A Narrow Way Through to an Expanded View

Dominique Townsend

To be responsible, I should clean up. Sometimes I should speak, and sometimes, be quiet. There are those I should feed, several times a day for the duration of their lives, and others I should not neglect. But some, so many really, neglected altogether.

I’m reminded of someone who at the time seemed to me like an old woman. She was in her 50s. I was in high school. I saw her every afternoon walking through Providence. I was a babysitter and the kid rode on my shoulders. Sometimes she needed to drink and sometimes she needed to pee. The woman passed us, cheerful, picking up trash from the road. She got her exercise, and she cleaned. I’m sorry to say she seemed crazy to me, but now I see her differently, cleaning up.

Vultures clean up. They’re efficient, unless there’s just too much, as there often seems to be. I am one of those who cherish the vultures for cleaning up, over and over.

Hubert Decleer and I were sitting at the base of Samyé-Chimpu, watching horses graze. It was 1997—the first trip I took with him to Tibet. As we drank instant coffee from enamel cups, I learned to think in a new way about responsibility. It was fall. We wore wool hats and scarves from Kathmandu against the chill. I hovered next to him in the quiet pleasure of it all. The horses seemed serene, at ease, carefree as they grazed on grass. I thought I’d like to be like them. And I sensed that Hubert and I both enjoyed the horses’ calm abiding. But Hubert’s mood was different from mine. Out of the silence, he sighed, then shook his head. He seemed forlorn. “Poor beasts,” he said, his eyes directed to the horses, “They only think about eating.” For me, this was a new way of thinking about human responsibility—if we’re fortunate, we get to think about more than finding food and not being eaten.

More recently, a student in my class was frustrated that Milarepa took responsibility for his mother’s karma. She felt he had stolen his mother’s chance to make something of herself. Fires within fires and wheels within wheels. Rounds of violent feelings peppered, if we’re lucky, by bells ringing out.

One time, I saw a squirrel on a branch eating mulberries at the beginning of my walk, and as I returned home, I saw that squirrel fall dead from the tree. The next day, I saw a pregnant woman eating the berries from the tree and stopped to tell her what I had seen, out of a sense of responsibility. A circular sense, a circular scene. Or maybe it was me who was pregnant.

Once, at Dolma Ling Nunnery in Dharamsala, on a rainy day off from teaching English and studying Tibetan, I sat at my low table facing the window. I faced the flooded field behind the teachers’ quarters where I lived, reading a book on training the mind. I paused and happened to see a spider capture a fly. Later I saw a gecko capture the spider, and later still, by accident, I caught that gecko’s tail in the window as I closed it, having opened it to watch the storm clouds coming in from the foothills. Wheels within wheels.

Now I’m reminded of a time when I traveled to Eastern Tibet by myself when I was in my 20s. I was looking for connections between the monastery I was studying for my dissertation, and communities in the areas that now “map” onto, or have fallen into, China’s Sichuan and Qinghai provinces. To prepare, I spent a few weeks in Xining studying local language and then I naively and perhaps irresponsibly set off on my own, on buses and by taxis and motorcycles, sometimes on foot, making connections and asking the best way to the next monastery I was curious about. There were places I was determined to go—Nangchen Gar—as if by fate. But maybe there were other forces at play. Like chance, and greed, and haplessness. Whose responsibility did I become on the bus from Shechen to Dzogchen? Who went so far out of his way? Who gave me her bed so I’d be safe from someone she knew to be a danger? Whose torn hair did I find massed in the wall in one of the towns that would be leveled years later by the earthquake? What was my connection to her now that I had found it? Is it better to be in motion, or to sit in silence? Is it better to understand or to adapt?

My friend, walking me to another bus stop, sighed and waved goodbye, “Only the sparrow flies alone.”

Dominique Townsend is Associate Professor of Tibetan Buddhism at Columbia University and was previously Associate Professor at Bard College. She is the author of a book of poems, The Weather & Our Tempers (BAP 2013), a book about Buddhism for children called Shantideva (Wisdom Publications, 2014), and the scholarly books A Buddhist Sensibility (Columbia University Press, 2021), Longing to Awaken (University of Virginia Press, 2024), and All This is Dreamlike (forthcoming from Columbia University Press).