VIII. Dharma Talks

On days off, when Maow wasn’t testing my survival skills, Tom sought to enrich my spirit. Tom was a lanky Swede, the most easy-going man I met in Thailand, which is saying a lot. No matter which direction fate took him, Tom went along without much fuss. As a young man, he joined the Merchant Marines to see the world; he didn’t care which country. When he happened to land in Thailand and happened to discover Buddhism, he happened to become a monk. After about a year at the monastery, while on a visa renewal trip to Bangkok, Maow saw him walking down the street and, deciding on the spot that he would make a fine husband, took him home with her. He was okay with that as well. For the past three years, they ran tours together in the jungle.

Tom still had a love for Buddhism and would talk about it to anyone who would listen. I had an on-again, off-again, flirting relationship with the religion for years, but never delved too deeply. Having precious little to read and no television, I accepted Tom’s books and tutorials. He took me to local monasteries and even arranged for an audience with his former abbot, a wizened, smiling, bald man who could have been dipped in gold and placed on an altar. Since I didn’t speak much Thai, the meeting consisted of me smiling uneasily at the foot of the abbot, who seemed to gaze directly into the back of my brain. This went on for several long minutes before the abbot made an obscure hand gesture towards me. This meant, Tom said, that I was to sit and meditate for the next hour with the abbot. I wasn’t exactly prepared for this, but how do you say “no” to the Buddha? I couldn’t even say “no” in Thai. Before we began, Tom taught me the traditional Thai mantra, “Pu-,” with every inhale, and “toh,” with every exhale. Over the course of the hour, my mind stayed with the mantra a total of maybe three minutes. Tom assured me that this would get better with practice, as would the knee and the back pain.

On the ride back home, we passed a Traditional Thai Massage parlor. I convinced Tom that he owed my aching back that much, so we stopped in. As our buttocks were being dabbed with hot sacks of herbs by chattering masseuses, Tom told me about his time in the monastery, “When you first get there, you think it’s great, but after a few months, the novelty wears off. It’s not that glamorous, sleeping on a stone bed with a wooden pillow, waking up every single morning at 4:30. It’s just a job after a while, a sixteen hour, seven day a week job.”

I asked him if it was worth it. He said it was for the occasional glimpses, moments when his mind would “pop open like a cork,” and then everything would be clear. But these moments were fleeting; he knew the process took a lifetime. His long-term strategy was to return to the monastery when he was sixty and finish out his life as a monk.

As our respective masseuses kneeled on top of us and bent us into a variety of shapes, Tom told me, between groans, about some of the older monks who, having been regularly meditating for decades, developed telepathic abilities. Once, when Tom was thinking of quitting, one of these elders convinced him to stay, referring to an incident in Tom’s past which he never told anyone about. “I don’t know how else he could have known. I think maybe (Christ!) when you meditate for a long time, it clears out the noise in your mind and you (Fuck!) can access some kind of shared consciousness (oh, that’s better).”

He wanted to develop that in himself, but was warned that chasing after those powers was considered “off the path.” If certain abilities developed, he was to note them, but let them go. “Go back to the breathing, always go back to the breathing,” they told him. The only time he should use these abilities was if it would help somebody. Anything else was considered a dangerous ego feed.

While my masseuse made me painfully aware of my body’s limitations, I realized that my ideas of Buddhism were just as limited, especially after Tom told me the story of the young monk who was stuck in a state of bliss. The monk thought he had reached Nirvana and he had stopped progressing. The abbot brought in a specialist monk from another monastery, a “fixer” (I pictured Harvey Keitel with a shaved head and saffron robes). He came to shock the young monk out of his blissful state. It all happened in private over many days. Tom didn’t see the procedure; he thought maybe it was like cult deprogramming, or maybe like the eye-clamp scene in A Clockwork Orange. I probably would have been as content with the blissful state as the young monk. I always thought that bliss and Nirvana were the same thing.

We drove home in silence, our bodies relieved, relaxed, stretched out, and smelling like Tom Yam with lemongrass, each lost in our own thoughts. I had no idea what enlightenment, or Buddhism, was really all about. I had a lot to learn and over the next few months, in between tours, Tom was happy to oblige me.