Killing the Buddha Read online

  Following Rodrigo’s lead, a dozen devotees rose on stiff legs and took up the plates of goodies; what they’d given to the gods they now returned to themselves. As they trotted up and down the rows of their fellow worshipers, air-dropping dried fruit and cheese cubes, they continued chanting. MA NU PA LA YA. One of the monks stumbled and spilled a whole plateful of the offering onto a sitting worshiper in a cardigan sweater. TO TE NO PA. A look of horror blossomed on the cardigan man’s face as baloney, grapes, Chex mix, and cookie crumbs rained into his hair. Someone said, “How’s that for a shower of blessings?” Cardigan tried to laugh.

  Ani Rinchen carried a pitcher from which she poured red wine into our cupped palms. MA HA SA MA YA. When we failed to understand whether we were to anoint ourselves or have a drink, she mimed lapping at her hands like a dog at its bowl. And she kept praying, even as her fingers covered her face, HA HA HA HA HO.

  It was late in the evening when the ritual ended, the sacrifice consumed, the cushions stacked neatly in the corner. The few who lived in the monastery with Ani Rinchen retired to the second floor. They all had jobs to get to in the morning; Ani Rinchen worked days as a secretary in a doctor’s office, giving a portion of her paycheck to the monastery each week, putting the rest away so she could afford, in a few years, to go on a long retreat at a less public monastery in New York State. Three years of silence, back where she came from.

  Those who didn’t live in the small rooms above the prayer hall put their shoes on and climbed into their cars for the drive back to suburbs of Washington or Baltimore. Outside, one pair of headlights after another briefly brightened the night as engines hummed alive and tires spun on ice and gravel.

  In the light of the beams, we finally saw the monument the motel clerk had told us about: the stupa, a twenty-five-foot-tall altar shaped like a space capsule with a window near the top, where a gold Buddha sat watch. All the strange things the clerk had claimed were buried beneath the stupa were really there, we’d learned, guns, knives, even electron microscopic images of Ebola and HIV.

  Small offerings to the Buddha, red candles, blue bottles of water, yellow candy wrappers, shells, plastic whistles, coins and paper money dotted the flat surface of the base like stones at a Jewish grave. A blue plastic sign stood in front. THE THINGS YOU SEE AT THE STUPA ARE OFFERINGS TO THE BUDDHA, it read. PLEASE DO NOT TAKE THEM AND DO NOT HARM THE STUPAS.

  IF YOU DO, YOU’LL EVENTUALLY EXPERIENCE THE TERRIBLE RESULT OF SUCH ACTION, INCLUDING FUTURE POVERTY, SEPARATION FROM ALL THINGS VIRTUOUS, PHYSICAL DEFORMITY, AND OTHER TERRIBLE FORMS OF SUFFERING.

  Truth in advertising: There are rules, you break them, you pay. Keep your toes behind the line or Guru Rinpoche will chop them off for you.

  We wondered if the clerk had seen the sign, or if it had been night when he’d been there too, the nectar and Fig Newtons offered inside, the blade waiting in the dark. Was this the price karma took in trade for liberation? Obedience to rules that pay you back ten times over if you break their rhythm, if you wear the wrong pair of shoes?

  Our friend David wouldn’t have bothered with the question. The precision that compelled him to maintain a distinct pair for each phase of the day would have led him to turn on his heels at the sight of such a melodramatic warning. “There are rules,” he would say, “and we must play by them.” Right: Take nothing, leave nothing, don’t make offerings to a karma that maintains its order by the threat of a blade. David wouldn’t have left anything. Neither did we. Not a penny or a candle or even a stone.

  I, in turn, will do this to you…

  LEVITICUS 26:16

  Leviticus

  BY MICHAEL LESY

  I’M fifty-seven years old—well past the age when, according to Jewish tradition, someone should have taken me aside, stood me in some water, and whispered the secrets of the universe in my ear. Answers to the big questions: what came before; what comes after; what is above; what is below. No one told me anything. What happened, instead, was: I got private lessons from Blind Joe Death. First, my old aunt, the one who’d pawned everything to bring my father to America, died: Her apartment caught fire. Then my father: He lived so long, he lost his mind. Then my mother: She went blind, and stopped eating. Then my wife: She got Lou Gehrig’s disease and died in her sleep. Every three or four years, someone in my family got sick and died and I buried them. No whispered secrets: just twelve years of death and dying.

