Gorkhaland Revisited

Crumbling house in Darjeeling town, "Gorkhaland"

Down the bumpy road from Kalimpong bazar we trundle, out of the stink and relative bustle of the town.  Kalimpong: a former "spies' nest" of a hill station still bustling along modestly with its skein of streets crammed with tiny momo restaurants.  Kalimpong.  This is where my engagement with the Nepali-speaking world began 5 1/2 years ago, though it is an Indian town in most of its particulars.  Kalimpong and the rest of Darjeeling District, despite sharing the state designation of West Bengal with Kolkata and Siliguri and all the vast Bengali-speaking plains in between, is populated in the vast majority by Nepali speakers who have been settled in the region for generations.  This is India, though, as anyone here will be quick to tell you if you make the mistake of referring to him or her as a Nepali.  Nepal, from this vantage point, is a curious and rather backward place, and many Kalimpong residents have never crossed the nearby border.  This is India: in their morning assemblies the school children belt our the Indian national anthem and Indian rupees change hands in the bazars, where the shops are run mostly by Marwaris and Biharis. That much identity is clear.  Moving down to the state level, however, the issue is more complicated.  Technically and administratively this is West Bengal, yes, but since 2008 none of the shopfronts display this fact openly.  Where "West Bengal" was once written, hastily-printed letters now declare this "Gorkhaland."  Gorkha is the name not just for the famed Nepali soldiers who fought so fiercely, khukuris in hand, for the British, but for the Nepali-speakers of Darjeeling District (or what is also, confusingly, called North Bengal) who have also adopted the title to distinguish themselves both from the Bengalis to the South and the Nepalis to the West. 

In practice, daily life outside the bazars is much like that in Eastern Nepal.  The striking difference is one of identity politics: whereas in Nepal a shared Nepali identity is so much a given that the differences between caste, tribal, and ethnic groups stand out starkly as markers of community, here the common plight of being under-recognized works to draw the Gorkhas together as a more-or-less cohesive group while blurring the differences between Rai (all 40-plus subgroups), Limbu, Newar (not to mention the dozens of Newar castes), Chhetri, etc.  Of course it's no Shangri-La: Bahuns (Nepali for Brahmins) are still sometimes resented as the most dominant, powerful group, "small castes" and "untouchables" are still tangibly low on the social ladder despite legislation to the contrary, and the pre-Gorkha inhabitants of the region, Tibet and Bhutan-derived Bhotias and indigenous Lepchas, have become minorities struggling to maintain their own distinct identities, languages, and traditions.  In fact the melting pot effect of Gorkhaland tends to discourage other caste or tribe-related languages as well: it's fairly rare to hear any of the Rai or Limbu languages here, for instance, despite the large numbers of those groups in Kalimpong. 

We were bumping along the road from the bazar.  Bumping along towards Bung Busty, one of several villages within an hour's walk from the Bazar.  From here, where the paved road peters out, I look back to see the town crowded along the ridge between two hills, the gleaming roof of the big Hindu temple, the flattened quadrilateral of the fair ground.  The town's momo stalls and weekly market are a world away here, I think, as I catch a whiff of cow manure and wood smoke and watch the dogs tussling in the dust.  It's quiet and sunny, and all around me are newly-flooded rice paddies and the enormous, lazy leaves of banana trees.  I'm back, and I'm not sure how to feel.  5 years ago, on the Pitzer in Darjeeling program, I was plonked down with a host family in this village after a 2 week crash course in Nepali.  My now-partner and traveling companion, Thandiwe, lived with another family a short walk away, and though we were friendly at the time we didn't see much of each other outside of school hours.  I found my host family nice enough but never really clicked with them in the way I later found was possible.  There was old Aapa, the patriach, an old Lepcha man and a joker who never took me too seriously.  He found my initial stumblings in Nepali hilarious.  (What's that you say?  bhudi dukhyo ki budhi dukhyo? Your stomach hurts or your old lady hurts?  Ha ha ha).  His wife, my first Nepali Aama, was a proud Chhetri (or Ksatriya, a high Hindu caste) woman who had married Aapa in what must have been a passionate and scandalous move in its day.  I found her intimidating, as I could understand hardly one word in ten that she uttered, and many of her utterances sounded like commands.  Their youngest son, Lha Daju, and his wife, my Bhauju (sister-in-law), were closest to me in age, but with a seven-year old daughter they were hardly peers.  As much as with anyone, I connected with the 12-year old Ruben, a madhesi (i.e. someone from the Bengali plains) who stayed with the family and went to school in Kalimpong in exchange for doing odd jobs around the house.  We'd sometimes walk together after dinner with flashlight over the terraced fields to find and fix a blockage in the water pipe, or sit by the fire and do our best to communicate.  It was a memorable time of expanding my horizons and generally everything that a good immersive study abroad experience ought to be, but it was also often a trying one.  I remember waking up in the middle of my first night with my host family, in my too-short bed in my too-short room, opening the window, and puking into the potted plants lined up outside.  There was a lot of puking that semester, and a lot of stumbling communication.
Five years later, I haven't called, my one letter probably didn't even arrive, and here I am showing up at the house again.  I've heard through the Pitzer program staff that Aapa and Bhaauju have both died in the meantime, and have no idea what to expect.  From the outside, though, the place looks much the same as ever: the old building (now the kitchen and dining room) and the newer concrete house with their tidy dirt yard in between; the mango tree and potted plants, the home-made beehive and the kitchen garden below.  With a deep breath and a nervous smile I step into the yard.  Not exactly the bustle of activity I remember; the place is deathly quiet.  I call out a namaste and there emerges from the house a young woman I don't recognize with a baby in her arms.  She greets me with a friendly but slightly quizzical look.

