we just call him ‘Bodhi.’ Wise one. Teacher.”
“And the good-days-and-bad-days thing?”
Balbeer handed him some firewood. “Be useful,” he said.
Milo went off to heat some water.
—
So, Milo thought, this is what it’s really like to be a healer.
He put pressure on wounds that were bleeding. He tied splints around crooked arms. Once, he cut off a ruined leg. He gathered firewood. He cleaned things that needed cleaning.
One day, Milo saw the Master making his way out of the hospital with a pail full of shit, going to dump it in a latrine that he himself had dug.
“That’s the teacher I’ve been looking for,” Milo said to himself, “if he’ll have me.”
“Could you at least take the arrow out of my throat,” coughed a soldier at his feet, “before you leave the third dimension?”
Milo’s eyebrows shot up.
“Ompati!” he cried. “I’m so pleased you’re not dead!”
Ompati started to say something but gagged instead.
Milo made him be silent.
He made himself useful.
—
The next few days passed in a blur. Milo worked in the makeshift hospital and did what the Buddha people around him were doing. He slept wherever there was space. Ate whatever came his way, which wasn’t much. Surprising, thought Milo, when it came right down to it, how little a person needed.
The students seemed happy in a way Milo had trouble understanding. They weren’t like other people. Most people had a kind of unhappiness they carried around with them. You saw it in their eyes or heard it in the way they talked. They were always a little bit mad about something, or worried, or sorry. This nagging unhappiness was a way of living that most people had gotten used to.
The Buddha people didn’t have this unhappiness. They seemed to have a way of doing rather than fretting. Doing what was in front of them at that moment, whether it was talking to you or stitching a wound or drinking a cupful of water.
As he was noticing this, thinking about it, he realized that Balbeer was standing beside him. Balbeer put a friendly arm around his shoulder and said, “You’re already enlightened, Milo.”
Milo blinked.
“I don’t see how that could be,” he said. “I haven’t—”
“You haven’t had an explosion of light inside your head, or seen the future, or had fire shoot out of your nose?”
“No, I haven’t.”
“That’s not what enlightenment is. It’s not some mystical explosion. It’s noticing what’s going on around you, here and now, and you do that.”
“Not always.”
“Well, you’re not always enlightened.”
“So then basically everyone’s enlightened, probably, at least some of the time. Like this guy whose leg I had to cut off. He screamed so hard he was drooling, and his eyes rolled back in his head.”
Balbeer squinted, thinking. “I don’t know,” he said.
Milo was surprised. He had never heard a teacher or a serious student say “I don’t know.” It sounded frightfully intelligent.
“Why does a rhino have horns on its face instead of up on top of its head?” Milo asked.
“I don’t know,” said Balbeer.
“That’s wonderful. How come wood burns? Why do our armpits stink? What does it mean if I dream about being naked in the marketplace?”
“I don’t know. I thought I was the only one who had the ‘naked’ dream.”
“I think everyone has it.”
They went and got something to eat.
—
Not long after, there came a morning when all the Buddha people got up and started walking away, down the road. Milo and Ompati got up and went with them. Milo discovered suddenly that he had nothing in the world to his name. A primitive kind of robe, one set of underclothes, and a pair of leather sandals he’d borrowed from a dead mahout.
Ompati picked up a stick from the side of the road.
“It feels good to have something,” he said, “even if it’s just a stick.”
They walked in silence for a time.
“I haven’t seen the Master for a week,” Ompati said. “Is he even with us? Maybe he has gone on ahead.”
“He’s old,” Milo answered. “They say he has good days and bad days.”
“Doesn’t everybody have good and bad days? What does that mean?”
Milo shrugged. He didn’t know.
That night, they found out.
They were sitting around a fire at twilight, cooking some beans they’d begged from a passing caravan, when Milo was struck with energy.
“I’m going to go ask him,” he said.
“Ask who what?” asked Ompati and a couple of pilgrims who had joined them.
“About the dream I have, where I’m in the marketplace and I suddenly realize I’m naked.”
“Everybody has that dream.”
“Yeah, but I wonder what it means.”
And he was up and gone among the many fires, looking for the Buddha.