EVER SINCE I’D arrived at Doi Suthep, I’d been bowing down to something or someone: to the monks in charge during ceremonies, to the Buddha during prostrations, to Phra Sam at every reporting session. I didn’t bow out of respect; it was more like pretending to be nice to the boss. I’m a rebel, a skeptic, a freethinker. As a matter of principle I try not to submit to anyone I don’t respect or admire — especially people who expect it of me just because of the robes they wear or their position in some hierarchy. Revolutions have been fought and lives sacrificed for my right not to do that. And every time I had to do it at Doi Suthep, it left a bad taste. My growing doubts about Phra Sam only made the taste worse.

I was feeling adrift and teacherless. I didn’t know the abbot. I didn’t trust Sam. I had gone looking for Roger the philosopher that morning but hadn’t found him. Ajaan Tong was just a name spoken with reverence — deserved or misplaced, I couldn’t say. Doi Suthep, the institution, was still a mystery to me. And I was at odds with Buddhism on some crucial philosophical matters, which Sam was doing nothing to help me sort out. My vows were shaky; my practice was fraught with doubts.

According to my meditation guide, doubt was one of the seven great obstacles to self-realization, and it would often manifest as “doubting the correctness of our own practice” and “wondering about the competence of our meditation teacher and whether he or she really understands us.” I was, it seemed, a textbook doubter.

That afternoon, in the empty meditation room, Smiling Daniel, Hannes, and I pulled three cushions over to the wall and whispered out of the sides of our mouths as we pretended to meditate. This cracked us up. It was all so junior high. Smiling Daniel consulted his watch: “I think Phra Sam will be busy chanting for the next half-hour.” Then, sotto voce, he expounded upon the benefits of meditation. He told us how, while still in high school, he had meditated while looking into a candle for four straight hours and then gone to his writing class and written a book.

“A whole book?” Hannes said.

He’d also taught himself Spanish just sitting in his room. And he’d taught himself to play and compose music — and promptly written two symphonies.

“Um, how does this work exactly?” I asked.

“Whole domains of knowledge just come to me,” Smiling Daniel explained. Either he was the nicest, sweetest sociopathic liar I’d ever met, or he was a Buddha incarnate. “I can just see them. Like a whole body of knowledge was revealed to me a few days ago in only twenty minutes of deep meditation.”

“Really?” said Hannes. “Like what?”

“Like all of human thought.”

“You’re sure it was all of human thought?” I asked.

“I tried to tell Phra Sam at reporting, but he didn’t want to hear it.”

I was beginning to develop a little more sympathy for Phra Sam.

Smiling Daniel continued on with his stories: About his theories of natural genius and the stages of enlightenment. About the mystic Osho, who dictated a book a day to his followers. About some unknown lower-caste man in India who went to the forest after his entire family was killed and without any training taught himself to meditate and became enlightened. “It just shows you how —”

“Shhh,” whispered Hannes. “I think someone’s at the door.”

Someone was at the door, and, like schoolkids caught smoking behind the gym, we tried to look innocent: Don’t laugh. Is it Phra Sam? Fix your robe! Shhh! 

When Silent Tim stepped into the room — as grim-faced and focused as ever — we looked guilty: faces flushed, lips quivering on the edge of laughter. Not laughing . . . not laughing, I faux-meditated. Whether Brother Tim was on to us or not, he paid us no mind and proceeded with his walking practice as if there were nothing odd about three of his fellow students sitting shoulder to shoulder along a stretch of wall. In the end, the joke was on us. Silent Tim’s dedication was uncompromised. I, on the other hand, felt shame as I struggled to contain my laughter: the shame of squandering one’s good fortune.

I stood up and walked to another meditation hall, back to sore knees and silence and emptiness.

THE NEXT DAY I returned to the monastery’s information center to look for Roger. The center offered booklets outlining Vipassana practice and a display about the history and basic tenets of Buddhism. Behind a desk sat a monk I hadn’t seen before.

“Is Roger here?” I asked. Just then I heard a muffled flushing sound, and Roger’s bullet head and broad shoulders emerged from a bathroom. He had on typical Thai casual wear — short-sleeved shirt, khaki linen pants, and sandals — and wore an air of both serenity and diffidence. He threw up a hand in greeting.

“Have a few minutes?” I asked.

“Sure. What do you got?”

“Questions,” I said, pulling the list I’d prepared from my waistband.

“You brought a list?”

“Well . . . ,” I began.

“First things first,” he said, motioning me to an empty seat. Once I was settled in, he wanted to know why I’d chosen to practice Vipassana, and why here at Doi Suthep.

“Actually, I’ve been wondering that myself.” And I launched into a capsule version of my checkered spiritual past: the eclectic influences; my suspicion of organized religion. As best I could, I described some harrowing early mystical experiences. “It was as if I had died,” I told him.

“You did die,” he said with a smile.

Roger, it turned out, had been a Chicago stockbroker before he’d left that world to pursue serious study of the dharma. He’d been ordained as a monk decades before and had traveled throughout Asia. Eventually he’d abandoned his monk’s robes and landed at Doi Suthep, becoming philosopher-in-residence. As he addressed my grab bag of philosophical questions, he had a habit of enumerating his answers with his fingers, using his right thumb to count them off on his left hand, beginning with the pinkie. Given how chock-full of numbered lists Buddhism is — the four noble truths, the eightfold path, the five hindrances, the ten armies of Mara — I could see how he’d developed this habit.

I wanted to know why, if sitting was where the real work happened, Vipassana placed so much focus on walking meditation.

“Walking is the mind observing the lower body. Prostration is the mind observing the upper body. Sitting is the mind observing itself. So it is important to give sitting and walking equal time.”

“That makes just enough sense for me to roll with. I don’t know why Sam couldn’t have thrown me a few bones like that. I can’t seem to get anywhere with him on the more philosophical side of things.”

“You won’t.”

“I won’t?”

“No, and that’s ok. You need to learn what the teacher has to teach,” he said. Roger had a way of bringing his points home in these guru-like nuggets: seemingly wise, slightly mischievous, just a touch of mockery.

“OK,” I said, “but just help me with this one question that Sam keeps asking me. I never know —”

“Whether the left foot and right foot are one or separate?”

“Yes! It’s driving me crazy. I keep wanting to say —”

Roger put up his hand, stopping me midsentence. “What,” he asked, “is the sound of one hand clapping?”

“Uh . . .”

He waited.

“I am, of course, familiar with the question,” I said.

His eyes said, Go on.

“But I’ve never been asked it in a serious situation before.”

We were both silent. Finally Roger said, “Who cares?”

It was my turn to smile. 

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