A Fighter's Heart: One Man's Journey Through the World of Fighting (35 page)

I was still waiting on word from Myanmar and hadn’t heard anything—about either training or fighting. In the meantime, I thought I should examine meditation to some degree. In Thailand, nearly every male will spend a rainy season at a temple at some point. It’s a part of Buddhism. Beya spoke wistfully of becoming a monk, once his fighting career was over. It was what he wanted more than anything. Many of the Japanese martial arts have a meditation component, the Zen. Apidej said it had helped his concentration, and maybe it could help mine. I knew from Virgil how important concentration could be.

I found a somewhat famous meditation center far in the north, called Wat Thaton, near Chiang Rai, close to the Myanmar border. The wat practiced
vipassana
meditation, although I couldn’t have told you what that meant. I knew you were supposed to be silent the whole time. That sounded like a challenge. Which led me to Chiang Rai and being picked up by a monk, Panyavudo, from the temple, who spoke perfect English, and a driver, Sukhit. Panyavudo asked me if I wanted to take a tour of the Golden Triangle. If I would pay for gas, we could do one.

“Sure,” I said.

It was good just to be out of the oppressive heat and grit of Bangkok, healing for the heart to be out in clean air and the countryside, with the jungle dark dull green on all sides and rounded hills and mountains rising around us. We drove through a series of towns and wandered the grounds of the ancient wats; it was interesting being the walking companion of a monk in orange robes. The Thais were respectful and the
farang
curious and staring.

Panyavudo was a young man, maybe thirty-five, small and slender with an acne-scarred face, a pleasant smile, and thick glasses. He began to fill me in on some of the basic tenets of Buddhism. He had been ordained about six years before, and briefly disrobed (become a layperson) for two months to sort out some family troubles. He had an eagerness to please that was touching, and a tremendous amount of nervous energy. We walked around on ancient wat that was slowly being reclaimed by the jungle, and he stepped carefully around ants on the ground, stopping to pay respects to the
chedi,
the big stone column or cone with the Buddhist relics inside. We looked over the rows of amulets and statues for sale; grassroots Buddhism in Thailand has a strong current of animism, and there is a thriving trade in amulets, charms, and lucky statues.

Back in the car, competing with the roar of the windows, I explained myself and the book I was writing to Panyavudo by saying briefly, “I don’t want to hurt anybody. I just enjoy the action and striving.” I wondered if that was true.

We drove up along the Mekong, a broad brown eel with its tiny ripples like scales in the humid sun. More temples and shrines, and then a brief stop at the Myanmar border. Panyavudo walked frenetically—he would have been right at home in New York—and I realized that this was a real treat for him. He got to leave the temple every two months, and he wanted to look around. His ankles were strangely black and blue, and I wondered why.

Back in the car and driving to the wat, I asked him about meditation and what I was going to learn. “You become aware of the processes of the body and mind,” he said. “By becoming aware, you can understand that there is no ownership of body or mind, that thoughts are just illusions, and that suffering can be overcome.”
Sounds good,
I thought, and leaned back and watched the green hills roll by and become more mountainous as we approached Wat Thaton. We turned in through some massive gates and wound up past lower temples and outbuildings (the wat exists on nine levels on the mountain) until we reached the Meditation Center. It was dark, and Panyavudo showed me to my little cabin and said he would see me in the morning. No computers, no cell phones, no reading. Nothing but meditation and reflection, eating and sleeping.

The cabins for the meditators were small white cottages set on stilts on the steep hills, surrounded by thick jungle, with one room and a little toilet with a bucket and bowl for bathing. The bed was a one-inch pad on the floor; there were two folding chairs and about ten feet by fifteen feet of hardwood floor. There was a sense of reduced scale, a little like Tokyo—the light switch next to the door was at mid-thigh.

I fell asleep and awoke sometime later in the dark to the ringing of bells and then a sonorous, amplified nasal chanting that went on for at least an hour, and then I fell back asleep, and in the morning walked down to the Meditation Center, through a shaded road with about ten cottages like mine and dogs lying idly about.