  As to my relatives: I’ve got no claim to fame, no inside track, no precious knowledge. On my mother’s side, they were all scoundrels, fools, thieves, and adulterers. Putzes, gonifs, and schnorers, I believe, were the terms once used to describe such people. On my father’s side, it was a little different: We were Levites, my father said. “The descendants of scribes” was the way he told it. One of my cousins even married a rabbi, but the rest of my family—one sharpened knives; one sold keys; one sold steel; one sold doors and windows. What can I tell you? They made a living. Their children went to college.

  As for my father and me being descendants of scribes: It took me years to figure out when to stand up and when to sit down during services. I can count on two hands the number of times I’ve worn tefillin. Most of what I know about being a Jew, I learned from books. I bought them; I read them; I still read them. I taught myself.

  For instance: I was fifty when I learned that, besides guarding the Temple and writing everything down, my ancestors, the Levites, also killed people. We were Israel’s official executioners. Long before Egypt and the Exodus, Levi and his brother Simeon had rubbed out a whole city full of men related to a Hivite who’d raped their sister. “We’ll live with you, peacefully,” Levi had said to the rapist and his kin. “Just circumcise yourselves to make things right.” The fools did; Levi and Simeon waited three days and then killed them all. A whole city of dead men with no foreskins.

  That’s why Moses knew who to call when he came down from Sinai and saw the Golden Calf, the false god made from jewelry. “Whoever is for God,” Moses shouted, “join me.” Moses was a Levite himself. We came running. “Go through the camp,” Moses ordered us. “Gate to gate; no exceptions; brother, neighbor, kin; it doesn’t matter. If they’re guilty, kill them.” We did as we were told. Brother, neighbor, kin. Three thousand people. That’s how we earned the right to serve as the priests and keep the stories.

  I tell you this now to warn you. My ancestors had a hand in writing Leviticus. If you’re looking for stories of redemption, you need to look elsewhere. Purity and impurity; guilt, death, and being alive—“instructions for priests”—that’s what Leviticus is about. According to tradition, Jewish boys were given Leviticus as their first study assignment. “Children are pure; therefore let them study the laws of purity.”

  Imagine: a book about purity written by people with bloody hands. Explained, now, by a man who knows only what he’s read. A self-taught storyteller. If I were you, I’d be careful about what I believed. And what I didn’t.

  There are a lot of stories about how we—the Jewish people, I mean—got into so much trouble. Every one of the stories has to do with obeying and not obeying the Commandments—all 613 of them, the shalts, the shalt-nots, and especially, the consequences.

  As I understand it, God didn’t offer the Torah to us first. Instead, He went to the children of Esau. You remember Esau—the hairy one, the hunter—who’d been tricked out of his birthright by Jacob and his mother. “Will you accept the Torah?” God asked Esau’s children. God was probably trying to make amends for what Jacob had done. Esau’s children were wary. They asked to read the Torah before they agreed to anything. They got as far as the Sixth Commandment, the one about murder, before they stopped and looked at God. “That’s a hard one,” they said. “You must know: We live by the sword. That’s who we are; that’s what we do. Things happen. We can’t agree to this.”

  God took the Torah to the children of Ammon and Moab next. You might have thought they would have accepted it—Ruth, the wife of Boaz, the great-grandmother of
King David, was a Moabite. No, again. They read as far as the Seventh Commandment, the one that prohibited adultery. “Don’t you remember?” they asked God. “We’re descended from Lot’s daughters. How could you have forgotten? Lot slept with his own daughters in the cave. After you obliterated his home and turned his wife into salt. We can’t even begin to agree to this.”

  God went to the children of Ishmael next. Once again, He was probably trying to make amends for the way their ancestor had been treated, thrown out to make room for Isaac. “Will you accept the Torah?” He asked. “Is there anything in there about stealing?” they said. God answered, “That’s Commandment Eight. Stealing is forbidden.” They looked straight at Him and shook their heads. “That’s how we make our living. We rob; we steal; we ambush people. How do you expect us to make money if we can’t steal it? No deal.”