Soon she, Thandiwe, and I are sitting in the little-used formal living room (in my nearly 4 months here I remember sitting here twice) and chatting.  She is Lha Daju's second wife, a Limbu; his second daughter is thus a Limbu-Lepcha-Chhetri mix and almost 7 months old.  The three of them are alone in the house these days, Aama having moved closer to the Bazar to live with a daughter after her husband died almost 2 years ago.  Ruben has grown up and lives in the plains with his family.  The two dogs I remember have died and are replaced by two more, and instead of the broiler chickens I remember, there's a small fish pond.  Life goes on, evidently.  And the timing of my visit is good: Ama, Lha's first daughter, and some other relatives and friends are all due to arrive this evening for the weekend.  I am invited back the next day to meet them all.  The next morning, we arrive to find the place full, with the various generations present forming a pyramid: a solid base of 6 or 7 kids, 3 young-to-middle-aged adults in the middle, and Aama by herself at top.  Upon catching sight of me she takes of her glasses and wipes a tear from her face in one motion.  Seated next to her, we hear in excruciating detail, through Aama's intermittent tears, the story of Aapa's last day.  Of what everyone was watching on TV when he fell down complaining of chest pain, of how the doctors in the Bazar were unavailable and how he was taken in a hurry down to Siliguri in the plains, not to return.  Aama was left behind at the house, waiting to hear the worst.  Here one day, gone the next, and Aama left alone after their decades together no longer wants to live in the house.  It is unclear how interested she is in living at all, although later at dinner she is all coos and smiles playing with her newest granddaughter.

Lha is much the same as I remember, still working on odd construction and other local projects in the neighborhood, though more and more of his peers are shipping out to Qatar or Malaysia to find work.  He is as cheerful and energetic as ever; we don't ask about his first wife's death after long illness from kidney failure, and he doesn't bring it up.  Little Anushka, his older daughter, now twelve, is bigger and no less bold, and seems to enjoy her baby half-sister.  One of Lha's own sisters feeds us lavishly (with us ignoring grumbles that we aren't eating enough) and we are enjoying playing with the happy, bouncy baby ourselves when the back-up power cuts out.  It's getting late, time to go.  We say our goodbyes, making no promises to return again but glad to have visited now.  Aama, proud and beautiful to the last, says she'll meet us in her dreams, in heaven. 

