INSTALLMENT 1

I just arrived in Delhi. Strange ancient scent of incense everywhere, and a weird but lovely sense that everything in somehow gentler here--even the trucks seem to be moving at a slow, lumbering elephantine pace. On drive from airport I noticed many of the cars and trucks are painted with hand lettered messages surrounded by rainbow colored designs--as if everyone had only the time but need to doodle and decorate even the most conventional utilitarian objects. Everywhere is a sense of age, decay, whimsy and yet a deep seriousness verging on weariness. It is dirty and poor and humble and funny. These are my first impressions.

It is midnight--just checked into hotel after awesome first class flight--13 hours seemed like 2 hours.

In the morning I fly to Katmandu, Nepal, meet up with the guru and begin the adventure in the Himalayas.

The very phrase "I have a guru" now strikes me as sort of problematic. First, the point of having a guru is to undo the delusion that there is any rigidly fixed, solid, truly existent thing called "I." And that insight would also pull the rug out from under the idea of "having" something. The word "guru" means "heavy" in Sanskrit--meaning heavy with good qualities, which Rinpoche is--beyond words. But still, it is strange to have a guru. Strange and wonderful. Kind of like India.

More as it unfolds

INSTALLMENT 2

I just left Nepal and am heading into India, where I will spend the rest of the month. Nepal was really amazing: after 6 days there, I realized I didn't see a single argument, hostile exchange of words, or even a harsh facial expression, the people are just so gentle and happy. (With the exception of some very violent Maoist rebels--last night, we were told not to leave our hotel after dark, and today we saw a large protest march by the communists. But anyway, now we are back in India.)

Drove for 6 hours and only saw one car. People walk or ride buses or bicycles or yak drawn carts.

The beggars are heart breaking and ubiquitous; babies barely old enough to walk, people with stumps for arms, and one guy last night in a wheelchair with actual macrocephalia (meaning his head was as big as a beach ball, eyes mounted high on a round convex skull.)

Yesterday, we visited the site where Buddha was born--it was so much fun because we rode bicycle rickshaws to the spot, and suddenly this powerful air of joy descended--a palpable wave of quietness and ease, as if a mil dose of ecstasy was in the air. We sat outdoors and rimpoche gave a teaching.  Similarly, today when we visited the place where Buddha lived until he was 29, the air--which in Nepal is often thick with a mixture of incense, burning wood, cow dung, and sometimes garbage--became incredibly sweet, like nectar. Again, Rinpoche gave a short talk--this makes my trip to India very different (and better) than when we went to Tibet last year because there, Chinese secret service followed Rinpoche everywhere and he could not give any Buddhist teachings.

Everywhere we go, the children wave and beam the brightest smiles. I have seen some truly amazing things. It really is a plunge into a whole different world.

INSTALLMENT 3

I am on the street in the middle of some small weird town and goats and oxen are wandering through traffic and an old woman is pleading for money and motorbikes are blaring their horns and ancient men are crouched on the ground selling piles of grains and it is sunny and warm and I am in a strange land.

INSTALLMENT 4

We are driving through Bihar state--the poorest in all of India. It is disconcerting. Little baby boys stand barefoot--maybe 3 years old--right at the edge of the highway where trucks and buses zoom by. Troubling.

I am subsiding on balance bars and a bit of rice. I may be skinny when I return. But hopefully a bit wiser.

Spending everyday with Rinpoche--he is giving short talks every day at special locations like this morning we sat where the Buddha died--and it is really just so wonderful to be around him and listen and absorb what I can.

INSTALLMENT 5

India is really hard to understand. I have been traveling across the country from Nepal towards Benares for the last three days and cannot fully get over the massiveness of the population and the incredible poverty. It makes me think about happiness--how human beings adapt to circumstances and adjust our expectations under such remarkably different conditions.

When I see a man sitting on a pile of grain sacks in a cart pulled by an ox, as trucks roar by him--it is like the middle ages still lives side by side with the 21st century. And yet, for all I know, he may be more cheerful than I am: his facial expression seems more content than most of the faces I see in air-conditioned cars back home. Earlier today I watched a little barefoot girl in a soiled yellow dress, her skin covered in chalky dust, looking too weak even to beg; what will her life be like? Where are her parents? Where are her shoes? Who am I--in a pair of $160 sneakers, which is more than some Indians earn in a month--to judge?

