Nirvana Express - Day Four

... more from my memoir from a dozen years ago about my brief time in the monastery ...

Day Four: The Begging Bowl

My attempts at sleep meditation do not seem to have borne fruit.  I sleep fitfully.  Partially it is nervousness; in the morning I am to step out of the monastery alone for the first time.   One of the most inviolable precepts of monkhood is that one may not work for, earn, or in any way strive to attain personal comfort.   Eating is a particularly complex issue.  The rule is that one must not take that which is not freely given, and in the case of food this generally means walking around in the morning with a begging-bowl.

For the first three days of monkhood, one is sequestered within the monastery walls, and isn’t allowed to go out foraging in the streets.  Now, you might think that this has to do with a sort of ritual immersion in spirituality … the idea that you need to become wholly and utterly sanctified before setting foot beyond the gate.  After all, three is a magic number in all cultures.  For example, from Neolithic mother-goddess cults all the way to Christianity, any divine being wishing to come back from the dead is expected to grant the living the courtesy of staying down under for three days.  No self-respecting being expects to be resurrected overnight.  You’d think that the three-day quarantine is all about that, but it’s not.  Like many other Buddhist customs, it’s purely practical.

Three days is the average time it takes for a monk to learn how to walk around without his robes falling off.

On the fourth morning of monkhood, I learn that I am somewhat below average in this respect.  My morning struggle with the robes has yet to yield an elegant result.  Nevertheless, after about half an hour, I emerge from my room with the robes more-or-less attached and with the little tail that one uses to twist and tighten it sticking firmly out from under my left armpit.  I’m sure Sigmund Freud would have seen some phallic imagery there, but, quickly remembering that I am supposed to be beyond such metaphors, I quickly dismiss them from my mind.  Gathering up my bowl, I march proudly out to face the secular cosmos.

I don’t get very far.  Only two steps from my room, I run into the Maha, who gazes at my attire in horror.

“Oh dear, oh dear,” he says, “you’re wearing your robe all wrong.”

“No, I’m not,” I insist.  After all, I have followed the instructions pretty faithfully.  And usually there’s a forewarning before the robes drop off — a twitching of the fabric somewhere, a shifting in the folds.  “Don’t worry, I think I can manage a ten minute walk without an embarrassing incident.”

 “Well, you seem to have figured it out all right,” says the Maha, “but you see, when you go outside the temple, you have to wear the robes in a different style.”

Now I suddenly recall one of those 227 monastic precepts — it’s about going completely covered when a monk goes among laypersons.  I had thought that I was completely covered, but in fact, inside the temple, one goes about with one’s right shoulder exposed.  

Presumably, it wouldn’t do to inflame any passing laywomen to see that little piece of shoulder, and so yes, there’s a completely different way of wearing your robes when you set foot outside the gates.  And that, as the dawn begins to break over the temple’s gilded gables, is what I must now proceed to learn — and fast, because after all, the hordes of well-wishers with their offerings of food are not going to hang around forever.

They’ve got skytrains to catch.

A few days ago I already gave one description of how to wear those robes; a second, contradictory description would probably not be very useful.  So, suffice it to say that, beginning with finding the little square of cloth that aligns with the back of one’s neck, there’s a completely new system of twirling and wrapping to be learned, and the end result is that the monk, with his begging bowl inside the robes and accessible only by manipulating a little flap, is totally rolled up inside that rectangle of saffron, much like a piece of ravioli, or rather, I should say, a wonton. 

I had thought that the previous style of monkly couture was a little stifling, but this is positively suffocating at first.  However, the mode of dress lends itself to those delicate, deliberate steps that one always sees monks taking as they move slowly down the alleys in the dawn.  Now I understand why; the full-wrap technique winds up you so tightly that it is impossible to be anything but delicate and deliberate in one’s movements.  

Oh yes, the hands.  The left hand, supporting the bowl so that it doesn’t go bouncing on the pavement, is completely concealed.  Well, left hands, in Asian cultures, are pretty unseemly anyway; one knows what they are traditionally used for.  But the right hand, too, is hidden in this style of dress.  Only by wriggling its way through a tightly wound roll of fabric can the hand create a little slit for itself and emerge to open the lid of the alms bowl or manipulate small objects.

It is with a certain measure of self-consciousness that I finally manage to make my way down the steps of the kuti.  The Maha, who in addition to showing me the ropes, performs the function of a sort of babysitter, leads the way.  I do not wear my sandals.  This is a very strict monastic order — some do, in fact, allow monks to wear sandals for this ritual — but we must, like the Lord Buddha himself, go completely barefoot into the world, heedless of the thorns, snakes, bugs, mud, and gravel that might assault our delicate, city-bred soles.

The back door of the temple leads to a parking lot, and then to a little alley bordered by noodle stands, before reaching the main road.  It is morning, and the Maha walks much faster than I do, so I find myself alone in the alley.  This is it, I tell myself.  This is the “going-forth”, as the English-language monkhood manual so grandly calls it, a descent from Parnassus into the seamy secular cosmos.

There is a moment of panic, but all at once, the technique of the walking meditation takes over.  I take one step at a time.  Slowly, breathing deeply, trying to become aware of each minuscule sensation.  One step, then another.  

Why is it that we are commanded to go barefoot into the world?  To show our humility, no doubt, our vulnerability; to be a living metaphor of the frailty that is flesh.  

These sound like very negative reasons, but there is another, more positive one.  The skin is a living, breathing organ, the organ of the human body that has the largest area, the greatest sensitivity to the outside world.  And the earth beneath our feet is the earth that gave us birth, our mother, the earth that will receive us once our struggle against entropy has ended.  Children may run barefoot in the grass, but as adults we shield ourselves from the earth; the act of putting on shoes is an act of subversion, of resistance to reality.

Shoes?  Why, in Los Angeles, one doesn’t even walk at all.  Not only are one’s feet shielded from the earth, but even one’s shoes; I for one use the drive-through for my ATM, my diet Pepsi, and my car wash.  

Not for a long time have I felt against my feet the sharpness of a cobblestone, squeezed moisture from the moss in the cracks of concrete.  Not for a long time have I swerved to sidestep the squish of excrement between bare toes or the crunch of a dying cockroach.  

I suddenly grasp that these homely sensations, these textures of reality, forgotten since God knows when, are a severed link in the chain of being.  

The journey down the alley, which only takes a minute, is in itself a miniature voyage of discovery.  

Or rediscovery.

Once I emerge from the alley, I see the Maha across the street; he has gone to the newsstand to fetch the Seer’s daily newspaper.  I hug the alms bowl to my chest and twirl the tail of my robe in order to hitch it a little higher so that it won’t drag on the pavement.  Then, taking my life in my hands as all Bangkokian pedestrians do, I cross the street.

The other side of the street consists mostly of shophouses: pharmacies, electrical appliance stores, and newsstands with living quarters in their upper storeys.  In front of one of the ubiquitous Chinese pharmacies, a wooden table has been set out, and there are trays of food: little plastic bags of curry and soup, and cups of boiled rice.  There is a bit of a cottage industry as the faithful line up to buy food which they will in turn offer to the monks.  

My first benefactor is a man I’ve seen, all in white, at the meditation class; I’ve seen him sitting not far from me, lost in thought.  I wonder if he even recognizes me.  I am, after all, not a person anymore, but a metaphor, and a pathway for his own karmic journey.  Gingerly, I lift the lid of the bowl.  He empties a cup of rice into it, and puts in a bag of curry.  My eyes remain downcast, as is seemly.   I do not proffer thanks; that too is improper in this ritual.  It  is the strangest thing to me that I cannot show him this common courtesy, but it would diminish the karmic value of his gift to me.  

