Milo closed his own eyes and tried.
Tried not to think about chickens, and why rocks were hard, and a bare-breasted woman he had glimpsed once, and string, and his belly button, and snow…
—
The Buddha and his traveling disciples left Sravasti in the middle of the night.
“We’re going,” whispered Balbeer, awakening Milo. “Before he has another bad day.”
“I don’t think they’ll talk about it,” yawned Milo, “even if he does. They don’t want to see it, so they don’t.”
“They’ll see it,” said Balbeer, “if it happens enough.”
They were on the road for days and days, begging food along the way. Every night, Milo and Ompati joined the Master in quiet talk and meditation. The rest of the Buddha world might want to forget the almost-drowning, but the Master himself obviously considered the young men to be good and worthy friends.
“I suck at meditating,” Milo blurted one evening. He wanted to meditate so badly, the failure was giving him stomach cramps.
The Master raised a quieting hand.
“Meditating is mostly breathing,” he said. “Breathing is our most intimate contact with the world outside ourselves. We bring it in”—the Master inhaled—“and we push it out”—and exhaled. “When we do that, the world outside becomes part of us.”
They breathed together, the three of them. In, out. In, out.
“So,” said Milo, “it doesn’t matter that I can’t help thinking about monkeys or my big toe?”
“The mind can’t help being noisy. Last night, trying to meditate, all I could think of was cats.”
“Oh,” said Milo, surprised. “What about them?”
“Nothing. Just cats, cats, cats, cats, cats, cats.”
“Cats, cats, cats, cats, cats, cats, cats,” repeated Milo. Ompati joined in.
“We’re meditating, aren’t we?” asked Milo.
“We were,” said the Master.
“I don’t get it,” said Ompati. “You’re supposed to clear your mind, but it’s okay to think about cats. You’re meditating if you think about cats, but not if you think about meditating.”
The Master closed his eyes and appeared to weigh this.
They waited awhile for him to continue, until he began to snore softly.
—
Sitting with Ompati at their own fire, later, Milo was silent for a long time.
Not meditating silent, just silent. Thinking.
“They say the Master has achieved Perfection,” said Milo eventually.
“It’s kind of obvious,” Ompati replied. “You know it when you see it.”
“Yeah, but it’s not what you’d expect. I mean, sure he’s all spiritual and everything, but he also has the practicality thing going on. He has trouble meditating, like me. But he makes a success of it. His mind is falling apart, but he makes a success of that, too. And then things like the tiger. That was amazing!”
The fire popped. Sparks rose, whirled, and died.
“Is there a point?” asked Ompati.
“There is. It’s this: I want Perfection.”
“Doesn’t everyone?”
“No, I don’t think so. I think most people want a little bit of it but not the whole package, where they leave the cycle of life. I think—no, I know—that I have lived thousands of lives. I may be the worst meditator ever, but I’m beginning to know things. Almost like my other lives are slipping me notes. Don’t look at me like that. Anyhow, they have been telling me—I think—that until now I never wanted real Perfection, because I never saw it in the flesh. Not like this. It’s something I’ve been rebelling against for a long time.”
“Rebelling? Against Perfection?”
“Yes. But not anymore. It’s necessary somehow. I can feel it. I’ve been fighting against becoming part of the Oversoul. But now I want that more than anything.”
Milo could hear the voices in his head dancing around and singing.
“Let me get this straight,” said Ompati. “You’ve been rebelling against Perfection, but now you’ve changed your mind because the Master is perfect but in practical, groovy ways you can understand?”
“Yeah. That’s what a teacher does, right? Gets you to understand? Well, I understand.”
The voices in his head presented him with some cool dancing lights and sitar music.
Milo hadn’t known they could do that.
“Wow,” he said. “Beautiful.”
He reached down and touched the Earth. For a moment, he could feel it turning beneath him.
“What in hell are you doing?” asked Ompati.
“I’m not sure. Something wonderful. It’s making me have to go to the bathroom.”
And this felt quite Buddha-like to him, and quite perfect, and maybe it was.
—
After that, a string of bad days.
If you weren’t part of the Master’s inner circle, you might not even know. If you were one of his old disciples or one of his new friends, though, it meant more work.
Balbeer dropped back through the ranks of marching pilgrims and took both Milo and Ompati by the arm. “Can you do something for the Master? He’s not at his best today.”
“Anything,” said Ompati.
“We’ll reach a village soon. Take his food bowl, and when you beg for food, fill his bowl, as well.”
They bowed. “Happily,” they said.
At the edge of the village, the disciples stood in a tight circle around the Buddha and smiled at the pilgrims as they passed with their food bowls.
“All is well,” said those smiles.
“We’re going to be late for the elephant races,” called the Master, from inside the circle.
The villagers were generous. They were always generous. Especially when Milo raised the Master’s bowl and said, “One more, if you please, for the Buddha himself.”
Afterward, he and Ompati sat among the disciples around the litter. The Master crawled out on his hands and knees to join them. They passed him his food bowl, and he ate without relish, as if eating were an afterthought. His eyes, Milo noticed, seemed far away but not empty or lost. He was working on something in that brain of his.
After a while, the Master turned to Balbeer.
“I wonder,” he said, “if you would do something for me?”
“Of course,” said Balbeer.
“When we have finished eating, will you go upstairs and tell my mother I wish to see her?”
Milo’s heart sank and took his appetite with it.
“Of course, Master,” said Balbeer, looking as if he might cry.
—
They rested all day at the village. Milo found a dignified old bo tree to sit under and meditated his ass off for three hours.
Cats. Rain. Trees. Love. Dogs. His penis. Night.
His mind was noisy. Nothing he could do about it. But the breathing part, that he could manage.
In. Out. Be aware of the air and the world coming in, going out.
There was something familiar about the exercise. Not because he’d been breathing all his life but because he had breathed this way before. Expertly. Consciously. He had a mental flash of his naked body floating in space….
Perfection. In some other life. But he had lost it. He didn’t recall how.