Some mold-breaking
was required after 51 weeks of teaching and meditating, so I bought a bus
ticket to the far southeast arm of Myanmar that borders Thailand for several
hundred miles. Some people describe it as the long tail of a parrot that’s
facing west.
It’s one of many
areas in Myanmar that are remarkably undeveloped for this day and age, in great
part due to an insurgency—in this case, the Karen (emphasis on the second
syllable), who currently fill many refugee camps on the Thai side of the
border. Due to a historical mix of political and economic repression, lack of
development, and people shooting at each other, I got to see this during my
last week in that country:
Maungmagan
beach—in fact, most of the coast of southeast Myanmar—looks like the beaches of
Thailand in the 1960s and 70s. I took a three-hour beach walk to the north from
a short row of tables under grass roofs where you could eat fresh fish and
drink coconut milk, and I did not see a single human being. For part of that hike
I took off all of my clothes and smeared some sunscreen on my tush. Sorry if
that image affects your appetite, but that’s what I did, walked naked on an
empty beach, with an occasional splash in the surf. Walking south from the same
point I saw about a dozen little kids running and splashing and giggling, and a
couple of high-end resorts with signs facing an empty beach advertising their
karaoke bars.
My reaction: oh my
god oh my god oh my god oh my god, I’ve got this whole bloody tropical beach to
myself. And the water is cool and clean and the fishermen throw their nets in
the water and the kids ignore me, while their elders look at me as if I’m the
very first foreigner they’ve ever seen, and everyone’s being friendly and
showing a deference that I don’t deserve, and the girls are all so pretty and
the young guys so buff, and the local teens can’t wait until low tide so they
can set up a space to play soccer on the hard sand, and I can go for another
walk and swim and come back and sit in the shade and drink another lime juice,
and I want to live forever and never ever ever have this place change, not one little
bit.
I wonder if Buddha
would laugh, or roll his eyes, or sigh deeply—I just spent seven months trying to
make an awareness of impermanence the 24/7 default mode in my mind. But then
again, I can’t picture any of those guys—Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, God—chillin’ with
a tall glass of lime juice or walking naked on the beach. Even the Hindus tend
to put clothes around the waists of Hanuman the monkey and Ganesh the elephant,
though I do like they way they show Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva with their consorts.
Sensual pleasures and a mistaken view of permanence—two major hurdles to
liberation I’ve been told, several times a day. I think about those concepts as
I strip down, drink fresh fruit juice, and eat fish caught just minutes ago.
Pure
greed, the mind was filled with it during my
visit to Maungmagan. I don’t want this beach to change for
another millennia. I want other people who can appreciate this beach on the
same level I do—deeply, spiritually, Buddhistically—to have the opportunity to
sit on a cushion for many months and then be challenged by greed and a sense of
permanence afterwards. I don’t want this beach to be the destination of
thousands of 20-somethings to have all-night full moon parties with lots of alcohol
and music and dancing and rutting, mostly because my participation in such base
activities requires another rebirth.
That’s
what they do on some of the beaches of Thailand, where I’m headed next.
