OUT OF TUNE

Not long ago, I drove from San Francisco to Los Angeles on infamous I-5, a spooky four-lane speedway that for three hours shoves you through preternaturally perfect plantations, past identical concrete clover leafs, off ramps paved only for desert oases of fast food and gas, and into the one true marker of the whole flat out run: ten miles of high stink manure from Harris Ranch where if you are not gagging you can stop to eat steak. Driving the alien I-5 makes me feel I’m playing the lead role in a horror movie, and this mid-summer trip was even scarier. At 75 miles an hour, whizzing past right lane semis and slaloming around SUVs lolling in the left, I had to keep deciding mile by mile whether in the record breaking 115 degree heat, I should fry myself or fry the car: air conditioning off, air conditioning on. A breakdown on this desolation freeway, famous for predator perverts and pirates, could be fatal.

Comfort is all I wanted when I arrived. I wanted to be soothed, born again in the human realm, and I reckoned this would happen easily for I had driven six perilous hours in steam heat to sit in the presence of my Buddhist Rinpoche, newly arrived from Asia. He was giving a public weekend teaching. The fact that it was on the farthest side of town and in an unfamiliar location unfortunately aggravated my yearning for the safety of familiarity but I figured his words would bring it quickly.

As always before my teacher talks, we had to do the opening chant, the six-verse prayer to the lineage of gurus to help us realize enlightenment as they did. I’ve recited this chant so many times, in Tibetan, I’ve nearly got it memorized, a small point of secret pride. So I didn’t take the handout on which it was neatly printed and which was rattling in a lot of hands as the translator took the microphone to make an unusual preliminary announcement. If Rinpoche hadn’t been seated center stage in this recital hall borrowed for the occasion, I would have expected deflating news about the star being so sick we were getting the understudy. What we got was news that His Holiness the 17th Karmapa, head of the lineage, had written a new tune for the old supplication.

The translator turned on a tape and everyone started singing, trying their best to follow the alien high, low, Chinese sounding melody. Except me. I sat there with my mouth open, silently freaking out as I struggled to find the Tibetan syllables I knew in cadences I didn’t. Nothing was recognizable: losing the familiar rhythm, the known tune, I lost track of the words and I didn’t have the handout like everybody else did. I had nothing to grab to steady myself. The long chant became an incomprehensible alien jungle. I was starring in a nightmare again.

I was sure this was all just a misunderstanding, a wrong detour, and we’d revert to the old tune for the opening of the afternoon session. But of course we didn't. The translator reminded us we needed to learn the new one—a solemn Tibetan inspired melody the Karmapa had created to increase our devotion. It was still a foggy foreign mess to me: I couldn’t fit anywhere into the tune any Tibetan syllables I could remember so I could not join in prayer. My mood darkened. My smile collapsed. I wanted my tune back; I wanted to chant without a handout in front of me so everyone could see I knew the tune because I was an oldtimer, somewhat special. It was distressing enough that my teacher was in a strange room in a strange place in an unfamiliar city. I didn’t need a strange tune to deal with too. I wondered why I had put myself through so much stress to come here.

That night I caught up with my beautiful goddaughter newly back to Tinseltown after earning an award adorned master’s degree from the nation’s premier drama school. She was having a hard time adjusting to the disrupted rhythm of her life now that the scaffolding of grad school had come down. She’d moved from her own place in the East to the West where she was staying with friends, lost her long term boy friend, not found a rewarding job or welcome arms. She seemed even more unsettled than me. We went to a fine French bistro where despite such treats as grilled salmon and cassoulet she ordered mac and cheese.

Sunday morning I tried hard to be cheerful now that I knew my way to the site and where I could find coffee at the break. But my mood blackened hearing that new Chinese sounding chant tune again and still not being able to find my way among the words, like Bill Murray staggering around Tokyo Lost in Translation. My mind was so messed up I could hardly hear what my teacher was saying. My eyes abandoned him to wander around the room.

