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.

Nirvana Express: Day One

continuing to excerpt my 2001 diary of my very brief monkhood....

****

Day One: Angel who Walks the Earth

The day of the ordination is complex, and fraught with ceremony; I do not have time for doubts.  An air-conditioned hall has been set up for my relatives.  The Seer is nowhere to be found today; he has gone on one of his many missions to help the needy, leaving me feeling a little lost.  

In the morning, I go through the Pali text I must recite.  Nervous for a moment, I leave the text aside and go on the internet, where I encounter my hermit friend Sharon.  She says to me, “I have a feeling that I, too, am going to the monastery.  I’ve had a dream-vision where I was in all sorts of temples — and my head was shaven.”  I ask to speak to Tomm, her “entity”.  I type, “Will you be at the monastery too?”

“Of course,” he types back.  I wonder what form that will take, and whether it will terrify me.  The truth is, what unnerves me most about the inward journey I must undertake is that I have always had an image of myself as a consummate rationalist.  I have been able to write about the fantastic and the supernatural, indeed, made money at it.  But to actually look into the heart of these things … the prospect has always made me panic.

Sharon’s Tomm will, it turns out, have something of a rôle to play in the unfolding story of this inward journey.

I am sitting in what will become my room — it is not exactly a cell, for though spartan, it has air-conditioning and a gorgeous antique chair inlaid with mother-of-pearl — going through the text one more time.  It cannot be that hard, I keep telling myself.  After all, millions of guys go through this every year.

That is, after all, one of the things I’ve missed out on, growing up far from the mother culture, far from the things that are taken for granted in this country.  During the khao pansa season, the three-month “period of seclusion from the rains,” young Thai men everywhere become monks, pledging to remain for the duration of the season.  Are these men impelled by inner voices?  Perhaps.  Tradition tells us that a man’s duty is to seek the yellow robe for a time, in order that his parents may be reborn in a celestial realm.  Perhaps there is some pressure from elders involved.  Perhaps it’s simply the thing to do.  This is not a decision that can be forced on a person, however, which is why a monk-to-be must ask — three times — in an ancient tongue — to be admitted into the Sangha.  And although the decision is, indeed, reversible, and one can leave far more readily than one can join, the words of the ceremony contain frequent references to “the rest of one’s life.”

The Guru has told me that he won’t accept a three-day monkhood — although I am later to learn that one of the new monks did in fact leave on the third day, unable to handle things — or even a seven or nine day monkhood.  “This isn’t a holiday,” he said to me.  “You must actually embark upon a real voyage of toward the truth.  I will allow you to remain here only if you do so for a minimum of fifteen days.  After all, His Majesty the King himself, despite all of the affairs of state, was able to sacrifice fifteen days of his life to live among the Sangha.  You can do no less.”  

Fifteen days, then, or a little longer, since the time of leaving a monastery must be accurately defined, to the exact minute, by reference to astrological charts, is the time I shall be within these walls.  This will be the fast track, the express train to self-discovery. 

A Maha, who has been a monk for fourteen years and is an excellent drill sergeant, helps me.  He is a small man, slender, very delicate in his movements; my mother mistook him for a samanera, one of those young boys who often take up the yellow robe for a while and who are asked to observe only ten precepts rather than the 227 that monks must obey.  She was astonished to discover that he is already working on his master’s degree at the Buddhist University.  The Maha has been ordained since the age of twelve.

The Maha sits on the mother-of-pearl inlaid chair in my room, acting the role of the Upajjhaya who will accept me into the monastery.  I manage to get through the text, if haltingly, and he smiles.  “Don’t worry about a thing,” he tells me.  “A lot of people botch it up far more than that.  And if you stumble, someone will prompt you.”  

So much for my fear of flunking the entrance exam.

Since the ordination is to take place at 4:15 p.m. my family is afraid that I will starve to death afterwards — because, you see, a monk may not eat after noon.  And this temple is very strict; some sects would consider, for example, a banana in a blender to be a drink, not food, but here it is a no-no.  So, there is the obligatory last meal — quite a feast really, for there is a hole-in-the-wall restaurant down the street that is famous throughout Bangkok for its moist, firm-textured roast duck.

