A Terabyte of Dhamma

As the only yogi at Shwe Oo Min Kalaw, and without a monk to talk to about my practice, I need to be especially careful about maintaining awareness and monitoring my mind. Intensive practice has pitfalls—all kinds of demons can arise on retreat. As I’ve been told time and again, the challenge is to accept them, invite them in for a cup of tea, and figure out why they’re such frequent visitors.

There’s a Tibetan saying that you should live at least two valleys away from your teacher, meaning that you have to be really motivated to visit him, schlepping up and down steep terrain to spend time with someone who knows you. That’s the old model, born from an agrarian culture during a time when a teacher’s workload was considerably lighter than those of today’s meditation masters, who use long-distance jets to lead retreats with yogis all over the world.

In a way I now have 50 teachers, and no need to even get out of bed. They’re all on my hard disk, with a handful on my iPod. I’ve got talks by the cream of Western teachers (Joseph Goldstein, Sharon Salzberg, Jack Kornfeld, Ajahn Sumedo) who spent time in the 1960s and 70s with dhamma heavyweights such as U Pandita, Mahasi Sayadaw, Dipa Ma, and Ajahn Chah. I’ve also got actual recordings of those four Asian masters (and dozens of others) with English translators. 

The source of this bounty? The Great Dhamma Hard Drive that is making its way around meditation centers in Myanmar, and I suppose in other countries, too.

Gone are the days when monks were told to leave their monasteries, to use their alms bowls for their meals, and to spread the Dhamma far and wide. Today the teachings might make their way from hard disk to hard disk via a small number of portable disk drives that contain a terabyte of dhamma-data. I’ve downloaded about 1/3, and even then I don’t think there’s any chance I’ll make it through all those audio, video, and text files before my demise.

Weighing in at 45 gigs is Sayadaw U Tejaniya, whose teachings I listen to more than the others. That’s funny for several reasons. He is a genuine meditation master—he was personally chosen by Shwe Oo Min to take over the position of Meditation Sayadaw when Shwe Oo Min stopped teaching. He is in great demand all over the world.

It seems strange that I should be listening to mp3 files of a teacher who I could easily go visit and listen to in person—he’s just an overnight express bus ride away. But the files I have were recorded at the Insight Meditation Center in Barre, Massachusetts. U Tejaniya led a month-long retreat there early last year (2012), and they paid his favorite translator to fly all the way from Singapore to assist him for the entire month. She is an excellent translator, and that makes all the difference. So I have over 30 hours of clear recordings of small groups of retreatants asking the same questions that Sayadaw hears all the time in his office in a Yangon suburb.

For a while here in Kalaw I had one-to-one interviews with a Canadian monk named U Khema. He was serving as the interim caretaker monk for the meditation center while the main monk was away taking care of his teacher in California. U Khema is the best teacher I’ve had during my year in Myanmar—not because he has the depth of knowledge or power or experience of U Tejaniya or other Burmese masters, but because he speaks my language, both linguistically and culturally.

U Khema and Paul during our trip to a elephant camp 20 miles from Kalaw.

His style of learning is the same as mine, a mix of hands-on doing and reading. I would often see him on the porch of his kuti reading a Buddhist text on his Kindle at noon, and I would look again at 1, 2, 3 and 4, and there he’d be, locked in. So when I asked him questions about certain defilements that arise again and again in the mind, he had a deep well of knowledge to share about how the whole process works. The Five Hindrances. Five Aggregates. Eightfold Path. Fourteen akusala cetasika (unwholesome mental factors). Seven bojjhanga (enlightenment factors). U Khema also knows all of their individual names in Pali, the ancient language that the Buddha spoke. The monk knows his stuff, and I don’t, so it was a good match.

He went back to his home monastery a month ago, so I’ve had to let go of my attachment to the idea of having regular access to a good teacher who knows me. There is a long history of bhikkus and bhikkunis who become resident monks at monasteries in order to be close to their favorite teachers, and who spend years with them so that there is some sense of connection similar to the Tibetan masters and the yogis who tramped over two mountain passes to visit them.

I will never have that connection with U Tejaniya, but I will benefit mightily from his books and recordings. Meanwhile, I’ve listened to all of Joseph Goldstein’s 46 talks on the Satipatthana Sutta, the core text of Theravada Buddhism. I’ve listened to 10 talks on the same topic by Bhikku Bodhi, an American monk who lives in Sri Lanka. Excellent stuff. Ajahn Sumedo’s humor always comes through in his recorded teachings, and Sharon Salzberg’s New York attitude comes through in hers.

I listen to at least one teaching per day, often in the hour just before I sleep. I’m spending an average of 2-3 hours daily with my Dhamma Disk, reading from the thousands of texts that are on it, listening to the many hundreds of talks, and watching the fifty or so films, including the fiction film Kundun, the PBS documentary on the life of the Buddha, and a few nature documentaries from PBS and BBC that are not really about dhamma, but give a sense of wonder about our planet.

Such is the path to nibbana in the 21^st century. I feel fortunate that long before I ever thought about coming to Myanmar, I had opportunities to listen to live teachings from a broad range of meditation masters, including some elderly Tibetans who were the last of their kind—educated in Tibetan monasteries before escaping to India in the 1950s and 60s.

I’ll just assume that they would react with equanimity to a yogi sitting in his Kalaw kuti with his earphones plugged into a Macintosh, looking for ways to make friends with his many defilements.