  According to what I’ve read, God went to every nation on the planet. They all had some sort of problem with the Torah. At last, then, He asked us. We didn’t even have the sense to read the agreement. “We hear and we obey,” we said. Such smart people.

  Of course, like every story about every important event, this one has an alternate version. I can accept the first one. But the one I prefer—the one I believe—is very different:

  This time, we made it as far as Mount Sinai before we were asked to agree to anything. God drew us up outside a perimeter, twelve miles from Mount Sinai. “Don’t cross the line or you’ll die.” Then it started: The whole mountain began to smoke as if it were a piece of coal in a furnace. Huge, shattering, shuddering shofar blasts trumpeted down on us. All of us were pure; the Golden Calf hadn’t happened yet. God spoke to each and every one of us, inside our minds, in a voice that was as different, person to person, as the soul of each and every one of us was different, one to another. Babies at their mothers’ breasts heard and understood. God made the body of each pregnant woman “as transparent as glass,” and as He spoke, the children in their wombs turned their heads and opened their eyes and saw. Supernatural sight was granted to us all: We could see the thunder, we could hear the lightning. We were, each of us assembled there, given the gift of prophecy. All the future and all the past flickered in front of us, in a glance.

  That’s when we panicked. “Please!” we begged. “Please stop!” We rushed to Moses. “You speak to us. That we can bear. But not God.”

  Which is when God lifted up Mount Sinai and held it over our heads like a basket. “Now,” God said. “You must choose. Either accept the Torah and live. Or refuse it, here, now, in this place. And die.”

  “We hear and we will do,” we cried. “We hear and we will obey.”

  Deals like that never have good outcomes. Leviticus ends with five sets of prophetic curses, seven curses in every set, each set more terrifying than the last, each curse more dreadful than the one before. All of the curses are retributions. When—not if—we break the promises we made at Sinai, God assures us: We will pay.

  Every week, a portion of the Torah, accompanied by a passage from one of the prophets, is chanted aloud, during services, in every shul, every synagogue, on the earth. And every year, when we reach those final sets of curses in Leviticus, we chant them hurriedly, heads down, hunched and hushed, in an undertone, because we know: It’s happened before, it’ll happen again.

  “If you do not obey Me and do not observe all these commandments, if you reject My laws and spurn My rules so that you do not observe all My commandments and you break My covenant, I, in turn, will do this to you.”

  First come panic and disease, fever, swelling, and lesions. The sky turns to copper and the earth to iron. Wild animals begin to starve, so they attack our livestock. When there are no cattle left, they hunt down our children. We flee to the cities, but plague breaks out. Then, when there is no food, we begin to behave like the beasts we fled. “You will eat the flesh of your sons and the flesh of your daughters.”

  Long ago, we made a deal we now know we couldn’t keep. On the ninth day of the lunar month of Av, on the same day that the Babylonians destroyed the First Temple, the same day that five hundred years later the Romans destroyed the Second, on that day, in the very same year that Columbus made landfall in the Caribbean, the Spanish Inquisition exiled from Spain whatever Jews hadn’t fled or been burnt or been converted or gone into hiding. We had been in Spain for more than a thousand years. We had been advisers to the Caliphate and to the Reconquista. We had served as court physicians, made fortunes trading spices and silks, composed books of gemstone clarity and other books of mystic splendor; we had worked as jewelers, pharmacists, textile makers, and metal fabricators. We had married and intermarried. Been assimilated. Until Ferdinand and Isabella expelled us. Later, the rabbis would explain this expulsion the same way they had explained all our other exiles: “Sometimes that is the only way to prevent us from becoming so assimilated that we disappear as a nation.” Why were we expelled? According to the rabbis, God was trying to do us a favor. He was trying to keep us pure.

  This, then, is how Leviticus begins and how it ends: Die now, or die later. These were—and are—our choices:

  Refuse the Laws and die where we stand.

  Accept the Laws and live only until we break them.

  Be so dispersed that we disappear like water spilled into sand.