R.I.P.  Nima Tshering Lepcha
           Namkomit Lepcha

Nepal panorama

<< Leaf plate vendor in Asan, Kathmandu

Continuing with the attempt to cram weeks of helter skelter into a few hundred words...I have some more coherent, thoughtful posts on the docket, but for now, an attempt at a panoramic shot of the last few weeks, in which I've closed a loop that began 5 1/2 years ago, when I first visited Darjeeling on my initial foray to India and Nepal.  We're always closing loops in space through time: every time you return to the same room in your house you close a loop on the four-dimensional map of your life.  Those places we live become a tangle of small, overlapping, intersecting loops, and then the occasional lone line shoots out to a far place, across an ocean perhaps, to where another tangle begins.  My tangle in Nepal of the last couple years is now part of a finished loop that begins and ends in Darjeeling; soon the thread will head back into uncharted territories to the South.  Puri, Varanasi, Rajasthan, who knows?  
               I left off aboard a sleeper class train to Gorakhpur, near the Nepal border.  We stayed there for the afternoon, Thandiwe and I, to check out the Gorakhnath temple, which commemorates the founder tantric Siddhi who founded Hatha yoga.  But this proved to be something of a dead-end.  Nothing very interesting happening spiritually that we could unearth, and when a Brahmin priest beckoned me over it was only to try and coax large bills out of us for a tiny puja.  Ah, India, the land of extremes, love-child of spirituality and materialism.  The highlight of that day at the temple complex wasn't the life-size likenesses of Gorakhnath's lineage holders or trying futilely to round up some information, anything, on the significance of the place and the teachings, but rather going for turn on a peddle-boat in the square pool with a local school boy excited to practice his English.  A few hours after arriving at this place, one I had been quite excited about, we were ready to leave.  This, of course, is the other side of spontaneity in traveling.  Onward, onward.  The next stop on our sometimes-pilgrimage is Kushinagar, where the Buddha reached Mahaparinirvana.  i.e. died, at the age of eighty, having turned countless of his countrymen and women onto the road to liberation that he uncovered.  The site was long forgotten and has still not reached the popularity of the other major Buddhist pilgrimages, and we are there at the height of summer, when the place is half-abandoned.  Lucky us, actually.  We are able to visit the 25-century-old Buddha statue in peace, and meditate a while under a Pipal tree a stone's throw from the stupa that marks the spot of his death.  A powerful place, resounding in its tranquility.  The only activity around us the slow, steady labor of the man cutting the grass with a machete.  We tour the various temples, Japanese, Burmese, Chinese, spend a sticky night in an otherwise empty guesthouse, and pose for a photo op at the request of a troup of visiting monks from Burma.  The next day, we cross into Nepal, and with the transition comes a  palpable sense of homecoming as I shift from halting, limited Hindi to fluent, comfortable Nepali. From Kushinagar it's ahead 80 years to the place of Buddha's birth in Lumbini.  A stark contrast to the emptiness of Kushinagar, but not in an unpleasant way.  The expected temples from every Buddhist country--each claiming a share in this particular meritorious pie--were present, and rather oddly thrown together in the Japanese-designed park grounds, but the open layout and abundant green space keep the place from feeling too Disneyland.  We pedal around the grounds on creaky Indian cycles rented from our funky guesthouse, and make our first stop near a little straw hut whence an old man has emerged and is beckoning to us.  Definitely not disneyland.  We squat on the earth floor of his shelter or sit on straw mats, and listen to the man speak Hindi as he explains his existence, unquestioned, to us.  His life consists of worship, sadhana, little else, it seems.  He rises early and visits the site of Buddha's birth a short walk away, prays, perhaps meditates, cooks for himself, prays more, sleeps.  He indicates a few fried flatbreads from his breakfast, hour before, and indicates that we eat.  I'm hungry and do so gratefully, savoring the simple food and open-hearted generosity of the man, and hoping my stomach is ready for this kind of generosity.  Leaving the man with a few rupees for supplies--oil, flour, rice, dal, and salt his only necessities--we stow our cycles for a time and enter the main part of the complex.  At the heart of it all is the ancient complex of Stupa ruins that marks the place where the queen of Kapilvastu gave birth to Gautama by a pool, in the heart of her prosperous kingdom.  Again, the time of year and time of day (early) allow us a few moments of relative solitude at this normally crowded site, and we are able to sit and calm our minds in Samatha meditation under a huge Pipal tree that housed the shrine where visitors pay respect.
Meditation has been the constant thread through this trip, the stabilizing force, the quiet at the heart of the madness.  Today, weeks after Lumbini and Kushinagar, while meditating in my gust house room in Darjeeling, a fitting image appeared and succeeded in distracting me: our mind as a disk spinning with great momentum.  In the kind of calming meditation called Anapana, the simple act of focusing the mind on the natural breath, we reach out and try to stop the wheel's habitual, seemingly inevitable motion.  It's moving too fast, and we succeed only in generating heat and friction in the few seconds we can manage to grasp at it.  But, with discipline, we reach out again and again.  As our fingers callous and strengthen we grasp harder and for longer, and the wheel slows.  And once the spinning is under control, the next stage of the work can begin.  Having achieved a degree of Samadhi, contol over the mind, one can work to develop Panna or Prajna, wisdom, through the technique of insight meditation (vipasyana).  One can start to examine the nature of the wheel, the patterns that once appeared as a blur.  And one can start to try and change some of those patterns, generating a great deal more heat and friction (physical and mental discomfort) along the way...Yes, I am back in the thrall of Vipassana, as taught in various international centers by S.N. Goenke of India.  His a pure form of Burmese Theravada Buddhism, which means it's a philosophy combined with a method, without the superstructure of ritual to complicate it.  As Goenka-ji presents the Dhamma, or teachings, or path, it is entirely non-sectarian, merely a remedy for universal sufferings that therefore must itself be universal..  The ten-day courses are designed so that anyone, from any background, can come, and, if she is prepared to set aside every aspect of her normal life, all habits and creature comforts from sufficient sleep and food to reading and writing and communicating with other humans.  As I described after my 10-day sit at Dharmapakasa in Illinois back in March, it's an incredibly hard, cold, dry, and lonely undertaking, but one that effects remarkable transformation.  Like life in the chrysalis, I suppose.  On the tenth day, when the vow of silence is broken and Noble Silence is replaced by Noble Chattering, in Goenka's words, the sense of not just relief but love, gratitude, and good will is palpable.  Well.  Four months on from my own experience with all this, I wasn't quite ready to sign on again, but I was eager for Thandiwe to experience what I had (which makes me sound like a sadist, but I know she's stronger than me in some crucial ways, and that it would as worthwhile for her as it was for me).  While she was sitting her 10 days at the center on the edge of the Kathmandu Valley, therefore, I decided to volunteer as a dhamma worker.  Even the requisite three daily hour-long sits was plenty for me, I discovered, and the schedule had its own demands.  I re-discovered that I'm a lousy disciplinarian (the Nepali guys under 30 took almost every opportunity to start chattering!), but felt the rewards of service when I got to reach out to struggling meditators the way a volunteer reached out to me, in loving kindness, and gave me the courage to stick it out on Day 4 when I was ready to quit.  And what could have been a lonely time is redeemed many times over by the kindness and compassion of the other volunteers, all Nepali, from 16 to 67 years old.  The course remains slow, but leavened with a pen and notebook, a couple novels, and work to do, the 18 hour days fairly flew in comparison to my previous Vipassana stay.  And at the end, sweet reunion, sweet communion, sweet exodus.  And Epic theological, geological, and erotological conversations with a rejuvenated Thandiwe, who had the expected Hard Time but also felt cleansed and clarified.
One upshot of this purification: the sudden return to our haunt on the outskirts of the tourist district, Thamel, came as a slap in the face. After one night we flee south, to Patan, and spend our last five days in Nepal based out of a sleepy little guesthouse over the event horizon of that particular black hole.  Still, we decide not to renew our Nepal visas and buy bus tickets to take us to the Eastern border.  After a social last few days, we find ourselves aboard the night bus to Karakbhitta, on the boarder with Siliguri and the gateway to the Darjeeling Hills of "Gorkhaland," Nepali-speaking India.  We've come almost 100 km west from the Valley after a late start due to a Kathmandu jam and have almost reached the turn-off that will take us down out of the hills and to the east-bound, straight road across the Terai.  We've got adjacent seats near the front (leg room!  A small miracle) and are settled in.  The sun is sinking behind the hills on a surprisingly clear evening, and the moving-vehicle trance is enhanced by the beat of the folk music blasting from the stereo.  Soon it is dark, and I doze, waking to a feeling of peace and security in the face of the almost complete unknown.  I feel coddled, soothed by the warm night air, the music, the banana trees flying by, the jarring turns in the road.  I am able to relax completely, to cherish the moment, knowing that it is fleeting.  Anitya, anitya, anitya, intones the voice of Goenke in my head as on the Vipassana course recordings: impermanence, impermanence, impermanence.  Sure enough, the bliss is not to last long.  Before dawn my reverie is cut short by the all-too-familiar sulphurous belches that precede most of my explosive gastrointestinal episodes in India and Nepal.  This time I reach for a Cipro tablet, knowing the time for holistic, preventative management and time for the big guns.  This is a bus ride, hours left to go, and the closest thing to a bathroom on board is the sliding glass windowpane next to me.  Thankfully the rumblings subside into a minor, vague unease, and Thandiwe sleeps on unaware of my brush with hilarity--which is what would have ensued elsewhere on the bus, I can only imagine, when the passengers caught sight of my skinny ass hanging out the window.  Doubly lucky I am, for within hours the bus is stopped at a banda.  Apparently along this stretch of road in Jhapa a few months ago, a man was killed in a road accident, and his family has still not been compensated.  The strategy, as usual, is to shut down all traffic until a satisfactory outcome is achieved.  Glad not be on a schedule, I ready myself for a long stopped in single-file traffic on an unglamorous strip.  But today the appropriate wheels are greased, and we're on our way and rolling within a few hours.  By mid-day we cross the border into India, suspected visa problems amounting to nothing, and catch a jeep for the hills.  The ride is stunningly beautiful as we are whisked up and out of the heat and bustle of the lowlands into the terraces and tea gardens of the hills.  Behind us stretches the gangetic plain, off into the haze.  Ahead lie fog-enveloped ridges, hill stations like Kurseong and Kalimpong draped over them.  The toy train to Darjeeling criss-crosses the motorable road, the air quickly cools, we are in another world.                     