I see the Maha in a dark alley nearby.  I follow.  Suddenly, I am in a marketplace, hidden from the street by the façades of the shophouses.  It is so early that many of the stalls are still untended.  Still, there are people everywhere.  Dawn is the time to make merit before picking up the groceries for the kitchen back home.  This isn’t a shiny American-style supermarket, where the odors of fresh food are carefully masked by layers of Saran wrap.  Here, every kind of scent assaults one, from the noxious fumes of leaking petrol to the fragrance of jasmine of rose petals.

A bleary-eyed woman turns chicken drumsticks on a grill.  Another arranges flower garlands on rattan trays.  The market is dingy; the dawn has not penetrated, and here and there a naked bulb sheds harsh light over a pile of durian or an old man blending milk and coffee in a glass urn.  The concrete paving is moist and warm; grit works itself between my toes.  There are monks here, each one moving in a sort of bubble of solitude, for though shopping in Bangkok is very much a contact sport, the throng parts each time a monk moves through.  

As I follow the Maha, his shaven head bobbing up and down in the distance, I too sense the parting of the crowd; I am like a mini-Moses breasting the Red Sea.  The yellow robe really does make me something other than myself.  There is an unseen radiance that envelops me.  

When I have given food to monks in the past, I have often been distracted by the thought that hey, maybe they won’t even eat it, or perhaps they’re not even going to like it, or some monasteries are so bloated with offerings the leftovers must surely end up in the garbage.   But as I accept the people’s offerings, their piety overwhelms my skepticism.  I am of course precisely repeating the footsteps of the earliest Buddhist monks.  I feel the weight of history; I feel like a tiny pattern within an immense and ever-turning mandala; and this sense of belonging somehow subsumes my doubt.

Well, back the kuti, it occurs to me that when the bags of food arrive at the breakfast table, they’re not the same bags that were offered to me in the marketplace.  In fact, the food seems a lot more to my liking now than it did then.  In fact, those little muffins on the tray by my place at the table … well, I don’t remember receiving those at all.  They are a sort of Chinese variant of those blueberry muffins that are such a fixture of breakfast in American greasy spoons.

I am not, of course, allowed to evince any kind of preference for one kind of food over another; but I suspect that there’s been some Machiavellian maneuvering in the kitchens of the kuti, and that someone has conspired to mix up the bags so that this Thai monk who isn’t quite Thai can be allowed to eat some farang food that isn’t quite farang.

#

Having successfully avoided several large piles of dog turds during my perambulation of the marketplace, I run into an extremely large pile during the Guru’s morning lecture on meditation.  He chooses to use shit as a metaphor for karma.  Once again, I am impressed with the ubiquity of bodily functions in Buddhist philosophy.  The King James Bible seldom mentions excrement; I can think of only one instance offhand, and that’s in the Old Testament.

The Guru tells us a parable.  In ancient times, he says, in India, naturally, the land of parables, two indigents are walking down the street, each carrying an empty basket.  They see an enormous pile of dried excrement in the road.  “We can sell this as fertilizer,” they tell each other, and they eagerly fill their baskets, place them on their heads, and go off through the forest, on the road to the nearest town.

They come across a pile of dried wood.  One of them, the cleverer of the two, presumably says, “Well, let’s trade in our shit for this dried wood, which will fetch a much higher price in the town.”

His friend says, “I’ve been carrying this shit for so long; I think I’ll wait until something better shows up.”

The wander through the forest some more, and they stumble on an abandoned cart filled with bolts of expensive silk.  Well, you can see where the story is leading.  From silk to silver to gold to piles of diamonds, the clever one keeps upgrading his basket, while the other one, faithfully plodding along, says, “I’ve been carrying this shit for so long, I think I’ll wait just a bit more.”

They reach the city at last, and the clever man turns in his precious cargo for a huge fortune and lives happily ever after.  His stupid friend doesn’t really mind; he’s not the jealous type; he’s not a bad person, you see, and he is perfectly happy to trade in the basket of dried excrement that he’s been carrying on his head for so very long.  But just as he reaches the fertilizer shop, it begins to rain.…

With this repulsive image fresh in our minds, the Guru then says, “Now, students, I’m going to add another five minutes to the clock … and I want you all to empty your minds and meditate for thirty-five minutes.”

#

Lunch today features one of the most famous chocolate cakes in Bangkok, made by the hand of M.R. Malinee, a friend of my mother’s and creator of this well-known recipe.  My mother and sister have surveyed the various offerings in the kuti, and have decided that the roast duck down the alley is probably a better deal.  They vanish for a while, leaving me alone with the Seer and the chocolate cake.

The Seer looks at me and says, “You shouldn’t go back to America yet.  Your chart shows a cloud that extends over your life all the way until at least February 2002.  Becoming a monk has mitigated what could have happened — it was a sort of surgical solution to your inner turmoil.  But you’re in danger until at least October, and the shadow will not utterly pass until February.”

“But I do have commitments,” I tell him.  “Books to write and whatnot.”

“Other factors will intervene,” he says.  “You will be fine here.”

I do not know how clearly he sees into my heart.  I do not entirely understand why, only two weeks ago, a voice whispered in my ear that I must begin this inward journey.  I am troubled by things left undone, by my condo in Los Angeles left in disarray, even by the fact that — now that I think of it — I didn’t turn on the dishwasher before I left California.  And yes, the dishwasher thing has been gnawing at me from time to time.

“Let it go,” says the Seer.  “You can buy more dishes.”

The Seer has endowed an upcountry temple that specializes in the teaching of novices, many of them poor kids who would not otherwise have a chance to go to a decent school.  He suggests to me that perhaps, if I stay at the monastery, I could be placed in charge of the entire kuti, and he could spend more time at the rural wat, where, I suspect, his real heart lies, for he was born and raised in Thailand’s deep south.

The idea of being placed in charge of an entire division of a monastery when I have in fact only been here for a few days is strange to me.  On the other hand, the Seer seems to suggest it in all seriousness, and I realize that even in a few days, I have become accepted here, eccentricities and all; being a monk is not, despite the shaved heads and identical robes, about conforming.  Every monk here is on a unique journey, and every journey is equally deserving of respect.

I decide that I will, next time I get near the internet, transmit this to Sharon and Tomm; perhaps they will have another perspective on it all.

It is now time for the afternoon session of the meditation workshop, and piti is the word of the day.  My companion-in-suffering, the Intellectual, tells me he hasn’t managed to achieve any kind of piti whatsoever.  He has tried and tried.  The aches and pains of an aging body, forced to hold weird positions for long periods, have militated against piti.  I ask him if he’s tried the chair thing.  I know I couldn’t have done it without a chair.  

He whispers in my ear, “Seriously, though, I think there’s another reason why it’s never worked out.  You see … I don’t entirely … believe.”

But I don’t entirely believe either … at least, I don’t think I do.  But piti has still descended on my doubting mind.  Before I can argue this point, though, he says, “I’m too angry.  That’s it, I’m just too irritated at all the superstition.”

I believe that the Intellectual is experiencing some disillusionment.  It’s because of what I mentioned briefly in the chapter defining piti.  The fact that levitation in the imagination was bandied about in the same breath as levitation in actuality.  The Intellectual doesn’t buy this, and it colors his perception of the entire process.

“You know,” I say, “maybe it’s better not to think about these things too much.  We should take from this teaching what we are able to accept, and let the rest go.”

“I know,” he says.  “But it’s a bit of a leap to go from penetrating psychological insight to — fables and hearsay about people flitting through the air like in low-budget Indian epics.”

There may be many doubters, but the Intellectual is the only one with the courage to express doubt openly.  His honesty touches me.  

