Monastery Notes

Three months later

- Mindfulness In Plain English

As some variant of curing my hedonic treadmill, I’ve had more than one friend recommend time in a ten-day Goenke Vipassana retreat or quote Sam Harris’s podcast by heart. I too have been hopeful, inspired by the Thich Nhat Hanh quote about washing the dishes. I imagined myself joining the enlightened club, sitting peacefully for days on end and finding all the answers.

This has become a bit of a trope. “One of the prominent shifts in the religious landscape of North America in recent years is the explosion of Buddhism into various facets of American culture,” says David McMahon in The Making of Modern Buddhism.¹ Jonathan Haidt (Happiness Hypothesis), reports meditation as one of the few ways to sustainably increase your level of baseline happiness (others include SSRIs and cognitive-behavioral therapy). And, The New Yorker Cartoons recently posted their satirical 30 Most Disappointing Under 30 on Instagram. Second slide of the carousel: Will Heller, 26. “After a month at a Zen silent-meditation retreat, Heller went back to his job at Goldman Sachs as a commodities trader in oil and gas.”

Still, trope or not, there are few times where you can even try to stop running on that treadmill. This was one of mine.

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Our cohort met in August. Sixteen of us gathered in Chiang Mai for orientation, fresh-faced for the three months ahead. Most, predictably, were from small liberal arts colleges. We took a flight to Delhi, an eight-hour train to Gaya, then a bumpy bus to Bodh Gaya, a Buddhist pilgrimage town in northern India. At five in the morning, we arrived at the Burmese Vihar, the monastery for Burmese monks making pilgrimage to Bodh Gaya. Though we lived in a separate building from the monastics, Bodh Gaya’s religiosity permeated through the town. There are more than 40 Buddhist temples in the area, and the Bodhi tree under which the Buddha attained enlightenment is a major Buddhist religious site.

If you visit Bodh Gaya before September, you’ll sweat yourself to sleep. So, pilgrimage flourishes in the colder months. From March to September, the town population is almost purely local. In an attempt to blend in, our program coordinator took us shopping for kurtas and pajamas before we arrived. This was futile. We were the only non-Indian people in a twenty-mile radius. Every year, the locals referred to the wide-eyed cohort as “Robert Group”, a leftover from the previous coordinator’s run nearly a decade ago.

The meditations course met twice a day, morning and evening, for about an hour each. Morning meditations tended to be purely sitting and walking, whereas evening meditations typically added on a half hour of lecture. It was split into three units, each lasting three weeks and covering a major Buddhist meditation tradition. The first was Theravada, the second Zen, and the third Tibetan Buddhism, or Vajrayana. Each section was taught by master meditators of that tradition.

U Hla Myint, an ex-Burmese monk from the Mahasi Sayadaw tradition, taught us Theravada meditation. In the mornings, we’d shuffle in the meditation hall five or ten minutes late, and he would pad in after, clothed entirely in white, close his eyes, ring the singing bowl, and sit without a word. When he did speak, his gentle voice was barely audible through the microphone. U Hla Myint emphasized metta, or lovingkindness practice, a technique to enhance concentration. At the conclusion of each session, we would chant together from a little white pamphlet our wish for all beings to be well and happy. It seemed to work – he had a calm to him.

Zen, on the other hand, was taught by a round-faced Japanese man known only as Sensei. He had found meditation in his youth and trained formally at Eiheiji, one of the two head temples of Japanese Soto Zen. He flew to us from Melbourne, bringing Australian practitioners John and Isabel in tow. His style was different.

U Hla Myint liked to enter the meditation hall after we’d all milled in so we wouldn’t feel embarrassed to be late. Sensei had no such reservations. If we arrived at 5:31AM, he’d bark, “Late!” as we bowed to the small bronze Buddha statue in the center of the room. The Buddha watched, ensnared in incense smoke.

