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MANAGE YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONHOT CHOCOLATE WAS the one luxury we were permitted. You made it yourself with a combination of boiling water, mysterious bulk chocolate powder, powdered milk, copious amounts of sugar, and — if you wanted to be spiritually correct — no ants. You had to blow the ants (nonviolently, of course) off each of the tins before opening them. As I assembled my drink at the close of lunch, I had to blow three times for each tin, harder each time, saying, Blowing . . . blowing, to myself. I noticed Smiling Daniel, empty mug in hand, looking at my strenuous efforts and smiling even more than usual.
“These ants have extremely good traction,” I whispered. He nodded. He was a lanky, yet somehow graceful, twenty-year-old with angelic good looks. His viking mop of blond hair had been shaved off the day before, leaving a stubbly pate, as well as a gash where our cook’s razor had gone awry.
“How’s the practice going?” he asked. He made it sound like the next reality tv show: The Practice — five monks in an inner-city Zen center; their lives, their loves, their quest for self-annihilation.
“Oh, up and down,” I said. “This morning some good progress, but earlier today and yesterday I was pretty upset. You create all this empty space, and all kinds of stuff comes up to fill it.”
“That shows you’re really practicing, if stuff is coming up.”
I told him I was also having trouble with a lot of Buddhist metaphysics. The whole rebirth thing, for one, didn’t seem consistent. Hadn’t the Buddha broken with the earlier Vedic philosophy around the notion of a permanent soul? So what was there to be reborn? In Buddhism, as I understood it, self and soul were illusions, like everything else.
“There’s no personality that gets reborn,” Smiling Daniel said. “But there’s a see-er, a place from which to gaze. That does get reborn.”
“That’s pretty deep for a twenty-year-old with no hair.”
Smiling Daniel smiled.
“When I try to bring any of this up with Phra Sam, I get nowhere,” I said.
“Yeah, he doesn’t know anything.”
I was unsure how to respond. I agreed, or thought I did, but was surprised to hear it so baldly stated. “But at least he’s a decent teacher,” I said.
“Actually, no, he’s terrible. He teaches beginners and those with ten years’ experience the same way. You know the book he’s got?” I remembered a little notebook he always had at his side during reporting sessions. It reminded me of a grading book. “That’s the regime. He just insists on that. You can’t teach that way. I was reporting to him the other day, telling him about an insight I’d had about the nature of thought behind the thinking, and it wasn’t in the book, so he couldn’t handle it. He cut me off: ‘When you’re thinking, just be thinking . . . thinking. Do thirty minutes walking, thirty minutes sitting. Now go practice.’ ”
“He did that to me too.”
“He has a temper. He’s insecure. He knows all the terms and all the stories, but it’s as if he hasn’t meditated.”
“Well,” I said, “it seems I’m not crazy, after all. I can’t tell you how I’ve been ping-ponging back and forth in my head for days: Am I totally arrogant? Is he a fraud? Am I the only one who’s feeling this way?”
“Kind of helps that none of us apprentices can talk to each other, huh?” As if we were a comic duo, we both turned from side to side, pretending to look out for the monastery secret police.
Smiling Daniel said he was just going through the motions to get his ordination. He was a week away from completing his full twenty-one-day course, after which he hoped to be accepted into the sangha, the great community of monks. He would leave Doi Suthep and wander from monastery to monastery in his saffron robes. He could ride buses for free, and people would put food in his begging bowl.
“So, listen,” I said, “now that I’ve got you here — a knowledgeable person I can actually talk to and all — when you’re doing walking meditation, are your feet one or separate?”
“One and separate.”
“Right! That’s exactly what I’ve been thinking.”
“You should talk to Roger about all this.”
“Roger?”
“Yeah. Big bald guy. You’ve seen him getting lunch with us sometimes.”
“Oh, yeah, him.” I remembered him from the food line the day before: a big-chested, bullet-headed man in his early fifties. He’d ladled his rice and vegetable curry with slow, controlled movements, his eyes grinning. “What’s his story?”
“He’s the resident philosopher dude. He runs the information center: does drop-in meditation demos and teaches Buddhist-philosophy courses.”
“He’s not a monk?”
“No. ‘I have enough precepts of my own,’ he told me. ‘I don’t need theirs too.’ ”
“He sounds like the man to see.”
“He’s cool, but the real man to see is Ajaan Tong.” Smiling Daniel explained that Ajaan Tong — the teacher of all the teachers and the true master of the monastery — resided at Chom Tong, another monastery several miles south.
I thanked Smiling Daniel, who dipped his head to me, and we went our separate ways. Things at Doi Suthep were becoming clearer and murkier in equal measure. With each revelation, it seemed, a new intrigue was added. The next day I would go see this philosopher, Roger, and maybe later in the week, if I could, Ajaan Tong. Until then I was more or less on my own.
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