We continue to listen to the discourse on piti, but I am too distracted to enter a deep state of meditation; I am haunted by images of my home in Los Angeles, and by the Seer’s obscure predictions of a shadowed future.

#

After the evening chapel, I have a surprise visit from my Uncle Mai, his friend, and my cousin, and I show them around my quarters — I feel like a little boy again, you know, when friends come over and your mother says, “Now, why don’t you show Little Jethro your room?”  They prostrate themselves and present me with several dozen containers of fruit juice — the best quality — as well as the Oriental Hotel’s prized cookies.  Then they proceed to admire the furnishings — the air conditioning with its remote control, the private bathroom that even has its own urinal despite the fact that it is against the 227 rules for monks to pee standing up.

After they leave, my nephew, Pup, comes by; he’s been studying for a test at Mahidol, and he has his homework with him; he asks me a few questions about four-part harmony.  

The Littlest Novice shows up.  He has the VCD he told me he wanted to watch on my computer.  To my amazement, it is a pirated edition of the Spice Girls movie.  Heavens!  Is this too lewd for a young novice to watch, I wonder?  I decide that to let the kid be a kid, and I put it on while Pup babysits (or is it the novice who is babysitting my nephew?) and then I am summoned for the evening meditation.

That’s where I have my miraculous experience of the day.  It is during walking meditation, and it has started to drizzle.  All the monks and supplicants have scurried to take cover under the roof of the cloister or inside the vihara.  But for some reason I don’t notice this at first, so concerned am I with the act of putting one foot in front of the other.  

The wind begins to blow.  It’s a warm, moist wind; in the tropics, in the midst of the rainy season, the wind that presages rain is not a hurtful wind.  It plays with the hem of these robes, but I walk on.  It billows a little, but I am only dimly aware of it at first.

The rain comes.  A little at a time.  I become conscious of each individual raindrop as it glances off my skin.  I breathe, I walk, I stop, I turn.  The marble pavement becomes slick, as though stone itself were sweating.  The rain falls harder now, and as it pelts down I feel what I have rarely felt in my adult life — I feel enveloped in, caressed by the forces of nature.  Nothing can harm me.  The rain spins about me a silken cocoon of being, of immediacy.  This is another piti:  not an experience of inner reality, but a more profound embrace of the external world.   There is an aspect of Buddhism that emphasizes withdrawal and detachment, but tonight I am feeling the opposite; I am the plaything of the earth and sky, a figment of the world’s imagination.  Though nature is vast and I am small and helpless, I feel nurtured; I feel loved.

Well, after that, my sitting meditation is something of an anticlimax.  And when I ask my friend, the Intellectual, whether he has finally achieved any piti, he says to me, “I appear to have snoozed off.”

“Don’t worry,” I say to him.  “It’s only, what, the third day of the meditation class; we have four more to go.”

He smiles ruefully.  “That’s true,” he says.  “Well, maybe my karma just isn’t up to it.  Or maybe it will be all the sweeter for coming at the eleventh hour.”

Siam Community Orchestra's Bruckner 9 - Complete

I decided to post the entire concert from last week...enjoy!

Nirvana Express Day Three: A Momentary Ecstasy

*** continued serialization of Somtow's "Nirvana Express", the diary of his brief monkhood which he kept in 2001

Day Three: A Momentary Ecstasy

The dawn brings the delivery of a delicious honey-roasted pork from my mother.  The plate, piled high, awaits on the lazy susan at breakfast, but of course I am not permitted to show too much enjoyment.  Eating with gusto is one of the many things forbidden in the 227 rules of monkhood — along with chewing loudly, taking large mouthfuls, and covering up one’s curry with rice so that it appears that one has no curry, and thus tricking one’s benefactor into ladling out some more — I kid you not, the latter is actually an official prohibition.

I show no visible gusto, but I do end up with a bit of an upset stomach.  Perhaps, I think, meditation will cure it.  After all, the Buddha specifically states that walking meditation helps regulates bowel movements.  

I spend the hour before morning chapel in my room — I suppose I should call it a cell, as Catholic monks do, but I find it hard to feel any sense of imprisonment when the room has both air conditioning and a private bathroom,  There is a beautiful chair in the room, inlaid with mother of pearl and doubtless worth a hundred thousand baht.  Although the room itself is spartan in its furnishings, each simple object is an exquisite work of art.  A lot of love and thought has been devoted to this room.

In the chair, alone, without two hundred others meditating around me, I try once more to empty my mind.  I think it is starting to work … no Mount Kailasa, no flashes, but a pervasive calm.

Morning chapel is an ordeal, still.  I wonder why “arthritis” is not among the list of diseases they interrogate you about in the ceremonial inquisition before you become a monk.  After all, they ask you if you’re a leper.  Today, we know that leprosy is only infectious amongst a tiny percentage of the genetically predisposed.  They also ask if you’re a cripple.  That would never fly in politically correct America.  Asking whether you’re human or not — well, that I can understand.  You never know what kind of demoniacal being might want to seek refuge in a monastery.

Had they asked me, in Pali, about arthritis, I could have answered with a snappy “ama bhante” and ended up with a medical release from monkhood.  But no.

So here I am, with my romanized manual before me, last monk on the far right in the back, chanting up a storm.  The chanting begins with standard phrases about Buddha, Dhamma, and Sangha, but then enters unfamiliar territory with long sections chanted half in Thai and half in Pali.  The Thai is supposed to be the translation of the Pali, so it is hard to understand why a single Pali word can be followed by an entire sentence of Thai.  Presumably it because Pali is one of those languages in which a little utterance can mean a lot — ancient languages all seem to share that characteristic.  I remember from struggling through Ovid in school.

The odd thing is, much of the Pali chanting bears a certain similarity to Latin.  (Sanskrit, I understand from a brief look at a few textbooks, is somewhat more like Greek.)  Pali has the rhythms of Latin, with the verbs chiming in at the end, with the cases, persons, numbers, and tenses lined up in neat little rows with their endings all matching; it’s almost like Latin with an Indian accent.

The chanting is addictive, hypnotic even.  But I notice that attendance at morning chapel doesn’t seem to be that strictly enforced.  Monks wander in and out, and seem automatically to glide into their proper place.  Behind the monks, the novices are supposed to sit, but only one has shown up, and another is drifting in.

It’s not really polite to stare at the spectacle around me, but I can’t help myself.  I force myself to resume chanting.  

Suddenly, a high-pitched, boyish treble voice joins in the chanting.  Whoever it is knows the words perfectly, chants with utter confidence, his voice soaring above the others, adding a bell-like resonance to the masculine bass that roils about the chapel.  I glance behind my shoulder and see that the Littlest Novice has finally shown up — the one who wanted to create a video game and monks battling demons with weird martial arts.

Now, inside this sacred place, he is a completely different boy.  The chant flows from his lips as from the lips of an angel.   He is transported.  This place does change people.  The street urchin has become divine.

As I prostrate myself, later, before the Guru in readiness for the morning meditation class, I thank him for teaching me the wherewithal to see the vision of Mount Kailasa.

“Ah,” he says, nodding knowingly.  “That vision was a nimit.”

What he means by that is that I did not see the true Mount Kailash, but an image manufactured in the depths of my unconscious mind.  He tells me that nimits can be both beautiful and dangerous, and if I find myself distracted by one, I must act as though it isn’t there.  He sends me back to my chair, and proceeds to address the subject of death.

Death, along with love, is what human beings are most preoccupied with.

What is death?  This is what the Guru chooses to discourse on, at length, before the daily meditation begins.  We learn that the flesh is inherently degenerate, that our body is a graveyard for the corpses of pigs and chickens.   We listen to an enumeration of the thirty-two unpleasant parts of the body, spending as much time on excrement and mucus as on prettier organs such as skin and hair.  

