The Dalai Lama's Cat (The Dalai Lama's Cat 1)

After the first few mouthfuls, most customers at Café Franc har

dly noticed their food or coffee. Despite all the elaborate preparations, for which they paid a high price, they virtually ignored their food, too busily engaged in conversation, or texting friends and relatives, or reading one of the foreign newspapers Franc collected daily from the post office.

I found it bewildering. It was almost as if they didn’t know how to eat.

Many of these same tourists stayed in hotels that provided coffee- and tea-making equipment in their rooms. If they wanted to drink a cup of coffee without actually experiencing it, why didn’t they do it for free back at the hotel? Why pay $3 to not drink a cup of coffee at Café Franc?

It was His Holiness’s two executive assistants who helped me make sense of what was happening. Sitting in the room they shared the morning following my first visit to Café Franc, I looked up as Chogyal pushed back from his desk. “I like this definition of mindfulness,” he said to Tenzin, reading from one of the many manuscripts received each week from authors petitioning His Holiness to write a foreword. “‘Mindfulness means paying attention to the present moment deliberately and non-judgmentally.’ Nice and clear, isn’t it?”

Tenzin nodded.

“Not dwelling on thoughts of the past or the future, or some kind of fantasy,” elaborated Chogyal.

“I like an even simpler definition by Sogyal Rinpoche,” said Tenzin, sitting back in his chair. “Pure presence.”

“Hmm,” Chogyal mused. “No mental agitation or elaboration of any kind.”

“Exactly,” confirmed Tenzin. “The foundation of all contentment.”

On my next visit to Café Franc, having enjoyed a hearty helping of Scottish smoked salmon with a side of double-thick clotted cream—a meal I can assure you that I ate with the most intense, if somewhat noisy, mindfulness—I settled onto the lotus-pattern cushion between the latest issues of the fashion magazines and continued my observation of the clientele.

And the more I observed, the more obvious it became: what was missing was mindfulness. Even though they were sitting a few hundred yards from the Dalai Lama’s headquarters, in the Tibetan Buddhist theme park that was Café Franc, rather than experiencing this unique place and moment, most of the time they were mentally far, far away.

Moving between Jokhang and Café Franc more and more often, I began to see that up the hill, happiness was sought by cultivating inner qualities, beginning with mindfulness but also including such things as generosity, equanimity, and a good heart. Down the hill, happiness was sought from external things—restaurant food, stimulating holidays, and lightning-quick technology. There seemed to be no reason, however, that humans couldn’t have both: we cats knew that being mindful of delicious food was among the greatest happinesses imaginable!

One day an interesting couple appeared at Café Franc. At first glance, they were quite ordinary-looking, middle-aged Americans in jeans and sweatshirts. They arrived during a midmorning lull, and Franc sashayed over to their table in his new black Emporio Armani jeans.

“And how are we this morning?” he asked, in his standard opener.

As Franc took their coffee orders, the man asked about the colored strings around his wrist, and Franc began the recitation with which I was now familiar: “They’re blessing strings, and you get them from a lama when you take special initiations. The red one was from the Kalachakra initiations I took from the Dalai Lama in two thousand eight. The blue ones are from vajrayana initiations in Boulder, San Francisco, and New York, in two thousand six, two thousand eight, and two thousand ten. I got the yellow ones at empowerments in Melbourne, Scotland, and Goa.”

“Very interesting,” replied the man.

“Oh, the Dharma is my life,” Franc announced, placing a theatrical hand over his heart, then nodding his head in my direction. “Have you seen our little friend? The Dalai Lama’s cat. In here all the time. Close karmic connection to His Holiness.” Then, leaning closer, he confided, as he did at least a dozen times a day, “We’re at the heart of Tibetan Buddhism here. The absolute epicenter!”

Quite what the couple made of Franc was hard to tell. But what set them apart from other visitors was that when their coffee was placed in front of them, they stopped their conversation and actually tasted it. Not only the first mouthful but also the second, third, and subsequent mouthfuls. Like the monks at Jokhang, they were paying attention to the present moment deliberately. Relishing their coffee. Enjoying their surroundings. Experiencing pure presence.

Which was why, when they resumed conversation, I eavesdropped with particular interest. What I heard should not have surprised me. The man, a researcher in mindfulness from America, was telling his wife about a article that had appeared in the Harvard Gazette.

“They used a panel of more than two thousand people with smartphones and sent out questions at random intervals during the week. Always they were the same three questions: What are you doing? What are you thinking? How happy are you? What they found was that forty-seven percent of the time, people weren’t thinking about what they were doing.”

His wife raised her eyebrows.

“Personally, I think that number is a bit low,” he said. “Half the time, people aren’t focusing on what they’re doing. But the really interesting bit is the correlation with happiness. They found that people are much happier when they’re mindful of what they’re doing.”

“Because they only pay attention to things they enjoy?” asked his wife.

He shook his head. “That’s just it. Turns out that it’s not so much what you’re doing that makes you happy. It’s whether or not you’re being mindful of what you’re doing. The important thing is to be in the direct state, attending to the here and now. Not in the narrative state”—he spun his index finger beside his temple—“which means thinking about anything except what you’re actually doing.”

“That’s what Buddhists have always said,” agreed his wife.

Her husband nodded. “Only sometimes these concepts get lost in translation. You come across people like the maître d’ here, who wears Buddhism like a badge. For them it’s an extension of their ego, a way to present themselves as different or special. They seem to think it’s all about the external trappings, when in fact the only thing that really matters is inner transformation.”

A few weeks later, I was enjoying a post-luncheon doze on the top shelf when I awoke to a face that was as deeply familiar as it was completely out of context. Tenzin was standing in the middle of Café Franc, looking directly at me.

“You’ve noticed our beautiful visitor?” Franc glanced over at me.

“Oh yes. Very pretty.” In his tailored suit, the ambassadorial Tenzin gave away nothing.