The view was breathtaking, out over the low, flat floodplain with a river snaking idly across it, to some rows of high and mysterious mountains in the far distance, like a vision of ancient Asia from an emperor’s palace. And then I went inside and began meditating.

The kind of meditation practiced at Wat Thaton was dynamic (moving)
vipassana
(“to see things as they really are”), and the key concept is mindfulness. Through meditation, in which you focus entirely on the immediacy of the action, on the
feeling
of the action, you build up the strength of your mind and your awareness. As your awareness grows, you become better able to see your own thoughts for what they are: illusions. You become able to see things more clearly, to see the truth through feelings such as greed, jealousy, and even joy. This leads to an end of suffering and, eventually, maybe, enlightenment. I was down.

I started learning the various kinds of meditation; there are sitting, standing, lying down, and walking versions, although in practice all anyone does is walk and sit. For walking, there were patterns on the floor of seven steps in one direction (for the petals on the lotus and as part of mindfulness and so on) and then a nearly military pivot and seven steps back in the same line. The idea is to focus entirely on the feeling of the movement, to be entirely present in the moment. There is no past and no future, just the present, and every time a thought creeps into your mind, you are supposed to let it leave and resume focusing on the movement.

The sitting meditation was similar, sitting cross-legged (or half or full lotus, if you could) and moving your arms in prescribed patterns, over the belly button, up to the heart, and back down to the knees. Again, the intention is to focus on the movement, being totally aware and present in that precise instant; every time your mind wanders, bring it back to the movements.

It was excruciating. I have never been so bored as I was during the first five days of meditation. It should have gotten better after three days, but apparently I have a noisy mind. Because you focus on every movement and are so present all the time, the days pass with agonizing slowness, every second is present and accounted for. Even the walking meditation can go on forever. I was put on a schedule: meditate for a half hour in one form (walking) and then switch (to sitting). I would check the clock after what felt like twenty minutes and see that a whole three minutes had passed. I cannot describe the boredom in sufficient terms.

The worst was sitting. Because I have very tight hamstrings and lower back, sitting cross-legged became painful quickly. Most first-time meditators can sit for ten or fifteen minutes without pain; for me, the pain started in five. And I was sitting for half an hour. In meditation, Panyavudo told me with his huge smile, “Pain is a friend. It is a reminder to mindfulness, and it tells us in the end that it is only pain, another illusion, and this helps our understanding.” He could sit for an hour and a half, and some monks can sit for four or more hours, but for them there is always pain, and dealing with it and working through it are part of the process. Sometimes the bones in your ankles would grind into the mats, and I realized why Panyavudo’s ankles were black and blue. Enlightenment through agony.

So I would sit and sweat as the pain came in waves from the back and knees and tendons, moving my arms faster and faster in an attempt to speed up time, trying to remain mindful, trying to stay straight but with my back invariably bowing, and the clock moving with indescribable slowness. The days, because of the focus on the intense instant present, become absolutely epic. They would go on and on and on and on…and I’d still be only halfway through. I did come to realize that time is a human concept with no reality; there is only the present, impermanent. And there is a tremendous difference between knowing something by having read or been told it, and
knowing
something, by having it become clear to you through intuition.

As a meditator at an intensive meditation retreat, I was not supposed to speak; eventually, I was supposed to stay in my room and “study,” just meditate, for the entire day.

The day began at three-thirty a.m. with bells, an ancient alarm clock, a call to chanting. The bells would ring, and then ring again, faster and faster until it was a continuous
ding-ding-ding,
and then a long pause, and then a repeat. Sometimes the dogs would join in, howling and yelping in the darkness. This invariably made me giggle.

After I heard the bells, I would put on my white clothes (laypeople wear white) and go to the chanting hall in the pitch-black darkness, leaving my flip-flops and umbrella (it was the rainy season) at the door. In Thailand, you never wear shoes inside anyone’s house, it’s disrespectful and dirty; and when you approach or enter a wat, you are expected to remove your shoes.