We learn that death is the very definition of life, for what is a living thing but a piece of earth that has somehow fended off death for a few brief moments of existence?  Well, this is all very depressing, and I understand why some people think Buddhism is overly pessimistic: nothing exists, we’re all going to die, the best thing we can hope for is go out like a candle instead of being endlessly reborn and suffering … a few thousand lifetimes can really get on one’s nerves.  So, when we reenter the inner world to begin the morning’s meditation, I am not a happy camper.

And yet … today’s journey into the unconscious is a roller coaster ride.  Yesterday it was all effort, and my reward was a momentary glimpse of the abode of the gods; today, I slide right in, my mind draining instantly, like a colander of fresh spaghetti.  

First, in the darkness, there is a face.  I see the face dimly at first.  It’s dark, but its outlines radiate a certain energy.  There’s the faintest hint of a moustache, and great brooding eyes.   The chair I’m sitting in faces the left side of the great golden Buddha that dominates the vihara; on either side, there are huge statues of arahants, their gaze permanently fixed in adoration of the great master.  The face in my mind’s eye seems to match the faces of these arahants, faces I have never seen because the statues have their backs to me, because they are gazing upward at the Lord Buddha.  The face’s features are somewhat Indian, I think to myself, wavering in the shadows.  Is this an ancient sage, or is it again a nimit, a figment of my imagination?  I sink deeper into the meditative trance.  I see pagodas shifting in the mist.  I see stone ruins, minarets, walls covered with bas-reliefs.  In niches and nooks, tiny stone devas are frozen in elaborate dance gestures.  

A kind of warmth steals over me.  An inner warmth, different from the heat that pervades the vihara, intermittently alleviated by a turning electric fan.  This warmth has a color to it as well, a deep red, and begins with a glow at the tips of my fingers and toes, works its way up the limbs, seems to center itself on a spot somewhere in the middle of my forehead.  This must be what mystic call the Third Eye, what others refer to as the pineal gland.  This is the spot where Hindus traditionally place those caste marks that have caused some in the west jeeringly to refer to them as dotheads.  This dot is positively glowing, radiating energy.

And growing, too. The dot becomes a circle.  It shifts from red to white, from lukewarm to incandescent.  I can barely keep my eyes closed, there’s so much light.  And then, within the light, I begin to make out the silhouette of some ancient personage.  It is someone sacred.  I am sure of it.  I am certain that if I can let go just a little bit more, I will even hear this personage speak.  It is not the Buddha himself — I do not think so — though the apparition stands serenely, his hair spiraling upward as though aflame, one hand reaching out, palm forward, as if to bless, to touch —

And then there is a touch.  On my shoulder.

Startled, I open my eyes.  It is the Guru, who has left his preaching chair and has been wandering around the vihara, looking over his charges.  “Your posture,” he says mildly.  “A little straighter.  That’s it, that’s it.”

Was it the Guru that I sensed, hovering in the circle of light within my inner world?  He is standing exactly where the ancient personage seemed to appear in my vision.  Is this some kind of cosmic joke, or did I somehow have a brief encounter with the Guru’s spiritual essence?

All I know is that I have been jolted out of the meditative state.  I struggle to suppress a certain irritation.  After all, I was about to be addressed by some ancient sage, only to find myself being curtly spoken to by an earthly guru.   Clearly, however, this is another lesson in humility.

Later, it is lunchtime, and a little huckster stand outside the vihara does a brisk business in the Guru’s self-help books as I, the Intellectual, and the other new monks enjoy a simple but abundant meal of honey-roasted pork, duck, satays, Chinese pasta, and exotic fruits.  Well, they are exotic to me, at least.  You can’t find a decent mango in America.

After we eat, all the monks chant a prayer of extraordinary beauty — the yatha varivaha.  It is only later that I realize just how beautiful it is; at the moment it is mere nonsense syllables, and it seems that even to many of the new monks, they have little meaning save for the hypnotic quality of the sounds themselves.

But later I am to learn the meaning of this blessing, chanted by monks, somewhere, every single day in Thailand in every single place where monks are being served by laypersons, a blessing so commonplace that children can repeat it word for word like parrots, a blessing whose translation few people know.  

As the rivers full of water

flow into the great ocean,

so let the merit you have made 

benefit the dead; 

may what you have wished

come quickly to pass,

may your wishes grow to fulfillment

as the moon that waxes on the fifteenth night,

as the jewel that grants desires.

The monks chant enthusiastically, and I, knowing neither the words not their meaning, feel ever an outsider, ever an alien.

But then, that afternoon, there comes the payoff.  The Guru has added another five minutes to the clock — bringing the total to thirty minutes of concentrated breathing — a longer span than I have ever imagined I could do.  But this time, the visions come immediately.  The circles of light, the arahants gazing on their Lord in eternal adoration, whirling about, circles within circles … all these images drift through my mind with renewed clarity.  The irregular movement of the electric fan, the beading and coalescing of drops of sweat on my brow, the sighs of an elderly gentleman as he wheezes through the breathing exercises … yes, I have become aware of all these things.  And then, without warning, I push through to another level.  The circles of light spin ever faster, and then, all at once, there are waves of light, breaking across my consciousness, torrents and tides of blinding whiteness.  And fireworks!  Coruscating, scintillant rainbow rivers spiral and twist and whirl.  

I am lost in wonderment, lost in an ecstasy that far exceeds that of any hallucinogenic experiment I may or may not have undertaken in the 60s (which if I did, I surely can’t remember now!)  So this is what it’s all about — this is the psychedelic symphony of light described by such mystics as Coleridge and Blake. 

Abruptly, the little beep-beep-beep sounds, signaling the end of the thirty minutes.  

“Come out of the meditation slowly,” the Guru’s voice cautions over the vihara’s speaker system.  

Slowly, slowly, the vision subsides.

The Guru warns us not to be seduced by the beauty of visions.  They are nimits, he tells us … sometimes they can mislead … entrap.

And yet, I know I am on the verge of something big.

#

The evening is a bit of party night.  My nephew, a music student at Mahidol University, drops by; my parents pop in for a visit; and as the sun sets, the Seer, surrounded by a small congregation of my relatives, decides to tell us inspiring stories from the life of the Buddha; his memory is limitless, his narrative technique worthy of an ancient bard, singing tales at the dinner table of a Viking chieftain or a Mycenaean King.

One question has been bothering me since I stumbled across it in my English language manual, the one that gives all the translations of these quaint Pali texts.  “Why, Lord Seer,” I ask him, “am I agreeing that I can only bathe every fifteen days?”

My mother says, “Oh, nonsense.  How could the Buddhist texts possibly tell one to refrain from bathing?  The ancient Buddhists weren’t dirty.”

The Seer laughs.  “Well, yes, there is such a prohibition,” he tells us, “and it came about because, one day, the Buddha was preaching in a remote place, in which there was only one small stream available for bathing.  The members of the nobility who had come to hear the sermon couldn’t get back to their city before the gates closed, and the stream was clogged with the disciples of the Lord Buddha.  Out of consideration for the supplicants, the Buddha created that rule … but you see, it only applies in that one location, in that particular circumstance.”

It seems, then, that the monastic regulations are a sort of mishmash of precedent and custom.  Rather like the English common law, they have grown over time and developed into a rather complex, even hairsplitting code.  