A couple of loose fragments:
Getting intentionally lost in the labyrinthine streets of Patan with a new friend from Vipassana.  Stopping to eat a big clay dish of the famous, rich Bhaktapur yogurt called Jujudhau (imported from the other end of the Kathmandu Valley), and stopping again when we see a jumbled assortment of musical instruments in a shop window.  We bang on drums, pluck at guitars and what looks like a fretless six-string banjo, until the owner distracts us with something even better: an instrument he's made, like a one-headed drum with a long spring attached.  Shaken, the spring vibrates and reverberates against the drumhead, sounding like storm winds.  Another, smaller one imitates a cricket.  Soon we are all jamming, improvising against a typical Newari street-procession beat...............and at the Vipassana center, craving fellowship, I head up to the course office with a bag of good ground coffee I've brought from the states.  Unsure what the other volunteers will make of this (what, you've been keeping foodstuffs in your room?) I'd considered just making myself a cup to get me through the slow day, but decide to chance it.  Everyone turns out to be as eager as I, and I make a strong, black, sweet cup for everyone in the office.  The next day the ritual is repeated, though I wonder if we're not breaking Vipassana law by craving pleasant sensations, and the next evening, when I must decline, until the coffee's gone.  Small pleasures.

Snapshots

Above: Paan-spit-stained airshaft of a cheap hotel room, Delhi

The churn of experience has been churning away, and (besides the eventual, hoped for gobs of butter), bubbles of reflection have been percolating upwards towards the surface.  By some conspiracy of influences, I'm in the midst of what seems a paradigm-shifting metamorphosis, time plays funny, and everyday events spin themselves into Significant Happenings.  I've been drawn into a nexus, which is all very exciting, but it makes coherent interpretation difficult.  Until I pull some sort of perspective together, I'll satisfy the writing itch (and 'to write' in Hindi/Nepali is derived from an Arabic root meaning "to scratch") with a series of snapshots.

So, the last 10 days, in fragments:

