Cynic

When I first went into Section Five at Wat Mahatat, I was so cynical. I had heard that meditation retreats could change your life but I had seen so few examples of transformation that I wasn’t even sure that “life change” was possible. Most people I knew lived their lives with a depressing inevitability, making the same mistakes over and over. I had been repeating the same patterns, doing whatever I wanted, since I’d moved out of home at seventeen. Despite all this apparent freedom, I wasn’t particularly happy. Sure I’d experienced happy times, but those moments of freedom were fleeting, associated with altered states or attachments to others. None of it was very solid, real or lasting.

I could only go into the temple for five days, which seemed brief, adding to my skepticism. Living in Thailand we heard a stream of outrageous news stories about the naughty monks; sex scandals; the ‘karaoke monk’; and the adulterous guy whose angry wife chopped off his penis. She’d then attached it to a helium balloon with a piece of string and watched it float up into the sky. He had thus become a monk. I recognized that this inauspicious calling, along other scandals, were in the newspapers because they were just that – scandals. Nevertheless they didn’t give me much confidence in the Sangha.

Whether it was a fascination to try something new, or a calling from a previous life, I don’t know, but despite all this I ended up in Section Five, Wat Mahatat, for five days albeit with a high dose of cynicism.

Maichee Tip checked me in on Friday evening and told me to come back with my things in time for breakfast the next day at 7am. I read the page-long list of rules including white clothing, no talking, abstinence from alcohol, no food after midday, sleeping on the floor and eight hours meditation each day. It sounded intense but I liked a challenge. I said I’d be back before seven for breakfast. She didn’t show me around and I was glad. The place looked dark and overcrowded.

That night, quite typically, a party ended up in our apartment. I smoked and drank too much but at around 1am when someone suggested hitting the bars, I thought of that early morning breakfast and wisely made my way to bed.

Still, getting up before six on a Saturday morning was a rude shock. I dressed in white and jumped in a cab. The driver said he didn’t know where Wat Mahatat was but somehow he seemed to find it. It was still dark as I walked up and down row upon row of small, box-like living quarters, amongst the finely hedged topiary and pink bougainvillea. I could not find Section Five.

It was eerie being in the temple stillness in these dark hours of the morning. People were sleeping so I walked gently. Out of nowhere came a vicious barking dog that bounced my heart into my throat. A semi-clad monk popped his head from his quarters, said something to the dog, then gave me a look that read, “Who the hell are you?” Something wasn’t right. All at once I realized that not only was I in the wrong place but also that there could be few places more wrong for a farang (Western) woman with a suitcase than a Thai monastery in the middle of the night! My heart was still rattling when some other monks walked by. They also looked curiously at me and my suitcase. Something was definitely amiss.

Finally I came across a man sweeping leaves and I asked him if this was Wat Mahatat.

“Mai Chai, Wat Po!”

No wonder the monks were looking at me strangely, I was in Wat Po, not Wat Mahatat and the living quarters of Wat Po are not the place for anyone apart from nuns and monks. I made my way out embarrassed yet relieved to be back on track and hailed another cab who thankfully knew where he was going. Wat Mahatat is just down the road from Wat Po.

When I got there nobody seemed to care that I was late. I was met in the meditation hall adjacent to the lobby by chanting saffron-robed monks who sat on elevated polished floorboards facing the impressive alter. Beautiful golden-bronze Buddha statues and brightly-coloured flowers sat on the alter. As the chanting finished some men dressed in white, the meditation trainees or “yogis,” served the monks food.

The sound of chanting from another room started up as one of the yogis ushered me towards it. In a large light-filled room the nuns and novices, all dressed in white, were finishing their chanting and starting their breakfast. I noticed that the farangs, also dressed in white, were all seated at a low tiled table together. I put my bag down and joined them. Unlike the nuns and the Thai female novices who wore their elegant white robes and sash, the farangs wore white pyjama-like outfits suggestive of a psychiatric hospital. I laughed to myself as I knew I looked just like them.