It calls to mind a discussion that the new monks were having over lunch.  The Guru, you see, was telling the faithful supplicants that there are certain loopholes in the Five Precepts which all Buddhists are asked to observe.  (Contravening these precepts is not sin in the Judaeo-Christian sense, but it may lead, perhaps, to a negative progression in one’s karmic journey.)  “Let’s suppose,” the Guru has been telling us, “that you are sitting in a room, and the mosquitoes are starting to become a nuisance.  You desperately want to slap a few, and eventually you open fire with the old aerosol, leaving a dozen dead souls on the floor.  And so you’ve destroyed a dozen lives just because of your momentary annoyance.  But what if you didn’t intend to kill them — what if you offer them a way out?  Let’s say you leave a window ajar, and instead of letting fly with the airborne poison, you just spray a bit here, a bit there, like a delicate sort of farting?  You will have annoyed the mosquitoes, and most will choose to depart through the window … and those who do in fact end up whizzing, openwinged, into the embrace of the fumes, well then it’s their own karma, not yours, since you did not spray to kill, but simply to … influence their choices a little.”

At lunch, I have been saying, “Yeah, that may be a loophole, but some of those insects are just as dead as in the other scenario.  And no matter what you say you intend, you’re still trying to get rid of them and you still have a bit of the executioner’s motives clinging to your mind.”

A monk I have not yet met, tall and pale, somewhat older than the new monks, says, “There are really three different levels of moral law.  The first is the law as laid down by humans, the most imperfect.  The second is the law embodied in the precepts or silas, such as that we must refrain from taking life … but what you say brings us to a third level of moral law: the law of dhamma, which allows even less wiggle room than the others.…”

#

At eight o’clock comes the special late-night meditation in the vihara.  And now, something really weird happens to me.

I try to repeat the success of the afternoon.  At first it seems easy enough.  I slip quickly into the state I was in just before the big fireworks and the tides of light.  It’s about ten minutes or so in, I guess.  

Then yes — again — that blinding incandescent light —

And then — complete emptiness.

I know nothing until I hear the beeping, telling us that it is time to come slowly forth from the inner world.

I know I was not asleep.  I know this.  After all, I have woken up several thousand times in my life, and now what it is to have just slept.  This was not like that.  This was not a state of sleep.  It was nothing.  Nothing at all.

Was this, in fact, at last, the momentary Nirvana so rapturously described by the Guru the previous day?  If so … why can’t I remember anything at all?

It’s like that poem by Keats.  You know, the one where the knight meets a gorgeous elfin lady who takes him to her grotto and seduces him until —

And I awoke, and found me here,

On the cold hill’s side.

Is that one of the attributes of the state of ultimate nothingness — that the nothingness is so absolute that nothing can remain even in the remembrance of it?

I do not know.

I resolve to try a fresh tactic tonight.  In the Guru’s instruction manual, of which I have an English-language copy, there are four postures of meditation: sitting, standing, walking, and … sleeping. We have not yet tried the sleeping style.  It doesn’t look like the Guru is going to cover the sleeping meditation in this seven-day course.

And yet, there comes a time in any journey when one must leave one’s guide behind and take a few tentative steps alone.  

Tonight, I decide, I’m going to try it for myself.

Bruckner - Last Night....

What an enjoyable concert last night ... in only its second concert, the Community Orchestra showed itself a truly viable player in Bangkok's musical scene....

Why Bruckner? Reasons to come to Mahisorn Hall this coming Wednesday

Siam Community Orchestra •

in rehearsal

The Siam Community Orchestra, on its second outing, is tackling one of the biggest, most monumental works in the symphonic repertoire, and one that has never been played in Thailand ... Bruckner's Ninth Symphony.  Apart from the "because it's there" answer, I ought to explain why.  

I created this orchestra because I wanted to bring together people from across all segments of society in Bangkok who yearn to play BIG music - those pieces that they would never normally get a chance to play unless they were already part of a major symphony.  And so that audiences would get a chance to experience these BIG works - live, played by people who are of the community, sharing their enthusiasm.  

I've been overwhelmed in rehearsal by the passion with which these people have imbued Bruckner's Ninth Symphony.  

Richard Wagner once said that Bruckner was "the only composer who can stand beside Beethoven."  That is a wild claim to make when so many great composers exist, but when you listen to the Ninth, you can believe it.   There are indeed a lot of connections between Beethoven's Ninth and Bruckner's Ninth apart from being in the same key ... the numinous, shifting beginning that seems to gel out of chaos into a tremendous unison statement of an elemental theme seems to portray the very act of creation ... not a wave of the hand sort of creation but the birth of a universe out of darkness and terror.  Both symphonies follow with a scherzo that is savage and vehement and pounding.  And then a slow movement of incredible depth, fashioned out of two alternating themes, one a little faster than the other, and the heavens opening up to the sound of trumpets ...

You can see that one ninth is modelled firmly on the other.  And then there is another Ninth to come - Mahler's, which also has connections to this one, most clearly in the Adagio movement.  

What's different about Bruckner's Ninth is the sense that block by block, stone by stone, a cathedral is rising around you, and your ear is inexorably drawn up and up toward what can only be the voice of God.

I have lived with this symphony for about 45 years now and I had always felt that the work was "complete" the way it has been left to us.  In the Adagio, in particular, Bruckner builds up on two occasions times a powerful and sweet crescendo which climaxes in what sounds like the very heavens opening up and us seeing the face of God ... first in incredible splendor then a second time as though veiled, "through a glass darkly" as it were.  The third time this music comes, there is no climax, only a dying away into music that sounds like distant church bells, sinking into nothingness.  

In the past my interpretation of this was always that Bruckner wanted to show us that God dwells behind veils of impenetrable darkness ... that we can never catch more than a glimpse of the Holy Grail, and the more we approach it the more elusive it becomes.

Yet, I've recently listened to the reconstruction of Bruckner's last movement, which has now been done to what seems to be just this side of perfection after years and years of controversy.  

And I see now that Bruckner didn't mean to hide God from us but to save the blinding revelation for the final movement.  This finale changes everything and makes every note of the first three movements have a completely different meaning.

On Wednesday we will play the symphony with the old meaning attached.  But it is my hope that in 2014 the Siam Philharmonic will give the Thai premiere of the other version, with all the meanings turned upside down.  

Meanwhile please show your support for Thailand's passionate musicians by coming to our concert on Wednesday the 8th at 8 pm, Mahisorn Hall.  Pre-book by emailing tickets@bangkokopera.com, or just show up.

Nirvana Express Day Two — Walking Meditation

Day Two: Walking Meditation

The second day of my monkhood, I rise even earlier than the 5 a.m. “official” wakeup time.   There is no bell, no alarm; a Thai monastery doesn’t operate by enforcing time constraints.  People are expected to get up of their own volition.  I do have an alarm clock, but I don’t use it today.

I then spend about an hour trying to put on the robes.

One might think that it can’t be that difficult to get a yellow bedsheet to stay put, but it’s quite a process.  The robes come in various sizes, and the Seer has ordered a large one for me, since I’ve got a bit of a paunch.  But it’s decidedly long, and wrapping in becomes rather unwieldy.

You see, the first thing is that there is, in fact, an inside and an outside to this contraption.  You can tell from the seams, for a robe is stitched together from precisely 32 pieces of cloth, which symbolize the 32 unpleasant parts of the body which are used for the meditation on the impermanence of the human form.

In ancient times, robes were literally made from castaway material, even dead people’s shrouds, sewn by the monks themselves and then dyed this simple yellow for the sake of uniformity.  Some of the 227 regulations for monkhood include detailed instructions about the needle cases monks may possess, what materials they may be made from, and so on.  These days, with robes being off-the-rack, as it were, the regulations are seldom cited.

