MASTER & DISCIPLE

BURIED AMID THE back streets of East Tungsten, the Nekkhamma Buddhist Centre was the site of Gen Kelsang’s final Death Conversation class. Owing to airborne pollution, the building’s arched windows were now coated with black dust. Passersby could barely see in, and patrons peering through the glass from inside the vihara itself could make out only vague and vestigial forms. 

That evening’s class had been surprisingly well-attended. Sufferers of all ages, bents and tax liabilities had perched themselves atop cotton zafus, today’s session having begun with a guided maranasati meditation in which participants were encouraged to reflect on the coming of death and, as an exercise in non-attachment, to visualise the body’s decay. 

“For those unawakened, the dream continues,” Gen Kelsang said towards the end of the session. “Now we experience this dream-like life. Soon we will experience dream-like dying, and after that, so long as we’re still asleep, there will be many other dreams which we mistake for real lives. Only by way of the spiritual path do we achieve the means to fully awaken.”

“So there is no death,” a man in a white fedora said. “Just awakening or re-birth.”

Gen Kelsang glanced at Amara, who was stationed on a red zafu directly in front of her, a girl of seventeen who’d been attending her sessions for months.

 “In death we simply shed our skin,” Amara began, alert to Gen Kelsang’s prompting. “The physical body wastes away, but often the cycle of re-birth is only just beginning.”

The rest of the attendees were quiet. “But I don’t want to be re-born as something else,” the same man said, “I want to stay exactly as I am. That’s the problem.”

“The problem is the want,” Gen Kelsang said. 

The man was shaking his head. “But want is what causes me to look in both directions before I cross the road. Want is what keeps me alive. Maybe I want to want.”

Once the session had ended, a woman in a cashmere scarf sidled over to Gen Kelsang at her perch. Kneeling ceremoniously, she handed her a patterned leather bag, explaining that it was something called Burberry—top of the range.

“Which range?” Gen Kelsang said. 

Stroking with a manicured hand the pashm scarf that, for the duration of the session, had remained around her neck, the woman began to chuckle uneasily. “I just wanted to say thank you.”

Gen Kelsang wanted to tell the woman that evidently she’d done nothing for her, but instead whispered: “You’ve said it,” before accepting the bag with a certain beleaguered recognition. 

Remaining as she often did to help tidy up, Amara had begun arranging the mats and zafus in a neat stack in the corner of the room, spraying each with disinfectant. Observing the interaction between Gen Kelsang and the scarfed lady, she smiled and shook her head. 

Since returning to London following her years of monastic training in Drepung, Gen Kelsang had occupied a small one-bedroom flat above an opticians, a short bus ride from the centre. Recent, extended post-meditative debriefs with Amara, however, had ensured that more often than not these days, she found herself walking home in the dark, having missed the last regular service bus. As with any inconvenience, Gen Kelsang saw this as an occasion for exultation. If one night the wind was especially harsh, and rain drenched her sandalled feet, how she would rejoice upon reaching her flat, drying off and warming herself with blankets and hot tea, and how pleased she would feel about her shaven head.

Amara had been attending sessions for weeks before they became acquainted. One icy winter evening, she’d arrived at Gen Kelsang’s midweek Vispassana class to discover that she was the only attendee. After a brief and intimate meditation, Amara explained that recently, in light of her steadfast attendance at Gen Kelsang’s evening sessions, she had begun to perceive thoughts simply as upscaled sensations, simulacrums of the self, and that in accepting the inviolable impermanence of all things, mental and material, she had broken free from the tethers of her machinating mind. 

“That’s good,” Gen Kelsang had said. 

Henceforth, Amara began to linger after sessions to ask questions, request advice; luxuriate in the sometimes celestial presence of a person free, seemingly, of all manifest desire. 

Now entering the kitchenette, Amara flicked on the kettle and began trawling through the cupboards in search of chamomile, stopping for a moment to admire the small, white resin figure of the Reclining Buddha—stricken by his final illness, perched on his side, right hand supporting his head, poised for parinibbana—that had been placed on top of the microwave. In the shrine room, Gen Kelsang remained seated, eyes sealed, attentively detached. Beside her sat the patterned leather bag. 

