This was my sixth retreat, and at 30 days by far the
longest. All of the others have been at Cloud Mountain, a retreat center about
60 miles north of Portland. Individual teachers rent the facility and set their
own rules for each retreat, but one thing in common to Buddhist meditation
retreats is “noble silence.” After an orientation/question-and-answer session
on the first evening, retreatants (also known as yogis) are asked to observe complete silence except for meetings
with the teacher and doing chores. Due to my Cloud Mountain experiences,
retreat = noble silence.
Not the case at Shwe Oo Min. Trivial chat was an object that
I used to investigate “right/wrong attitude” for the first three days of my
retreat, then I had to let it go. There were 40 or so Westerners at the center
when I showed up, mostly 20-somethings, and when you are 20-something you have
so much to say (I know I did; come to think of it, isn’t that what blogs are about?),
and not much patience to wait until later—it needs to be said now!
I could understand if it were talk about Dhamma (Buddhist doctrine)
or one’s meditation practice. But what I heard was a lot of samalappawada—a great pali word that
sounds just like what it means: “idle chatter.” Hot topics included, but were
nowhere near limited to, boyfriend/girlfriend problems, the best guest houses
in Bangkok, and good websites.
Sayadaw Tejaniya (“Sayadaw” means “teacher” or “abbot”)
believes that one must practice mindfulness/awareness—or to use his favorite
term, “awareness+wisdom”—during conversation, and that such practice is best
done in a controlled environment such as a retreat. Otherwise, upon return to
the real world, all of the good practice done while sitting on a cushion or in
mindful walking will not get transferred. Great idea! But while I was there,
never did I hear verbal instruction or reminders to practice awareness while
conversing, therefore samalappawada
ruled the day.
Throughout the center grounds I saw evidence of past efforts
to enforce noble silence. Next to the juice table (they serve glasses of fruit
juice every afternoon at 4 o’clock) there was a laminated sign posted with the
words, “Please do not talk while drinking juice” (in English, Hangul, and
Vietnamese), but it wasn’t enough to stop the daily event from turning into
happy hour. Laminated trilingual signs were also taped to some of the tables in
the cafeteria, admonishing yogis to eat mindfully in silence. Other signs were
posted in the dorms and meditation hall. Seeing those signs made me think that
there had been some vigorous discussions behind the scenes among the resident
monks and nuns on the topic of noble silence.
It took me a couple of days to notice that the number of
visible retreatants dropped noticeably at 8 o’clock every morning. According to
the schedule, the hour between 8 and 9 was for walking meditation. It was the
last hour of the day before it got so hot that you wanted to be sitting or
walking beneath fans, and I was surprised that more people didn’t take
advantage of that coolness. I was doing my walking on the porch outside the
men’s second-floor meditation hall when I noticed several retreatants entering
Sayadaw’s house with their laptops. That’s when I learned about “Internet Hour”:
from 8 to 9 every morning, Sayadaw opened his office and invited everyone to
bring their computers, use his wi-fi, and connect to the world. Because of my
Cloud Mountain mindset, I was gobsmacked. I went downstairs, crossed the road,
and stood outside Sayadaw’s office looking in. Sure enough, there were 20 or so
of my fellow meditators totally engrossed in the Internet.
Let’s be real, if I were in my 20s or 30s, I would’ve been
there too. But I’m not—I’m turning 60 during this Year of the Snake. I sold or
gave away most of my possessions, and I worked really hard to save enough money
so I could take a full month off to sit on a cushion and look at the mind, and
I am sufficiently intimate with the mind to know that if I spend an hour
online, the mind is going to need at least one hour calming down so as to
return to a state of awareness and samadhi
(mental stability). And even if I achieve that stability, it won’t be very long
until the mind starts composing emails for the next Internet Hour, because
that’s what minds do. To think otherwise is very foolish.
Then I started noticing a half-dozen Western males who I
never saw except at the two daily meals or chatting away during walking
meditation in the evening. A couple of them showed up in the meditation hall every
second or third day, with their cushions strategically placed next to electric outlets
so they could recharge their computers while meditating. They would make appearances
at events where Sayadaw was sure to see them, but otherwise they stayed in
their rooms, doing whatever with their electronic devices.