After a frantically social last few days in New York, I wake at first light with a wisp of a memory of turning off an alarm two hours earlier, sit bolt upright, and five minutes later am out the door with partner and luggage, unshowered and greasy, and hop in a yellow cab for Newark airport.  My panic subsides as the driver sagely selects a route and we leave Manhattan behind.  Half to calm my nerves and half to solicit his obstacle-removing shakti, I repeat Ganesh's mantra under my breath.  An hour later we are through on board a Virgin flight for Delhi.......................Our first night in Delhi, in a cheap but clean hotel room armed with a big ceiling fan and a window into a paan-spit stained airshaft.  It's hot but bearable out but like a convection oven inside, the cement walls and hard mattress radiating the day's heat.  The jetlag trance state proceeds through successive rounds of a cooling ritual: rinse off with warm water from the cold tap, dampen topsheet, lie under it until its life-preserving power is exhausted.........................................Wandering the narrow gallis of Old Delhi our first evening, I ask a shopkeeper in my stumbling Hindi where good local eats can be found. His directions are, essentially, "go left, then right, then left again, and you're practically there."  At a bit more prodding, a map is produced.  The first left is to be taken at a Hanuman temple, and the shopkeeper will take us that far.  He wants to share some of his culture and his city, and we wash our hands in a tiny basin, leave our rubber sandals without, and tour the neighborhood shrine.  Soon we have caught the resident priest's attention and been walked through a puja.  Having completed our darshan (viewing of the divine image) we leave with smiles, marigold garlands, tika'ed foreheads......................................In the day's rising heat we charter a tuk-tuk to the Baha'i lotus temple, that faith's only outpost in Asia.  As we wait for the gates to open, I feel myself flushing with a heat greater than that outside, as if I'm the source of the high ambient temperature. Inside the vast, open space within the lotus, silence reigns.  I long to slip into the clear blue pools around the temple.  Mind occupied with the Baha'i creed that all faiths are essentially one..................................Getting the runaround at the New Delhi railway station as we try and purchase tickets for the next day's departure for Gorakhpur, 15 hours to the East.  It is not possible, no, not for four days...until we find the right office, the official one, and buy our tickets for less than half then price we'd been quoted.  Despite this, we have found Delhi much less tout- and scam-infested than we had been led to believe.  It is less concentrated than Kolkata, and without that city's sense of decaying grandeur disappearing under tropical growth.  Instead sprawling, drier (though this is due as much to the season, the last days before the rains begin).  Delhi Chicago to Kolkata's New York? Which would make Mumbai L.A....and Chennai?.................................On the platform awaiting the 8:25 Gorakhdam Express, along with what must be half the population of certain small city states.  We claim some space, people-watch, sweat, and are oggled in turn.  We remark to each other on people's willingness to stare.  Buy a 10 rupee folding fan: "folding fan!  folding fan!," a chant we decipher only after 10 or so repetitions................................aboard the train, sleeper-class.  I awake before 2 AM somehow convinced it is almost dawn, and sit in the open doorway of the car, watching the dark shapes of bushes and the occasional house go by in the Uttar Pradesh countryside.  It's not unbearably hot for a change, in fact almost cool in the heavy, grey pre-monsoon skies.  Move my bowels at the squat toilet, quite clean and perfectly odor free, since the hole opens directly down onto the tracks.  Marvel not for the first time that I'm in India. At 4 A.M. I buy a paper cup of chai (chaay, actually) from the tea-wallas who patrol up and down the aisles, and later some breakfast: aloo chop and white bread with a ketchup packet.  India's British heritage reveals itself, like divine will, in unexpected ways........................Divine will.  I wouldn't have caught myself using that term a year or even a month ago, but I'm becoming less shy about such things.  Do I believe in God?  Not the god I forswore as a small child lit up by thoughts of black holes and, later, the prospect of laying bare the workings of reality through string theory and the like.  I'm still not crazy about the term, and the capitalization, and most of the connotations.  Theology strikes me as futile.  The less said the better about the object of faith--but I've discovered faith, and understand, as Michael Gruber writes in the guise of one of his characters, that it's a gift.................I guess we're out of snapshot mode now, and I haven't even gotten to Nepal yet, even to Kushinagar and the first purposeful stop on what is to some extent a pilgrimage...but Michael Gruber.  The man has penned three novels that have provided an extremely timely source of spiritual nourishment in, of course, an unexpected form.  The books detail the life and most interesting cases of a Miami detective who finds himself embroiled repeatedly in what he comes to dread (and eventually embrace) as Weird Shit: African sorcery and its descendant Santeria, South American shamanistic practice, and less exotic but no less forceful cracker Protestant faith, amongst others.  They're a ripping, gripping read, but under the cover of the thriller, part of the books' real work is to challenge the world's current materialist worldview in ways that are hard to ignore.  Indeed, one comes to realize (if one hasn't already) that our society is as religious as any other, but with rather perverted idols: money, sex, speed, forward motion, shiny things.  Science itself, what should be a method and not a belief system, has taken on cult status.  In this light, alternative views become attractive and in fact essential, and Gruber presents a host of related spiritual systems that fill the void.  The overall arc of the trilogy is also concerned with the spiritual maturation of the star detective, Jmmy Paz, Gruber being a wise as well as an intelligent writer.  There's plenty of other juicy stuff, lots of sex, and also a recurring, hard-hitting racial theme.  Better than any white author I've read, Gruber understands the varieties of racism and the ways in which it is instutionalized and sanctioned.  They're challening books all around, but the medicine just tastes so good you can't put the bottle down.

In the interest of timely posting, I'll leave whatever typos in and save the Nepal stuff for next time.  How time flows, then oozes, sticks, recoils... 
Love to all my readers, with apologies if I've gone too far off the deep end this time.
Jonathan

Investing in Ourselves

It appears that the Escher-eque architecture of the political economy (or is that the economic politic?) is finally betraying itself for what it is: a mesmerizing but trumped-up house of cards.  And while most houses of cards are at least built upon foundations as solid as, say, a coffee table, ours is held aloft by increasingly sporadic gusts of hot air from the maw of a bloated, sickly, senile carnivore.