  Prosper in our exile until our assimilation causes God to disperse us again.

  The clearing where we stand is hemmed in on every side by darkness and foreboding. But: It’s still a clearing. It’s all we have. What do we do then—what can we do—in the only space that remains? We know what’s come before. We suspect what will come after. How do we now behave?

  Leviticus offers three answers. One is in the form of a story about two brothers; two are bound up, inside of, the code of Laws itself.

  A story about two brothers. One was named Nadab, and the other Abihu. Nadab’s name meant “willing”; Abihu’s meant “God is my father.” They were the eldest sons of Aaron, the High Priest, the brother of Moses, the one who’d stood with Moses before Pharaoh, the one who’d been left in charge while Moses was alone, on Sinai, listening to God.

  Nadab and Abihu appear near the beginning of Leviticus. Something strange happened to them. It happened after a long series of ritual purifications, anointings, and immersions—all done to prepare Aaron and his sons for the priesthood.

  Leviticus itself begins with seven long chapters that describe, in detail, not only the sacrifices the priests were to perform but the sins of omission and commission that the sacrifices were meant to rectify. For instance: The principal sacrifice, the “elevation offering,” was not just a voluntary offering made by people who wanted to raise themselves to “a higher spiritual state.” It was also required of anyone who (1) had failed to perform one of the 365 positive commandments; (2) had had sinful thoughts but had not acted on them; (3) had inadvertently broken a commandment, positive or negative, for which there was no prescribed punishment; (4) had just made one of the three required Festival Pilgrimages to the (yet to be built) Temple in Jerusalem.

  Nearly every sacrifice the priests performed was an animal sacrifice. The blood of every bull, ox, ram, sheep, goat, calf, or turtledove that was sacrificed had to be ritually splashed, smeared, collected, and channeled. It was the blood itself—not the smoke of the flesh burnt on the altar—that linked the people, through the priests, to God.

  Consider the description of the second of the sacrifices Moses made to prepare Aaron and his sons: “Aaron and his [four] sons leaned their hands upon the head of the ram. Moses slaughtered it and he took some of its blood and placed it upon the middle part of Aaron’s right ear, upon the thumb by his right hand, and upon the big toe of his right foot. Moses brought the sons of Aaron forward and Moses put some of the blood upon the middle of their right ear, upon the thumb of their right hand, and upon the big toe of their right foot, and Moses threw the remaining blood upon the altar, all around.” Eight days after this sacrifice, Moses ordered Aaron and
his sons to begin their duties. First, the priests made a “sin offering,” then an elevation offering, then a “peace offering,” and finally a “meal offering.” A bull, a ram, a goat, and a calf were ritually slaughtered; their flesh, fat, livers, and kidneys, their heads, breasts, feet, and tails were piled on the altar. Aaron raised his hands and blessed the people. Then he and Moses went into the Holy of Holies. When they came out, they blessed the people again.

  That’s when something remarkable happened: A line of fire, “like a pillar,” came down from Heaven and ignited the elevation offering on the altar.

  The rabbis, in their commentaries, have traced the path of this heavenly fire. First, the rabbis say, the fire went into the Holy of Holies, the sanctuary where the Ark rested. Moses and Aaron had just been there, but their presence had been exceptional: The Tabernacle was a place that no one but Aaron was permitted to enter, and even he was not permitted to enter it except on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.

  From the Holy of Holies, the rabbis say, the fire flew to the Golden Altar and lit the incense on it. From the Golden Altar, the heavenly fire flashed to the Copper Altar. “The people saw and sang glad song and fell on their faces.” And that’s when Nadab and Abihu did the things that killed them: “Each took his fire pan; they put fire on them, and placed incense upon it, and they brought before God an alien fire that he had not commanded them.”

  The rabbis have been trying to describe and explain what happened next—when and where and why it happened—since it occurred. It appears—as far as I can tell—that the brothers acted spontaneously, and, although they acted separately, they seem to have acted at the same time. They lit sacred incense in their own censers, then walked straight into the Holy of Holies with it. They acted without thinking, without planning. They seem to have been overcome with emotion. They died as soon as they came out of the Tabernacle.