You must envision me, alone in my room in this strange place, learning all over again, in my late forties, how to get dressed.  I am like a toddler, helpless, but I struggle.  First, you find the little square of sewn cloth that tells you where your neck goes, thus making sure the robe is on right-side-up and not inside-out.  Then, you wind it around yourself — not symmetrically, but the left side over the shoulder and the right side under.  You join the ends, and begin twirling them together, much as you might roll a poster into a mailing carton.  Grabbing the top end of this roll, you hold it as high as you can with your left hand; then, you wrap a flap that seems to appear out of nowhere over your left shoulder and around the arm.  Then, bunching up the twisted roll with your right hand, you twirl it some more, at the same time lifting it to make sure the hem of the robe clears the ground.  You then toss the twirl over your left shoulder, catch the end in the left hand, and pull, so there is a sort of handle under your arm with which the robe can be tightened, hitched up a little, and otherwise prevented from falling off.

There is a prize for anyone who understood the preceding paragraph.  

I do not understand it myself, nor am I certain I will ever accomplish what it describes in my short time here.  

All I know is that I spend something like two hours experimenting with the robes, and by the time I descend to the Seer’s audience-chamber (which is also his breakfast nook) I still haven’t figured it out, and must humiliatingly ask for help from the Littlest Novice, a 13-year-old Southern kid with a disarming smile.

#

Over breakfast, the Seer tells me how he became a monk, but I am still in a sort of miasma.  Sometimes I don’t understand what he says.  “In my youth, I became a monk in front of a waterbuffalo,” is what I keep hearing, but it’s because the Seer still has a trace of a provincial accent, and he’s really telling me he became a monk “before the flames” — he was referring to the custom of entering the monkhood to honor a dead ancestor at a cremation ceremony, the monkhood lasting only as long as the funeral pyre itself.  It is with great confusion that I hear his tale while attempting to eat rice gruel with the decorum that is required of a monk — chewing loudly, with one’s mouth full, and other impolitenesses are all against the 227 regulations of monkhood.

The Seer’s tale continues.  He tells of having two options in his youth: the monastery or the military.  He decided on the monastery, way down in the remote rural South of Thailand, and after a while, his preceptor tempted him with an offer: if he could pass his religious exams, he would send him to Bangkok.  “Bangkok, in those days,” says the Seer, “might have been an alien planet.  Boy, I sure wanted to see the big city.  And it turned out, I was the only one to pass the exam.”

 Eating breakfast as a monk — my first real meal as a monk — is quite an experience.  There is a lady who keeps presenting us with food as the conversation progresses, but I may not receive food from her directly because she is a woman; I must first place a yellow cloth on the table, and, holding on to one edge with both hands, allow the dish to be placed upon the cloth; I then place the dish with the others and am free to partake of it.  Alas, if the lady should accidentally touch the dish after I have already received it, she must present it properly all over again.

I expect morning chapel (my first experience of chapel as a full-fledged monk) to be as taxing on the knees as the ordination ceremony, but it is mercifully short.  As a monk, I can’t hide in the very back, sidling up to the wall to rest my weary back; I have to take my correct place, which is in fact as the very last monk in the very last row of monks, yet not as far away as the novices, of which there are about two.  To my relief, chapel is much shorter than I think.

Everyone stares because I’m peering at an English-language chanting manual, with transcriptions of the text.  A senior monk up front begins with a little intro, and we’re off, chanting our way through the praises of the Buddha, Dhamma and Sangha, pausing now and then to fall to the floor in the five-point-prostration, a very precise positioning of the body so that the knees, elbows, palms, and forehead are all perfectly aligned in a sort of pyramid.

Then, with barely a ten-minute break, comes a full morning’s worth of meditation.  The Guru is in the midst of a running a seven-day intensive meditation workshop, and now, it seems, I am to learn the meaning of some of the things I was attempting the previous night.

When I arrive, the main vihara is crammed with eager meditators.  All are dressed in white, all but one monk, who looks almost as old as me, and decidedly as uncomfortable.  He is seated on the upper platform, leaning against one of the square columns, ornately frescoed with decorative floral motifs against a lapis-blue background.  He turns to smile at me, and I realize that this, too, is a new monk; there are rumors that among the crop of young monks, there is another my age, who, like me, has decide late in life to begin his inward journey.

“So,” he whispers, as I crawl up the steps of the stone platform and seat myself on a flat yellow cushion in the monks’ area, “I am not alone anymore — there’ll be two of us aging monks struggling our way through this ordeal.”

“Are you all right?” I whisper.

“Well, this sitting position is hard to take,” he says.  “I’ll have to remember my muscle relaxant spray tomorrow.”  My thoughts exactly.

I will refer to this new old monk as the Thinker, because later it will transpire that he is constantly analyzing the teachings of the various gurus in the temple.

I turn to the images of the Lord Buddha and perform the prostration to the Triple Gem.  The Guru is already seated on his preaching chair, facing the meditation students who are clearly in awe of him.  I have arrived a little late, and the lesson is in full swing.  To my astonishment, even though the students are sitting very still, very respectfully, and without seeming to strain to maintain their phabphieb position, this is not a somber group at all.  The Guru is telling them about controlling the breath, interlacing the rather dry narrative with anecdotes about India, many of which seem to have to do with either excrement or body parts.

The Guru instructs us to breathe slowly and rhythmically, to use the sound of the word buddho as a focus: bud for breathing in, dho for breathing out.  Buddho of course is a Pali word, a title of the Buddha, and it essentially means “he who is awake.”  Awake, so much more homely a word than enlightened, is perhaps closer to the original sense of what Buddhism is about: seeing past illusion.

It is only nine in the morning, but I have been awake since four — in itself a startling innovation, as I have risen before my customary bedtime.  The light that streams into the vihara from windows, bordered by gilded shutters with fading gold leaf designs, is bright, warm; the heat that suffuses the vihara is intermittently mitigated by standing electric fans that turn this way and that, an incongruous intrusion of technology.

And now, the moment of truth: we are to meditate for twenty minutes.  I try the buddho-buddho thing several times, but it is, to say the least, abortive.  I begin to fidget.  I open my eyes a few times, and it reminds me of a certain episode of The Twilight Zone — wow, this is really dating me, isn’t it?  I mean the one where (if memory serves me) the character ends up trapped in a space-time warp where time is moving a million times faster for him than other people, so they all seem to be statues to him, and is a blur to them.…

How to find the inner stillness?   It does not come.  

The jangling of a dozen unsynchronized grandfather clocks tells me that it is now long past eleven o’clock, the lunchtime of monks, and that the magic hour of twelve, after which no solid food may pass a monk’s lips until dawn of the next day, is fast approaching.  When we emerge from our meditative state — well, when they emerge, for my state has been that of bewilderment — it is 11:30, and naturally I’m starting to get worried — especially when the Guru immediately launches into one of those numerical expositions that seems to be such an important feature of the more theoretical aspects of Buddhism.  What I mean by these numbers is this: there are groups of ones, twos, threes, fours, and so on: four types of brahmavihara, eight sides to the eightfold path, and so on: I could show you an entire book of numerical lists.  

The Indians have always been masters of lists.  As a musician, I am astonished that only Indian music has divided the octave into 66 divisions or srutis, while poor old Western music has a mere twelve, and Thai or Indonesian music even fewer.  The Buddhist scriptures, which came from India, have more lists than you can shake a stick at.  I think that the lists are important to those who are in love with lists, but perhaps, for those who wish to journey to the heart of Buddhism without stopping to admire the view on the way, the Four Noble Truths might be enough.

As the expounding of lists proceeds, my friend the Thinker turns and whispers to me, “I think we’d better prostrate ourselves and leave, or we’ll miss lunch.”

The Lord Buddha did not believe in self-torture.  Indeed, after tormenting himself in fakir-fashion for some time in order to try to attain enlightenment, he realized that mortification of the flesh wasn’t the way to the truth, and began eating and drinking like a normal human being.  He was much reviled by his associates for this; but later on he convinced them that his was the right path, and they, too, ate.