The chanting hall was a large building, like a small church, but with no pews or furniture, just a long, hardwood floor with thin mats laid down in strips. At the far end was a collection of large golden Buddhas in various postures, tapestries, pictures, and candles. On the floor in neat patterns were the monks’ cushions, inch-thick pads on which they sat, some brocaded or colored. At any given moment, about half would be occupied by monks in their orange or brown robes, sitting cross-legged or kneeling.

The chanting was led by a heavily tattooed, rail-thin older monk, or by the meditation master up on the dais with his back to us, facing the Buddhas. The chanting was in Pali, an ancient dead language from India, the home of the Buddha. The Buddhist scriptures, written five hundred years after Buddha’s death, are in Pali and Sanskrit. For many hundreds of years in Thailand, the monks had chanted without even knowing what they were saying, until sometime in the last century a monk decided that it was time to understand what he was saying every morning and evening. The Pali is a wailing, nasal, bubbling song, droning, rising and falling with a heavy cadence, and serves two purposes: to remember and pay homage to the Buddha, the Dhamma, or Dharma (his teachings), and the Sangha (his disciples, the body of monks around the world—themselves), and second, to train the breathing, as it is a difficult performance, with short, sharp inhalations and long, slow powerful chants. This was also the religious part of things, something I observed but didn’t take part in other than sitting quietly until my legs screamed and my back ripped holes of fire into me. It was the medieval aspect, the kowtowing and pressing the forehead to the floor, the unthinking worship of the Buddha.

After the chanting ended, we would meditate as a group; most of the monks would continue to sit, while the laypeople would get up, slowly, joints stiff and bent up like cripples, and begin the walking meditation.

I would walk for a half hour and then leave, go back to my room and put on shoes to walk up the mountain, as we were allowed to do walking meditation on this path. I would stride briskly and with some attempt at mindfulness, umbrella firmly in hand through the darkness, past the silent dogs and through the gloomy jungle. The road wound up and down, past smaller temples and a huge
chedi
being built and past the abbot’s and higher-ups’ ornate houses. It was strange to be alone in Thailand; you’re almost never alone. Eventually, after a mile or two and maybe a seven-hundred-foot climb, I would come out at the Standing Buddha, the best part of my day.

The Standing Buddha was a massive golden statue, thirty feet tall, on a high, raised, tiled platform, miles above the valley. The river ran below, thousands of feet down, through the thick Asian jungle, and wound mysteriously away into the mountains at my back. The view was incredible, distant mountains shrouded in low clouds, the storm-tossed sky ripped in blues and blacks as the dawn approached.

I would do my tai chi form out there on the high ledge, in front of the massive golden Standing Buddha. Almost immediately, my form had begun to feel better, the chi flowing from my palms. Ajahn Suthep, the meditation master, had shown me some
chi gung
exercises, and I tried those, too.

Afterward, on the walk back, I would often meet the only other
farang
at the retreat, a quiet German girl named Britta, and some of the hill tribesmen coming up from their valley behind the mountain. On my first morning, a young boy, maybe six years old, silently fell into step with me for most of the walk back, and I slowed to accommodate his churning short legs, and we didn’t speak but walked together.

Sometimes I walked up in the rain clouds, with mist thick and low around me and water saturating my breath, and sometimes I walked in the torrential rainy-season deluge, the water sheeting in streams across the path, waves and ripples and eddies forming.

Back at my hut, the light cool and growing, I would “shower” with the bucket in the cold water and nap and wait for the food, which arrived at seven forty-five in a column of covered pots stacked together by a clever handle. This was my other favorite time of the day, I took a lot of photos of my food because it was so pretty. But you had to make sure that you ate only half and saved the rest for lunch, because that was all you got. Also, you had to keep the food safe from ants. There was a poisonous or repellent chalk that did the trick; you would draw a circle on the floor with that and put the food inside it.