I eventually figured out that some of these foreigners were
taking advantage of Myanmar’s meditation visa system to stay in the country for
longer than the 28 days that tourist visas allow. I met two Europeans who had
been in Myanmar for almost a full year, and I heard a rumor about someone who
had stayed for more than 18 months on meditation visas. These people were not
meditating for 12-18 months. But I also don’t think that they were doing
anything illegal like drug smuggling—they were just manipulating the system so
they could explore as much of the country as possible, periodically spending time
at a meditation center to justify their meditation visas.
Then there’s the over-the-top case of Richard, a Scotsman
from Edinburgh in his late 60s who showed up one afternoon, larger than life, noisily
reconnecting with some youngsters he had met at various guest houses throughout
Asia. He’s one of those Peter Panish-types who prefers to avoid growing up by
staying on the guest house trail, occasionally going home to check on the house
and the renters and to plan his next trip. He is a Class-A Bullshit Artist, a
boisterous raconteur that I want to spend a few hours drinking Guiness with once
my promise to abstain from alcohol for a year elapses. He went to Shwe Oo Min
because he had to wait for a week before flying to his next
destination—Kunming, my former stomping grounds. He didn’t feel like spending
too much money at a guest house in Yangon, so he just took a bus out to the
center, got a room on the same dorm floor as mine, and killed time whatever way
he could. I saw him in the meditation hall just once—on the outside porch. He
was sitting in a chair, supposedly meditating, but when a couple of pretty
Burmese women walked by in front of the building, he moved his chair a few feet
to get a better view. The way that some meditation centers work in Myanmar, if
you show up with a meditation visa you are allowed to stay, no questions asked.
At all meditation centers, you decide how much you will voluntarily pay in dana for the room and two meals a day. Richard
is clearly not the only one taking advantage of the system, just the oldest, so
far. He was my biggest challenge in terms of avoiding samalappawada—he’d see me coming and immediately launch into a
story, he could tell I was a sucker for a good one.
At the end of the first week my thinking was, “OK, I have to
accept the chatter, but I can work around it and maintain my own noble silence,
and if anyone asks I’ll tell them, and if anyone thinks I’m weird for doing so,
let ‘em.” One day I noticed that I had a schedule of appointments I needed to
keep: talk with Dario (someone I know from Seattle Insight Meditation) about
news from home and Myanmar travel advice, talk with the office workers about
sponsoring a breakfast for the sangha,
get some information about other meditation centers from a young medical
student who knew his Dhamma and who was leaving the next day, and sit in on
Sayadaw’s question-and-answer session for English speakers. Where was my
calendar book?
I met another retreatant in his 50s, a programmer from the
Bay Area, who had gone through the same process—wondering where the noble
silence was, accepting that it wasn’t going to happen, and trying to balance
the social with the meditative. He and I had three wonderful conversations about
Dhamma over the month I was there. I had another couple of those with the
medical student, a couple more with a Finnish meditator in his late-30s, and a
couple with a 62-year-old Vietnamese-American woman who was renouncing a lot
more than I to shave her head, put on robes, and apply to a Buddhist university.
What a treat to be around people with the same interest and much more
experience! So there was precedent for conversation, but for me, it had to be
about Dhamma. I went to great lengths to avoid the samalappawada, but as you likely guessed by now, I occasionally
caught myself being the instigator.
Then Sayadaw did the best possible thing for my narrow
goals: he left. Eight days after I showed up he took off to lead a month-long
retreat in Vietnam. And when he left he took the Internet Hour with him. Within
four days of his departure, the number of Western retreatants fell from 40 to
about 7 or 8. The noise factor decreased in kind. Those of us who stayed seemed
to be in tune with the noble silence idea. It never approached Cloud Mountain
standards, but some days my only non-Dhamma conversations were with Paul, an
outgoing Seattle musician who occupied the dorm room next to mine. We
discovered we had also occupied the same rooms at the same time for lots of
music events, knew a lot of the same local blues people, but had somehow never
met until we were on the other side of the planet.
It started to actually feel like I was on
retreat. The causes and conditions started lining up for my biggest insight,
which was about causes and conditions. But before I foolishly try to describe
what it feels like to have a vipassana
insight, I’ll get into some of the day-to-day details, and introduce you to four
fellow meditators.
