The Return

I told you about young backpacker types taking advantage of the meditation visa system. Well, so am I. I applied for a six month extension in order to teach English in a monastery school in northern Shan State, not too far from the Chinese border. I will try to hook up with a monastery that actually supports my meditation practice, but the primary motivation this time is to serve as a volunteer teacher.

The process starts by getting permission from Sayadaw, which takes just a few minutes. The next step is dealing with Dta Dta, a woman in her 30s who unfortunately has the best English in the front office, which makes her the go-to woman for English speakers with standard accents as well as Estonian, Czech, German, French, Ukranian, Mexican, Australian, and all other accents. Poor Dta Dta, I do feel for her.

I gave her the slip of paper from Sayadaw giving me permission to apply for a six month extension, she gave me the paperwork to fill out in duplicate, I gave her the requisite eight passport photos, which she looked at and said “Very handsome,” and I offered her my glasses for a second look. Then I said, “How much do you need?” to which she replied “Oh, don’t worry, you can pay it later.” The way she said it made me think, “Oh, that’s weird, usually they want the money up front.” I had no idea that her real meaning was “Don’t worry, you can pay after lunch or sometime before I go home at 5 o’clock.” When will I ever learn?

She was, however, very clear in her answer to my question, “How long will this take?” “Six weeks, so you should come to the office and check on April 7.” I knew I would be in Yangon by that time, but as instructed, on April 7 I gave Dta Dta a call. Her responses to my questions were

Who are you?

What do you mean, a visa extension?

When did you pay? Do you have a receipt?

When were you here? When did you apply?

Who are you? When did you pay?

And so on into cyclic existence befitting a meditation center. Obviously a return visit was called for.

I made it an adventure. Instead of forking out $20 for round-trip taxi fare, I decided to take the local bus, the one that stops every 50 yards or so, and that sometimes picks up passengers in-between as long as the bus doesn’t have to come to a full stop. Local bus drivers in Myanmar always hire two assistants, one to call out the destination and the stops and to tell people to hurry up getting on and off, and another to collect the fare, which ranges from 100 to 300 kyat: about 11 to 35 cents. For 35 cents I got a full 90 minutes’ worth of entertainment, including an accident—my bus sideswiped a pickup truck, so I got to see some theatrical denial and negotiations between drivers.

Good thing I was entertained, because unlike what I’d been told, the end of the line for the “gna-dit” (number 51) bus was several miles short of where I needed to be. I found a “moto-boy”—there’s always a bunch in every village, guys in their early 20s who own 125 cc motorcycles and who spend their days hanging out waiting for riders. They don’t usually troll for fares, but one moto-boy found me, told me he knew where Shwe Oo Min was, and that he would take me there for 2,500 kyat. That’s taxi fare, I’d been told to watch out for those moto boys, they’ll take you for a ride. I offered 1,000 max, he said OK, and he took me on a 5-10 mile ride through some nasty back roads to get to the center. He went well beyond the moto-boy call of duty, so I gave him 2,000. He was really happy with that, on top of being happy with the idea of a foreigner being interested in something like Buddhism and meditation. 

Total travel time: 2 hours. Total time figuring out the problem with my visa in the office: 3 minutes. Dta Dta remembered my face and my filling out the forms in duplicate. She asked me for $120, gave me a receipt, and that was that.   

Hosannas and palm leaves were not expected upon my return, and none were given. But I sure had a sense of coming home. I was expecting to say hello to maybe 1 or 2 people before having another bus adventure back to Yangon. Instead, I almost stayed overnight.

One-by-one I ran into my Buddha homeboys: US Paul, Aussie Paul, Fran, Carl, Than Loc, Hiro, Mathias, some others with whom I had made connections despite their tortured English. This was the core group of foreign and local yogis who had spent two weeks meditating in relative silence and scorching heat after Sayadaw left for Vietnam. They were the few and the proud, and I was welcomed back as a comrade. During my retreat I had had focused discussions about Dhamma with all of them, mixed in with a few samalappawada sessions.

What a great feeling, the attachment of belonging! Immediately the appointments started adding up: a walk with Than Loc, a cup of US Paul’s special instant coffee recipe that he calls a “Burmese speedball,” a promise to meet with people during the juice hour. And they were so calm! They had spent their days in meditation and media blackout while I explored the streets of Yangon and dealt with editing clients by email. They knew very little about the Buddhist-Muslim riots and killings that had taken place in three Myanmar cities during the preceding week. I was the messenger bringing news from the outside world—this must have been what it was like before telegraphs, when news stories took days, weeks, or months to travel across states, countries, and oceans. When I saw the looks on their faces when I told them about Buddhist monks attacking a Muslim madrassa, I thought, “Maybe you should shut your mouth, Mr. Media Man, they will find out soon enough when they leave the center, let them have the pleasure of looking at their minds in isolation for a bit longer.”

And the big news at the center? Sayadaw had returned just the previous evening! Everyone was excited about his presence, and happy to see him taking leisurely strolls around the grounds, checking on the orchids. And this is where I had a minor, non-vipassana insight. Almost all of my Buddha homeboys said the same thing: “How wonderful that you came back today, Jon, you can visit with Sayadaw and talk about your practice since you returned to Yangon!” And each time, the suggestion made me squirm and stammer while I tried to feign excitement.

