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Open pages
by Newcomb Greenleaf
Chögyam Trungpa,
Disappearances,
and Rainbow Bodies
 Living in Vermont, you can't avoid the name Harold Frank Mosher. His novels about northeast Vermont are often recommended, and several have even been made into "major motion pictures." I formerly regarded such recommendations with the condescension of a New Yorker moved to Vermont (a "flatlander" in local parlance). Life was too short to read books by Vermonters about Vermonters; wasn't it enough that I lived here?
Last fall, an old and dear friend, Terry Kilshaw, spend the night on his way to a program at Karmê Chöling. Terry put Disappearances—Mosher's first novel of 1977—in my hands without any particular recommendation that I can recall. I hope that the subtle condescension with which I received it was not too evident. (I learned recently that "condescension" formerly referred to the virtue of being polite to social inferiors and servants.) In my younger years I eagerly devoured fiction, and would likely have given Mosher a try. But now, long in the tooth, I find that time is short, and mostly read dharma and related work. My taste for tall tales of whiskey smuggling from Quebec to Vermont in 1932 has decreased to near zero.
I placed Disappearances on a motley shelf of surplus volumes, many also unwanted gifts, and it seemed likely that it would soon make a journey down to the cellar in a box, waiting for that continually receding moment when my wife and I begin to sell our excess worldly goods on Amazon and eBay. Then on a recent Sunday evening, while I was biting down on an innocent cracker, a tired molar on the upper right split almost down the middle and changed the volume's fate entirely.
Monday morning I was in a dentist's chair where it was deemed advisable to get the tooth removed immediately. The extraction was supposed to take 10 minutes but took over an hour; with nothing much to get hold of the remains had to be sectioned with a drill and pried away from the jawbone. Dr. Fox apologized for the trauma and gave me heavy pain pills. My instructions were clear: as soon as I got home I was to take one and go to bed with an ice pack on my cheek.
Now my fiction habit has survived in a vestigial form—I like a fun novel when I am under the weather. For several years I've had a Harry Potter in reserve, waiting for a flu that has yet to come. But for an afternoon recovery from a long extraction I needed something short and light. Disappearances caught my eye. I sat down on the couch to give it the first page test: was it light and engaging enough to take to bed when drugged, with my jaw swollen and a hole in my gum?
The first page led to the second and in no time my condescension had utterly vanished, and my attention—even my allegiance—was focused on the story, in particular on the central figure of Quebec Bill Bonhomme. Using the instructions of Dr. Fox as an excuse, I went to bed to give myself a long period of uninterrupted reading. In younger days I probably would have read through the night to the end, but now my eyes get tired and this world—acting through my wife and dog—clamors for my attention.
Through that long afternoon of reading I occasionally noticed that I had neither taken a pill nor applied an icepack, and also that there seemed to be no pain and no swelling. Either I was very lucky or perhaps the extracted tooth had been exerting such a malign influence that its removal had healed me. Later I began to wonder if, through the person of Quebec Bill, the book might have played some part in the healing of my jaw.
It took me three days to finish reading, and through most of its final chapters I was either laughing or crying. While Disappearances can be described as a comic melodrama, I found it anything but a light book. Yet I had to wonder why I felt so strongly moved. Why the tears—what was that all about? Gradually I realized that I felt like I do when I have been reading dharma of unusual quality. Behind the melodrama, behind the loving rendition of life on a small and failing farm in a poor and isolated patch of Vermont at the height of the Great Depression, behind the comedy, I seemed to have found a powerful spiritual message.
Perhaps the first clue to the spiritual meaning of the book is its title, which refers to the disappearances at death of Quebec Bill and others. To a Christian this might signify the Resurrection, but to me it suggested the Rainbow Body tradition of Tibet, in which a yogi of highest accomplishment is able, at death, to dissolve his or her body into the essential energy of the elements, symbolized by a rainbow, with the event often accompanied by unusual meteorological phenomena. It is a tradition that seems to be waning in this age where truth is given by scientific observation. In The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying Sogyal Rinpoche writes of a 1952 instance of the Rainbow Body in Tibet which was witnessed by many people, but does not give a more recent sighting.
Nothing I have seen indicates that Mosher had any Buddhist reference in mind when writing Disappearances, or that he knew anything of Tibet. But after finishing the book and pondering its title, I began to see it as a superb—albeit fictional—portrait of a mahasiddha, to see Quebec Bill as a crazy wisdom yogi of highest accomplishment. I realized that it moved me in part because Quebec Bill feels so close to the essence of the only mahasiddha I have had the good fortune to spend time with, Chögyam Trungpa Trungpa, who was ceremonially cremated there in 1987. While Trungpa did not manifest Rainbow Body, his cremation was marked by strange mixes of clouds and rainbows.
Let me try to describe the contradictions of Quebec Bill in such a way that—with small changes—they could describe the crazy wisdom of Chögyam Trungpa. Bill was an indefatigable optimist yet he saw those around him with great clarity, seeing their basic goodness and their neurotic habitual patterns simultaneously. He was extraordinarily generous yet his indifference to the opinions of others often made him appear ruthlessly self-centered. He followed his own star. He was at ease with a vast range of his fellows. He loved a good joke and yet was totally serious. He was a gifted artist who could magnetize a throng with his fiddle. He was a devoted teacher who gave his life to his main student, his son. He was a prodigious drinker. He fell in love with a future nun and wooed her away from her vocation. She bore the son who became his student, whom he named "Wild Bill."
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Newcomb sent this article to Howard Mosher and received the following reply.
Dear Mr. Greenleaf
Wow! No one has ever seen what you see, or appreciated the characters and ideas of Disappearances as much as you do. Thank you for your wonderful essay, "Disappearances and Rainbow Bodies."
Disappearances is the book of mine that readers seem to love or hate. There isn't much middle ground. I loved the parallels you draw between Quebec Bill's disappearance and the Rainbow Body tradition, and Quebec Bill as a "crazy wisdom yogi," that seems to me to be the perfect comparison. And the last paragraph of the essay is just wonderful. Thank you! And thanks for sending it to me. It made my spring.
Very Best,
Howard Mosher
PS. Sorry about your tooth!
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The curious open love with which Wild Bill regards his truly wild father is an extraordinary depiction of devotion. If you want to understand devotion, you would do well to study that relationship. While Quebec Bill is indisputably his master, Wild Bill has three other teachers who convey the dharma to him. His mother, Evangeline, teaches him about compassion and loving kindness. His Uncle Henry teaches him practical wisdom and skillful means. His Aunt Cordelia teaches him about emptiness: through careful study of history and literature she teaches that "all is illusion."
Quebec Bill takes his son Wild Bill on a transformative journey (it should be noted that they are going in search of liquor, which as amrita is a symbol of wisdom). Wild Bill is the book's calm narrator, by temperament (and later literally) sober as a judge. The "Wild" perhaps indicates that Wild Bill will have to attain his wild and fearless side. For most of all, Quebec Bill was fearless. He was unafraid in situations of great physical peril—that fuels the book's melodrama. But, more importantly, he was utterly unafraid in every waking moment, no matter how ordinary, always wide open to all of experience. That quality of fearlessness was the greatest teaching that he gave to his son, and it was the vividness of Mosher's portrayal of fearlessness that brought tears to my eyes. That portrait gives Disappearances its spiritual depth for me, as Quebec Bill "channels" the essence of Chögyam Trungpa. And perhaps, if my jaw that never did ache is to be believed, it possesses a deep healing power.
© 2007 Newcomb Greenleaf
Next on Open Pages: The Heart Sutra, the Womb of Buddhas, by Red Pine.
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