In my own small way, then, I am reliving this significant episode in the life of the great Teacher.  

We prostrate ourselves to the Guru (who, being deeply involved in his exposition, barely acknowledges our departure) and make it to the lunch pavilion just within the threshold.  Having seated ourselves and begun, we are safe from apati.  But there is some ceremony yet, for this is a lunch that is being presented to us by the faithful, and some other monks have kindly joined us to keep us company — all of them new monks — fresh boyish faces, unlike my companion and myself.

To my wonderment, I discover during lunch that I’m no longer this writer-composer with the millstone of celebrity hanging around my neck.  Along with my hair have gone many other outward trappings of my life.  The young monks question me about America and about why I have to follow the chanting with a romanized textbook, but they do not know anything about me.  And this is very liberating.   It is actually possible, at this late stage in my existence, to become once again an unwritten page, a born-again virgin.

#

After the lunch, I brace myself for another session of wrenching sitting positions and useless meditation, but it then occurs to me that the Guru did tell me the previous evening that some people do meditate in chairs.  I wonder whether I should interrupt the abbot’s lecture to ask him for permission to do so.

Then, in a flash of understanding, it occurs to me that this isn’t like being at boarding school in England.  No one is making me torment my muscles.  No one has forced me to become a monk.  If I get up, and stagger over to one of the many chairs that line the outer vestibule of the vihara, no one will try to stop me, nor will I be summoned to a stern lecture from some bespectacled schoolmaster brandishing a cane.

It’s another liberating moment.  Not that it would do to just get up and stalk off to a chair.  A monk must be gentle and reflective in his movements, must not raise his voice or attract attention to himself.  So I sort of unobtrusively slither, while still in a sort of semi-prostrate position, behind a huge green frescoed column, feeling somewhat like an overweight caterpillar as I do so.

The chairs are these one-piece plastic things, the stackable kind you find at picnics and beaches.  Their very homeliness, amidst the massive gold Buddhas and the brilliant primary colors of the murals, are a reminder of the vainglory that underlies the splendid edifices we have built for ourselves.

This would be an uncomfortable chair back in my world of L.A. conveniences, but suddenly it is the greatest blessing on earth to be relieved from the physical contortion of the lotus position.

At that moment, the Guru begins an oration about Nirvana.  He says something that makes me sit right up.  “Nirvana isn’t necessarily something remote, something that you will never achieve at all in this life.  There is the great Nirvana, the complete and permanent cessation, the utter peace that has no boundary … but there are also momentary Nirvanas … brief glimpses of the great Nirvana.  Do not forget that.  Those brief glimpses can come at any time, and they are just as valid, for time and space are themselves illusion, and a moment can be eternity.”

This is a startling revelation to me.  I have always believed that Nirvana is a sort of theoretical, unattainable pot of gold at the rainbow’s end; that one’s lot in life is to be aware of the rainbow at least, and not to worry to much about the destination. I resolve to close my eyes and try for such a fleeting glimpse, but all around me, I hear the sounds of people getting up from their various sitting positions.  

It is time to practice another style of meditation, called jongkom in Thai, cankama in Pali.  

Basically, this means walking around.

Well, back home, we’ve all walked for AIDS, we’ve marched for dimes and other noble causes; why not walk for self-illumination?  The Guru begins to regale us with the five (yes, another list from India!) benefits of the walking meditation.  One of these benefits is improved performance of the digestive tract.  You see, Buddhism, unlike many western religions, cares about such things as regularity in bowel movements.  

I am, as a typical product of these harried times, of course rather skeptical that walking can lead to piti, a state of ecstasy born out of meditation; but I am willing to give it a try, and an aged monk leads me out of the vihara into the cloister, where about a hundred men and women, clad in white, are already walking around.

The spectacle resembles a cross between Agnes of God and Dawn of the Dead.  What am I doing in the midst of this zombie movie?  But soon, the Wise Old Monk explains.  “Stand perfectly still,” he says, “breathe deeply … deeply.  Then, set forth … first your right foot, then your left.  Feel the ground beneath your feet, be aware of every speck of dust, every kink and rill in the surface of the stone.  With your right foot, think bud—.  With your left, think —dho.  Go deliberately, carefully for about twenty-five paces, then stop … stop completely … reflect.  Then turn.  Bud —.  Right foot, 90° angle, left foot, turn again … dho.  Now you are moving in the opposite direction.  Slowly … slowly … right foot first … bud —.  Then left foot … dho.   That’s all you do.”

All?  I think to myself.  I never knew that mere walking could involve such a complex coordination of thought and movement.  I try it.  Slowly, I become aware of the texture of the flagstones.  Each step seems to stretch out forever … becoming an adventure in itself.  

I walk.  I stop.  The cloister, aside from being filled with zombies, is lined with life-sized golden Buddhas, and the ashes of the dead, whose faded black-and-white photographs stare back at me from the statues’ pedestals.  The oddest thing is that, each time I stop to turn, I seem to be face to face with a different Buddha, and each Buddha seems to wear the face of a significant person in my life … my life outside the walls of the monastery, which is only two days behind me and which already seems remote, untouchable.

My mind seems to detach itself from the body a little: I see myself as a robot, a walking automaton; as my spirit ascends more, I see a pattern emerge; these white-clad meditation students are participants in a cosmic ballet, weaving in and out of each other, always subliminally aware of one another’s rhythms, swerving imperceptibly to avoid collisions.  It is a beautiful thing.  But who is the choreographer, who is the orchestrator?  

In the center of the cloister stands a gilded pagoda.  I imagine myself at its summit, looking down at the shifting patterns.  It is, in microcosm, the dance of the universe: the planets, the moons, the stars, the galaxies.  It is stately; it is beautiful; yet I still experience no catharsis.  For I have not yet emptied my mind.  I am still burdened by the weight of my own thoughts.

Am I trying too hard?

I groan when I hear that next we will sit in meditation for twenty minutes.  (It seems that five minutes will be added for each day of the course, until, by Sunday, we shall be able to go off into a self-induced trance for an hour or more.)  I long for release, and yet the very intensity of that longing is preventing it from happening.

Still, the chair helps.  I am not in agony.

As I close my eyes and concentrate on the breathing, images of the past distract me.  The week before my ordination was, as I’ve said before, one of exhilaration and turmoil.  It haunts me all at once — from lapping up the enthusiasm of the opera fans in San Francisco to my sense of violation at the vandalizing of my home in L.A. — from exciting news about new book deals to betrayals by close friends.  

“Forget the past.”  I hear a voice, gentle, full of concern.

It is the Wise Old Monk.  He has been standing in front of me; with my eyes closed, I did not even sense his presence.  How did he know that I was being tormented by memories?  His apparent ability to read my mind has startled me so much that I obey him without thinking, and for a moment, my mind is emptied of all remembrance.

There is nothing at all.

And then, forming out of the nothing, there is a mountain peak capped with snow.  Drenched in sunlight.  The sky the brilliant blue of a Ceylon sapphire, the snow so white that it burns like the very sun.  I am sure that I know this mountain: it is Kailasa, the legendary dwelling place of the Gods — the Indian Olympus, somewhere in the Himalayas.  This isn’t just a mental image.  I can feel the chill of the mountain wind.  It is real.  

Slowly, it fades.

Is this the momentary Nirvana that the Guru has been describing?  I do not know.  And yet, on emerging from my meditative state, I find that I have been weeping.

