The first hour of meditation, before sunrise, was the most beautiful. A cool breeze, laden with fragrance, blew in from the valley, crossed the terrace, grazed those triangular, motionless masses of people wrapped in blankets, and disappeared into the hillside forest, still so dark. The presence of John, swathed as he was in that white blanket pulled halfway across his face, was heartening. At his feet, the general was proof that meditation was possible: he remained perfectly still, yet somehow he was very far away from the rest of us. I sat there and studied that silent scene of peace carefully before closing my eyes. It seemed to me that the group was releasing an enormous amount of energy, and that the shared effort was lifting each individual effort along with it.

On the morning of the eighth day I managed to lift mine. My legs were hurting badly and I was on the verge of giving up again, when suddenly the suffering eased, the pain stopped frightening me, began to dissolve, and disappeared. I had done it. My mind was no longer a monkey leaping from branch to branch. The pleasure was immense. Then I heard John's words: "let go... let go... let nothing hold you... nothing....." Even the pleasure of having tamed the mind, of having mastered the pain, was fleeting: it was anicca (impermanence), and I let it go. I returned to the point where the breath touches the skin, and I seemed to see myself split in two: the mind, outside my body, observing the body, which had been reduced to an insensible skeleton through which I could feel and see the dawn breeze blowing. A sensation I had never experienced before. I heard John's voice pronounce his amen and the gong announcing breakfast, but I remained motionless, as though I had shed some portion of my heavy humanity.

The hours that followed were not quite as extraordinary, yet time passed without my waiting impatiently for it to end. Meditating was no longer an endurance test against the clock, like holding yourself underwater until your lungs feel ready to burst. Meditating had become what it was meant to be: an exercise in concentration. I had the impression of having learned something, the way one learns to swim or to read. Now it was up to me. I had put a bridle on that beast called my mind; now it was a matter of deciding which way to ride.

I used the midday break to go meditate by the waterfall. After the anapana (breath-observation practice), I entered the skin, lost myself in a single cell, and the void opened before me. Golden images of familiar faces came to meet me: my mother, my father... Then came unknown faces; then colors of extraordinary beauty. I had done it.

I had fierce cramps again, and no small amount of difficulty, but by now I knew they were temporary and that I was capable of returning to that door and walking through it. What I had come to understand above all was the greatness of John and his method: reaching the idea of impermanence, reaching the awareness of anicca, by using the pain that stillness produces. Once I had accepted that this pain was as fleeting as everything else, the great step had been taken.

That experience reinforced my hypothesis: a blind faith in science had robbed us Westerners of a rich store of knowledge. By turning onto the highway of scientific learning, we had forgotten all the other paths that, at one time, we too had known. I had my proof: pain is not merely a physical phenomenon to be managed with a pill. You can arrive at the same result by training the mind.

Was that the answer to Leopold's question? Was it possible that learning to use the mind was something to pack in a suitcase and carry with me, so that when I returned to Europe I would have more to explain than a handful of old sailors' yarns?

The final hour of meditation was devoted to the practice of loving-kindness (metta). The idea was that, now that the course was ending and our minds had been calmed and purified, we would all share the merits we had gained through practice. It was a hymn to love, and John brought it to a close by reading the magnificent letter of Saint Paul to the Corinthians: "Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not love, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal... and though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and though I have all faith so that I could remove mountains, and have not love, I am nothing...." And nothing is what twenty centuries of thought have added to that.

Afterward, a long list of people was recited, to whom we dedicated our gratitude and a share of the merits for having contributed to the course. Among them was the owner of one of the most famous massage parlors in Bangkok, who had reportedly provided all our vegetarian meals. That's Thailand for you.

We were at last released from our vows and from the commitment to observe the Noble Silence. That evening a dinner would be held, not vegetarian and well supplied with wine, to celebrate the end of our retreat and give the participants a chance to talk and get to know one another. That was not what I wanted. I picked up my backpack and left.