I'll let those images float around free of further interpretation.  I don't claim any real talent for political/economic analysis.  For that, I'd like to recommend Very Knowledge and Club Orlov.  The authors of both are highly skilled at summing up just why, exactly, we're in so much trouble.  Trouble?  It depends on how you look at it.  But most people would call this Trouble with a capital T: the Western, consumption-oriented way of life is on its last legs, at least in the West (China may just be getting started).  The writing is on the wall.  The eagle has crashed into the ocean.  Yes, change is afoot, Mr. Obama.  Great upheaval is on the horizon, as the re-orientation of something as massive as the global economy won't happen without making a few, uh, waves.  As in tidal waves.  Things in the U.S. are poised to get radically ugly.  This is a good reason not to gloat, even over the downfall of as brutal, myopic a tyrant as the U.S. has become.  But it is exciting.

Amidst such a backdrop of gushing oil and economic failure, it's a good time to think about very basic things, including such impolite questions as "where does your food come from (and where will it come from)?"  And "what is your plan for when oil costs $10 a gallon?"  Many highly intelligent authors have argued that the necessary questions are going to be good deal harsher than this second one, since I have assumed that oil will still be available, and, implicitly, that things like highways will still be in good repair and safe to venture out on in a private vehicle.  Check out James Howard Kunstler for some juicy speculations on that score.  There are limitless possible scenarios, but I don't fancy stockpiling guns and canned food or even for that matter moving up to a remote hilltop in Vermont year round and tending a big garden and a flock of sheep.  Much as I like the sound of the latter, it just ain't me.  For these purposes, the details of just how a post peak-oil America will look are not really the point.  Instead, I prefer to focus on the basics.  When pondering how to spend time, money, physical and mental energy in a time of intense uncertainty, I find myself asking "what can I invest in that I won't end up regretting no matter what happens in the world?"

The short answer is "myself."  Lest that sound irretrievably egocentric, let me backtrack a bit.  

I've figured out that the intersection of my talents and passions and the needs of the world--which is how someone famous or other once defined "calling"--lies in the realm of nourishing, in making myself a vessel for traditions that nourish and tend toward wholeness.  If this I were in The Giver, I'd have been named Nourisher on my thirteenth birthday (and been awfully confused at the time, except that even then I loved to cook).  So I've decided to invest in the pursuit of that general goal.  Health being at something of a premium these days, there will be no shortage of work to be done.  All the more so if we define health broadly, to mean not just lack of detectable disease, but also a positive state of balance and contentment.  Ayurveda provides a set of powerful conceptual tools for achieving balance in body and even in mind.  The contentment part, though, is more elusive.  This is the realm of what we might call spiritual health.

Wait, hold it.  This is getting suspect already.  What does "spirituality" even mean?  Luckily it doesn't fall into the category of asking "what is jazz?," to which Louis Armstrong famously responded "man, if you've got to ask, you'll never know."  Really good jazz has a certain ineffability that defies definition, and if you can't feel it, there's no use trying to pin it down with words.  Ultimate reality may share some of that elusive quality--ask Mahayana Buddhists, who have developed complex ways of talking about that very elusiveness without reifying the concept of elusiveness itself, or physicists, who delve ever deeper into the structure of time and space, uncovering marvels within marvels.  Even the innermost marvels, if there are any that are ultimately innermost, defy all comprehensibility, with features like wave-particle duality.  The most promising theory, String Theory, requires that there be something like 11 extra imperceptible dimensions curled up into vanishingly small knots at every point in space-time--and this is in the name of simplifying.  Ultimate reality may well be beyond our capacity to understand it (wouldn't it be weird if it weren't?), but spirituality is not.  Leaving aside the term's mixed connotations, let us think of spirituality as a sense of purpose in our lives.  This doesn't mean we have to "know the meaning of life," just that we have an operational, pragmatic idea of how to create our own meaning.  Once we have meaning, we have direction, and we have something larger than our own egos and desires to base our lives upon.  Direction gives perspectives and resilience, a certain stabilization that, tended to, will tend us in return and keep us on the path.  

If this spirituality--meaningfulness--is the goal, what is the means to it?  A good place to begin the search is with the Sanskrit term for health itself.  The word is swasthya.  It means self-situatedness.  It conveys a sense that the place to start is with ourselves.  Each of us.  Working on her/himself.  This sounds simple, but in the context of Western society it is in fact radical, for we are accustomed to looking everywhere but within for fulfillment.  But it would seem that some sort of self-work is in order.  This is not egocentrism, for the goal of the process (or one of its side effects) is to eliminate the pernicious and false construct of the ego.  Rather, one's self is the only place one can start.  Later on ripples will spread outward, but those ripples come from the center.  We have to be self-centered; the challenge is (to paraphrase Einstein again) to widen our circles of compassion enough to embrace every being.

It's worth emphasizing that this kind of spiritual work is precisely that: work.  It is work in much the same way farming is work, and involves many of the same processes: preparing the ground, planting the right seeds, weeding out what is undesirable.  It requires the same sorts of attributes that help make any long-term endeavor successful: attentiveness.  The will to succeed.  Effort.  A sense of timing.  Immense patience.  Faith.  All these are necessary qualities, and yet they are also the fruit of the labor.  Thus the process is cyclical, and as different stages are reached, the seeker gains the strength and skill to proceed further.

So far I've avoided talk of religion per se.  Spirituality in the sense of finding and refining one's purpose through "self-cultivation," may or may not come associated with a particular religious tradition.  Many find that having a well-trodden path to follow is helpful--even if (in the world of so many Southasians I've spoken to), "all roads lead to the mountain"/"all rivers lead to the sea"--while others develop practices independently.  For most, some level of guidance is helpful.  What kind of path to follow does, of course, depend on one's aims, level of motivation, and many other factors.  And not all spiritual techniques accomplish the same thing.  The term "spiritual work" is still a useful one, however, if understood as that which contributes to an increase in positive attributes in the practitioner such as contentment, selflessness, and equanimity, while weakening negative thoughts and tendencies.  Buddhism and Christianity, for example, have some serious metaphysical differences, but they both aim to cultivate ethical living through kindness and compassion.

