He had walked many thousands of miles, clad in black robes and carrying only his stick and his bowl, and in all that time he had rarely been hungry. The people were poor and had little, but he had nothing, and it was the custom to provide for those less fortunate than oneself. A handful of brown rice. A hunk of maize bread. On good days a small portion of goat's meat, sometimes with mashed beans. Perhaps even small fishes, cooked underneath flat stones in the glowing embers until the skin was crisp and brittle. Each meal was a feast.
No, his body had never suffered the pangs of hunger, even though his soul constantly hungered.
He had sat with priests and wisemen, listening to them while remaining silent himself, struggling to understand. Letting them fill the empty bowl of his mind as the villagers replenished his feeding bowl. The knowledge had been dreadfully slow in coming and painfully acquired. In the early days language was the obstacle. Using signs and gesture and his scant vocabulary he had come to understand the essence of their teaching, yet the greatest obstacle still remained: the rigidity of his mind, its dogmatism and unwillingness to accept.
Eventually he found himself in the mountainous region of the northeast where the holiest men lived. There he discovered, as if by divine revelation, that the enlightenment he was seeking was in a place he had never suspected--inside himself. And with the knowledge came the awareness that first he had to strip off, layer by layer, the defenses that had been erected and reinforced since birth to protect his vulnerable personality.
The vast majority of human beings were encased inside this protective shell all their life. The love of self and the desire to impose it on others, on the world at large, made them try to re-create every person and every thing in their own image.
So the first step, he now came to see, was to let go--to disinherit his bodily needs and accept the world as it is. To accept what is given. From this moment on he discarded his own personality, his own identity, and miraculously found himself beyond the barrier in a world that was completely changed because he himself had undergone a metamorphosis.
His body erupted in sores, which festered and became succulent feeding places for parasites and flies. He almost died of malaria and lay for days in a burning, shaking stupor, tended by two old women who starved the fever out of him. Twice he was bitten by venomous snakes, which had curled close to share his body heat while he slept. He became thin, almost to the point of emaciation, with stringy arms and lean flanks; yet harder, tougher, and more resilient, able to withstand the heat and cold and the hardships of travel over long distances, always on foot.
One accident damaged him permanently; he had fallen down a steep rocky ravine and smashed his left knee. The healing took many months, leaving the limb misshapen, and thereafter his walk was lurching and ungainly and caused him much pain.
His face changed beyond recognition--burned and cracked by the sun and blistered by the wind, the flesh tautened on his cheekbones, leaving deep hollows beneath. His chin became a jutting knob of bone. In this prematurely aged mask his eyes appeared uncommonly large, the whites tinged with blue so that they seemed even whiter, the brown irises clear and brilliant like convex mirrors. His stare was daunting in its naked, uncompromising directness.
He acquired a new name, too:
There were still vestiges of his former life, traces of racial memory, which sometimes surfaced in dreams. He could not erase them completely, even though they had no meaning or relevance in his new philosophy: The past was truly dead.
Now the time had come for this new being to fulfill the purpose for which it had been created.
He stayed three weeks in New York while arrangements were made. The ashram was a converted loft in what had been a warehouse on Cleveland Street in the SoHo district. For much of the time he sat and meditated. Whenever approached by any of the young initiates who had heard of his pilgrimage he was amazed to find that they shared his beliefs; he was no longer alone as he had been all those years ago when he set out on his quest.
