I WENT BACK to see Roger again the following day, and he was no less intriguing. Roger was full of Doi Suthep stories. It was hard to tell where history left off and legend began, or which legends Roger himself believed. The most fanciful story he told me involved a Doi Suthep monk who had been arrested in Bangkok after having run afoul of corrupt officials.

“He refused to testify,” Roger said. “ ‘You will stay here in your cell until you do,’ the police told him. The monk said, ‘No, I’ll sleep in Chiang Mai tonight.’ They laughed at him. But he did.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Bilocation. He transported himself back to Chiang Mai.”

“I don’t believe that.”

“You don’t have to. I’ve been with monks who can do it.”

In spite of his every-once-in-a-while flashes of insanity, Roger seemed to be just the teacher I was looking for. Our conversations were relaxed but challenging and unpredictable; it was like a fireside chat with a wise and kooky uncle who also happened to be a professor of the occult.

“Just observe your abdomen,” he might say, “since that’s where you’re holding tension.” From this concrete advice, we might go a few rounds on body-mind dualism. “Do the eyes see?” he might ask. “Does the body know? Are not all feelings simply passing mental states?” I’d counter with the notion of “embodied mind” that I’d picked up in a cognitive-science seminar. “There is no you,” he would say. “You are not driving the chariot. In fact, there is no chariot.”

“I don’t know whether there’s a chariot or not, but I think I had a ‘no driver’ experience when I was at Burning Man two years ago.”

“Burning what?”

“The big cyber-Woodstock festival in the Nevada desert. I was with my girlfriend at the time. We were biking in and out of a dust storm, and we were very stoned — like, tripping stoned. Anyway, we were talking, and it seemed that the words I was saying were not being authored by me; they were just happening. And all the social conventions and body language and everything — it was all just happening through me, unauthored and unowned; not predetermined so much as programmed. I was a language machine. It was scary. I felt soulless, almost inhuman. I guess that was the fear of ego death. But I told myself not to freak out, to go with it, to let the machine be. And it was freeing. Uncanny, but freeing.”

“Thoughts without a thinker. Not so different from Vipassana, eh?” Roger said.

“I guess.”

I’d come halfway around the world to receive the wisdom of the East only to find myself swapping drug stories with a balding Chicago stockbroker.

“You’re like Myron,” I told him.

“Myron?”

“Yeah: Everybody’s waiting on line to speak to the great guru in his remote mountain temple. They’ve brought their most pressing questions: ‘Great guru, what is the meaning of life?’ ‘Great guru, what is the sound of one hand clapping?’ ‘Great guru, what is the taste of freedom?’ There’s a middle-aged woman in line who seems a little out of place, but she waits her turn, and finally, after days and days, she has her audience. ‘What is your question, child?’ the guru says. ‘Myron,’ she says in a thick Jewish accent, ‘when are you coming home?’ ”

Roger chuckled. “You don’t know the half of it.”

WITH THE EXCEPTION of what were becoming regular afternoon visits with Roger, the days continued on much as before. I was walking and sitting in forty-minute intervals, yet still my mind drifted. Some of my anxieties seemed to have faded, but other problems, including a boost in sexual craving, had taken their place. I was still holding tension in my abdomen and still trying to wish it away during sitting meditation. Roger was helping me think through my issues, but the sort of numinous insight I longed for remained as elusive as ever.

One morning I woke with a hard-on. It wasn’t the first time this had happened at Doi Suthep, but there was a particular urgency to it that morning. A pretty apprentice nun from England had arrived the day before, and that night she’d been in my dreams, along with Cate Blanchett and three Thai prostitutes. In more than a week at Doi Suthep, I hadn’t jerked off nor hardly touched myself, but in the shower that morning I couldn’t help but wrap my fingers around my cock. I just stood there like that for a while, debating my options. I wanted to maintain at least some semblance of the precepts I’d committed myself to, but I also wanted release. I wanted hard physical pleasure. I began stroking myself. I stopped. I willed myself to let go.

“Does the Buddha ever get a hard-on?” I asked Roger that afternoon.

