The Breath of God. Jeffrey Small
a couple of dead leaves from the fern and then turn the pot so that the fullest side faced the bed.
“Making lists again?” Kinley asked.
Grant placed the laptop back on the table. He knew he shouldn’t take the bait, but he said, “I can’t just lie here all day long and watch my breath.” Grant admitted to himself that he’d been enjoying learning the tenets of Buddhism in much greater depth than he’d studied at Emory. In addition to filling the long days, his lessons with Kinley had stimulated his insatiable intellectual curiosity. But he found many of the meditation exercises Kinley suggested pointless. “I mean, I have to do something,” he said, a sentiment he’d shared more than a few times.
“What is it you have to do?”
“Well, my research for one thing.” He resisted adding that his research was directly related to the Issa legend, which Kinley seemed to be keeping from him, but then he suspected that Kinley knew exactly what he was talking about.
“And when you achieve that goal, what next?”
“Simple. I’ll set new ones, just larger. Publish books. Tenure.”
“This will bring you happiness?”
“Without our goals and the plans to reach them, we would still be chasing antelope across the savannah.” Reaching forward, he tucked a blanket underneath his cast to elevate his leg. It was starting to throb.
“You are in pain today.”
“I do have a broken leg that is set in this nineteenth-century-looking cast.” Grant knew Kinley well enough by now to know he could poke fun at the rudimentary cast that made his leg look like a log swaddled in tattered sheets.
But rather than smile, Kinley narrowed his eyes and said, “I wasn’t speaking of your leg.”
Grant remained silent.
Kinley paced the room, his hands clasped behind his back. He moved not with the nervous energy characteristic of pacing, but with grace, like a dancer gliding across the floor. “One day a student came to his master and asked, ‘When the leaves fall from the tree, what then?’ The master replied, ‘The body is exposed in the autumn wind.’”
Grant knew better by now than to try to dissuade Kinley from delivering one of his koans. He sighed deeply and turned to Kinley.
“Do I bore you?” Kinley asked.
“Look, I’ve been lying here for weeks.”
“You are a superb student, Grant, but your problem is not that you are missing information. You don’t need to be taught more. You need to be taught less. You don’t need to think more, you need to learn to think less.”
“Pretty anti-intellectual of you. Not what I’d expect from an Oxford grad.”
“Buddhism is not just about learning the teachings of the Buddha. It’s not about believing in a doctrine. The Chinese have a saying—”
“I’m sure they do,” Grant quipped, picking at the plaster on his cast.
Kinley chuckled and continued, “The finger pointing to the moon is not the moon.”
Grant began to respond and then closed his mouth. After a moment of contemplation, he said, “The teachings and doctrine are not the ultimate truth, they are just a sign pointing in the direction of the truth?”
Kinley smiled. “You want to know more about Issa, correct?”
Grant’s heart rate accelerated, but he kept his face passive.
“Issa too struggled with the teachings he learned on his journey through the Himalayas. What he learned differed greatly from what he’d been taught as a child in his homeland. Although his sharp mind quickly comprehended the essence of the teachings, it was only after he practiced what he learned for many months that he reached enlightenment.”
Kinley paused when he reached the desk by the window, staring at the fern. “One particular story ... but my memory is fuzzy on the details. Over twenty years have passed since I read the manuscripts.”
“Manuscripts!” The word escaped Grant’s mouth in a gasp. “You’ve seen writings about Issa?”
“We have several.”
“Here in the monastery?”
An electricity originating in Grant’s core spread through his body. He felt it send pins and needles to his hands and feet.
The monk nodded. Grant thought he detected a spark in his dark eyes. Did his new friend understand the magnitude of what he claimed? Grant longed to talk to Kinley about his theories, but he wasn’t ready yet. Instead, he indulged himself by playing out the scenario of how he’d be received back home. All the problems he’d faced since his undergrad years. He could regain the respect of the board, which had admitted him only because of Billingsly. This was the kind of discovery that happened once a generation. He would have his pick at tenure opportunities—Harvard, Princeton, Yale.
The thoughts swirled in Grant’s mind like a tornado picking up debris. If Kinley was right, then Grant’s theory about Nicholas Notovitch’s discovery a hundred and twenty years ago would be proved. Grant’s professors at Emory, even Billingsly, all regarded Issa as just one more in a series of quaint legends, but something about the story had always resonated with Grant, something about the teenager searching for answers that eluded him. Grant sided with the common people he encountered in India who believed in the popular legend of Issa over the majority of Western scholars who rejected it. Grant thought back to his own upbringing in his fundamentalist household: the teachings that other religions were the dark work of Satan, that three-quarters of the world’s population was going to hell because they didn’t “believe in Jesus”—the “my God versus yours” attitude that made Christianity seem like more of an exclusive country club than a religion based on love and tolerance. Now Grant had an opportunity to show the ultimate fallacy of this line of thinking. He would uncover the mystery that would show not just a compatibility among the world’s great religions, but a direct historical link.
Then another thought stopped him. He sat up straighter. Kinley referred to manuscripts in the plural, but Nicholas Notovitch wrote about a single text he’d seen at the Himis monastery, a large book written in Tibetan with an ornate cover.
Trying to keep his voice even, Grant asked, “May I see the manuscripts?”
Kinley shook his head. “Not possible. They are located in our library, on the top floor of the utse tower. Even if you could climb the steps, which you can’t in your condition, the library is off limits to outsiders.”
Grant felt as if his mind were moving in fast forward and the rest of the world was in super-slow motion. Even Kinley’s words seemed to be drawn out too long. How could he be this close and not see the texts?
“But—”
A knock on the door interrupted his protest. Kinley opened it. “We will talk about this subject another time. Now we must eat.” Jigme entered as silently as ever, carrying a wooden tray with three steaming bowls of food and cups of tea.
Grant stared at the two monks. Kinley couldn’t just drop a revelation like that on him and then not allow him to see the evidence. I’ve got to convince him to allow me access, he thought. But watching the elder monk pass the bowls from Jigme’s tray, Grant knew that the discussion had ended. As much as he needed to see the Issa writings, he feared appearing too desperate. Surely over time he would be able to reason with a man like Kinley—an Oxford grad who valued the Western world enough to have pursued his education at one of the greatest universities—that there was value in helping Grant complete his dissertation at the very least. Not to mention the impact it would have on the masses.
Grant took a deep breath and said, “Three o’clock already? I’m starved. I don’t know how you guys eat just two meals a day.” He thought he detected the corners of Kinley’s mouth turn up ever