The others kindly passed me a clean plate, all the different foods on offer, and filled my glass with water. How different this place was to a Christian church. The temple was home to all these people, at least at that moment in time. We all ate together and, as I was soon to find out, slept together on the floors of the small bedrooms around the back. At any point a cat could be seen being fed in some quiet corner or a puppy appear out of nowhere.

The kow tom (rice soup) breakfast actually tasted really good. I surveyed my surroundings. Indeed it was as dire as I’d first thought. There just didn’t seem to be enough room for everyone, we all sat squeezed together. The kow tom was one thing but could I ever get used to eating fish for breakfast? Just then I saw a moving shadow out the corner of my eye – yikes – a cockroach! Certainly these wouldn’t be killed in a Buddhist temple so I guessed I’d have to live with them! Nursing my hangover I wondered how the hell I was going to get through five days of this.

That day it went from bad to worse. After breakfast I was shown where I was to sleep – along with four other girls. The room was next door to the rooms of some of the monks and the temple boys, who I later discovered are orphans, taken in and raised in the wat. These boys seemed to be responsible for the cooking, along with the nuns who prepared the fruit and the pre-cooked food donated to the Sangha. Our room was a shabby little box with a few flat cushions on the ground. How the hell was I going to sleep in here? I sat down to take stock. Why had I decided to do this???

As the bell chimed one of the other girls explained that it was time to go and chant and then meditate. We sat on the floor in the meditation hall and chanted following the monks and the words in the Ordination Procedure and Chantings booklet. After chanting we went down into the bowels of the building to the meditation room - a dingy little box through a narrow door below the stairs.

The stuffiness of the room was made only slightly better by the fans but there just didn’t seem to be enough room for us all to sit, much less do walking meditation. Somehow we managed to squeeze in, elbow to elbow. This was not the idea of a meditation retreat I had envisioned. I had heard of forest temples in Chang Mai, mountain temples in Sri Lanka and even a cave temple on the beach of Ko Phangan. Oh why had I only taken three days off? If I’d had longer I could have gone to Chang Mai or somewhere else? Instead I was stuck in this urban temple, this dingy basement, dirty air blowing in from people’s shoes walking down the street, cockroaches crawling up the walls.

My despair was exacerbated by my hangover and I struggled to listen as Maichee Tip gave me meditation instruction. I sat in the basement for three hours trying hard to meditate until lunch. It took everything I had to stay awake.

Lunch at eleven was like a Godsend as it meant I could get out of the basement. The back room was a hive of activity. Plastic containers holding stainless steel serving implements were taken from cupboards and distributed. Festive floral sheets of plastic were put on the floor for the nuns and novices to sit on. The food looked delicious. Usually it seemed to be some combination of rice, fish and vegetables. I noticed a pretty young katoey (trans-gender woman) preparing the food. I later found out that she had been a temple boy now waiting for an operation to become a girl.

We sat at the table as one of the farangs passed around plastic covered pages with the Pali words we would chant to give thanks for the meal. When the monks in the next room finished their chanting we began ours and then we ate. After lunch I could do nothing but retire and fall asleep on my surprisingly comfortable piece of floor. Despite the humble quarters my sleep in the temple was always deep and blissful. I was always able to lie on my back with hands by sides, meditate for a bit, fall into a deep sleep complete with amazing dreams and wake, an hour or so later, feeling completely refreshed.

However, at the end of the first hellish day I was still sleep deprived and had to sit through my first dharma talk. This was with a young monk who seemed to love the sound of his own voice. The answers he gave us never seemed to bear much relation to the question he was being asked and were accompanied by long and boring explanations that were never very clear. I couldn’t work out if this was a language or cultural thing but I’d often find it amusing. Here were these farangs hanging on his every word, despite his words not making any sense. I could see them looking perplexed, doubting themselves, thinking it was their fault for misunderstanding, wondering if perhaps they weren’t enlightened enough! This amused me, after all, as a resident in Bangkok I had background information. This could be the karaoke monk for all I knew and I certainly wasn’t going to make a silk purse out of the sow’s ears that he was sprouting. This wasn’t helped by the constant interruptions with the ring of his mobile phone. He’d unwrap it from somewhere in his robe, answer it and chat away in Thai for what seemed like forever. All I could think about was falling asleep on my curiously comfortable patch of floor.