“No,” Roger said, smiling. “At the highest levels of enlightenment, sexual desire is completely extinguished.” He paused. “But it’s the strongest of the hindrances, definitely the hardest of them all to get over.”

“How do the monks here do it?”

“Some do specific exercises to shut down the sexual urge, like imagining a woman’s body as filth — composed of bones and veins and intestines.”

“I don’t suppose that helps the nuns’ campaign for full ordination.”

“More than a few monks end up hating women. It’s the only way they can stay the course.”

“It doesn’t seem very Buddhist.”

Roger gestured as if to say, It is what it is.

“What about you?” I asked.

“I have the opposite problem.”

Roger, it turned out, was married. He’d met his wife at a temple in Nepal, and they had two kids, ages ten and thirteen. He’d left them all back in Chicago and hadn’t seen them in months. Meanwhile, he had two girlfriends here in Thailand.

“So you’re not celibate?”

“The Buddha didn’t think of celibacy as a goal in its own right — more like good training for dealing with your sexual life. I’ve done that training.”

“And now you’re enjoying that life?”

Roger smiled.

“But you could give it all up for enlightenment?” I asked.

“I haven’t — but I could.”

Roger sounded like an alcoholic who believes he can give up drinking anytime he wants.

“So celibacy is a means, not an end?” I asked.

“At the higher stages of enlightenment, celibacy is moot. For the rest of us, yes, celibacy is just a means.”

“But it’s clearly still frowned upon for a monk to break his vows.”

“I’m not a monk, am I?”

True enough. Nor did he seem to be much of a husband and father. I asked him about this.

“In Thai culture,” Roger explained, “it’s understood that there’s a ‘minor wife’ and a ‘major wife.’ ” He described how, on his days off from Doi Suthep, he’d tool around Chiang Mai with both his “minor wives” on the back of his motorcycle. “Here in Thailand, women are still women, and men still men. Asian women in general don’t compete to be like men the way your white Western women do.” He said “your,” as if he were talking about some distant culture to which he no longer had ties.

“There’s something I like about that competition,” I said, feeling a need to hold up the banner of feminism in what was looking more and more like a wilderness of patriarchy and girlfriends for hire.

“That’s because it’s all you know,” he said.

“But what about your kids back in Chicago? Don’t they miss you? Don’t you miss them?”

“Does the frog care which tadpole is his?”

I looked at Roger closely. Bald and hulking, he reminded me of Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now — a Colonel Kurtz for the Birkenstock set. He’d come too far up the river, spent too much time in the spiritual and sexual playgrounds of the East. He’d been seduced by too many Tibetan yogis and mysterious Ajaan Tongs; too many perfect, dark-eyed twenty-three-year-olds, gentle souled and ready to please. Was I, then, his Martin Sheen, come upriver past pleasure gardens of sexual commerce on one bank and communities of celibate, saffron-clad monks on the other until these opposite banks met in the form of a mad, head-shaven, fifty-five-year-old former stockbroker who made up his own rules from a philosopher’s chair?

THE NEXT MORNING, upon waking, I found myself again aroused. This time, however, I was able to keep my hands at my sides in the shower and simply be noticing . . . noticing my desire. It subsided some, and I proceeded to the upper meditation hall and did my prostrations. (The mind observing the upper self.) I did my forty long minutes of walking. (The mind observing the lower self.) And then I sat. (The mind observing itself.) At first it appeared to be another unremarkable session, with the usual mix of boredom, doubt, fantasy, knee pain, and small signs of progress. But then something happened. Without my wishing it to, my tummy relaxed. I found myself simply observing my abdomen and my thoughts and the small sounds around me. The ugly radio interview came up, as did women, and also my grandiose speculations about the nature of the universe. The full theater of my mind was on parade, just as it had been all week, yet something was different. I was at a subtle remove, a detached observer.