I spotted a friend I’d done many a retreat with, especially in India. Two years ago at the monastery there, I remembered, somebody abruptly changed the evening recitation for us. The soulful prayer to Chenrezig, deity of sublime compassion, a prayer I profoundly love, was without warning supplanted by a whole new version we were told had surfaced in Tibet. It included recitative where lyric melody had been which instantly ruined the whole spirit of the aria-like prayer for me. But my friend was thrilled. She insisted with a bright smile she loved it. And that’s what made me really mad. People who loved the new version were smashing my chance to get the old one back. I went back to my room which was also her room and spitefully recited the old one in its entirety. I was so oppositional I did not bring the new version home, which allowed me to keep doing my favorite prayer the way I first heard it and still like it. I figured I would solve my opening chant problem that way too.

The wise men of the Dharma must have known I was coming soon to the religion nearest them. I have been told Trungpa Rinpoche who got here first and set the stage constantly switched tunes and prayers and schedules and just about everything he told people to do one way he then told them to do another, exasperating them as he kept them from pouncing on one way or other as being the right way, grabbing hold and attaching like a barnacle to a rock. He was like the back and forth tide that chafes those creatures, keeping his students continually off guard, not letting them land on solid ground and plant themselves with a big Aha! He was trying to train them to be survivors of real life where there is no solid ground, just banana peel after banana peel, circumstances one after the other pulling the rug out from under you. Causes and conditions are shifting continually as in a kaleidoscope, rarely coming together the same way twice so the only grip you can get is onto the understanding that life does not provide re-runs and instant replays. Like Ole Man River it just keeps moving along.

Oddly enough when Trungpa Rinpoche died his old student guard immediately tried to freeze things right where he had left them. They became a Vatican determining ecclesiastical right from wrong, adding so much weighty baggage they slowly sank a vibrant and flexible assembly into a stiffened dark age. That’s what the weekend headlines were revealing as well when I read the Sunday paper at the break for lunch. People who’d had their particularly beloved supplication tune—shamah, hosanna, mashallah-- superseded by another were going crazy ripping each other’s guts out and blowing up everyone in sight to insist their way is the only right way, the grand triumph after which life is dammed. They in their blinding rage were making the world as desolate as I-5.

I left the weekend teaching certain I did not know the new tune and thus would not feel at all obliged to sing it. I switched on the radio as the car struggled to climb over the mountain and get down to the dead flat and treacherous speedway. I scanned rapidly one station to another unable to find a sound that soothed me. There had been a decade of satisfying radio, tuning in and taking part until the erudite grace of Simon and Garfunkel, the intricate chords of Bill Evans gave way to the ear bashing pound of Led Zepplin and silence seemed the saner setting. Tapes, CDs and IPods are a gift to those of us who want our way or no way. You know: They’re playing our song! We want it played over and over making us think we can go back, hold on. We want the same singer to sing the same song and get mad when s/he moves on to something different for a change, like Dylan going electric. The way we first heard it, that’s the way it should be, the right way. I put on Mozart, mac and cheese Mozart who wrote sublimely soul lifting music for people in an age of enlightenment.

I sat down in front of my shrine the night I got home and loudly sang that opening chant the familiar way. I was into maybe the fourth verse when suddenly words stopped coming out of my mouth. I had been stung by a thought. There were actually two old ways to sing this supplication: the halting deep basso way Rinpoche’s monks do it at his monasteries and the singsong I was using, a way Rinpoche once laughingly described as dog howling. This was taught to newcomers, he explained, because it’s so simple anyone can master the cadence. Well, how about that! I was sanctimoniously hanging on to dog howling, arrogantly certain it was "right", that I knew best. My teacher, bless his wisdom, always chants this foreigners' dog howling version with the same gusto he displays on the more sonorous monastery tune because, I guess, he knows better than I do that praying is praying and life moves along. This prayer was written in the 15th Century. Who alive could name all its tunes? And truly, if what you intend to do is pray, did they matter?


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