THE GENERAL was on the verge of tears all day Saturday after the wedding. I said, “Surely you were happy to see them married?” He said, “It’s not the wedding that upset me.”
“Perhaps you were brooding too much on Diana and her big meringue dress?” I suggested. “Is that what caused the tears?”
“Not at all,” he replied. “But there was a comedian on The Late Late Show last night, sneering at the newly weds. It was crude and ungracious. And it saddened me.”
“Perhaps Ireland has lost its taste for pageantry,” I suggested. “Even the beatification of Karol Wojtyla in Rome hasn’t impinged on the Irish psyche, the way such things used to in the old days.”
“It’s easy for you to be glib,” he said, “you’re a Buddhist.” I said, “I’m not; I’m a Catholic who happens to practise Buddhism because I can’t afford a psychotherapist.” He said, “It’s the same difference. At least you have some Queen of the May or White Goddess in the clouds that you can pray to. I’m an agnostic. So the royal family is the only thing I’ve got to believe in.”
Actually my first encounter with Buddhism happened near Ballina – in a Tibetan Buddhist Centre. I was depressed. I’m always depressed. So I turned off the main road one day and drove up an avenue of potholes, sheltered by huge larch trees, where prayer flags hung like bunting on a stately 19th-century building.
Inside a group of young people had gathered in the Shrine Room, or what used to be the old drawing room of the house.
The shrine was decked with candles, incense and fresh flowers. The young people prostrated. Then they sat on their mats, with their backs straight, in the lotus position, and I leaned against the wall, with my feet stretched out before me, closed my eyes, and allowed the incense to penetrate me, and the sound of the chanting and chiming bells to flow over me.
At one stage a girl squeezed my knee. I didn’t know what she was doing for a moment, but then she whispered in my ear, that I should take off my shoes. When I looked around I realised that everyone else had taken off their footwear, so I began to untie my laces, but I was too flustered to succeed. To my astonishment the girl leaned over and loosened the laces for me. I took the shoes off, placed them behind me, thanked her with a smile and hoped my socks didn’t smell. I don’t know what they were chanting. I was just thinking how I’d like to hug the girl who undid my shoes.
As the prayers continued I gazed at the ornate hangings on the walls, the photographs of long-dead monks, and the copper bowls of water that stood in a line before a painting of a white female Buddha.
The girl who loosened my laces had black hair tied in a pinnacle at the crown of her head, and she wore a long white cheesecloth dress down to her bare toes. I went home and dreamed about her, and for days indulged in a fantasy that some day she might unlace my shoes again. To be perfectly honest, it was in the hope of meeting her that I went back again and again to the centre.
And on my return visits I met many different people; some, like myself, with bad backs, still dragging unopened psychological baggage into middle age like oppressed donkeys. But I also met people in search of faith, healing, or psychotherapy. I met Christians in search of meditation skills not found in their own tradition and young people debilitated by alcohol, or just lonely and depressed. And everyone was finding consolation in a shared silence and stillness; I suppose there’s nothing wrong with that.
But I never met the beautiful girl again. And though I asked about her, described her, and even tried to say where exactly she had been sitting in the room, nobody remembered her.
Eventually even I began to doubt if I had ever met her. Her image dissolved into the female Buddha on the shrine, which was always decked with flowers; just like the May altars of my childhood, where I first imagined a pure white mother, as white as the whitest flower, and more lovely even than the Duchess of Cambridge, smiling down on me so tenderly. But as the General says, “That indeed, was a very long time ago.”