Samalappawada

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.