One element of Gen Kelsang’s monasticism, Amara had noticed, was the sense, when talking to her, that she was not entirely there. She had a tendency to close her eyes in the middle of a conversation. Part of her spiritual practice, she’d explained to Amara when questioned about this, was to concentrate, wherever possible, on the light that begins to develop the moment we close our eyes. By concentrating on the light’s proliferation, in time, one begins to feel it. Now when she closed her eyes, Gen Kelsang would see only brightness, calmly swelling light. And what we see when we close our eyes, Gen Kelsang had explained, is a reflection of how we perceive death. And what we fear most about death, of course, is its objectionable colour. 

“So you don’t mind about dying,” Amara had summarised one evening. 

That was the idea. Because of course for Gen Kelsang, dying did not mean death itself.

Vacating the shrine room, Gen Kelsang joined Amara in the kitchenette just as the kettle began to boil, immediately placing the Burberry bag on the small, circular table.

“Suits you,” Amara said, pouring out two mugs from the steaming kettle. 

“In Mahayana teachings, there are Karmic consequences to refusing a gift.”

“Even if the item is impure?”

“Why deny the giver the opportunity to be generous?”

“It’ll be worth something.” Amara handed Gen Kelsang her mug, tea bag removed, as she preferred it. 

“You have it,” Gen Kelsang said. “Something to put your things in.”

Amara narrowed her eyes at Gen Kelsang. “You’re testing me.”

“That wouldn’t be very dharmic of me.”

“You could give it away, or donate it.”

To a charity shop on the high street, Amara suggested, whose proceeds went towards grants, counselling and education for disadvantaged youths. Gen Kelsang agreed, and the matter was settled. Gen Kelsang would head there first thing in the morning. When both of them had finished their chamomile tea, Amara rose to refill the kettle. Gen Kelsang watched on a little wearily. Sometimes she got the sense that Amara would sooner stay here all night if she could. 

“What is it?” Gen Kelsang said. “He’s still bothering you?”

“I haven’t seen him,” Amara said. “But sometimes I think I can feel him watching me.” She sighed. “Earlier, on my way here, I just had this—feeling.”

They were talking about Jalal, Amara’s former sweetheart. She’d been avoiding him since the breakup. 

“We can walk together,” Gen Kelsang said. 

“Can’t we just talk for a bit longer?”

Amara had first befriended Jalal back in year nine. In those days he would sit alone at lunch, seemingly deep in thought, a silent and slow-moving boy with a large circular scar on his left cheek. One day, thinking he looked especially solitary all of a sudden, grazing at his cold Moussaka, Amara decided to join him. They talked only intermittently, Amara asking occasional questions, Jalal answering vaguely at first, but seeming to grow more talkative once it became clear that Amara wasn’t trying to bait him into some kind embarrassing disclosure. When Amara eventually got up to leave, Jalal thanked her. 

In time, they developed something of a friendship, often eating lunch together, sitting next to each other in class, occasionally meeting up outside of school for long, rambling walks. If at first what drew Amara to Jalal was his commitment to quietude, soon she couldn’t shut him up. He would shower her with questions: what was her favourite fizzy drink? What did she like to watch? Did she have a TV in her room? He listened to her when she spoke about her family, about her ambitions to get as far away from East Tungsten as possible, about how doing well in school seemed like the only way she ever could. He nodded at all the right moments, and never interrupted. What was refreshing at first was the fact that, unlike everyone else, Jalal never seemed to want to talk about himself. 

“You should go to the police.” Gen Kelsang had folded her arms, and was leaning forward in her seat.

“I can’t,” Amara said. “His probation.”

A few months previously, Jalal had been arrested for stealing a sledge hammer from a local hardware shop. Amara had learned this from an acquaintance of an acquaintance. Before being handcuffed, Jalal had headbutted the arresting officer. 

“You’re worried you’ll get him in more trouble,” Gen Kelsang said.

“I just don’t want it to be because of me.”

“If he’s been following you—”

“He has a curfew,” Amara said. “He’s not allowed out past eight PM. How could he be? And what would I tell the police? I haven’t seen him. It’s just, I have this sense.”

