My knife fight: Part 1

Last week I journeyed from sea to shining sea to check in with my revered and aged teacher before his return to Asia. "Rinpoche," I said, sitting at his feet, "I've come to confess I do not much meditate upon a cushion as you would like. But I have made Dharma part of every minute of everyday and now I keep seeing how everything about me has totally changed. Frankly, the Park Avenue person I used to be would probably just die if she knew what I've become." Rinpoche sat still in his brocade chair and loosed his huge Cheshire Cat smile.

"The deities have become as real as family. I talk to them by mantra all the time now. And I sense they are protecting me. Something is. Rinpoche, something actually makes good things happen--the way loving parents might. I think it's Guru Rinpoche and White Tara and definitely Mahakala coming up with the  most magically wonderful solutions when problems arise for me. People say I've got all the luck, but I think it's just your blessing on my practice." More of that  smile. 

"And now that I know how wondrous it is, I am so afraid to lose the bliss, I  obsessively watch my every move and thought. So I guess my whole life has turned into practice." 

"Very good," he said.

"Yes, well sometimes it doesn't feel like that.  Can I tell you a story?"

"Yes."

"Do you remember the last time you came to my little house in Maine, we released live lobsters off the dock?" He nodded. "You remember my neighbor the lobsterman who brought them to us in his boat?" Nod. "Well, about six weeks ago I was standing in his doorway paying my share of the private road bill and eating lobsters came up. 'You know,' I said, 'Rinpoche and the Dharma have so deeply got to me, I just can't kill and cook one any more. When I think about the fact that they are living creatures who can feel, I can't bring myself to buy one to eat it. It would give my karma massive indigestion. Of course, if someone serves me a cooked lobster, I'd eat it. The Buddha ate whatever was offered so as not to offend his host or prevent the merit of generosity. But you know how it is around here: none of my friends serves lobster when it's just us because they figure we're all eating it all the time with our house guests. So I haven't had a lobster for two summers.

"Midway through this confession, Joe's wife appears. 'I can fix that," she says. "I've just cooked up a mess of lobsters and crabs Joe caught. Wait a minute....  Here you go!'  She hands me a cooked lobster tail and claw and a whole crab neatly in a bag.

"I take the bag home and cast aside what I was going to cook for dinner. Reluctantly I put the cooked seafood on a plate, make myself a little salad and pour a glass of white wine. I am finally in Maine eating real Maine food, all that seasonal, local blah. i used to do this all the time, for decades, and people envied me. But every time I cracked that crab, my spirit sank. I felt White Tara's disappointment in me reverting to cannibalism, dipping one of her children in a little melted tarragon butter. But what to do? Out of respect for my neighbor's generosity and the killing of these living creatures for my enjoyment, I ate every possible morsel of them. Just like all those clucking happy tourists on all the piers. But I didn't enjoy it like they do because I knew murder was involved and I was disturbing White Tara, protector of all beings.

"About two hours later, brute darkness rolled over the soft September evening. Languorous and tentative sways of lightening that were dancing like Tara's veils suddenly sharpened into sizzling swords pointed at my house. Again and again my room lit up ghastly white, ghostly white actually. Fierce wind stormed in and began to loot the landscape. Thunder boomed. Branches broke, trees crashed. One hit my roof and I shook more than it did.

'I'm sorry!' I screamed. 'I didn't mean to eat the lobster, I didn't want that crab. I'm sorry!  I won't do it again, honest. I promise. So stop! Please stop attacking!' Three times I did the mantra to ask Vajrasattva for forgiveness, swearing in between I'd never eat seafood again. But the storm didn't stop. It just got worse and worse..."

Rinpoche was laughing away. 

"The next morning I told Joe to never ever ever again give me lobster. It cost me five trees and a piece of roof. Rinpoche, who knew 26 years ago when I started my first meditation class, I'd end up like this?"