On a balcony that separates two residential sections of the kuti, I sit in a plastic chair while the Maha supervises the shaving.  There is ceremony involved here, too.  Once one has become a monk, one may not touch a woman — the lightest tap is considered an apatti, or offense, and entails ritual purification —  but the cutting of the hair is always begun by the senior female relatives — first my mother, then assorted aunts.  The scissors are a little rusty — no one thought of bringing a pair from home — but once the first cuttings are collected into a glass bowl, later to be laid on the family shrine, the Maha continues the job with a sharp razor.  He’s clearly used to doing this; in no time at all I’m completely bald.  The eyebrows too, of course.  

I take a look in the mirror.  I am not yet a monk, and monks are not supposed to look in mirrors.

“What about shaving?” I ask, alarmed.

“You can look at a mirror for that,” the Maha tells me,  “because that’s a practical reason.  You just can’t go staring into mirrors for the purpose of admiring yourself, or beautifying yourself.  That would be apatti.”

It is also, it seems, an apatti to wear black sandals, and the previous day we have hastily purchased a pair of brown ones from the nearest department store.

Out of nowhere comes a torrential monsoon shower, which just as suddenly ends.  The sky continues to be overcast.  A moist wind blows.  These are good omens for an ordination.

 Now it is only an hour before the ceremony.  I put on a white dress shirt, and around my waist I wear a large white piece of fabric that resembles a tablecloth; it folds back and forth in the front and then is tied with a sash-like belt of the same material.  It is a sort of sarong.  Monks, I am dismayed to discover, do not wear underwear.  

 The waiting room has begun to fill with relatives.  Even though the decision to become a monk was sudden, and I only told my parents, word has begun to leak out.  A Buat Naak ritual is not unlike a bar mitzvah.  There are the beaming parents, the fussing aunts, and the bar mitzvah boy sweating over whether he’s going to screw up the chanting.  There is a table laden with offerings, for all the monks who officiate at the ceremony must receive gifts of the prescribed type.  

And now I put on over my white garments a lace and gilt surplice.  It is because of this stunning piece of embroidery the pre-monk outfit has come to be known as the “angel who walks the earth” costume.  Wearing it, one does feel remarkably angelic.  As if one is clothed in light.  I try walking a few steps.  I even feel lighter, more ethereal.   

My aunt has readied a tray of coins, which I will, before crossing the threshold of the chapel, cast out onto the pavement, symbolizing my rejection of the material world.  

And now we emerge from the waiting room.  There is to be a ritual promenade around the chapel, three times, clockwise, the candidate for monkhood in his glittering gold and white apparel leading the way, the relatives following.  It is a beautiful chapel, the stone of the walkway worn down, indented from a hundred years of such processionals.  We do not proceed in straight lines as there is an occasional pile of doggie-poo to circumnavigate.  Buddhist temples do not deny protection to any needy souls … always, there are the stray dogs.  Later, I will learn that even faeces have their place in the monks’ daily contemplation of the impermanence of the universe.

At the threshold, I pause for a moment.  With one gesture I fling away all the coins in the tray.  Later I learn that I was supposed to sprinkle them hither and thither, but it seemed somehow more right for me to cast off all venality at once.

Then, my mother carefully grasps the hem of my angel surplice.  Each of the relatives holds on in turn, so that we become links in a chain of humanity.  This symbolizes the fact that I will dedicate all the karmic merit of my monkhood to others, who will climb to heaven by clinging to the edge of my robe.

And so it is that I step inside the chapel, and am face to face with the earthly representatives of the eternal Dhamma, the law of cause and effect that governs the cosmos.

    Beneath a tall image of the Buddha seated in meditation, there are about fifteen monks.  Some I know: the Guru is there, as is the Maha.  Others I will come to know.  Prostrating myself three times before this august body, I begin to chant, in Pali:

Reverend sir, 

I go for refuge unto that exalted one,

Though he has long since attained nirvana….

