Ever wondered why it's considered impolite to gaze into a stranger's face in the lift, in the subway train, in a city?
The reasons must be varied and number in the dozens. But david suspects that the main one is people do not want to admit that their private ennui lays bare on their faces for everyone to see. So they don't want you to look.
If you sit at a sidewalk bar and observe the faces of passers-by, you'll probably see quite a bit of impatience, mild desperation, veiled anger... Battle-stations against "reality"—so to speak.
This is not news but, if you don't just look but also count, you may discover like I did how few exceptions one can find.
Our friends and relatives scatter over a spectrum ranging from being "successful" and "confident" to frustrated and debt-ridden. If those in the unfortunate group walked around with a blank, hard expression like a ski-mask, we would just dismiss that as "fair enough." Then we half-expect, as a simple-minded 180º flip, that the lucky ones should dance merrily down the streets each day with Gucci shopping bags...
"If just a third of my friends are screwed, at least a tenth of the remainder should be basking in heaven, right? They can't all be unhappy."
Not really. david notices the "better-offs" often wear their facial muscles even tighter, colder, and they are lonier. Exceptions are so far in between that it might be more accurate to take low-grade neurosis as a universal human condition.
That's why yesterday was a day of days for me. For a change, I beheld with my own eyes at a close distance someone whom I believe to be a holy man.
Those few friends of david's who have zig-zagged Nepal and Burma to seek dharma gurus would be giggling now. This's the first time david saw a mahasiddi in person, all right? So shut up and read on.
The Venerable Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche—the highest scholar of the Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism—was in Hong Kong for a few days to give three talks on Shantideva's Entering the Path to Enlightenment.
At the venue, there's a large hall where the Rinpoche would give the discourses to the 200 folks who wanted Chinese translation. The small "English" room next door was where the twenty of us squeezed together in front of a live TV to hear the translation by a Caucasian monk. It so happened that our room was adjacent to the Rinpoche's temporary office. So he had to pass among two dozens of unenlightened "language anti-socials" en route to the big hall.
I'd have imagined that a master of the Rinpoche's standing would coolly breeze past with his small entourage of student-monks. It turned out that, when the Rinpoche saw us, he stopped, humbly placed his palms together, and gave us his trademark big smile and wished us well in Tibetan.
Then david's heart missed a beat.
I saw a happy man. I mean, I saw a happy man.
A happy man... joyous to the bones, beyond plight, through and through; so happy that nobody could miss the infectious radiance for anything else. In that moment, it striked me that I had never seen a completely happy person in the flesh before.
It's quite, eh, refreshing.
I'll have to be a conceited fool to start elaborating at this point my *guesses* of how the man attained that level of serenity. There's no need anyways. Ask the Rinpoche and he'll say "follow the Buddha's teachings diligently." Yeah right.
On the other hand, david did learn something. The man has taken half a century of unsettling exile life in his stride with not much more than three robes and a toothbrush to his name. Yet he still oozes happiness, I suppose this says a lot about the efficacy of "security," "romance," and Prada bags as reliable agents of true joy. I suppose this also says a lot about Hong Kong.
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