One day in the park, a year or so into their friendship, Jalal asked Amara if he could kiss her. Before she could respond, he’d closed his eyes and leaned in. From that point on they’d meet up in the rose garden, shielded by foliage and confidential hedgerows, to kiss and hold hands all afternoon long. At dinner time she’d finally head home. Jalal, for whom family meals were a kind of mythological notion, would beg her to come back after she’d eaten, and sometimes, in the event that her parents were sufficiently diverted, she would. Back then, Amara envied Jalal for the simple fact that he never seemed to have anywhere to be. 

Several months into their developing romance, Jalal began to change. He grew to well over six feet, developed thick, wizening facial hair and a low, sonorous speaking voice. Almost immediately, and for the first time in his life, he began making friends, mostly older boys from other schools, the types that Amara would sometimes see lurking on street corners and hear howling late at night in the park. Having recruited Jalal to their ranks, they’d stay out till the early hours of the morning, and on weekends perform what Jalal called missions. During this period, he somehow acquired a bicycle that seemed far too small for him. According to Jalal, he’d found it in the park. Soon his attendance at school became patchy, and in the rare event that he did elect to turn up for lessons, he’d sit gazing down at his phone, refusing to hand the device over whenever a teacher attempted to confiscate it, and often responding with veiled physical threats. 

It came as no great surprise when formal expulsion proceedings were initiated after Jalal hurled a pair of scissors—accidentally, he insisted to Amara—at a teacher who’d requested that he stop swinging on his chair. The wound on Miss Harrison’s cheek had required more than a dozen stitches.

One afternoon, the young couple ran into one of Jalal’s new companions on the high street. Immediately, Jalal’s entire manner seemed to shift. He spoke in a language that Amara barely understood, seemed to reference events and incidents about which he’d never informed her, meanwhile ignoring her completely. Glancing around, Amara noticed that other pedestrians seemed to all be crossing the road as they approached. Afterwards Amara, disgruntled, requested an explanation. Jalal just shrugged. It was then that Amara informed him that she didn’t much care for the person he seemed intent on becoming. By that point, they’d drifted onto a quiet residential street. Stopping, Jalal turned loomingly towards her, moving so close that Amara could hear the vicious rhythms of his heart. She stumbled backwards, into a spiky homefront hedge. Exhaling suddenly, Jalal turned and started off in the direction from which they’d come. 

Fearing some kind of outburst from Jalal, Amara decided to stage the breakup at a local café. On receiving the news, Jalal seemed momentarily to return to the quiet and diffident boy she’d once known. He appeared calm, adrift, eventually offering nothing more than an acknowledging nod. Amara left some coins to pay for her chamomile tea and stopped only briefly by the door to turn and glance at Jalal, who had remained at the table, motionless. Then she saw him pocket the coins. 

“We’ll walk together,” Gen Kelsang said. 

“We’re going opposite ways.”

“Where would a monk need to be?”

“My Karma,” Amara said. 

“Don’t worry about your Karma.”

“I’m being irrational,” Amara said. “He has a curfew. They’d arrest him if he broke it. They’re monitoring him. It’s all in my head.”

“At least let me walk you to the bus stop.”

While they finished tidying up, Gen Kelsang, attempting to change the subject, began to recount the story of the robber in Tibet who killed a horse that was carrying a foal in its womb. The knife penetrated so deeply, so went the tale, that it slashed open the horse’s uterus, and the foal emerged through its mother’s side. As she lay dying, the mother spent her last remaining strength licking the foal clean. The robber stood watching this spectacle, a birth hastened by death, dignity in the face of dishonour, love leaking out of the horse as determinedly as blood. At that moment the robber resolved to adopt the foal himself. He carried it all the way back to his home in the hills. Without its mother’s milk, however, and colostrum nowhere to be found on the scant, wintery plains, the foal soon died from malnutrition. Afterwards the robber, guilt-stricken, decided to cease his non-virtuous way of life and began to follow the spiritual path. 

“It was inevitable, of course,” Gen Kelsang said, as they descended the stairs, “since a robber knows nothing of the dharmic path.”