I am kneeling, holding a set of robes in my forearms, as I struggle through two pages of text; occasionally the Guru intervenes to correct my pronunciation.  It is not kind to my arthritis, especially once it is over, for the Guru proceeds to preach a mini-sermon.  

“The Buddha,” he says, “actually existed.  He actually did achieve Enlightenment.  You would not be here unless you believed these things.”

At length, he commands me to depart, and in the corridor outside the chapel, several monks help me to change from the angel costume into the simple ocher robes of monkhood.

Alas, they are not that simple.  The outer robe is a rectangular piece of cloth, but the human body is not a rectangle.  Later, I will practice, and practice, and practice, but for now, it takes three monks, and another to hold my arm in place, and yet another to tie the thing down with a length of saffron cloth to prevent it from undoing itself in the midst of the proceedings.

I return, feeling a little self-conscious.  I prostrate myself before my parents, because I am bidding farewell, in a very real sense, for all time; when I return to the world, I will not be the same person, I will have been reborn.  

And then it is my parents’ turn to present me with my begging bowl, and to prostrate themselves before me, for I am no longer their son, but a living embodiment of the dhamma, in an unbroken chain of discipleship that extends twenty-five hundred years back into the past, to the ones who first sat at the feet of the Enlightened One himself.

I am interrogated, twice, in the Pali language, about my qualifications for the Sangha.  Am I a leper?  Am I exempt from military service?  Am I a fugitive?  Most people answer these yes-no questions by simply remembering that the first five are natthi bhante (no) and the rest ama bhante (yes).  Since I have worked from a romanized text that has an English translation, I have the advantage of understanding what has been asked.

By now, my aging body is a wreck from having wrenched itself so long into the formal position of respect.  The Guru, sensing my discomfort, tells me, “Well, it’s done; you’re a full phra now.  But I must recite the Anusasana, the words of instruction to the new monk.  It will take about five minutes.  Instead of kneeling all the way down, you can sort of stand on your knees, if you like.”

He then races through this lengthy Pali text with Donald Duck-like celerity.  I am amazed at how he can memorize so much and say it all so quickly, missing nary a beat.  My gratitude is as boundless as my excruciation.  And afterwards, with much snapping of photos and presenting of offerings to the temple, I emerge from the chapel, ready for the next stage of the journey.

#

Finally, I am alone in the room. I know that I may not eat until dawn, but for some reason there is no hunger at all.  It is something to do with the yellow robe I am wearing.  I do not feel the same, but as yet I have no clue as to what will happen next.

At around seven o’clock, the Maha shows up with a small ceremonial tray with candles, a small arrangement of flowers wrapped in a banana-leaf cone, and a glass of water.

“You must go now,” he says, “and formally present yourself to your Upajjhaya, the abbot.”

I move through empty courtyards in the gathering night.  The air hums.  Here, in this crowded metropolis that teems with noise and pollution, though I do not know who I am and where I am going, I feel strangely free from care.

 There is a brief interview with the Guru.  He insists that I sit in the phabphieb position, with my palms folded in supplication, which is the proper deference to show one’s guru.  

He says to me, “Well, you made it through the ceremony.  For someone who has spent his whole life abroad and can barely read Thai, even that is an accomplishment.”

I thank him for speeding through the Anusasana, but be brushes off my gratitude, presenting me instead with a pile of books which he wants me to read in a certain order.  Many are in English; most have been written by the Guru himself. 

“Normally,” he said, “I would require you to render daily services to me as your guru, such as washing my robes, and bringing me water to drink in the evenings; however, since we are not living in the same kuti, I shall not ask that of you; only that you read the books.  Now, return to your abode and rest.”  Abruptly, the interview is over.

It is only eight o’clock, but I feel extremely worn out after a day that began at five in the morning.  As I lie down, though, not quite daring to remove my robes for fear I may never be able to put them back on again, there comes a knock at the door.

