Buddha of the unwashed

<Groupie alert>One of the questions on a recent The Rest is Politics (Question Time) was "What are you reading now?" Alastair Campbell gave a plug for Jim Down's Life in the Balance; we're on the same page with that. Rory Stewart, in contrast went with In Love with the World by Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche. dus: not Aura Dione! Being a loyal TRIP foot-soldier, I immediately checked out the earbook on Borrowbox </Groupie alert>. The next day, I was cast loose car-less for an hour in Waterford so I walked into the Central Library and borrowed their dead-tree copy of the same book. Mingyur Rinpoche was born the same year as The Boy, but in Nepal rather than Dublin; and as the descendant of Tibetan kings rather than horse-riding protestants from King's County.

Following the tradition of Gautama Buddha [aka The Great Man], at the age of 36, Prince Yongey did a midnight flit from his privileged position as Abbot of a well-appointed monastery and went on retreat among the Great Unwashed of India. The book is

• a narrative of the first part of that journey
• a set of lessons on how to deal with suffering [snot, snores, stink and nowhere to sit on the train to Varanasi for starters] 
• a wordbook of technical terms in Tibetan, Pali and Sanskrit: ahiṃsā bhikku chanda dana koan mondo namo roshi samsara tulku vipassana zazen. 
• Google up the ones you don't know - there will be a test at 11:00.

Mingyur had intended to go on his [self-]discovery pilgrimage for 3 years and come back to his patrimony with more compassion and a few IRL stories to use as parables and liven up his teaching. Escaping from his minders at midnight having ordered a taxi for the train-station was in the nature of a schoolboy jape. Sitting in a jam-packed train bound for Varanasi being bumped by lousy neighbours; assaulted by the reek of the privy and startled awake by the train's whistle . . . not so much. He couldn't even honour his intentions to sleep in the station concourse the next night, paying a pittance for a dorm room instead. Baby steps, pilgrim! Reality is harder than the well-planned fantasy. 

In any case, this Rinpoche had a near-death experience [of the puka-puka, shit and go blind, dehydration, delirium and coma variety] just 3 weeks into his 3 year excursion. At some time during this ordeal, he realised that with one bound he could be free because he'd memorized the phone number of the nearest monastery of his sect. At the same time, he knew that bumming a call off the next tourist with a cell-phone would hardly be the correct behaviour for an enlightened no mind no matter tulku reborn into a his Buddha-nature. In any case, he passed out before really having choice in the matter . . .

. . . and woke up in a hospital bed, on a saline drip and having antibiotics coursing through his veins. This was courtesy of a foreign wannabe meditator to whom he'd earlier given some free advice / instruction. The bloke came round to say goodbye and found his Thai all in a heap. Mingyur recovered and set off on his retreat in earnest: staying away from his monastery for 4½ years (50% extra for good behaviour). But that journey is only sketched in at the very end of this book. It's a bit elliptical in the description but it might be that at his encounter with the very face of death he became enlightened = Bodhisattva. 

Good for him.

Up till now Matthieu Ricard has been my GoTo for GauTama. I have another line now. I got the book out of the library and ordered up an ear-book version through Borrowbox at the same time. The audio is read in standard American English by Feodor Chin, famous for doing voice-overs in video games. It grates a little: Mingyur's home is in Nubri, Nepal and Chin makes it sound like Newbury, the horse-racing town in Berkshire, England. One of my horse-riding protestant cousins lives there, so I experienced some cognitive dissonance. But that's just me. The Buddhist theory can get a bit heavy, which is okay IF you're chopping wood and carrying water about the farm with earphones - but a sleeper if reading it all on the page. Verdict: worth reading but not worth buying to read.