Dan Reid's house was half an hour's drive from Pongyang; I arrived at sunset. It was a magnificent house: built entirely of wood in the old Thai style, it stood on the bank of a river and had an enormous terrace over the water. Dan, who studied Chinese at Berkeley, lived fifteen years in Taiwan and learned Tai Chi Chuan and Kung Fu, and is versed in and practices various religions, from Taoism to Lamaism. Dan is also someone who is searching. He is convinced that in the Chinese and Tibetan past there existed a wisdom now lost, and he uses his vast knowledge of the language as a key to open that forgotten strongbox. He has written books on Taoist methods for staying healthy, living long, and remaining sexually active. Yuki, his wife, is devoted to Chinese occult sciences and is, like Dan, a great expert in meditation.

We dined on three different kinds of rice and tiny squid. They were the first living creatures I had seen on my plate in some time, and they aroused a certain revulsion in me.

We talked about gems and stones that, when worn on the body, attract energy and ward off danger. Yuki said she believed in the dematerialization of certain objects. She explained that when she was a girl, a woman had bent the bones of her hand to force two gold bracelets onto her arm, where they stayed. One day she woke to find that one of those bracelets had vanished. There was no way she could have lost it. They searched everywhere but could not find it. The only possible explanation was that it had dematerialized. It had become energy. Yuki said that old Chinese stories are full of events of this kind.

Dan was writing a Chinese cookbook and told us about an afternoon he had spent at a new restaurant in Canton, a very special one. The tables were arranged on three levels around an enormous iron cage in which various animals were on display, destined to serve as food: dogs, snakes, monkeys, bears, and other specialties. One of the monkeys had no hands, because a customer had wanted only the palms. Once the wound had been cauterized with a red-hot iron, the poor creature was returned to the cage, where it waited, screaming in pain, for a customer who might want to eat its brain alive. The cooks in their white uniforms went in and out of the cages carrying the pieces the customers had ordered, and the wretched animals, who had by now understood what fate awaited them, would begin shrieking like mad every time someone dressed in white approached, even if they were only heading to the bathroom.

"In the next life," I said, "in that restaurant the monkeys will be the cooks and the cooks will be the apes."

"Notice, notice," Dan replied. "You're still Western and Christian. You need to believe there is justice somewhere. For a Buddhist, on the other hand, it doesn't work that way." I had to admit that ten days of meditation had not rid me of the desire to settle scores with the wicked.

I slept out on the terrace and slept soundly. I woke at five with no need of a gong, went to place three sticks of incense in the room of the Buddhas, and meditated facing the river for more than an hour.

I felt very well, strong and purified. Those ten days of silence, abstinence, and effort had renewed me deeply. It was the 23rd of January and, according to the Chinese calendar, there were still two weeks to go before 1993 ended and, with it, my year of not boarding airplanes. But I felt a powerful desire to reassert myself as a Florentine, to take my destiny back into my own hands and defy the prohibition I had been living alongside for thirteen months.

At breakfast I announced that I would return to Bangkok by plane.

"You're right," said Yuki. "Today is an extremely auspicious day for you." When she had risen, Yuki went to meditate in the room of the Buddhas and saw my incense sticks. She had read my future in the way the ash fell. "There is no problem at all. Truly: no problem," she kept saying. And it gave me enormous pleasure. Did that mean I believed in messages written in ash? Why on earth not.

It was a Sunday and, having made no reservation, finding a seat on the Chiang Mai–Bangkok flights was not easy. I waited for hours and hours at the airport. Then I was called for flight TG 119. A good number? I wondered, as though following some old habit I couldn't quite name.

Everything unfolded in perfectly ordinary fashion: the little tune, the seatbelts, the takeoff, the anonymity of the other passengers... I closed my eyes, concentrated on the point where my breath touches the skin, and continued to know anicca until I felt the wheels touch down on the runway at Bangkok airport.

I remembered something the general had said in one of the Evening Discourses: if one dies while meditating, and the mind is still in that final moment, the reincarnation will take place in a realm of great peace and tranquility.

That chance I let slip by.

Sanuk