It is a monk I do not recognize.  He says, “The abbot requests that you go to the vihara to practice meditation with the other meditation students,” he tells me.  “You won’t have any idea what is going on, but he wants you to go along with whatever’s happening, try to get the hang of things.”

Once more, I set off into the night.  And it really is night; the sounds of the city seem immeasurably distant as I cross the courtyard, pass one pagoda, traverse the grounds of the chapel where I was ordained, and enter, through a worn wooden portal, an inner world within the inner world.  A cloister, completely lined with life-sized standing Buddha images, surrounds a central atrium from which rises a gilded pagoda.  

A dozen women, dressed in white, are walking back and forth in the cloister with great deliberation, staring at the ground, measuring each step.  They are, I assume, meditation students.  When they see me, or rather, when they see my yellow robes, for I have not yet found the “me” inside those robes, they bend low, place their palms reverently together; I am unused to such obsequy; it is yet alien to me.

Carefully, I go up the steps to the great vihara.  Inside, a great image of the seated Buddha towers over dozens of others; there are images of Thai kings, of holy men turned to face the great teacher; the columns are intricately painted with floral motifs and panels depicting the Buddha’s life, and every inch of the walls is covered with images from the Jatakas, the tales of the Buddha’s previous incarnations.  There is a whiff of incense in the air.  There are grandfather clocks on every wall, and not a single one is synchronized to any other; constantly, they jangle.  Time has no meaning here.

Columns set off an upper platform where monks are sitting on padded squares of cloth.  They all seem to know exactly what they are doing.  One motions me to sit beside him.  

There comes a voice on a loudspeaker: “We will all now sit in meditation for twenty minutes.”

I cannot achieve a partial, let alone a full lotus position; I wriggle as I try to warp myself into what seems to have come so naturally to the other monks.  They sit, hands resting on their laps, eyes closed, gazing at some inner center; while for the next twenty minutes, a seeming eternity, I struggle with aching joints and nervous tension.  I know I’m supposed to do something with my breath; I try different things; but I can feel is the pain.

Fifteen more days of this?  I ask myself.  What of the glorious hero on his quest?  Will I just end up wallowing in arthritic agony?  

I try to think of my comfortable bed at home in Los Angeles, complete with 300-channel digital cable, climate control, huge DVD library, instant internet access, and thirty-minute home delivery of any ethnic cuisine.  The strange thing is, the memories refuse to surface.  I want to ask my inner voice why I was sent here, but those inner voices never answer when you want them to.

I grit my teeth.  Next time, I will remember to apply the muscle relaxant spray and rub in some ointment before venturing forth to meditate.  

When fighting the dragons of career and love in the world outside, one expects a little exhaustion.  I am now learning that the journey within, too, is not without physical torment.

But then again, tomorrow is another day.

Nirvana Express: Day Zero

During my brief monkhood in the year 2001, I kept a diary of the experiences there.  I recently rediscovered it, and I've decided to post some excerpts from it over the next few weeks.

I have been going through severe emotional strain over the last year which is why this blog has been remarkably silent.  However, I am getting ready for a new outpouring.  The serialization of this diary over the next months may open the door a bit towards new material....

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Day Zero: Inner Voices

The path from birth to death is a journey without a road map.  Destinations, geography, and weather conditions are all hidden from us.  There are no signposts save those we have erected in our own minds, no tourist brochures save those we have ourselves manufactured with the tools of imagination.

This is not a story I have ever dreamed of telling.  

It begins, like Dante’s Divine Comedy, though far less poetically, in the middle of the road of life … more precisely, the Sacramento Freeway, an endless-seeming expressway that arrows its way through the parched hills of Western California.

It  is a Friday morning in San Francisco, the morning after one of the most thrilling experiences of my career — a reception to launch my opera Madana in the United States.   It has been an amazing night, a artsy loft party crammed with music enthusiasts and fans as well as potential sponsors, getting to rub shoulders with opera directors and famous philanthropists — being lionized.