In the Southasian context, spiritual paths take many forms.  Even within Hindu traditions in which the overall goal is union with the divine, there are a number of different paths that are recognized.  Since yoga means union, these have names like karma yoga (the yoga of action), bhakti yoga (devotion), and jnana yoga (higher insight), as well as the more familiar hatha yoga.  Speak with Bharat Natyam dancers or Tabla players, and you will hear of their own practices as paths to the divine.  It doesn't so much matter what as it does as how: Zen Archery could equally well be Zen Underwater Basket Weaving, as long as it performed with mindfulness and devotion.  Many profoundly spiritual people don't associate themselves with any particular tradition, but simply follow the quiet voice of their own way.  I'd love to hear people's stories of others they've known that fit this description, because I think we all have met people who inspire us with their inner quiet, quiet courage, courageous eccentricity.

As I find (to my own continuing surprise) my own spirituality unfolding along a Buddhist path, I have more to say from that perspective than I do in terms of general remarks.  At the heart of Buddhist practice lies meditation, a direct and unmediated act of self-cultivation (bhaavana).  As practices go, meditation is relatively subtle: no signs of visible activity or direct impact on the world.  There is a tendency in our culture to discount the subtle in favor of the obvious, the tangible.  This may partly explain the difficulty so many have in conceiving of something like meditation as having any real value.  Why do Tai Chi when you could really burn some calories by lifting weights?  In reality, subtle forces are the most influential, as gentle, unassuming water carves a gorge out of solid rock.  Emotions may be insubstantial, but murder would never happen if not for rage, hatred, fear, and jealousy.  This principle--that the subtle governs the concrete--is what makes meditation so powerful.  Along with plants and animals, who so far have not been the cause of much Trouble, the world is composed of vast human societies, each of which is composed of discrete cities and towns plus rural areas, composed in turn of families, and finally, of course, composed of billions of individual people.  These people's actions, their ways of being in the world, depend on their internal states.  Without peace and harmony in the inner world, we can't expect it on the outside, either.  Start at the center and ripple out.  And--neat trick--eventually (they say) the center disappears.

                                                                      *         *         *

  For someone interested in pursuing self-cultivation of the sort I've been describing, but who is not sure where to start, there is nothing to be lost and much to be gained by developing mindfulness.   A calm, steady mind is a necessary stage on a number of paths, and it's a beneficial practice in its own right.  Calming the mind through this kind of meditation is akin to simply stopping the motion that we're always making.  If the mind is a car, then it's always running, and of course we need to stop it before we can open it up, see what's wrong, and fix the durn thing.  I like the analogy of muddy water.  Since the mind is always moving, the mud never has a chance to settle out, and the water never clears.  But with enough calming meditation, the motion slows to a stop, and the particulate matter settles to the bottom.  The water becomes clear, full of light.

The simplest form of samatha or calming meditation uses the breath to still the mind and make it one-pointed, absorbed in its object of concentration.  Here are some simple instructions aimed at a novice meditator, enough to get you started with a simple daily practice.  Sit in a comfortable position on the floor or in a chair.  Establish a firm, comfortable foundation.  Straighten your back, but not so much that you make yourself uncomfortable.  Loosen any tight belt or pants so that you can breathe freely, down into your belly.  Set a timer for 5 or 10 minutes.  Close your eyes gently, and turn your attention to your breath, just the way you breath naturally, in and out.  Try not to control your breath, just watch it as it passes in and out through your nostrils.  Sounds simple, but it's not.  The mind will wander away again and again.  Each time you catch it wandering, gently but firmly bring it back to the object of concentration, the breath.  This is enough for many sessions, and it will be hard work.  It sounds obvious, but there is no substitute for doing the work.  Merely reading about it is no good.  You have to do it, every day.  "5 minutes a day better than half an hour on the weekend," says one of my teachers.  If you persist, you will find that the ability to concentrate develops, and your mind will wander less far and less frequently.  You will start to notice sensations that you hadn't before.  As this happens, you can zero your attention in very specifically on the place in or around the nostrils that the breath touches as it moves in and out.  You haven't exhausted the usefulness of this technique until you are able to sit completely absorbed in your breathing, without a trace of discursive chatter nor even a feeling of joy at your accomplishment, for extended periods of time.  Until then, there's always room for refinement of awareness, for sharpness of concentration.  

Pathfinding

I'm not always sure whether this blog is more an open journal (as the subheading once proclaimed), a manifesto, a travelogue, a sort of ethnographic cookbook, or a resource for seekers of holistic health.  It's safe to say that, like Daniel Dravit in The Man Who Would Be King, Ill Wind has been "most things in [its] time."  Today I'll venture into the swampy terrain of self-disclosure and make a declaration, a sort of "contrack" between myself and myself, witnessed by you-out-there.  To wit:

I hereby declare to remove myself, after a third and surpassingly glorious and chaotic romp through the subcontinent to be chronicled in due course, to Portland, OR, city of bridges and natural health mavens and Ursula K. LeGuin, to immerse myself mind body and spirit in the philosophy, art, science, creed, and praxis of Classical Chinese Medicine.  That deep-rooted stuff.  That heterogeneous, contested, obscure, decidedly living body of traditions about the body.