When our bus pulls over to the side of the road dozens of kids coming running toward it from the fields, their hands extended, pleading for food and money. Garbage is all over the ground, as well as a lot of shit--from animals and humans. The countryside is postcard perfect but near the towns and cities the air itself seems to be burning, constantly with wood smoke, and diesel fuel, and garbage.

At the same time, there is so much beauty all around, side by side with the chaos and horror. The colors here all seem saturated and hyper rich. There is an easy sensuality, a kind of inborn sense of balance and certainty to the aesthetics--you see it everywhere--the hand painted buses, the brightly colored plastic packets hanging for sale in wooden shacks, and the incredible vivacity with which people dress.

Then of course there is the oft-spoken of sacred aspect--temples everywhere, stupas, prayer flags--as if the spiritual element were so intertwined with mundane life it hardly bares mentioning. And yet it shines through.

And then there is India’s ravishing natural beauty--scene after scene that takes your breath away. Sunlight shining through a stand of banana palm fronds while a woman in an electric blue sari balances a massive hand-woven basket on her head. Large opalescent blue birds and monkeys and enormous boars and ducks, all untethered, living side by side with monks and beggars and farmers and prostitutes, in a landscape that manages to feed more than a billion human beings and still look sexy.

The people have a profoundly ecstatic sense of stylishness and a totally inexplicable attitude of slouched relaxation despite all outward signs of madness and desperation that I think it would take me years to understand, much less adopt.

I can't believe I haven't gotten seriously ill yet. A minor intifada erupted in my lower intestines yesterday but a combination of Imodium, cipro, pepto bismol and a good night's rest seems to have put that insurrection down, in sh’allah.

More as it reveals itself.

INSTALLMENT 6

When night falls in India, people start burning things. Like, whatever is at hand suddenly is on fire--all along the edge of the road small campfires of garbage and plastic and toxic flotsam--never mind that cars with gas tanks are rolling by the open flames. Apparently they haven't heard about "safety first," here. I even saw a few large oxygen tanks near some fires yesterday they burn casually in front of people's shacks. I watched a boy holding his bare foot over the flames yesterday--I guess it was cold. This is not a place for nervous mommies. Children seem disturbingly unsupervised. I assume their nannies are out gathering firewood.

INSTALLMENT 7

Sitting on a bus for 8 hours--bumping so hard it literally lifts you into the air. The feeling is like being thrashed by Goldberg, the pro wrestler. Meanwhile, part of the charm of driving on one-lane roads is that every few minutes one car or another has to pull over, but this always entails an enormous amount of honking. So while physically being jostled ferociously, your eardrums are subject to relentless aural trauma, and your lungs attempt to function amid a shit storm of burning plastic. For this, you have spent 10 thousand dollars. Anyhow, sitting here sweating, we finally reached our hotel. Almost. We were 7 kilometers away--i.e. about 4 miles, which would be 5 minutes but here takes a half hour. Then we stop. Apparently (not surprisingly) there has been an accident 2 kilometers ahead. And for 2 hours nobody has moved. Sweating on the bus while bandits swarm outside.

INSTALLMENT 8

I am beginning to think the key to understanding india may have to do with time. Nobody here is in a rush. Mark twain once said something about how india was older than history, older than time itself, and though I may be misquoting him, you slowly begin to sense that the indians live according to a very different clock and calendar than we do. They crouch there among the smoke and disease and goats while everything burns and crumbles. They sit still amid scenes that seem to demand immediate change and rescue and action, but they amble and smile. not because they are in denial but maybe because they are so fully immersed in some larger narrative that somehow each moment becomes tolerable. They aren't waiting. They aren't perched. There is a dreamy molasses-like pace to life even amid the chaos, a kind of molten slow-mo sense of time unfolding that everyone seems to have collectively surrendered to. It isn't that life is frozen or static or motionless. There is instead a kind of elastic quality to indian time: it might be an hour or a day or a breath or a lifetime. Everything changes. But nobody's going anywhere fast.

Today, the scenery is changing as we drive southward. Last night we arrived in patna, the first big indian city and it was surprising to see big neon signs for nokia and sony and realize there actually is a modern india. Leaving the city today on route to ancient monastery of nalanda, we passed an area where the roads were lines with burning gargage dumps, where I saw snarling dogs fought for scraps, and beyond which lay gorgeous green marshes and padies, acres of wetland, and then rows of crumbling buildings.

