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My Kind of Town Don Chapman |
Dangerous peace
>> Blaisdell Arena
"What a dangerous philosophy," HPD Detective Sherlock Gomes said as he and Dr. Laurie Tang filed out past the tilapia pond after hearing talks by the 14th Dalai Lama and the first part-Hawaiian lama, the first reincarnation of the beloved Tibetan Lama Jey Tsong Khapa, the Liliha-born 18-year-old once called Frankie Kharma.
"Dangerous? Buddhism is about compassion and peace and easing the world's suffering."
"That's what I mean, especially when you take it to a lama's extremes."
"Extremes? Such as?"
"If everybody gave up the rest of their life to pursue enlightenment, you know what? There's no war, so no generals. No industry, so no CEOs. No crime, so no cops, lawyers or journalists. Lots of people can find that kind of thinking dangerous to their continued well-being and standard of living."
"So peace is dangerous?"
"To some people."
At that moment, two dozen of those people, members of Te-Wu, the Chinese secret police, were on the move, getting into position to tail the two lamas from Blaisdell to whatever destinations followed, striking when they could. The Tibetans were holy, perhaps, but dangerous. Especially the boy.
Backstage, meanwhile, the young lama was having a reunion with his family, who were having a hard time not calling his holiness Frankie. Particularly his Tibetan-born father Steve. When it had become clear that the Chinese would do away with any semblance of the former royal system, to the extent of massacring them, he and his royal family fled over the Himalayas in 1954, losing on the way his older sister, leaving behind a fortune. He grew up in the Tibetan community of India, came to Hawaii in the 1970s and worked in Chinese restaurants, met his Hawaiian-Tibetan wife at a Free Tibet rally.
Steve was a bitter man who had turned his back on Buddhism and its inability to defend his country and his way of life.
He forbade his wife from taking their two sons to the Tibetan center in Nuuanu or even telling them Buddhist children's stories, especially not the one about a soul incarnated as a bull laboring in hell, pulling a huge wagon, and when another bull is having a hard time and suffering, the first bull compassionately tells the devil that he will pull the load for both. Which so enrages the devil, he strikes the bull, killing it and sending it to another incarnation -- as a human Buddha.
Now here was his son, a Buddha. At 18, tall and handsome, he should be going off to college, learning a profession that would change the family's fortunes in America. Instead, he was offering to pull the world's load.
His older brother Joe had some ideas about where the load ought to be carried, and could hardly wait to introduce Frankie to Kamasami Khan.
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Don Chapman is editor of MidWeek. His serialized novel runs daily in the Star-Bulletin. He can be e-mailed at dchapman@midweek.com