The next few weeks are sure to be full of exciting things.  I have just made contact with a new publisher who is enthusiastic about a possible new novel.  The British producer of a film based on my novel Jasmine Nights has just attached a brilliant director to the project.  There is talk of new operas, new horizons.  

But an hour after I wake up that morning — on the drive home to Los Angeles — something very strange happens.  I decide to become a Buddhist monk.  Less than twenty-four hours later, I am on a plane to Thailand.   A week later, I am having my head shaved and preparing to utter the first of a string of long phrases in an ancient language I can barely understand.

No one expected this to happen, least of all myself.   I am very much a person attached to the physical world; I am deeply involved with worldly things.  I love to party.  I stay up all night discussing fine music and great literature, or pounding away at one of my computers.  I devour films, plays, and gourmet cuisine.   In fact, the notion of monks not being allowed to eat after twelve noon has always frightened me; that’s about when I would normally wake up; I’ve always felt that if I had to live as a monk, I wouldn’t be able to eat at all since I would never be awake at times when one is allowed to eat.

 My lifestyle is very remote from what one thinks of as Buddhism — renunciation, detachment from desire, meditation, inward journeys.   Though born in Thailand, I left when I was six months old, and was barely able to speak the language as a child; even now, I am at best semiliterate in it.  In the moment that I hear the inner voice, I probably knew far more about the religions of the west — and even about Hinduism — than about Theravada Buddhism as it is practiced in Thailand.

And yet, that Friday morning, comes the inner voice.  “You must go to Thailand and enter a monastery.”  It startles me, nodding off in the back seat of my friend’s van, as we race down the freeway through the hills of California … hills the same deep ochre that you find in the robes of Buddhist monks.

I am not one to obey inner voices — or even to hear them.  Yet this urge is so powerful that within moments I take out my cell phone, telephone my travel agent in Los Angeles, and book a flight for the next day.   That evening, I send a fax to my parents, who live in San Francisco but are on an academic summer break in Bangkok, letting them know that I intend to become a monk.

My life has been a quest without a grail… a relentless journey from country to country, gathering data, spewing out books and, sometimes to great acclaim, sometimes simply into the void … an odyssey of sorts.  Perhaps I have finally arrived at the mid-life crisis I have been avoiding for so long. After all, at my age, I am still playing at being the enfant terrible, rather than the eminence grise.  Perhaps it is time to change roles. 

Truth is a sudden thing, like lightning.  I know with an unparalleled clarity that it is time to embark upon a more difficult journey, to explore that which I had never yet dared explore.  

At the time, I have no clue about what Buddhist monks actually do.  I know that my parents will be pleased at my decision, but I don’t really know why.  I know that monkhood is a rite of passage that millions of Thai men, from the King himself all the way down to the poorest peasant, have gone through; that monkhood is a cultural bond that goes beyond the elaborate class system of Thai society.  But I have never felt the need to be a part of that bond.

I know  that monks walk around at dawn with begging bowls, but I have no idea what else they do.  I know they sit around chanting those hypnotic Pali texts, but have no concept of what the texts mean, or who wrote them.  I don’t even know how one goes about becoming a monk; does one simply show up at the front door of the temple with a shaved head and a bag of robes?  Had I known, I would perhaps have hesitated.  Ignorance, indeed, is bliss.

I have a friend named Sharon who lives in a mountain hideaway in Georgia.  Though she seldom ventures from her home, she speaks to dozens of people daily through the magic of the internet.  She is a psychic.  Not a professional, in that she doesn’t answer questions for money; but she is noted enough to have been asked by the police to help locate a murderer … successfully.  Sharon goes into a trance and speaks (or types into her computer) in the voice of an entity named Tomm.   Twice a week, she gets together with an online group of psychics, and she has what amounts to a convention, in which people sit around at their computers channeling in tandem.