The indian sense of time is manifest in the extensive national dedication to doodling. Everything is decorated. Even the tractors are festooned with shining golden bands of tinsel and mint green plastic flowers and cherry red bands of sparkly cloth and tassles and orange taffeta. It is utterly irrational and glorious that a man toting bales of hay should take time to dress up his farm equipment like this, but everyone does it. I even saw a man yesterday wearinf a vest made of gold tassles. Just walking down the street. Today I passed a taxi driver wearing what appeared to be a WWI era pilots helmet, only it was outrageous purple, and he ws going about two miles an hour, with goggles on. Everyday is halloween.

Also--I saw my first saddhu this moning--he looked like a rastafairian with thick dreadlocks, only he was jst crouched by the side of the orad, wrapped in blankets with a crazed looking in his eyes. Clearly, he had nowhere to go. And if as karl marx said, religion is the opiate of the masses, between hinduism. Buddhism. Jainism, sikkism, and islam, clearly india overdosed along time ago.

INSTALLMENT 9

Today was very magical. we went to lumbini, which is the place where
the historical Buddha was born, 2,600 years ago.
along the way, i looked out the window and this is what i saw:

vast fields of green dotted with bright tiny yellow flowers. oxen
laboring by the side of the road,. barefoot children walking goats,
tethered by strings, meandering through wet marshy land. the goats
nibbled on empty fields while boys and old men drove past them on old
english bicycles.

it was late afternoon, and the sun was slowly sinking. everyone seemed
pleased, and moved as if in slow motion. there was a powerful sense
that there was nowhere to go. people just sat on the dirt, staring.
truckloads of chopped down trees whizzed by. i watched a man working a
manual water pump in a field. a very old man in a saffron colored
turban stood at the edge of the road. an old woman was sweeping the
earth with a homemade broom fashioned out of dried twigs. it was
irrational, since her front yard was just packed dirt. but still she
swept with an air of utter grace and riousness.

the women dress in shockingly bright colors--girls in fuschia and mint
green sarongs and saris. orange and red and purple scarves wrapped
around skinny torsoes. the colors explode against the sameness of the
dry green landscape.

kids play not with plastic toys but just with sticks or bits of rope
or each other, wrestling playfully, as if in some endless summer. the
poverty is beyond imagination: houses are built out of mud and straw,
tiny little structures 3 or 4 feet high--barely even shacks.

everybody is outdoors, standing still or just barely moving, like
trees in the wind.

in the distance, i saw women working the fields, their green and
orange and bright pink dresses flashing, unnatural and startlingly
surreal. there is no visible business, other than farming and the
occasional bicicyle repair man. i saw many things in stacks--stacks of
bricks and old tires, and men getting shaves and haircuts in small
wooden shacks without doors. and old woman in beautiful turquoise
silk robe stood knee deep in muddy water.

i saw hundreds of goats, each one thin and undernourished and unself
conscious, moving slowly, as if too weak to graze. i saw a dog with
one eye missing. and many large piles of hay, drying or rotting.

the people have an incredible sense of sensuality and style and
elegance despite being poorer than dirt. everyone is dressed with
tremendous panache and flashes enormous smiles or stares with deadly
poise. there is something static about it all, a motionless quality.
huge tropical flowers hang weightlessly in the trees, and like all
these beautiful faces, they are un-valued. trucks whiz by with buddhas
hand-painted on the side--each truck and bus overloaded and garishly
dressed and decorated with gold beads and filigree, like a mardi gras
reveler.

fileds full of sheep and spindly bare trees. oxen the color of lead
and sand. men sinking into mud as they work. fires burning. bicycle
rickshaws. dark oily black metal carts strung with banans and oranges,
and frying noodles. ancient people squatting for hours. a silence more
silent than death.

the whole scene was like a silent film shot in brilliant technicolor.
our giant behomoth air-conditioned tourist bus rolls by and the people
stare or wave, |as if to say, "welcome--we have no water and live with
raw sewage, and die of simple things, but welcome," smiling like a
baby smiles at his mother.

INSTALLMENT 10

We are inside another monastery--hundreds of buddhist monks are filling the streets-- far more than I ever saw in tibet. This town is called bodghaya--it is the place where the buddha became enlightened.