The first three days were pretty much the same. Not fun. I constantly questioned what I was doing there, a lot of negative thoughts and feelings emerged and I found it very difficult to meditate. I thought about leaving but always stayed, probably for no other reason than not wanting to feel like a failure.

Then on around the fourth day something changed. A sense of peace set in. All my doubts and anger seemed to disappear and I started to live in the moment. The food started to taste even more delicious. The Buddha statues seemed to shine more brightly. The sun on my face when I walked outside had a magical quality – I felt – and this is going to sound weird – like I was constantly being touched by God. I started to warm to the other yogis, some of whom I had at first found annoying. I took great pleasure in the chores I had to do, both the feeling of doing them and the knowledge that I was serving my peers. Even the cockroaches stopped bothering me, they were so shiny! The beauty of living in the moment is boundless. This is one of the main things this first retreat taught me – mindfulness, or staying in the moment, can become a habit and it is accompanied by such complete and utter bliss.

Despite my calm state of mind and feelings of love and benevolence towards everyone, in stark contrast to the way I’d felt before, I didn’t quite realise the power of what I had experienced in Section 5 until the day I left.

Upon entry to the temple, all yogis take eight precepts, which are also taken for life by nuns and monks. Upon exit the yogis give the eight precepts back and take five precepts, which are easier to uphold when living outside the temple. Ajahn Suphat, the monk who did this precept ritual with me, was older and had the wisest eyes and kindest smile. As I began to take the five precepts they all seemed no-brainers – not killing, not stealing, no sexual misconduct, no lying. But when he got to the final one, “I will not take intoxicants” I was a bit uncomfortable. Drinking is a big part of Australian culture and an even bigger part of ex-pat culture in Bangkok. I wondered if I should cross my fingers when saying that one. Oh well, I thought, nobody’s perfect.

The friends I had met in the temple walked me out to the gate. My time here had been good but not earth shattering. It had been calm; I had met some good people. As we walked out to the street and started our goodbyes the noise of the traffic was DEAFENING, so used had I become to the silence in the temple and my mind. A little unnerved, I jumped in a cab and asked the taxi driver to take me home.

Almost immediately upon driving off in the cab I became ravenously hungry. This was surprising though not unusual to me. It was 5.30; I always got hungry around this “after work” time. However I had been in the temple for five days and had not experienced these feelings of ‘after work’ hunger at all, despite the fact that our last meal of the day was at eleven. With thunderous clarity I realised the hunger I was experiencing wasn’t actual hunger, it was a craving or more precisely, a feeling of emptiness, no doubt fuelled by stress and all the negative thoughts skulking in my head. Those thoughts had been hounding me for as long as I could remember, for my whole adult life, maybe even before. No wonder I had been unhappy. I tried to bring myself back to the moment. I succeeded and the hunger disappeared, everything was okay again, as it had been for those last couple of days, the beauty and full significance of which, I only now realised. Could these and other negative feelings really be within my control?

I thought back to all the negative thoughts I’d had when I entered the temple, how dingy and cramped it looked, how boring the dharma talks were. I realized with painful insight that it was I who was the shabby one – my thoughts, my cynicism – not Section 5. I watched the chaos of the Bangkok streets whir by, the speeding cars, the shop fronts and street vendors, the building where I worked, the monuments and concrete skyline. My head was filled with a rushing of thoughts, of feelings, of questions and possibility. I didn’t know where all this was going to lead but one thing was certain; my life was never going to be the same.