I watched John meditate on his platform, just slightly above me, wrapped in a white blanket and motionless as a plaster saint. He looked relaxed and focused; his forehead was smooth, his lips curved into the faintest smile that struck me as almost mocking, as if behind those closed eyes he could see something I was being denied, as if those large ears with their wide lobes were catching something beyond the silence of the natural world. John had taken that first step. Toward what "wisdom," I couldn't say, but toward something that produced a calm floating around him like a halo.
What a strange story his was. He had been born in Pennsylvania in 1930, the son of a humble mining family. He started out working as a mechanic, then as a photographer. While completing his military service, he was posted to Japan: the trials of war criminals in Tokyo were drawing to a close, and John was sent to photograph the defendants as their death sentences were read aloud. Once discharged, he returned to the United States, studied at university, and managed to get into the CIA. There he was trained in a very particular skill: opening and closing all manner of locks without anyone noticing. Locks on houses, offices, embassies, even safes. His missions consisted of arriving in a city, spending weeks casing a building in order to enter it, photocopying documents, and returning home. In 1950 he was sent to Trieste, and afterward to Rome. He arrived in Thailand in 1954 to train the border police. There he was struck by Buddhism and began to meditate. Several years passed, and the CIA concluded that their agent had lost his mind, so they granted him a disability pension for "occupational illness." In the meantime, John managed the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok for a spell, then married, had two children, and went on meditating until meditation became his new mission.
In the third Evening Discourse on the Dhamma, on "the path of purification, of detoxification, of truth" (language that turned my stomach), John said that the Buddha's great contribution was understanding that the essence of the world lies in its instability, its lack of permanence, or anicca. All suffering flows from that. The only way out of pain is to become conscious of that anicca.
And so, after three days of anapana (concentration on the point just below the nose where the breath touches the skin, becoming aware of the sensations of contact, warmth, and the movement of air), we moved on to the real thing: vipassana, or insight meditation. Now the task was to direct that "magnifying glass, that beam of attention honed by concentration in the mind," toward the contemplation of one's own body.
We had to begin by fixing the entire mind on that point below the nose, then move it upward toward the center of the head (I understood then why so many statues of the Buddha have a flame at that spot), and from there, starting at the highest point of the body, very slowly and without losing control, we were to carry the mind across the skin and beneath it, through the skull and into the interior of the brain, through the eyes and nose, then descend gradually into the chest (the lungs, the heart, the veins, the bones, the stomach), and still further down, into the legs and all the way to the tips of the toes. We were not to think of anything else; the mind was to be like a flashlight aimed into the darkness of a cave, registering each sensation and recognizing how every one of them is transitory, how pain, pleasure, the brush of wind, a sound, are always passing away. "Know anicca.... Keep knowing anicca.... Anicca is everything," John repeated in a slow, deep voice. To know anicca. Hour after hour, day after day. Without exchanging a word with anyone, and remaining conscious of every gesture, every step while walking, every bite while eating, even outside the meditation sessions. We could feel each sip of water traveling down toward our stomach, settling there.
Taking turns on the platform with the general, John began his meditation hours with a prayer I came to look forward to with genuine pleasure:
Que todos los seres puedan tener paz y felicidad.Que todos los seres puedan liberarse de la ignorancia, de los deseos, de las aversiones.
Que todos los seres puedan liberarse del sufrimiento, del dolor, de los conflictos.
Que todos los seres puedan llenarse de infinita gentileza amorosa y ecuanimidad.
Que todos los seres puedan alcanzar la total iluminación.
(Literally: May all beings have peace and happiness. May all beings be free from ignorance, from desire, from aversion. May all beings be free from suffering, from pain, from conflict. May all beings be filled with infinite loving kindness and equanimity. May all beings attain complete enlightenment.)
And I waited for his amen with even greater pleasure, because with it came the end of the torture. I was making no progress at all. With enormous effort and discomfort, I managed to sit stiller than at first, but I hadn't come there for that. My goal was to learn to meditate, and my results amounted to precisely nothing. What was happening to me was exactly what a famous monk well-versed in meditation had once told John: "I have seen a hen sit motionless for three days while she incubated her eggs, but she never became enlightened."
As the days went by, I found John more and more convincing. There was nothing false or presumptuous about him. He was a simple man who believed he had discovered a great truth. He was a layman performing an exercise that was not necessarily religious, but was certainly spiritual.
Every time he entered or left the meditation terrace, he turned toward the Buddha and greeted him with his hands joined at chest height: simply a gesture of gratitude and respect for having shown him the path of the Dhamma. There wasn't the slightest trace in him of that cheap religiosity you find in so many other converts.
Could he be the "superior person" the young fortune-teller in Kengtung had said I would find? The facts seemed to fit the prophecy perfectly. But when John explained in his evening discourse that in his early days in Thailand no one had been willing to teach him to meditate, until he finally found his great teacher in Rangoon, I felt a faint chill run through me. "U Ba Khin taught me," he said. Yes! That was the same name! "You must follow the method of U Ba Khin," the young man from Kengtung had told me, "it is the best one for someone like you." And here I was, following it.
U Ba Khin was Burmese. Born in 1899, he entered the British colonial administration and rose through its ranks. When the Union of Burma gained independence in 1948, he was appointed director general of the Ministry of Economy. A devout Buddhist, he had been drawn to meditation since his youth, and he resolved to make this spiritual practice accessible to laypeople, something the monks had monopolized for centuries. It had been a simple choice: either you became a monk, or meditation was out of reach.