This morning we went to the top of a mountain where the buddha sat for 6 years, meditating and survuvung on only one grain of rice per day--until he nearly died. After 6 years, he realized torturing yourself with severe ascetic practices is not the way. And he had some nice rice pudding and got back to the job of figuring out how to become enlightened. This is why the buddhist path is called "the middle way"--as little red riding hood said, it's not too hot, or too cold.

Yesterday we climbed a very steep path to arrive at an astonishing mountain top called vulture's peak. This is the place where buddha taught the heart sutra.

Earlier in the day we visited nalanda, an ancient seat of buddhist learning where the buddha first came to teach 2600 years ago, when it was a mango grove. It eventually grew into a vast complex of 108 monasteries and temples. It was the world's first university, offering education in math, science, astronomy and other subjects alongside buddhist education, and it produced many of buddhism's greatest masters including asanga, buddhapalilta, and atisha--the last of whom brought buddhism to tibet.

Eventually, the muslims came and pillaged it and nature buried the ruins, so by the time the british came upon it in the mid 1850s, nalanda was a lump of dirt. British archeolgists dug up the buried ruins and by 1937 they had recovered most of what I saw--about 14 monasteries and temples.

When we arrived--about 28 of us, I was walking with rinpoche up front and we accidentally walked in through the exit gate. A pair of guards angrily accosted rinpoche and demanded he walk out and re enter through the "in" gate as we had broken the rules. Rinpoche said, "rules are made to be broken" and kept walking a few feet, sitting down on a bench.

The guards were getting increasingly angry and came back with another armed guard, this one with a rifle slung over his shoulder. The man with the gun argued in hindi with rinpoche. (Rinpoche lived in india after fleeing the chinese invasion of tibet so he speaks hindi.)

In 20 years, I have never seen rinpoche in a conflict. I couldn't understand what he was saying, but his face and voice remained calm and he refused to budge. I was slightly concerned the indian guard with the gun might do something stupid, as he was growing agitated and rapping a riding crop type of baton on the ground near rinpoche's feet. But rinpoche just talked to him and eventually the guards let us go. Personally, when men with guns in foreign countries yell at me, I tend to fold rather quickly. But rinpoche just talked him down. that's what they call vajra balls.

INSTALLMENT 11

A friend of mine who shall remain nameless, we shall call him "jeffrey witte," recently said, "it is strange how after twenty years of meditating, when the rubber hits the road you are even less able to handle attachment than most people." He said this not to be cruel, but because he was tired of me whimpering. I replied that perhaps I would be even worse off without the efforts I have made, and in any even I am only human: if it were easy to become enlightened we would all have become buddhas long ago.

But here in india, I have been thinking more about his criticism. To be honest, I also would have thought that meditating for a few decades might have delivered more dramatic results, in terms of insulatation from the vagaries of heartbreak. But no.

(In any event, they always tell you to meditate without any attachment to getting results, but in the beginning that just inst possible: we all want something or begin running from pain or fear.)

While most friends think I am crazy to spend an hour a day meditating, when Rinpoche was a boy he devoted 18 hours a day to his practice. Multiply that by 60 years, and I can begin to see why he is so much more free than I am--it is nothing mysterious--just more time and effort put in. It's like what the words kung fu mean, literally translated: "work" and "time."

Another well-meaning friend recently sent an email suggesting I try "surrenedering to the universe." She acknowledged this advice sounded a bit hokey, but later that night, laying in a hotel room somewhere iin the darkness of india, I tried it anyway.

Bone weary from a long bumpy bus ride through a foreign landscape of poverty, strange faces, illuminated by hundreds of roadside fires, queasy from the food, and feeling lost about who I have become at the halfway point in life, I turned out the lights and thought, "Okay, universe, here is my white flag. Please note I am waving it." And I thought for the first time in a long time about God.

Being Jewish, and grandson of a rabbi, as a boy I used to say the schmah yisroel prayer every night before sleep. But as they say in the catholic confessional, forgive me father, it has been a while. As I lay there wondering what difference, really, is there between surrendering to the universe and surrendering to God, I also felt a familiar aversion to blind faith. I am not a believer in just believing. Nor are collapsing in a heap, giving up, or sitting still my strong suits. I put my money on rationality and hard work, so surrendering the universe, or anyone else, felt a little like asking a fat kid to give up his donuts. But the combination of physical and emotional exhaustion this pilgrimmage has entailed had me so wiped out, I thought, if ever there was a time to surrender, it's now.

