Thanksgiving was my 280th day in Myanmar, 120
spent in retreat. This was unexpected—I knew I would do a one-month retreat at
the very beginning of my time here, and I was hoping to do a longer retreat at
the end, but in-between I thought I’d be teaching and editing and vagabonding.
Turns out I’ve developed a wicked attachment to meditation.
Yesterday I had a strong sense of sadness that I’m going to have to give up the
retreat lifestyle in a couple of months. I’m envious of my friend Paul from
Australia, who had the resources to semi-retire and spend close to a year in
retreat. The same goes for my bhikkhuni buddy Sandra from Mexico, who just left
the Kalaw Shwe Oo Min (SOM) Center after spending seven months here looking at
her mind.
This is them:
And as long as I’m posting photos, here’s one of me:
Jon at 60. Linn (a student of mine at Inle Lake) at 30. Tell
the difference?
Of course, envy and attachment to meditation are both
foolish in light of the Buddhist principle that you can label all of your unwholesome thoughts
as attachment, aversion, or delusion. There is no fourth category. It’s one of
several principles I’ve spent time testing in retreat, and I’ve found it to be
true: everything comes down to lobha, dosa or moha (the Pali
names for those three mind states). Therefore, it’s comical to develop an
attachment to a process that’s supposed to teach me how to recognize and work
with and avoid the pitfalls of attachment. I’m not the first to occupy this
space.
I’ll have plenty of time to contemplate attachment on this
current retreat. Sandra left yesterday, making me the only yogi at SOM Kalaw. I
see four other people daily: Koto, a 20-year-old college student with
surprisingly good English for someone who’s never been out of Myanmar; Go-An, a
17-year-old kid who drives me nuts doing the exact same things I did as a
17-year-old (loud radio, playing the same song over and over again, smoking
reefer, and generally acting like he’s the center of the universe); KeKe, a
19-year-old who has recently fallen in love, and who just got caught making
long-distance calls to her sweetie using the center’s telephone—a major SOM scandal;
and Maposo, a large, strong, 50-ish Shan woman with seven children who, through
her cooking skills, is giving me the greatest gift of all: exquisitely normal
bowel movements.
(I regularly deal with two other mammals: Maxim, a
four-month-old chocolate Labrador who defecates wherever he damn well pleases,
thank you; and eight-year-old Nicky, one of the foulest-smelling German Shepherds
I’ve ever met. Nicky has taken a shine to me, and shows it by rubbing up
against me at every opportunity.)
Kalaw is 4,000 feet above sea level, and it’s surrounded by
mountains that go up another 2,000 feet. There are multiple benefits to the
terrain. This is the “cool season” in Myanmar, but at SOM Yangon the daily
temperature can still hit the high 80s/low 90s with high humidity. Here at SOM
Kalaw in early December I wake up to the 40s, wear a ski cap and thick sweater
during my 5 a.m. sit in the meditation hall, and then slowly peel off layers as
the temperature slides up into the 70s.
Next benefit: the view from a bamboo kuti (a small building for visiting monks to sleep in).
This particular kuti
overlooks a deep green valley filled with a mix of trees and farmland, and
looks across a couple of small hills to two of the highest mountains in the
area, both capped with their own monasteries and pagodas.
Meditation masters encourage their students to look at
objects in the world as paramattha
(“ultimate reality”). We’re not supposed to look at them as conceptual objects
such as trees, two-story brick houses, or attractive men/women, but as they
really are: colors and shapes, no more, no less. From the kuti the colors are bright blue, multiple hues of green, copper red
(for the soil), gold (on the many stupas in view), and bright whites or dark
greys, depending on the cloud cover. All with brief flashes of tropical
mountain bird color.
The kuti is rarely
occupied these days, and I’ve laid claim to its front porch now that Sandra has
absconded. I sit there every afternoon for 2-3 hours, doing my meditation
practice and occasionally marveling at all the lovely conceptual objects.
Another benefit of the elevation: if I leave the center,
hang a right, and climb up a steep 100 yards, I start walking on a hard clay
road that forks and forks and forks again as it meanders through the mountains.
There’s lots of squatters in them there hills—landless Myanmar citizens who are
clearing the land and moving in without permission. I have mixed feelings about
them. Odds are that many of them or their elders were pushed off their
legitimate farms by the military regime over the past 50 years, so I can
understand their desire to take back what was taken away. But too many are
cutting down all the trees and planting tea bushes and vegetable gardens on
absurdly steep terrain, causing huge amounts of erosion. They’re going for the
short-term gain, and no one’s around to stop them—or better yet, to help them
do things the right way.
On one walk I met a Nepalese family tending their small
vegetable garden—Daddy, his strikingly pretty 16-year-old daughter, and his 13-year-old
son. All three were fluent in English. They turned out to be Jehovah’s Witnesses;
it took less than five minutes for Daddy to take a stab at converting me. I managed
to turn the conversation toward his son, who told me he liked to read. I
innocently asked, “What’s your favorite book?” Daddy interceded, and in an icy,
no-nonsense voice said, “The Bible. He doesn’t need any other book.”
I’ve seen them a couple of other times on my walks. They
live in a shack with pirated electricity and no running water about a half-mile
from SOM. No evidence of a mother. The kids do not go to school. I hope the
daughter is safe.
So I’m the only yogi in paradise, and I will probably be the
only one until mid-January, when U Tejaniya (the SOM Yangon Sayadaw) may bring
a busload of yogis for a short visit. I must depend on my dhamma books and a
computer full of dhamma files and films to serve as my teachers for the next
six weeks, since the resident SOM Kalaw monk (a Vietnamese-born American
citizen) has been called back to California to take care of his 85-year-old teacher. The interim caretaker,
a Canadian monk who turned out to be a wonderful meditation instructor, had to
go back to his monastery in Myanmar’s Mon state last month.
For now, it’s just me and my hard disk.