U Ba Khin began by offering courses to his employees at the ministry; then, in 1952, he founded the International Meditation Centre in Rangoon. By the time he died in 1971, meditation had become a spiritual exercise open to anyone, as it had been two thousand five hundred years earlier, in the time of the Buddha. His method concentrated all the effort into a course of just ten days, so that a layperson could return to ordinary life with the ability to meditate independently.
According to one of the anecdotes John would tell to liven up his Evening Discourses, U Ba Khin's first disciple was a stationmaster. Traveling through a remote region of Burma as a railway inspector, U Ba Khin went in search of a renowned teacher, accompanied by the man in charge of the zone's only station. When they arrived, a nun told them that the master was very busy and was not receiving anyone. "But we have come from very far away, and we only wish to present our respects," said U Ba Khin. At the top of a long pole stood a sort of hut-nest made of bamboo leaves, where the monk had been shut away for several days, meditating. A small door opened, a cloud of flies poured out, and then U Ba Khin saw the head of the arahant appear.
"What are you looking for?" the monk asked simply.
"Nirvana," U Ba Khin replied.
"And how do you expect to reach it?"
"By understanding anicca."
"Very well. Then teach it to others," said the arahant. And, closing the door, he returned to his meditation.
U Ba Khin instructed the stationmaster to adopt the lotus position and asked him to exhale while concentrating his attention on the point where the breath touches the skin.
Having brought meditation within everyone's reach gave new life to the practice and made it easier to spread throughout the West. John was one of U Ba Khin's first disciples, and the teacher himself authorized him to teach in Europe.
"So, master, since you know the West, you won't take offense," I said, taking advantage of the one moment when, called to his bungalow to report on my progress in meditation, I was permitted to break my Noble Silence. "You won't take offense if I tell you that in all these days I have not managed to meditate for a single minute; that instead of concentrating on my nose, my mind has done everything imaginable: from repainting my country house to drawing up plans to expand my library. Instead of thinking about my breathing, I've thought about things I need to write and about how absurd it feels to be here. When you say to think of the 'throat,' I think about squeezing yours, because you're subjecting me to this torture. When you say 'legs,' I think about the ones beneath the skirts of all the Thai women around me. Even that old ugly one in the last row."
John laughed, genuinely amused.
"Don't despair," he said. "Everything you're describing is passing. It will end. Your mind may not have been under any kind of control for centuries. And you expect to tame it just like that? In a few days? Wait. Keep at it. Keep knowing anicca."
The idea that my mind had gone unexercised "in all my previous lives" made me laugh. But who knows? It could be true.
What I have always loved most about Buddhism is its tolerance, the absence of sin, the lack of that dull weight we Westerners carry permanently on our backs and that, when you get down to it, forms the long tail of our civilization: guilt. Nothing in Buddhist countries is considered truly reprehensible. No one throws anything in your face, no one sermonizes or tries to teach you a lesson. That is why they are agreeable places, places where many young Westerners who travel there in search of freedom feel completely at home.
Buddhism leaves you in peace: it never asks anything of you, and certainly not that you convert to Buddhism. One of the prohibitions governing Buddhist monks is that they may not teach their religion to anyone who has not expressly asked for it; another, quite interesting one, is that they may not boast of their progress in meditation. Buddhism always lets you be whatever you want to be. It says one should not kill, yet everyone kills. And murderers? That's their problem. They'll have bad reincarnations! No one tries to deliver justice here and now. On the contrary: it is not our place to do so. For the same reason, charity is not a moral duty. In fact, helping the poor prevents them from freeing themselves from their negative karma; taking care of a leper means blocking their salvation through suffering and depriving them of a positive rebirth. Is the neighbor's house on fire? That must have something to do with his previous life.
More than a religion, Buddhism is a way of living; it is an interpretation of the world from the point of view of a peasant society that, living always very close to nature, needs to make sense of nature's absolute cruelty. There is no justice in nature; accounts are never settled there. So why demand that accounts be settled among human beings, if they too are part of nature?
Buddhism has no ambitions of conquest, either. It is not missionary, it does not hunt for souls. You want to be a Buddhist? Fine, getting there is your problem. That is why meditation was never actively taught. And it is no coincidence that the global spread Buddhism is experiencing today, beyond the Tibetan phenomenon, is due mainly to Western converts who, having never lost their crusading instinct, open centers everywhere to propagate the faith.
When all is said and done, if taken seriously and carried to its logical conclusions, Buddhism is the negation of civil society and, by extension, of progress. If everything is transitory, if there is no escaping the law of cause and effect, and if the only salvation lies in cultivating indifference toward life, in meditating one's way out of the terrible cycle of birth and death, then nothing matters, everything is futile, everything should come to a stop: a vision of profound pessimism with nihilistic consequences.
What kind of society would result if its members took these ideas to their logical conclusions? A genuinely Buddhist society could only be motionless and inert. Of course, in practice no such society has ever existed. They have all gone on functioning thanks to a formula of extreme tolerance: they have allowed monks to meditate (generally only the least gifted ones, while the more intelligent devoted themselves to doctrine) and have allowed ordinary people to "earn merit" by keeping the monasteries alive through donations. Common mortals went on living according to their nature, while the monks served by their example to keep alive the memory of all the virtues the rest could not attain. In this way a balance was struck, and society moved forward, setting aside the pessimism.
Sanuk