A dharma bum’s encounter with reality, Indian-styleIt is a path along which so many seekers and dreamers have travelled that it is difficult to be entirely sympathetic towards another dharma bum’s encounter with reality, Indian-style. Nikolai Grozni might actually complain. The Indian bits are wholly incidental to his narrative. What he is describing are his experiences of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition as it is taught at Dharamsala, as propagated by the teachers of the university started by the Dalai Lama. Grozni also comes trailing an impressive lineage. Aside from being born into a well-to-do family of professionals in Bulgaria, he was something of a musical prodigy in his younger days and he never fails to remind us of the specific events of his jazz-playing, pleasure-seeking, pot-smoking days that led to his eureka moment. If we are to take him seriously, there’s even an earlier memory that he provides of how when looking at a circular tower during his boyhood, he felt that sense of dislocation that an existentialist might identify as the first signs of “Being and not Being” in the world as seen by other people, such as his father, who told him, quite properly, not to be absurd. There is, therefore, a core of serious debate that runs through Grozni’s narrative that examines and then shreds apart the various different methods that Buddhists use to inculcate their dogma into their students-to-be. It is an intelligent guide to Buddhist practice shorn of all the mystic trappings. For instance, Grozni actually can read and converse in Tibetan and is adept at the systems of debate, the questions and answers that are part of their teaching method. This is something like learning the scales of music. At the same time, there is something in him that is completely antithetical to any form of authority. This may be perfectly consistent with who he really is but it does create a sense that he will never belong to the system into which he is trying to infiltrate because he has no respect for it. Instead, he appears to want the system to change to adapt to his needs. What this means is that it’s difficult to like Nikolai Grozni no matter how hard he tries to portray his failings, his valiant attempts to adapt to the Indian way of life, his detailed descriptions of what it is to suffer from the stomach bugs, the lack of money, the lack of privacy and at the same time, the rampant desire for sex, which distinguishes, according to him, the celibate way of life that monkhood imposes upon him. As a checkmate to the Buddha that Grozni has come to seek, there is also a larger-than-life character that he meets at Dharamsala who is the real subject of the book. He is a Bosnian rebel on the run, a refugee du jour called Tsar who has lost his passport and his past and is desperately trying to find ways of evading the Indian police, cadging money from nubile women, whom he services to everyone’s great delight and anyone else he meets, including the ever-willing Grozni.It’s all a rollicking, boys’ own adventure, with the Buddha and the bug thrown in for a little extra diversion.