#

In the afternoon comes a visit from my mother, the first visit since I bade farewell to my family and was reborn as a symbol of the Sangha.  It is strange to have one’s own mother prostrate herself, and yet there is a deep pride in her actions; she is acting out a role in an ancient drama that has been played and replayed for twenty-five  hundred years.

My mother wants to know whether I need a “luksit”, an assistant to fetch and carry, to spend the night in the monastery and walk behind me when I go out with my alms bowl of a morning.  I had worried about this; in Thailand, persons of a certain position in society never fetch and carry for themselves, and of course my relatives have been concerned that I won’t be able to fend for myself in this alien, harsh environment.  But I tell her that the environment isn’t particularly harsh, and that I am perhaps more used to fetching and carrying for myself than my relatives.  After all, living in the west, one does one’s own laundry and dishes.  Or at least, machines do.  I am sure I can make do without the help.  

My mother attempts to pick up and straighten out, but her chauffeur, who once spent time as a novice, warns her that she cannot touch any of the articles used by a monk — the blankets, the towels, and so on.  To do so would accidentally involve the monk in an apati.  Recoiling in horror, my mother retreats and allows the driver to fold the blankets.  I can tell that she’s itching to restore the kuti to her own well-ordered vision of how a room should look, but now that I have ascended to this higher plane of existence, she can’t.  It’s very strange to see this go-getting woman suddenly stymied by my karmic ascent.

Next, there is the evening chapel; I am getting a little more used to those knee-jarring positions of prostration now, but the evening session is generally a lot longer than the morning, and parts of it are not covered in my romanized Pali manual, but are chanted from a big, fat, somewhat forbidding-looking tome.  When Pali is transliterated into Thai, the rules for pronouncing it are quite different from those of Thai, so I flounder around and from time to time am forced into what used to be called, in my days in the Eton College Chapel Choir, the “goldfish trick.”

On my way back from the evening chapel, I am faced with a moral dilemma, the first serious one of my monkhood.  For, blocking the steps that lead up the outside of the kuti to my chamber, there stands a street person — a bum.  This is the sort of panhandler one finds aggressively hovering at the entrances of Hyatts and Hiltons in downtown San Francisco, refusing to go away and calling one names until bribed with a dollar bill to bother the next person down the street.  The sort of homeless person who accosts one in a parking lot demanding to clean one’s car windows even if they are spotless; the kind of person where you turn to whoever you’re with and say, “Oh, he’ll only spend it on booze.”

Such a drunken creature stands in my path now, in the half-dark, his breath stinking of alcohol.  “Luang poh,” he says, calling me holy father, which I still find a little unnerving, “have compassion on me.  Please help me to alleviate my karma.  I cannot bear my inner torment any longer.”

I ask him if there is some moral problem I can help him with, remembering all the times I spoke dismissively to the homeless in my secular days.  

He says, “I just need my train fare home so I can take care of my family problems.”

I say, “I am a monk.  How can you ask me for money?  Monks may not even touch money; how could I even lay my hands on some, let alone give it to you?”

It is true.  To lay hands on gold and silver (and by extension, on any means of commerce whatsoever) is a violation of not only the 227 rules of monkhood, but even of the mere ten regulations of a novice.  There is simply no way I can do as he asks, even though a monk must always be compassionate, even towards those whom he has difficulty feeling compassion for.  I am perplexed and lost, and as the bum continues to badger me, I begin to retreat, up the worn stone steps, toward the security and comfort of my airconditioned kuti.

All the while cursing my own hypocrisy.  After all, Prince Wetsandorn gave away his own children to a beggar; why couldn’t I find a way of giving the man something?  There’s always a chance he isn’t a drunk really, or that this one donation will be the turning point in his life that causes him to go back to his wife and kids.

Later, I come to learn that there is a small drawer of money somewhere in the kuti for such karmic emergencies, and one can, in fact, ask one of the laypersons serving in the temple to take care of mendicants.  So I guess this kind of thing happens frequently enough to require a solution.

The little exchange torments we for a while.  I have not yet learned one of the great lessons of Buddhism, the art of ubheka, of letting go of that which cannot be helped.

#

In the evening, the Littlest Novice sneaks into my room because he has heard that I have a laptop.  “Can you go online?” he asks me excitedly.

“No,” I tell him. “Well, I could, but I left my internet access codes back in the outside world.  I didn’t want email to impinge upon my inward odyssey.”  He looks at me with cocker spaniel-like eyes, and I realize that this excuse must sound quite pompous to him.  He cheers up, however, after I offer him a soda from the huge stockpile of offerings that relatives have been leaving for me all day.

“Do you have any video games?” he persists.

“No,” I say.  It’s for the same reason; I left all those disks behind to avoid being distracted from the great quest.

“How about VCDs?”

“No.  Same reason.”

“I have a VCD.”

“Well, get it, and you can watch it if you like,” I tell him, forgetting for a moment that watching a movie might conceivably constitute an apati.  Oh well, I tell myself, maybe it’s a documentary.  “What video games do you like, anyway?” I ask him as he sits politely on the floor at my feet in one of those positions of extreme politeness and physical agony that I find so difficult to achieve.

“Streetfighter II,” he responds instantly.  

I’m a little alarmed at such a love of violence.  I wonder whether there’s any video game with a more Buddhist flavor.

“You should invent one,” he says.  “Something about a young novice going around beating up demons and sending them back to the underworld.…”

I smile.  The yellow do not, it seems, change human nature, or boyish high spirits.   He tells me he will bring his VCD to try out, but at that moment, eight o’clock arrives and it is time to return to the vihara for evening meditation.

#

The evening meditation is only for those meditation students who are sleeping over, not the “day students”.  There’s a dormitory where they are housed, and also a nuns’ quarter.  I don’t know where, and I don’t ask; there seems no compelling reason to visit those places.  In any cases, the meditation students are swarming all over the vihara when I arrive.  

I am apprehensive that the Guru will appear; surely, I think, five or six hours’ worth of lists of Pali terms is enough for one day.  But he does not come down from his kuti, and the practice meditation is led by the Wise Old Monk who helped me earlier.   All the new monks are there, and all are already seated, lost in their inner explorations.  Using the chair, as I did earlier today, I do not experience any visions, but I am at least not suffering physically.

For the walking meditation, we are told that monks may actually ascend to an upper level of the pagoda in the central atrium, where laypersons are not allowed.  And so we do so.  But the steps are surely made for gods, not men.   After some effort, I manage to reach the platform.  The pagoda glitters; for though the city’s noise pollution is barely audible, Bangkok by night is never dark; the night sky glows with light that has bounced from cloud to cloud, that permeates the very air.  There is a breeze up here, a few yards closer to the gods, a godsend after the stifling heat of the day.  

Slowly, I walk.  I try to cast my mind back to the afternoon, to the vision of Kailasa.  The vision haunts me, but it does not return.  I walk.  The marble flagstones are smooth, warm; all day long they have been sucking up sunlight, storing up heat.  I walk.  Bud — dho, bud — dho, I repeat with each breath.

I still remember the image of the divine mountain, but now that a few hours have passed, I must admit that Kailasa has become a confused with the Paramount logo.  Trying too hard again, I’m afraid.  Yes, I’m acutely, vibrantly aware of the stones, the wind; but no, I am not visited by any visions.

Before I go to bed, I speak on the phone with a friend — it’s the first time I’ve deliberately communicated with the outside world since entering the temple.  My friend, a distant cousin, actually, is a well-known Thai journalist who also reads people’s tarot cards, and once performed a goddess ceremony for me in my back yard.  So she is not unacquainted with the supernatural.

I tell her of the afternoon’s breakthrough … and the evening’s disillusion.

“Don’t worry,” she tells me.  “Seeing a mountain means good news is on the way.”

I cling to this idea until dawn.