[Tech stress update: Aaaarrrggghhh -- every time I insert a photo link, ALL the photo links change to that URL. I'm trying to work it out with Blogger, so far with zero success. If you have any clue how to help, PLEASE let me know. In the meantime, the usual photo links to Ofoto are missing. I've added a few photos to the page, and there are two video links to Youtube below. They work. Woo Hoo!]
Did you ever want to just leave it all behind, go off into the mountains to a monastery, and meditate with the monks? I mean, not that you would actually do it, but did you ever get that feeling? Like Holden Caulfield, who asked his roommate Ackley, “What’s the deal on joining a monastery?” Yeah, I’ve thought about that too. This may shock you, but I sometimes experience a strange sensation known to people with paid employment as “stress”. I know I have it great, and I should be grateful, and I am, tremendously. But maybe I need a reminder sometimes, when (it seems) I spend all day every day for months on end wiping up poop, apple sauce, milk, and snot while simultaneously reading Thomas the Train, singing Raffi’s Greatest Hits, putting size 6 shoes on size 7 feet, shopping for Mexican food in a Chinese wet market, tap-dancing, and getting sideswiped by Shanghai taxis. Allison has been encouraging me to take a few days off and have a little vacation, all to myself, for the first time since early 2008, before Kai was born. Actually it was more of an ultimatum, or maybe a double-dog-dare. I’ve always said about my wife that with her brains, and my ability to do exactly what she tells me, we are unstoppable -- so I realized she was on the right track. Casting about for getaways, I came across an obscure Buddhist monastery just a few hours’ bus ride from Shanghai that allows Westerners to stay, eat tofu, meditate, chant a bit, and sleep in a tiny, freezing cell – sort of a Buddhist dude ranch. I exchanged several emails with the one and only English-speaking monk, and somehow I found myself at the end of November in Zhejiang province, on a bamboo-covered hilltop outside of Zaoxi, at Guang Jue Monastery.
There was a lot I liked about this little trip, even the bus ride, where I was wedged into the last seat in the back corner. I had time to do my audio Chinese lessons and eat the leftover turkey sandwich I packed from Thanksgiving the night before. We passed people burning fake money on the side of the road and praying to their dead relatives to mark the beginning of winter, as if saying, “I know you guys are cold; we haven’t forgotten you.” They weren’t just praying to generic “ancestors,” but to people they really knew and still remember and want to appease, as if they can influence daily events. The bus also stopped at what might be the tackiest truckstop this side of I-80 – for some reason they had a model of the Bocca della Verita, the “Mouth of Truth” in Rome, with a picture of Audrey Hepburn from the 1950’s movie “Roman Holiday” taped to the side of a machine into which you could stick your hand and, for 2 yuan, find out the truth about any question you cared to ask -- if you can read Chinese, that is. I’m pretty sure I was the only person who took any notice of Audrey, let alone recognized her.
The Guang Jue monastery was lovely -- small, a little run-down as a monastery should be, and with a tiny, outmanned crew of a few monks, a nun, and a cook striving in their non-striving way to make it all work. The reason this place can welcome Westerners is that they have in residence a transplanted Australian Buddhist, a wonderful character named Zhi Sheng, a.k.a. Malcolm Hunt, who speaks Chinese, has studied and practiced Mahayana Buddhism extensively, and is willing to hang out with tourists, newbies, wannabes, and lookieloos. He’s not exactly a monk himself, having deferred taking his final vows for the time being, which I took to be more a matter of spiritual honesty than fear (I came to learn that Malcolm isn’t completely sold on the whole celibacy-for-life part; he was pretty loquacious, for a demi-monk). He has a background in psychology, and he’s one of those people who can integrate contemporary Western knowledge with traditional Eastern beliefs and somehow not look ridiculous in an uttarasanga. I liked him a lot, even if I wasn’t sure if five years from now he won’t be in a café in Sydney sipping a latte and remembering his monk phase. Hey, even Buddha passed through innumerable phases, identities, on the path to enlightenment.