I lay still and felt everything collapsing inward, dropping through me, through the bed, floor, ground, and out into space. And strangely, a slow sweet feeling, like a whisp of ether, began to fill me.

God, is that you?

INSTALLMENT 12

An ipod seems like cheating when on a Buddhist pilgrimage. But the other night an American woman who is working for an NGO in Nepal and joined our trip loaned me her ipod, and I watched a whole season of the Sarah Silverman program as we rolled through countless miles of inky purple darkness, the smoke from roadside fires licking toothlessly at our insular white bus.

Sarah Silverman's shtick is a bit of a one trick pony and perhaps only marginally amusing viewing at home--but after 10 days of staring at oxen and naked kids squatting in wet fields and half built buildings and women balancing trays of fresh cow dung on their heads and buses piled with more suitcases and humans on top than already stuffed in down below, and more oxen, Sarah Silverman is better than heroin.

Right now I am listening to Elvis Costello's "little palaces," from king of America. It's funny because this album came out in 1986, and I bought it on cassette and (along with David bowie's scary monsters) it was my Sony Walkman soundtrack as I spent an incredibly lonely semester abroad at oxford.

Having Elvis Costello's tattered velvety voice spitting bitter complicated pinched and sensual syllables into your ear when you are far from home does two things: it reminds you that the universality of human emotions are ironically best expressed with the most precise, singular language. And it gives you the go ahead to indulge a snide sense of righteous indignation, like you were a young john cusack in "say anything," and damn it, you're a kick boxer. 22 years later, it still works.

This permission to feel a little wounded and defensive comes in handy in India, where the assault on your senses goes on 24 hours a day.
I was awakened in the dark at 530am this morning by the very loudly amplified call of a Muslim muezzin calling the faithful to prayer. We got in the bus at 7am and because roads are mainly one lane and there are no traffic lights or stop signs, all traffic is negotiated by nonstop horn blaring, so driving here is like having your head inside a mariachi band and vice versa. The Indian sun has a shimmery spear like brightness, that feels like a warm palm pressing steadily down on your skull, and it gets behind your eyeballs, sparkling away even while you sleep.

But it's not just your senses; it's your conscience that takes a pummeling.

Beggars are everywhere. India is not as poor as Tibet, but the culture here is all begging, all the time. It is a way of life. In Tibet, I hardly saw any begging, but the houses were built out of yak dung pressed into round and dried bricks. In India, they use ox dung to make walls, but there's a lot more real brick. The country also has a thriving high-tech sector but for whatever reason, begging--in a vigorous aggressive way--is built in to the culture here.

For example, yesterday, we visited the mahakala cave, where Buddha sat for 6 years. The cave is at the top of a long steep road, and as you walk up, literally hundreds of beggars swarm around your ankles. I say ankles because the elderly are laying on the ground and the rest are very young children--often holding babies for double the effect. They moan and plead and grab at your hands as you walk. Horribly disfigured children with missing limbs and leg joints twisted in ways you cannot imagine, shuffle, scuttle, and crawl like crabs, blocking your way, their legs jutting beneath them at horrifying angles.

It is very hard to look them in the eye. But there are so many asking for money, it is also impossible to do much without starting a riot.

I gave money to some of the oldest and youngest, aware that cross-currents of pity and mercy and judgment and revulsion were vying for my attention, and also that a single dinner at nobu--eaten with the usual level of dissatisfaction--would cost more money than all these people would see all year.

And then I ran.

I began darting between and around the beggars and broke off down the hill and into the dusty red clay fields. I ran on narrow paths of dirt between fields of potatoes and cauliflower. Two boys, about 6 and 8, ran with me. They were brothers, and spoke pretty clear English. We got to know each other as we ran, farther and farther from the crowd, and all three of us were laughing. I started chanting the call-and-response navy song from "officer and a gentleman":

"I don't know but it's been said,
Army wings are made of lead.
I don't know but I been told,
Navy wings are made of gold.
Sound off! One two!"