Of course, one doesn’t really know whether “Tomm” exists, or whether he has been created by Sharon’s own perfervid mind.  And yet, whatever belief system one subscribes to, Tomm always seems to have something eerily prophetic to say.  She describes his messages as extremely vivid images.

For months, Sharon has been seeing an image of me.  From time to time, she has been telling me about it.  It’s me standing beside a lotus.  The lotus keeps coming closer and closer.  The lotus is, of course, a Buddhist symbol, but she doesn’t know this.  I have told her so, but I do not see its relevance to my life.  Buddhism has been the farthest thing from my mind, until this sudden epiphany.

I decide to telephone her now, from the car.  “I’m going into a monastery in Thailand,” I tell her.

“I know,” she says.  “I saw it yesterday.”

Psychics can be really smug at times.

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It is Sunday midnight when I get to Bangkok, and on Monday morning I go to see a very famous Jao Khun (Venerable) at one of Bangkok’s most respected temples.  Since I will not disturb anyone’s privacy in this memoir, I will not use the name of any monk here, nor will I name the temple itself.  It is not one of those huge tourist temples, but it is in the heart of old Bangkok, bordered on one side by one of the few canals that still has water; other, more celebrated tourist attractions are not far, and Khaosan Road, where the backpackers gather, is a few minutes away.  

Built by the most learned of all the kings of the Ratanakosin era, the temple is reached through a labyrinth of alleyways.  A solitary gilded pagoda rears up above the pointed eaves, richly tiled in crimson and viridian.  The Jao Khun’s kuti, or dwelling place, is a few steps away from an unpretentious noodle stand; a swinging metal gate is a secret entrance to the complex.  I am destined to enter the inner world through a back door.

This particular Jao Khun has gained fame as an astrologer, and so I call him the Seer.  He has dedicated his life to the monkhood since his early twenties; now in his seventies, he has created quite the fiefdom within the monastic world.  He has done so by obstinately refusing to accept money, unlike some other well known clerics in Thailand; when people ask to donate large amounts of cash to his charitable projects, he tells them to keep the money in their own name, letting only the interest be used for the charities.  As a result, he sits atop a towering pyramid of resources, and has endowed scholarships for poor children, built Thai temples in the U.S. and Scandinavia, and has created a temple with an accompanying school for young novices outside Bangkok.   As senior monks go, he is considered something of a saint.

The Seer holds court in a modest chamber; he sits on a low bed surrounded with cushions, and lined against the walls are chairs which actually appear to be recycled car seats.  It’s very ecology-conscious.  The Jao Khun is as large and rotund as a Chinese Ho Tai or Laughing Buddha statue, and he seems to have been expecting me.  “It just so happens,” he tells me, “that, even though we never take in new monks at this time, your room is ready and waiting.”

Since the Seer is well known for predicting the future, this should not, I suppose, surprise me.  Then the Seer says, “Well, all you have to do is memorize the ritual for admittance into the monkhood — it’s only a few pages long — and we’re all set.”

This is my first indication that becoming a monk isn’t simply a matter of ringing the bell at the temple gates and shaving one’s head.  It seems there is a complex ritual involved, and I must formally ask, not once but three times, to be admitted into monkhood … and that I will be officially interrogated as to my qualifications by two senior monks.  The language of all these exchanges is Pali, a language of ancient India.

The Lord Buddha didn’t want to use Sanskrit, the language of the Hindu scriptures, as the language of his revolutionary new philosophy, because twenty-five hundred years ago this was already an ancient language.  The idea of using Pali was that it was, at the time when Buddha walked the earth, a spoken language which people could immediately understand.  The situation is somewhat analogous to the use of Latin in the Catholic Church up until the middle of the Twentieth Century; the Latin translation of the bible was called the “Vulgate” because it was in the vulgar tongue, that is to say, the language of ordinary people.  As the centuries passed, these “common languages” became more and more uncommon.  And thus it was that I found myself staring at a lengthy and enigmatic text, wondering when I would have it committed to memory enough to gain admittance to the inner world.