The first time Sensei held court, we were all made aware of a seating chart. We sat on prim cushions, all facing the Buddha, in a sharp-cornered rectangle around the room. He detailed the precise order in which we needed to walk in and out of meditation. John, who had taken a 14-hour flight to follow Sensei to Bodh Gaya, accidentally walked in front of the Buddha instead of behind it. “Wrong, wrong, wrong! Please, listen to me!” Sensei burst. John bowed apologetically.

Despite Sensei’s insistence on rigid spines and perfect hand shapes, he laughed frequently and easily, catching us off-guard with the depth of his belly boom. Unlike U Hla Myint, he offered not only office hours but also the offer to grab dinner, during which we could quiz him about his time in Berkeley or thoughts on Zen superiority.

Our third unit, Tibetan Buddhism, was taught by Chokyi Nimya Rinpoche. Chokyi Nimya is a Tibetan Lama from two distinct lineages (Drikung Kagyu and Nyingma.) He had a widespread following, wide cheeks, and the crows’ feet of someone who has spent most of his life smiling. I was on setup crew for the meditation hall during his section, so each evening, I laid out cushions for the fifty or so followers that had tracked him to Bodh Gaya. They were particularly determined. They had come from all over – South America, Nepal, Australia – to listen to his lectures in Bodh Gaya. One woman crashed our office hours to ask the Rinpoche how she could deal with her anger. Chokyi Nimya, due to his notoriety, only taught for a week. He made a grand exit by blessing us all, hopping in his security-detailed SUV, and waving goodbye with both hands. “I love you!” he chirped. His followers streamed behind the Hummer tearfully, calling, “We love you too!”

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I resonated most with Theravada, which is by now relatively common in western practice. It was popularized by the ten-day Vipassana retreat, as well as modern American teachers Jack Kornfield, Sharon Salzburg, and Joseph Goldstein (founders of the Insight Meditation Society). Theravada meditation begins with samatha, a training focused on a single object and mindful awareness of the body. It’s intended to build concentration, a prerequisite for vipassana. The aim of vipassana is meditative insight (and eventually enlightenment). It works in partnership with Buddhist philosophy – secular practitioners who practice vipassana over time often reach conclusions in agreement with Buddhist ideas such as selflessness (anatta) or interdependence.

To my distress, mosquitoes flourished in Bodh Gaya. Something about my blood seemed to draw them in, and they were particularly prolific during our evening sitting sessions. During meditation, little itches peppered my skin. Never knowing if they were tactile hallucinations or vicious bites, I became tense. I anticipated the moment when I’d inevitably try to shift without drawing attention when I felt that signature prickle. My thoughts swarmed in anticipation of mosquitoes. Even when there were no mosquitoes, I thought about when mosquitoes might come. My refusal to accept them trapped me between flinching on constant defense and accepting defeat.

Embarrassed, I never confessed my mosquito predicament to U Hla Myint. I imagined his confusion, wondering why I couldn’t let my thoughts drop their constant guard. But relaxing thoughts dripped of unproductivity. When a problem pops up, my de facto is that I haven’t thought enough, and I’ve simply overlooked the silver bullet, a third option that lets me escape two dreaded choices.

I couldn’t decipher the difference between acceptance vs giving up vs admitting that I was never going to find the silver bullet. But continuing to watch my thoughts led to a natural swell and fall. If I could wait out the bites, they’d fail to draw my attention. There was no defeat because there was no more battle.

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There is no real way around the hedonic treadmill except to stop resisting it, a Buddhist Catch-22. It’s no surprise that the answer is more elusive than a few months in a monastery. No wonder Will Heller went back to Goldman Sachs – it was easier. Intellectualizing impermanence is one thing; living the experience is another.

1. “Western Buddhists”, “Buddhism in the west”, “Buddhism in America”, and “modern Buddhism” are not perfect terms. I use it in reference to western practitioners who generally see meditation as the primary practice of Buddhism, view it as a philosophy over a religion, and dismiss supernatural elements. They are an overrepresentation of Buddhism in America – an estimated 75% of Buddhists in America are heritage Buddhists, whose practice tends to look different.