The boys tried their best to repeat the words back and we ran through the sun, yelling and chanting American military songs and laughing. Then I gave them both ten rupees and got on the bus. It was the most fun I've had in weeks.

INSTALLMENT 13

I am standing at the edge of the Ganges River at night and we are along with hundreds of other people putting candles afloat with saffron and banana leaves in the river.

INSTALLMENT 14

Last night was insanely magical. We are in the oldest living city on earth--Varnasi (also called Benares). And we took a bicycle rickshaw through the city at night—I have been to Hanoi, Jerusalem, lhasa and Phnom Phen, but never saw anything like this.

It was like a nuclear bomb dropped on a huge city and then millions of stragglers wandered back in and through a nonstop party. I wish I could capture what the city looked like but it was hard to get it in photos and words fail me now: so ancient and decaying and wild and unruly and madly chaotic and yet somehow peaceful. Finally, after about a half hour ride through streets crowded with thousands of people and cows wandering amid motorcycles, and babies who should be in bed, and people selling mysterious and impossibly brightly colored piles of powder, and carts offering vegetables, and storefronts with saris hanging for sale, and buildings that looked like they had been bombed and abandoned--and yet, there in the dark rooms, I saw people moving--we arrived at the Ganges river.

There was a puja going on and thousands of people were singing and clapping their hands together on vast row of steps that climb down to the water, where people go to wash themselves of sins (they believe the river is holy and purifies by touch, though the e coli count in 150 million parts to one). Hindus also believe that if they are cremated here, they will leave Samsara, so every day many bodies are burned here--I saw my first dead body, shrouded in saffron and strapped to the roof of a jeep on the way here.

When the singing ended, we walked to the water front and little boys handed out candles nestled in a little bowl made of a banana leaf, surrounded by saffron colored flower petals. One by one we set the candles on fire and put them in the river, where they form a sea of shimmery golden light, floating away under the moonlit sky. They told me I could make a prayer with my candle.

And so I did.

INSTALLMENT 15

I hate to admit this, because this is a buddhist pilgrimmage and therefore spiritual practice should be paramount on my mind at all times. But last night we arrived in bombay, and checked into the Taj President, an extremely swanky 5-star hotel, and suddenly I felt utterly seduced by something I had almost forgotten: luxury.

We arrived at midnight and the scene looked like south beach--a gaggle of scantily clad bollywood startlets crowded the front of the hotel, as a row of chauffered mercedes jockyed to pick them up. Inside my hotel room, fresh orchid flowers, a complimentary bottle of wine (wine is super expensive in india for some reason--a decent bottle is $1,200) a large box of truffles, and a pillow menu offering nine (!) different kind of pillows fom herb-infused and "organic" cotton to goose down and ayurvedic, whatever that is.

Went downstairs for dinner at 1am, and had first non-indian food in weeks. Was somewhat stunned to see batches of rich looking young indian kids roll in at 2am, looking very much like the brats on "laguna beach," the mtv reality series about spoiled kids in southern california: same air of pudgy uncertainty and listless entitlement.

I like bombay, because it is far more sophisiticated than any city I have seen in india. and the air is noticeably cleaner. after so many days of jarring medieval sights, it is reassuring to see familiar sites, like men working blackberries instead of oxen.

However, there is also something evil about knowing that these children of the wealthy are eating panini in air conditioned hotel lobbies while right outside a sprawling world of shacks and undrinkable water struggles miserably onward.

True, it is no less evil than me, a pampered american, living it up in new york while millions go hungry, but somehow the proximity of the new class of super-rich to the ageless presence of really horrifying poverty struck me as untenable. Bombay has high end american stores, and a towering steel and glass skyline like new york, but the city's outskirts are corrugated tin shacks. The poverty here isn't like the "other" america john edwards decries, where people run up debt to buy tv sets they can't afford. This is the kind where people die because they have no roof, no food, no work, and no hope of ever doing anything about it.

In the morning, I went to the gym and thought I might work out some of my liberal white guilt--after all, it is harder to feel like a spoiled and pampered colonialist when engaged in activity that hurts and makes you sweat like a beast of burden. But in the gym, I found that there's a personal trainer at your disposal compliments of the hotel. He literally held my hands and lifted me up and down, doing my sit ups for me. He I felt sort of like a white person at a resort in apartheid-era South Africa.