I had been away from the center for more than a week, and like anyone else who returns to civilian life, I had struggled with keeping a high level of intensity in my practice. But I really could not imagine going out of my way to talk with Sayadaw—I just did not feel the sense of connection that would support such an idea.

My friends’ suggestions made me think about the three times I had been in the same room with him. The first was on the day of my arrival, when it is standard protocol for a new yogi to meet him. He asked me what kind of visa I had. He asked me how long I was planning to stay. I said “Thirty days.” He said, “Thirty days, that’s a long time, have you done this before?” I said, “I’ve done two week-long retreats with Steve Armstrong.” And then one of his assistant nuns entered the room to do some administrative stuff with him, and that was that.  

The second time was that same evening, when he had his once-every-five-days question-and-answer session with English-speaking yogis. I was surrounded by 30 yogis who had already been there for weeks or months, I was the new kid in town. When it was my turn to speak I talked about dealing with sloth and torpor and heat, asked him for some advice, and he basically said “Get some rest” and that was it, on to the next yogi. It was a lame question deserving of a no-nonsense ho-hum response.

The third time was five days later, on the evening before his trip to Vietnam. At the last minute he changed his mind and decided to have 1-to-1 sessions with each of the foreign yogis, giving each of us 5-10 minutes of time. One person stayed in his office for almost 20 minutes, I was jealous that they had so much to talk about. The rest of us stood outside dealing with mosquitoes. This time I was prepared, I actually had two questions for him, one about the location of the mind (a topic worth three blog entries in itself), and one about awareness of awareness. The session went fine, but when I looked at the clock it had taken all of 8 minutes.

And that’s it. I recognize Sayadaw as someone who has come up with a unique approach to a 2,500-year-old form of meditation, and that he came up with that approach by spending years as a devoted student to a true meditation master named Shwe Oo Min. I recognize Sayadaw as a remarkably intelligent individual who used that intelligence to help his family build a successful garment manufacturing business after he had spent some years as an ordained monk, and then returned to a monk’s existence to spend as much time as possible with Shwe Oo Min refining his practice. I felt privileged to be on the same grounds with him, let alone to be in a position to ask for his advice on meditation. And I understand that it is impossible for him to make a strong connection with every single yogi who walks in his door. Still, I felt zero connection with him due to simple causes and conditions on both sides.

But what the hell, there I was at Shwe Oo Min checking up on my visa, and all of my yogi friends had said the same thing, “You really should check in with him while you’re here, talk about what’s going on with your practice.” That was wonderful heartfelt advice from friends who had been practicing non-stop in a retreat setting for the past eight days. So I sat on the steps in front of his office waiting for his 4 pm office hours to begin.

The Vietnamese Mother Superior nun opened the door at exactly 4 and immediately said, “Sayadaw is very busy.” And he was. There was a taxicab driver doing some kind of business with him, and he was pacing back-and-forth between his desk and a computer printer that wasn’t cooperating. The atmosphere was one of a busy office with workers trying to make a deadline. He looked in my direction without saying anything, though making it clear that I should say what I had to say, which was “I have two practical questions and a question about my practice.” He said, “Can’t talk about practice now, come back when there’s a yogi session.” Then we did our business—getting permission to visit another meditation center in the central part of the country that is more restrictive about accepting foreign yogis, and getting his account number at his bank in Singapore so I could send my retreat dana there and save my US cash dollars to support my volunteer teaching.

All of this makes total sense. I’d shown up unexpectedly, he was just back from a month-long retreat in Vietnam, and his office hours were generally for non-Dhamma stuff. But once again I left his office feeling no sense of connection, and while I accepted it, I was also disappointed, and feeling a bit of the very human emotion of envy that my Buddha homeboys all felt closer to him than I. Had I been a more experienced practitioner, I may have felt equanimity instead. I’ll work on it.

So I left his office, had my juice appointment, went to the dining hall for another glass of some unusual tea from Vietnam that was said to keep the body cool in intense heat, and chatted about Dhamma and non-Dhamma cabbages and kings until it was time to go. My Swiss friend Mathias joined me for the two-kilometer walk to the village because he wanted a haircut. During the walk we had one of the most focused Dhamma conversations I’ve ever had, because Mathias really knows his stuff, I had something to share that he was interested in, and we were one of those rare pairs of people whose senses of give-and-take in conversation were very much alike. I was energized, even in the intense heat of the Myanmar countryside.

I forgot to mention, in between drinking a Burmese speedball with Paul and my date with Sayadaw, I spent two hours in the meditation hall. I needed patience when I tried to meditate in my hotel room, but in the hall I slipped into a state of sati with almost no effort at all. I sat comfortably for a full hour, whereas even during my retreat 45 minutes tended to be my max. I continuously and affirmatively responded to the ongoing question, “Is there awareness?” I was able to step back and look at my thoughts from a detached distance. These were things that did not come easy in Yangon. So even though I was happy knowing that I would be sleeping in air-conditioned comfort and not waking up the next morning drenched in sweat, on the bus back to town I had a vision of Alan Bates in the movie King of Hearts, standing at the gate of the insane asylum, wanting to be let in because he had seen enough of the outside world.