My next hurdle is an interview with the Lord Abbot of the Monastery, who wields great power within the walls of that world.  The abbot is a stickler for tradition; he is also an extremely famous meditation guru, whose 7-day meditation course has earned him enormous attention in this country and even abroad.  Here I shall call him the Guru.  

The guru is gruff at first.  He complains about my posture, my manner of performing the five-point prostration, a traditional gesture of respect towards the Buddha and his living representatives; and he tells me he won’t put up with becoming a monk just for a lark.  “I want you to take Buddhism seriously, and I want you to enroll in my seven-day intensive meditation workshop starting on day one,” he tells me.  

I explain to him how the insistent inner voice sent me on this journey, and how I really know nothing at all about what I am about to experience; my mind is a blank page.

He says, “Well, such a voice could be one of your ancestors, crying out for a descendant to put on the yellow robes to ease his lot in the afterlife.”

He then launches into a fascinating story about his student days in Benares.  He tells me how deceased children and sages are not cremated there, but are tossed bodily into the Ganges; sometimes they float, and the birds of prey swoop down and have at them as they bob up and down in the river.  “I was sitting by the river, eating my curry,” he says, “when a little piece of small intestine landed — plop — right in my dish!”

Only later do I realize that this grisly tale is intended as a prelude to the formal meditation on the impermanence of the physical body.

“I’ve been studying the Pali text I am supposed to say,” I tell him, “but I think I probably need a couple of days.”

“Nonsense,” the Guru tells me, “if your heart is ready, you can learn it in a jiffy.”  He then sets my admission ceremony for two days hence.  “And by the way,” he continues, “we don’t pronounce our Pali the same way as in other temples.  Here, we attempt to pronounce it exactly as it was pronounced during the time of the Lord Buddha himself — retroflex consonants and all.”

Then, sensing my despair, he teaches me a trick for sitting in the awkward phabphieb position.  At my age, and never having had to sit in those positions, it’s weird, but to my astonishment, the guru’s trick actually succeeds in allaying my discomfort for some minutes.  I begin to suspect that beneath his punctilious exterior he is a compassionate soul, full of tenderness and concern.

Nonetheless, the Pali text, with its lilting rhythms and strange consonant clusters, almost makes me give up.  As the dreaded day approaches, and my relatives all get in on the act, worrying about what I shall wear and who will supply the robes and begging-bowl, I become decidedly conflicted about the whole thing.  I try placing the text under my pillow, thinking that perhaps I will absorb its contents while I sleep.

Just before dawn, I awaken from an astonishingly vivid dream. 

I’m already in the temple in the dream, in a foyer or entrance hall, which is suffused with an incandescent light.  Someone is exhuming a corpse, and when the coffin is opened I see the remains of flesh being stripped away until nothing is left but bones.  And I hear a voice: “It’s ready to be cremated now.”

The bones are being tossed over the threshold, in a heap on the ground.  Then I too cross the threshold.  Inadvertently, I step on the pile of bones, and I hear the crack of a thighbone.  I flinch, thinking to myself, “How disrespectful, I’m stepping on the dead.”  

And the voice replies, “They are nothing but old bones.  They mean nothing.  Let them go.”

As I awaken, I realize I am no longer afraid.  I have been told, with an absolute clarity, that I must incinerate the past, that I must go forth into this unknown world.  

“Let them go.”  The dream teaches me the first and final lesson of Buddhism.  The easiest to say, the hardest to put into practice.  I must allow all those bones to crumble into dust … not just the fear and the emotional turmoil, but even the good things, the successes, if I am to undergo this special kind of rebirth.  

And so it is that I begin the journey, leaving behind all the familiar landmarks of a convoluted life,  Although it is only for a few days, I must give up all my possessions, even my identity.  The time will be short, but it will encompass a life’s arc of experience, from birth to epiphany to death to rebirth.  

It is time.  We have parked at the back gate of the temple.  I am dressed in white, the color of an unwritten page, of new beginnings.

The gate begins to creak open.