If I had stayed at a hotel this nice at the beginning of the pilgrimmage, every other place we stayed would have seemed like a hell hole in comparison (some of the hotels in the smaller cities, while the best in town, were fairly spartan--as amenities like gyms, TVs, bathrobes, and clean floors are not seemingly available yet at hotels in india's hinterlands). So at least the chronology has been from spartan to luxury.

And the buddha didn't actually preach a doctrine of ascetism or ask for lay practicioners to take a vow of poverty. Once a wealthy hong kong businessmen approach rinpoche after hearing a dharma talk and said he was intrested in buddhism but wondered whether the fact that he owned a rolls royce would be an issue. To which rinpoche said, "it's no problem if you drive a rolls royce sir. The problem is if the car drives you."

I ordered a pizza, and sat by the pool and thought: the fact the bombay even has such a glitzy hotel is a sign of something positive: the booming indian economy. And while the rewards haven't been spread out very evenly, neither was the sauce on my pizza. And you don't hear me complaining about it.

Just then my socks started feeling a bit dry. Fortunately, I was able to have a bottle of Perrier sent over. Crisis averted.

INSTALLMENT 16

I am sitting in an airport, waiting for a flight back to bombay, watching the news on a big flat screen TV. They are showing muslims celebrating a big festival called Muharram, wherein they self flagellate and bang themselves in the head with the flat edge of a sword.

I suppose I'd rather self flagellate than have someone else do it to me. And one never wants to speak ill of other people's religions, but seeing vast crowds of people hit themsleves in the head repeatedly with blunt objects, I am reminded of H.L. Menken's famous maxim, "nobody ever went broke underestimating the American public." I reckon Menken could have turned a pretty penny in Mecca, too. Do we need a war on terror when the enemy is busy bashing his brains out with no help from us?

This is not to underestimate the cleverness of the opponent. For example, last night after my waiter brought a bottle of water to the table, I twisted the cap off and, feeling no resistance, surmised it had already been opened. In india, drinking tap water will turn gringos into human volcanos with spigots on both ends. Because unscrupulous persons will refill water bottles with tap water to make a few rupees--or to wage intestinal jihad--it pays to be mindful. I called the waiter, who may or may not have been muslim or a terrorist but certainly had a very terrifying mustache, and asked for a new bottle. He brought it, but I'm pretty sure he said, "allah akbar" under his breath.

I have also adapted to the threat of water borne illness by drinking enormous quantities of diet Tab cola, which has the added benefit of killing any mice who may be living in me.

Due to an outbreak of bird flu last week in west bengal, I have also become a strict vegetarian, eating approximately four loaves of bread per meal as I am starving to death.
On the upside, I now float.

Today we were going to visit another bunch of caves but I stayed at our hotel, a lavish former palace and did kung fu, ran on a treadmill, swam in the enormous pool, and practiced my rather measly yoga routine. I was apparently the only person at the hotel, and i guess exercising is rare in india, because the groundskeepers and hotel security guards and cleaning staff and assorted locals, friends and family formed a circle around me and stared. By the time I was done stretching, there were about 50 people standing in a around me, calling me "guru" and applauding, from which I deduce that a) labor is cheap in india as there are more porters than guests at the hotel, and b) yoga seems to be in decline here in inverse proportion to its popularity in the west, because if I am a yoga guru, mike huckabee is a rabbi.

INSTALLMENT 17

It would be a shame to travel in a foreign land without ever stepping foot inside a local family's home. And so last night, when a young Indian-american travelling with us invited me to his brother's apartment in bombay for a party, I accepted despite guessing that this might not be a typical indian household.

His brother, in his mid 30s, is CEO of the investment bank [REDACTED] in India, and lives in a luxury condo hotel, one of those apartments where you can order room service and enjoy all the amenities and services of a 5-star hotel. The rent is $23,OOO a month.

The CEO and his wife had catered a small party for us in one of the building's lounges--waiters brought us food while bartenders plied expensive wines and high end liquor. The party was supposed to begin at 730pm but our flight was delayed so by the time we arrived at 1030pm, our hosts and small circle of wealthy young bombay friends seemed quite drunk. The CEO's wife was friendly and wanted to provide some relief from what she considered the horrors of our Buddhist pilgrimmage. She addressed me as "dude," stretching the word out as if it were several syllables long, saying, "Doooood. I am a fucking Indian, but I would never go to the places you've been to." She mentioned that her wedding gown had cost $100,000 dollars.