So what did I do at the monastery? Nothing, of course! But what does “nothing” mean? Oh, you Westerners, you’re all alike. It’s all doing, isn’t it? But OK, I’ll tell you. We woke up at 5 or so to the sound of chanting, and stumbled to the temple to listen to a ceremony involving chanting, prayer, incense, and drums. Periodically, we sat in a small group and talked with Malcolm, meditated, and even, briefly, chanted, although I was never very good at that part. Three times a day we ate really tasty vegetarian food made by a deaf and extraordinarily voluble woman named Pou Pou, who spoke an obscure dialect that only ghosts understand. Aside from that, I wrote a little, studied Chinese a little, walked in the bamboo hills a little, and did, you know, nothing, for three or four days. [Here's a video with some raw footage of Pou Pou, plus a minute or two of a Buddhist ceremony.]
Once I walked past a little cluster of houses and a met an old woman who was bundling sticks together on the side of the road. She implored me to join her, which I did. From somewhere she produced two chairs for us to sit on. She talked at length, about what I have little or no idea. I told her my Chinese was bad and I couldn’t understand her, but I told her in Chinese, which she took as ample evidence that I understood everything she said. I eventually figured out that she wanted me to come to her house, just across the road, and eat something, most likely the gourds she was drying on the lawn, and then pay her, like I would at a restaurant. She appeared to think I was desperately searching for food, whereas the Buddhists were actually stuffing me with delicious meals -- Pou Pou may have been a madwoman, but she was a really good cook. But giant foreigners don’t just wander past this woman's house every day, and she wasn’t going to let one go by without at least taking a shot at making some profit out of it, for cryin’ out loud. I eventually thanked her and disappeared back to the monastery without ever sampling her gourds, but I wish her well, in a Buddhist way.
The hardest thing about the monastery was being away from Allison and Kai and Keegan; even though this was supposed to be my big chance to be by myself for a little while, I missed them terribly, talked with them a couple of times each day, even skyped with them briefly when the electrons aligned. I felt viscerally what it must be like for Allison to be on the road, and I was sad not to be able to wipe up all the poop, apple sauce, milk, and snot I was missing out on.
The best thing about the monastery was that, when the monks and I weren’t chanting, it was extremely quiet, very unlike Shanghai. Also, the sky was clear and blue in the daytime, and the night sky was filled with so many stars that I could actually recognize a good number of constellations I’d forgotten existed. On my last night there I went alone to the isolated upper temple at roughly 9:30, which at Guang Jue qualifies as the middle of the night, and I sat still in the silence and the pitch dark, and I could hear the universe breathing, and I finally understood why I had come there -- simply to remember to be grateful, grateful for my breath, and for being able to listen to Kai and Keegan breathing as we put them to sleep each night, grateful for being in love with my best friend, grateful for my place in the universe, grateful to be alive in this strange and wonderful world. This isn’t some special knowledge one can only receive in a remote monastery, of course; it’s wisdom that is available in every moment, with every breath, in the everyday course of our lives. The tricky part is just remembering. I headed home rested and happy to see my family, knowing that being with them is exactly where I need and want to be.
Of course, since I am not the Buddha, I got right back to all that doing. The next weekend I ran the half-marathon here in Shanghai, feeling slightly inadequate for just doing the half and not the full. Still polishing my self-acceptance skillz, I guess. Not to be all petty and worry about a little thing like my race time, BUT I CRUSHED TWO HOURS!! (Which for me is good!), and ran the half in 1:54:30, coming within a mere hour or so of the Kenyans who took first, second, and third. Allison brought Kai and Keegan to see my at the finish line [here's 38 seconds' worth of my cheering section], and they ended up watching the full marathon winners finish, and get their medals. I told the boys I won the race because, in a race like this, everyone who can finish is a winner, but Kai knew better. He told me, “No Daddy, you weren’t the winner. The OTHER guys were the winners!” You’ve got a good point there, son. But so do I.
