—
That night, the first of the monsoon rains arrived.
The Buddha’s thousands rolled up their mats and crowded into the huts and monasteries. In the morning, several young pilgrims woke everyone with a great shouting: “Come quick! Something wonderful! Something strange! The Master has to see!”
So the Buddha and his thousands followed the young men down to the shore of a nearby river. The Master wasn’t hobbling, Milo noticed. He looked sharp and quick.
The river had swelled, like a boa constrictor swallowing a horse. It plunged and thrashed, gripping whole trees and great branches.
“Look!” cried the young pilgrims, pointing, jumping up and down.
They all looked.
“A monster!” they cried.
Some distance from shore, a single jujube tree stood against the flood, its branches beaten and stripped, and in its highest reaches something awful crouched. Something wet and bad. Something toothy and glaring but also, clearly, something frightened.
“A devil,” murmured some.
“A demon!” said others.
“Nonsense,” said the Buddha. “It’s a tiger.”
So it was.
Soaked and muddy, baring its teeth at the flood, it looked ready to fight, if only something attackable would present itself. As Milo watched, it took a big green terrified shit.
Everybody looked at the Master, expecting something.
“Someone bring me a rope,” he said. “The longest rope you can find. Long enough to reach the top of the tree.”
A hundred pilgrims pelted back to the monastery and into downtown Sravasti, without hesitation or a single question.
Milo leaned closer to Balbeer and asked, “What…?”
Balbeer shook his head, frowning.
Noise and shouting—they were back with the rope! A hundred ropes! The Master selected one and tied it into a wide, lazy lasso.
“No way!” said Ompati. His sentiments were echoed up and down the shore.
Even the tiger took an interest. He watched the Buddha without blinking, licking his chops.
The Master whirled the lasso over his head…slowly at first…and cast it like an arrow over the water. It settled neatly over a broken branch just behind the tiger.
He tugged the lasso tight and pulled.
He meant, it became obvious, to pull the jujube tree down to the shore, allowing the tiger to leap to safety. But he was, after all, an eighty-year-old man, and…
The tree started to bend.
The thousands muttered and gasped.
The tiger knew something was up, but he wasn’t sure if he liked it or not. He shifted, glaring.
The Master’s hands began to quiver.
“Please be useful,” he said to those around him.
Disciples and pilgrims piled onto the rope. Balbeer began a chant, which got them all pulling together. “Ahn!” they chanted, and pulled. “Bastei!” they chanted, and pulled, and the tree bent closer, until at last the roots tore free and its top branches hovered just ten feet from the bank.
At this point, a couple of things happened very quickly.
The tiger leaped through the air.
Everyone saw the tiger flying toward the shore and let go of the rope and ran.
Everyone but the Master, who had secured the rope around his wrist.
The tiger flashed its teeth and fangs and went crashing away through the trees without eating anyone.
The jujube tree came loose and went rolling downstream with the flood, yanking the Master off his feet, into the raging river, and out of sight.
As fast as this happened, Milo was faster. He was in the water before he even knew he was going to go, reaching for the Buddha’s old bare feet, the last part of the Master to vanish.
The water swirled around him. Branches and gravel and floating dreck scraped at him, but his groping hands found what they were looking for, and down the river they went, the tree and the Master and Milo.
Milo pulled himself up the Master’s body, almost climbing him like a tree, until he reached the old man’s wrist. Once he had the wrist in his grip, he did what the Master could not, which was to use both hands to unwind the rope.
The tree rolled away toward the ends of the Earth.
Milo and the Buddha bobbed up into the air, gasping. They fought together for the shore, grabbing for weeds or branches, clawing at the mud.
A tall figure splashed toward them. Big, strong beet-farming hands grasped Milo—Ompati!—pulling him, pulling the Master free of the current, until all three of them beached themselves and lay there with their legs in the water, gulping air.
Pilgrims and disciples came running, surrounding them, shouting with joy.
Milo realized then that the flood had yanked their clothing away. He and the Master lay there naked before the growing crowd.
“I’ve had dreams like this,” said Milo.
“Everyone has that dream,” said the Buddha.
—
The Great Tiger Rescue had predictable results.
The story of the Buddha’s supernatural strength and compassion flashed across the jungles and villages. Within hours more pilgrims started thronging into Sravasti. A new fable! A new miracle!
The story of how the Buddha had been dragged into the river and had to be fished out did not flash anywhere. It was hushed up, on a solemn and voluntary basis.
You can’t blame them, said one of Milo’s past-life voices. Imagine if Jesus had been eaten by ferrets. It wouldn’t work well, fable-wise.
The disciples and pilgrims didn’t even want to talk about it that day. As they sat around in the thousands with their rice bowls, eating the midday meal in a light, cool rain, Ompati said, “Man, I thought it was all over. You guys were underwater for a long time—”
And everyone around them got up and left.
“They don’t want to hear it,” said Milo.
“You saved his life,” insisted Ompati.
“We saved his life, I suppose. That doesn’t change the fact that he isn’t like a normal person. He’s more like a story that lives and breathes. Sometimes the story has to be edited.”
“You’re starting to sound like a wise man,” Ompati remarked.
Balbeer approached and knelt beside Milo.
“He wants you to come and see him,” he said. “Both of you.”
Oh. Cool.
Balbeer led them through the crowd to the Master’s central hut. It was a modest home with a brick foundation and a roof of fresh green pwaava leaves, as if the Master lived beneath a huge salad.
Inside, the Master sat cross-legged, eyes closed. When Milo and Ompati sat across from him, his eyes opened.
“Thank you,” said the Buddha, patting Milo on the knee, nodding at Ompati.
“You’re welcome,” they whispered.
“Of course,” said the Master, “a life is like a wave in the river. It rises and then disappears back into the river. It rises again somewhere else. The rising and falling doesn’t make a lot of difference.”
“You mean it doesn’t matter,” said Ompati, “if Milo saved your life.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said the Master, fixing his eyes on Ompati, “to the river.”
Ompati looked at the ground, corrected.
“Now,” said the Master, “meditate with me.”
Eyes closed again.