Pauline Taylor, who lived with a menagerie of rescue animals on the outskirts of town, kept an eye out for Lama Tashi’s ancient, lime-green Volvo on the road into town, leaving home at the most opportune moment to engineer an encounter with him. Tears welling in her eyes, she told anyone who cared to listen that she had never felt such unconditional love as the time she’d first bumped into Lama Tashi in the Household Detergents aisle.

Professor Hawke, retired from Princeton, who refused to slum it intellectually with just about everyone, used to collar Lama Tashi any time he saw him, insisting he join him for coffee at The Good Roast, and demand answers to arcane questions of quantum mechanics.

Even Margarita Moore, whose staunch views on anyone who wasn’t Born Again, heterosexual, and a vigorous supporter of the Second Amendment were well known, was once seen holding hands with Lama Tashi outside her church, ardently agreeing that there is only one ultimate reality, and if we wish to experience it, first we must let go of our tightly-held view of self. In that moment, what the guru said seemed—even to her—to be so overwhelmingly obvious that she couldn’t possibly disagree.

Within hours, as the impact of his presence began to dissipate, she slid back into her habitual convictions. But at the time what an extraordinary vision it had been to behold!

So popular was Lama Tashi around town that people joked how an endorsement by the guru on the mountain would guarantee electoral success. When someone had questioned if he might himself consider running for office his face had crinkled, silvering goatee wobbled, and he had belly-laughed with appreciative gusto, as if the suggestion was deliberately and hilariously idiotic. Which in a kind of way it was. But in another kind of way, wasn’t.

The idea of having Lama Tashi as their representative in City Hall or Congress or even—why the heck not?—the Senate, was an idea that once suggested refused to go away. From time to time someone would ask him, “Would you consider being our Mayor, Lama Tashi?” Or “Would you run for Congress?” And he always replied in the same, cryptic manner. Meeting his questioner in the eye with a warmly encouraging expression he would say, “You are asking the wrong question, my friend. It is important to ask a useful question if we wish to receive a useful answer.”