They stopped briefly in the entryway. Gen Kelsang had the Burberry bag over her shoulder. Neither of them attempted to open the door. 

“Was the death of a horse and its foal a fair price to pay for one man’s enlightenment?” Amara said. 

“At that stage of the samsaric cycle, there is no death,” Gen Kelsang said.

“Right,” Amara nodded. “Only dying.”

Frustrated as she was by her own inability to assist others to the extent that she had once anticipated, Gen Kelsang often ruminated on the tale of the dying horse; on the influence of death and vice as harbingers of spiritual reform. Evening after evening, Gen Kelsang would repeat the same tired aphorisms to the same congregation of dilettantes, there, it seemed, to furnish themselves, to augment the I rather than exile it. In what sense was she truly helping? Wasn’t the world only getting worse? If guiding others towards full ascetic acquiescence was the stated goal of her now unvarying existence, wasn’t she failing? Wasn’t her own fear—or rather, belief—in death almost completely negated? How was she really making use of this?

“This bag,” Gen Kelsang said, as they approached Amara’s bus stop. The streets were still and empty. “What gives it true value is its contents, not its form.”

“The skin is perishable,” Amara said.

“Though all sensations stem from it,” Gen Kelsang paused. “Suffering is skin.”

Amara sighed. “The man earlier, what he was saying, about wanting to want. But what about the want not to want?”

Gen Kelsang smiled. “He was wearing a hat.”

They laughed. As Amara’s bus approached, the two hugged goodbye. 

“You’re sure this wouldn’t take you somewhere convenient?” Amara said as she boarded, greeting the driver and scanning her bank card on the reader. 

“Wrong direction entirely.” 

Gen Kelsang watched the bus depart. Twenty minutes earlier and she would have made the 67 after all. Strolling back towards the vihara, she spotted a familiar group of Romanians sitting on a bench outside the library, where they often gathered during the spring and summer months in festive celebration, gulping Balkan beer, chuckling collectively. Gen Kelsang had failed to notice them on the walk to the bus stop. A few of them saluted her as she passed by. 

Continuing along Sabbath street, street lamps flickering, she heard suddenly the zip of rubber on tarmac, the creak of antiquated axles, and soon a hooded cyclist passed her on the pavement, so close she could feel the oscillations of air as he went by. The cyclist came to an abrupt halt up ahead, then turned his mis-sized bike ninety degrees so as to block off most of the pavement. As Gen Kelsang approached, Jalal pointed to the Burberry bag.

Resisting the urge to cry for help, and scanning the shadowed face of her attacker, Gen Kelsang suddenly thought of the dying horse. 

“You.”

When Gen Kelsang failed to hand it over, Jalal attempted to pry the bag away from her. She resisted. Gen Kelsang was strong, puzzlingly so, given her arched frame and diminutive build. Soon the wind blew off Jalal’s hood, revealing his scarred face and shaven head. Gen Kelsang closed her eyes. Arms tiring, Jalal relinquished the bag with one hand, and with the other proceeded to strike Gen Kelsang repeatedly in the face. She made no sound, did not wilt or even flinch, and still she would not let go. Hands trembling, Jalal reached into the front pocket of his windbreaker. 

The blade was no longer than a ring finger. He kept it in a pencil case he’d used in school. Jalal hit her again in the face, weakly, then once more. Blood was now oozing out of Gen Kelsang’s nose, coating her sealed lips and dripping like melted ice from her chin. Finally Jalal, closing his eyes, guided the blade into Gen Kelsang’s neck. Sheets of blood gushed from the large, rubescent wound, and soon the unearthly force with which Gen Kelsang had held on began finally to dissipate. Without opening her eyes, she let go of the bag, stumbled backwards, then collapsed onto the concrete. Jalal stood for a moment, mouth open. Retrieving the bag, he boarded his bike and cycled off into the night. 

Blood seeping from her still sealed lips, breathing faint and laboured, in her final moments, Gen Kelsang tried to manoeuvre onto her side, head supported by her right hand, but after only a few moments her arm gave way. At last she lay smiling and still.

In death she opened her eyes. 

Buddhism coming of age contemporary fiction faith London mortality violence