Long silence. Maybe a whole minute. Finally he says: ‘You have four more days to work. Maintain sila. Develop samāadhi and paññā. Above all, build up your equanimity in the knowledge of anicca, the law of impermanence. Work hard and you are bound to feel the benefits. Bound to.’
I could have strangled him.
Pretty good description of Harper. When I first came here I thought the guy was too ordinary and boring to be running the Dasgupta. Like an accountant, a job-centre info officer. Even when he sits to meditate he looks like a council employee who’s lost his swivel chair. He came into his office one morning and found they’d put a zafu there instead. Then suddenly you find another side to him: you realize there’s a deep calm behind the nerdishness. He changes. For a few seconds you get an inkling of why he’s running a meditation centre. I suppose this is the Buddha body inside him that’s supposed to be inside us all. A calm Buddha body beneath frenetic, chain-smoking, wired-up Beth. Can you imagine? Mi Nu is the opposite. Mi Nu never comes back from her Buddha body. A statue carved in air is good. Just occasionally there’ll be a grin, a sexy flounce, a flash of appetite. Amazing because you never expected it.
Walked round the field so often I decided to go for it in the dark after the last meditation. Needed to be on the move instead of alone in the room. So fed up with thinking about what happens when I get home after the retreat. Walked across the field in a dark mist, then into the little wood at the bottom. Completely blind. How many years since I did something like this, feeling my way between trees at night, blundering into things? Twenty? Thirty? Surprisingly like the meditation, come to think of it, never quite knowing where you are, even though theoretically you’re somewhere entirely familiar. Inside yourself. Just that it’s dark. Maybe you don’t know yourself at all. Then where the path comes out of the wood back into the field I suddenly brushed against someone coming the other way. What a shock. In the pitch dark and silence. For one split second I was frightened. I didn’t see or hear him coming at all. That’s strange. I presume it was a him since we were on the men’s side. Anyway, whoever it was was as surprised as me, I heard him catch his breath, but we both observed the vow of silence and he hurried on. Then the truly mad thing: I suddenly thought that he was me. I’d bumped into myself! In the dark at night. Then we’d split in two and he’d disappeared. God, I wish. I wish I could. Though then I suppose I’d have to decide which of the two mes I wanted to be.
I love walking in the field at night too. When it was still cold, a couple of months back, I’d take a hot cup of tea in my hands and stand in the pitch dark sipping it and smelling the steam. Still, in eight months here I’ve never managed to bump into anyone. And my eyesight is awful.
Day 7 Three things at war:
1. Experience of sitting in silence: the breath, the mind sinking into the body, the body drawing the mind through it, like sap. Definitely something new. Worth coming for.
2. My thoughts resisting this, clamouring to get back to misery and melodrama. Huge desire to wipe my whole mind-slate clean. How?
3. Dasgupta’s evening explanations of what is going on in my head, in all our heads: our physical and mental pains are ‘the consequence of accumulated karma or sankharas following the principle of conditioned arising’.
Not much clarification there.
Forgot to mention the high point of the day: a Band-Aid in my salad. Must have been wrapped round somebody’s finger. I was taking it to a server to complain, then relented. Didn’t want to break the Noble Silence. The silence is the best thing about this place, like a cocoon. I would never have imagined the intimacy, eating together in silence.
Meredith’s plaster in the gentleman’s Waldorf salad. She’s hopeless.
The second cigarette is not as good as the first. I’m already hawking.
Conditioned arising is a funny expression. Nice title for a novel maybe. Nothing is absolutely itself. Everything arises as a consequence of certain conditions. Nothing is independent or permanent. Ergo, to get rid of something all you have to do is remove the conditions for its arising.
Easy.
Buddhism is an optimistic way of life, says Dasgupta with his droll, gala-evening smile. There is suffering, but there is also an end of suffering, a path that removes the conditions that allow suffering to arise. I’m getting to like him, the way you do get to like an old fraud. So much of what he says is rubbish, so much is self-regarding, but it makes sense, in its way. It makes sense that a man preaches against self-regard in a self-regarding way. Why would he be aware of the dangers of self-regard if he wasn’t so insufferably self-regarding? Full of self-regard he preaches against self-regard, and acquires adoring disciples. Convenient. Maybe I’ve said this already. Half the writers I publish write indignantly against pride and arrogance, then get more indignant when people take no notice.
Blessed are the poor in spirit, says Jesus, spiritedly.
I like Dasgupta’s glistening cheeks and his immaculate white outfits on the red armchair. He wears gold cufflinks. I like the way he preens after getting a laugh from his crowd. It must have been an American crowd, to judge by the cackles. Mainly women. Or, at least, it’s the women’s voices you hear. On the video you don’t see anyone but Dasgupta. Perhaps the men don’t respond because they sense the banter is meant for the ladies. Do gurus get a leg over from time to time, the cock arising in response to certain conditions? I haven’t had an erection all week. Not surprising with no T and no pornography.
Is this all men ever think about?
Jonathan reckoned modern civilization couldn’t survive without pornography. To be condemned in public and enjoyed in private, he said.
So, no conditions, no sweet arising. Maybe it takes a Buddha to see the obvious.
No woman, no fuck.
No fuck, no children.
No marriage, no divorce.
No bottle, no drunk.
No business, no bankrupt.
No gun, no shoot.
No birth, no karma.
No karma, no birth.
The aim of Buddhism: to avoid the conditions for arising again, for being born again.
Opposite of Jesus. Always wanting people born again.
In Buddhism the very fact of being born is a sign of failure. Old karma kicking it all off again. Sorry, kid, you screwed up.
What a welcome. Every start a bad start.
There’s optimism for you.
On the other hand, being born human is better than being born animal. You can develop sila, samādhi, paññā. Glass half full after all.
Because of man’s superior consciousness.
Does anyone believe this guff?
We must make best moral use of being human because the chances of a human rebirth are equal to those of a blind turtle that rises to the surface of the ocean only once every hundred years finding, by pure chance, that he has poked his head through the single narrow yoke floating up there on the surface.
What is this all about? Why a yoke? What sort of yoke? Do yokes lie on the surface of oceans waiting for blind turtles to stick their heads through them?