“The monkey mind is wily,” Roger had said. “Our meditating mind is simple.” His words, trite and tautological when I’d first heard them, now rang true. I hadn’t extinguished any unwanted thoughts. The full tempest and trivia of my mind, and the aches and pains and longings of my body, were still there — only now I was watching it all unfold without being pulled along. I wasn’t trying to drive, nor was I wishing any of it away. I had stepped back somehow into a place of no desire, no judgment. Paradoxically, this place of emptiness was filled with a feeling not unlike kindness: a kindness toward myself; a simple recognition of my own tragic, inescapable humanness. And I realized that this kindness was the basis for all other kindnesses; that one’s own happiness was not a form of self-indulgence, but rather a precondition for doing good work in the world.

I sat there feeling flush as the dawn sky blossomed from black to violet to blue. A fly settled on my left big toe. Phra Sam was sitting in posture beside the Buddha altar, as still as night. I could hear one of the temple dogs halfheartedly chasing something along the courtyard wall.

Something shifted inside me that morning, and the world, or at least the microworld of Doi Suthep, seemed to shift along with it. At breakfast I saw dour Silent Tim break into a big smile, as if tickled by some private thought. He put his hand to his face and began to laugh, rocking back and forth in his chair, all in perfect silence.

Even Sam was touched with a certain grace. At reporting he seemed encouraged by my progress, and we shared a few laughs. Come to him with the right expectations, I saw, and he could be quite likable. In his own way, he cared for his students. He was even disappointed that I couldn’t stay for the whole twenty-one-day course. How much had Sam been a blank screen upon which I’d projected my own resentments, fears, and longings? Was this what the Buddhists meant by “illusion”? Had I imagined for him a solid self, a fixed character, out of what was really an amorphous flow of passing mental states — my mental states?

On my way to see Roger that afternoon I noticed an older monk and three student monks sweeping away leaves that had fallen around the great bronze bells. One of the broom handles knocked against a bell, and the sound was haunting, like a God-child learning to play the xylophone.

“You’ve had fruition,” said Roger after I’d described that morning’s sitting and the quality of mind that had followed. “It shows how important practice is for you, how ready you are.”

I wanted to talk more about it, but he said, “You’re thinking too much; you’re still liking your thinking too much.”

“But —”

“Here,” he said, and he took out a worn, pocket-sized, hard-bound volume of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and handed it to me. “Page 67,” he said. “Read it. And take your time.”

For in and out, above, about, below,
’Tis nothing but a Magic Shadow show
Play’d in a Box whose Candle is the Sun
Round where Phantom Figures come and go.

And if the Wine you drink, the Lip you press,
End in the Nothing all Things end in — Yes —
Then fancy while Thou art, Thou art but what
Thou shalt be — Nothing — Thou shalt not be less.

“It’s not Vipassana,” he said, “but it might as well be. Now go practice.”

THAT MOMENT OF fruition marked the high point of my stay at Doi Suthep. In the few days remaining before my scheduled departure, my attention began to inch out the door ahead of me. I flirted blatantly with the pretty English nun and became even sloppier about my vows, sleeping in one morning until 5:30 a.m. (“We’re not running a resort here,” Phra Sam said to me during reporting.) In spite of my faltering discipline and the fact that I was only halfway through the course, Sam had agreed to take me with him on his next visit to Chom Tong monastery to meet the mysterious Ajaan Tong. When the day came, I packed my bags and made a 2,500-baht (sixty-dollar) donation to Doi Suthep in thanks for all that I had received during my stay.

Our audience with Ajaan Tong was set for the next morning. After waiting at Chom Tong for nearly an hour, we were beckoned into an anteroom. I was nervous. I imagined the master would be able to see right through me. Would he approve or disapprove? I felt like a greenhorn Mafia recruit being brought before the Don. With the velvet painting in the anteroom and the vases of plastic ivy, even the decor was Goodfellas. Finally we were brought inside. We bowed. We sat. There were a few moments of uncertain silence. If I was in the presence of greatness, I couldn’t tell. Ajaan Tong was old, and liver spots dotted his bald head. He did not look like a man who was going to levitate or bilocate to the other side of the room. Mostly he just seemed tired.

Sam introduced me and translated for Ajaan Tong, who wanted to know if, as a special favor to him, I would complete my full course. I said I would consider it, but this was a lie. I had no intention of going back to Doi Suthep for another ten days. We bowed and left. I realized later that my fly had been open the whole time.

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