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My Kind of Town Don Chapman |
Reggae with Buddha
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The second Lama Jey Tsong Khapa, the 18-year-old part-Hawaiian reincarnate of one of the most important Buddhas in Tibetan history, tapped his hands on their corner table, drumming softly with the beat of the loud music pumping through the speakers.
"You like this kine music?" said Kamasami Khan, descendant of the mighty Khans of Mongolia and local leader of the clandestine Free Tibet Warrior Society. And then he realized: Living Buddha or no, Jey was still just 18.
And here he was, head bobbing to the beat. He was blending in, and that would make Khan's job of keeping the lama alive -- and undetected by the Chinese secret police -- much easier.
"Yes, it's very good. What do you call this music?"
"Jawaiian," his big brother Joe Kharma said, "serious Jamaican reggae with a Hawaiian twist. The band is Natural Vibrations."
"It is freedom music," the lama said. "I shall compose a chant to this rhythm."
"I'll introduce you to the guys in the band later."
"Yes, please," he said, looking out at the dance floor. "But I must say, in the Himalayas one is less exposed to so many distractions."
"Exposed is exactly the right word!" Joe guffawed. "Guess you didn't see a lot of nuns flashing their thongs up at that monastery, eh?"
"Big brother, you do have a colorful way of expressing yourself. But what is a thong?"
Some things even a Buddha can't divine.
"Right there," Joe said, nodding toward the shapely backside of a young woman in tight jeans and bare midriff doing the bootie boogie on the dance floor, the top of her jeans slipping below the top of her red thong panty.
"This is comfortable?"
You could see the Buddha's compassion for her suffering.
You could also see an 18-year-old coming to grips for the first time with being 18. Even a lama has hormones, and he now understood what he'd heard referred to in the monastery as "a rise in the robes."
But he was a Buddha, and felt blessed for this insight into humanity and into himself, and reminded himself that one of Buddhism's three poisons was desire.
As she danced, thong girl turned, and now the young lama saw an impressive display of cleavage heaving from her red halter top. And then she was smiling and waving and her lips were moving but the music drowned out the words, and she was hurrying over to their table and giving Joe and Khan a hug and a kiss on the cheek.
"Jey, meet Bodhicita Guzman," Joe shouted above the music.
"Did you say Boddhicitta? The path of enlightenment?"
"Let me guess," she said, sitting down beside him, "you're Buddhist."
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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
