A curious Buddha and a naked lady

"Okay, look towards that lamp on the wall... no, the one on the left... right. Umm... and put your right arm on your right breast like this, yes, casually. Spread your feet slightly, slightly more, a little less, that's it, that's perfect.", Rinzen said looking at Anna through the camera lens.

"What has happened to you, Lama?", Anna asked teasingly. She had no idea that Rinzen, a Tibetan monk whom she had met only a few hours ago on a train to New Delhi, would become so different in such a short time. Neither did Rinzen.

"I don't know", he shrugged his shoulder and said with a child like grin. In the 8 hours of conversation they had had on the train, not once did he say that. He had sounded very definitive of his opinions that were rooted mostly in the sacred Buddhist literature. Yet his surety was brittle, his arguments finishing with ellipses. He had explained his theories with rigor and gravity, but he would look into her eyes as if pleading to tell him that he was wrong. That’s what she loved about him instantly - he was a man who radiated conviction on the surface but was troubled with a desperate urge for change inside ... just like she was. 

"This light is dim. Is there a bulb in this thing, what do you call...a flash? Does it have one of those? How do I start it?" He pressed some random buttons, flipped the camera up side down and then looked at Anna helplessly.

"Press that red button on the top... yes, that one", she said, laughing. "You know this Lama I met on a train; he gave me a sermon on meditation. I think he was a sham."

"Of course he was. Didn't he gave you a sermon on celibacy as well? I think he was... fucking with you", he said and started laughing at his own joke. This was probably the first time he had used that word. "Don't you distract me from my goal, woman! Let the Buddha click the naked lady", he said and started clicking pictures of her.

Anna changed her expressions spontaneously. She moaned for the first picture, looked towards the camera sensuously for the second, closed her eyes tightly and stuck out her tongue for the third. She had found the middle-aged intellectual lama attractive, but she was enjoying the company of this curious young man with a new found libido even more.

"Will you go back to Dharmshala, to your Monastery to live that life again?" she inquired, reminded suddenly of a basic Buddhist tenet that says nothing in this world is permanent.

"I don't know." he replied gleefully, still clicking her pictures from different angles. Then he put down the camera and looked at her, "I don't know what I will do. I don't know what I should do. I don't even know what I am doing right now. I only know that I feel like clicking your cute little ass staring at me"

Anna laughed with him and remembered another very basic Buddhist tenet – liberation is in the present moment.