I was immediately corned at the bar by a thin dark-skinned man with a pained grimace in his expression. He was a head hunter for investment bankers, he said, born in Sri Lanka, raised in Connecticut, and now living in Bombay.

"So, you are Buddhist," he said, as if challenging me to a duel. "Me, too--I don't practice. But my family donated the land for three of the most famous temples in Sri Lanka." He proudly named the temples, then leered his face close to mine and said, "It's in my karma."

I smiled. The Sri Lankan asked where I was from, and when I told him my address, he took to addressing me alternately as "West Side Boy" and "New York Boy." He asked how many beers I had drunk and whether I was content. I said I had had one, but didn't measure my contentment in beer. "When I saw the Dalai Lama recently," I began, "he said the most important thing was to practice contentment"--

"I don't give a damn about the Dalai Lama, or Tibet," he interjected. I noticed that the whites of his eyes were a murky lentil color and began to think he might be high on crystal meth. His body language seemed to suggest he was on the verge of stabbing me in the head with a fork.

Just then a waiter arrived with a tray of Indian food. I said "thank you," but my interlocutor angrily began demanding chicken nuggets. "Bring me a plate of chicken nuggets, and put it right here!" As he said this he jabbed his fingers harshly into the gleaming surface of the marble bar, and then began using his finger tips to describe a circle in the air. "On a plate!"

I was a little taken aback at the rudeness with which he barked orders, and embarassed for the waiter who shuffled away humbly, presumably to spit on some chicken nuggets.

"So, anyway, the Dalai Lama said--" I weakly persisted, but he cut me off again.

"You want to know about Buddhism? I'll tell you about Buddhism: I have a bullet lodged in my skull, between my spine and my jugular vein." He told me his roomate at the University of Connecticut had, begun stealing from him. And one day when he came home, the roomate put a pistol to the back of his head and shot him point blank, leaving him for dead in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor. He managed to call 911 and woke up a few days later on life support. "THAT is Buddhism, buddy boy," he said with an air of violent disatisfaction, as though his whole being were wracked with some unbearable pain.

"Oh my God. And what happened to your roomate? Did he go to jail?"

"He's dead," he replied matter of factly. His brown-red eyes glowered with nervous sadness, and he blew cigarette smoke in my direction as I tried to plan an escape. According to the Sri Lankan, his roomate, a good friend for several years of college drinking, had gotten involved with the mafia, and they were concerned he would spill secrets to the police if caught. So after the police put out an APB for the shooter, the mob killed him.

"Do you have any idea how much space there is between your spine and your jugular vein?" He asked, to emphasize the amount of good karma it took for him to survive. I told him I did not, but guessed there wasn't much.

He held up his fingers about the width of a pea. In the window behind him, the blue light of a massive swimming blue glittered in the darkness.

The CEO's wife invited us upstairs to their apartment for a nightcap, explaining that she and her husband go out to clubs every night until 4am. "Dude. We get drunk every night. I sleep in until noon. It's not even fun anymore." Their apartment was shocking even by New York luxury condo standards: huge rooms, appointed with Bang and Olufson flatscreen TVs, and great vistas of Bombay. I thought of the incredible scenes of poverty just a few miles away, on the road to the airport, where thousands lived in shacks without electricity or running water. I tried to imagine how those people might feel if they could see the lavish glitzy interiors of these private gated luxury buildings, and thought of Russia in 1917, when serfs stormed the royal palaces.

When I got back to my hotel I bumped into Rinpoche and described the incredible wealth I had seen. He said, "it's amazing there isn't a revolution. You know why? Because the poor people are happy here." He was right: I had seen more smiles on the faces of children playing in the mud than I had at the fancy Bombay party. Those ultra-wealthy young strivers were confounded by us Americans, and why we would want to go to run down dusty towns in India's hinterlands to follow in the Buddha's footsteps. I remembered the disgust with which the CEO's wife told me about going to Varnasi. "I am a Hindu," she said. "So when my father died, we had to take him to be cremated in Varnasi. I had to lower his ashes into the river and I got the most afwul rash on my skin. Absolutely awful. Fortunately, my cousin is a dermatologist."

Some things really enough to make your skin crawl.