It's official--I've sent in my deposit and I'm crazy excited to make a four-year run of it at National College of Natural Medicine.  This both is and is not a change of track for me.  Is, because I've spent so much time and energy on Southasia and its languages (Nepali, Newari, now Hindi) and medical traditions.  Isn't, because, like Ayurveda, Chinese medicine, in its classical, non Mao-censored glory, has the potential to integrate immanent spirituality and transcendent health.  And unlike for Ayurveda, there is both solid legal basis for practicing Chinese medicine in the States and a deep bank of resources (other practitioners and teachers) to tap into.  So as of January '11, I'm going to shift gears and dive into East Asia.  I'll be starting from scratch in some ways, and what I do already know may get in the way at times, but I have faith that I will not only become adept as an acupuncturist and herbalist in the Chinese tradition but also be able to integrate my Ayurvedic understandings and eventually become a stronger practitioner because of my eclectic background.

Not that it's all so cut and dry as this last statement may make it sound.  In fact, I suspect that this departure will end up being not so much a destination in itself but a substantial length of road to wherever it is I'm going.  Odd as it may sound heading into an intensive four-year program,  I see an intimacy with the Chinese traditional arts as a pre-requisite to something else--even if I don't know what that something is yet.  For I can't help but entertain notions of integration, in the most ambitious and inclusive sense, extending in this case to integration medico-spiritual understanding and techniques from different traditions into one eventual Path.  I'm highly aware of my tendency to think too much (why else would I do so much rambling?), but I think a lot these days about what that ultimate Path will be.  What vehicle I will wind up in for the better part of my journey in this life.  And I have inklings.  Unwise to articulate them too soon, perhaps, but I have inklings that this yog, this union, will occur in the historical meeting ground between India and China, in Tibetan soil.  I'm not sure about this, and even if I were, I don't think there's any shortcut there.  If I'm headed to the mythical Mt. Kailash, abode of Shiva, I must approach it as the pilgrims do, by making a kora.  Perumbulating.  Completing my part of the mandala, so that when I reach the destination I am prepared, i.e. equipped with the appropriate knowledge and experience.  For now, my path leads through China, if not actual China (and I am bone-scared of modern China), then a representative cultural distillation thereof.  Wish this foolish pilgrim luck.

Even as I write this, I'm conscious that it may be the most presumptive and pretentious thing I've spouted in quite some time.  In these few paragraphs are embedded some of deepest visions, faith, and (surely) pride.  But today I feel like letting all that hang out there flapping in the ether, if for no other reason that I'll have something to look back at in, say, ten years time, and be able to judge whether I was more full of pretension or prescience.

The Age-Old Quest for Nourishment

Today on the bus I saw a woman with a stroller get on and take a seat near the front.  She took out a bag of jelly worms and ate one, then fed another of the chewy red and yellow tubes to her infant.  I couldn’t see his or her little face, but I could picture the baby sucking the candy right down like a fat strand of spaghetti.  Ah, I thought--sweetness.  It’s the primordial taste, a direct link to our animal brains, the message that says “nourishment.”  But before someone gets on my case for advocating a diet of Haribo gummy candies for newborns, there’s a distinction that ought to be made.  There’s sweet, and then there’s sweet.  

As hunter-gatherers and early agriculturalists--in other words, people who got along somehow without food-processing technology much more sophisticated than the blade, the mortar and pestle, and the clay cooking/fermenting vessel, humans evolved to recognize viable sources of nourishment by taste.  Basically, the things that tasted good to us were the things that would keep us going, providing strength and nourishment to keep us not just alive but thriving.  Things like animal parts (especially internal organs like liver and heart, which are typically prized by traditional cultures and are eaten first by wild animals), seeds and grains, starchy roots and tubers, fruit and nuts.  Most of these foods taste sweet, in subtle or not-so-subtle ways.  Take bread, for instance: chewed for more than a few seconds, the starches in any loaf break down into shorter-chain carbohydrates, i.e. sugars.   So, in the mythical golden age of human nutrition, when the only problem with most people’s diets was that they might not be getting enough to keep body and soul together, sweetness was a pretty good indicator of nutritional value.  Enter the industrial revolution, slave labor, factory farming, and the McDonald’s-ization of global food trends, and the picture gets pretty distorted.  Now sweetness can be extracted from its nutrient matrix and concentrated, packaged and sold.  And by golly the stuff is a hit.  Rather like crack is a hit.  The same can be done with fattiness and saltiness, two other once-reliable indicators of nutrient-density.  The result?  The ketchup-dipped french fry, which to our taste buds is the perfect combination of fat, salt, and sugar.   Unfortunately, 99.999% of the fries out there are made with bad fat (chemical gobbledygook with names like ‘partially hydrogenated cottonseed oil’) bad salt (refined NaCl, possibly iodized but stripped of all other trace minerals), and even bad sugar (high-fructose corn syrup, which manages to be even sweeter and more problematic than the old devil, regular old white sucrose).  The potatoes are from a sterile, mineral-depleted lunar wasteland fumigated by spacesuit-wearing farmers, and the tomatoes, well, aw hell, they can count as a vegetable!  

I tend to get a little carried away when I think about what our society eats.  But it’s not my fault--things really are that unbalanced.  I’m not really one for statistics, but I’d be willing to bet that the average American is at least five times more likely to know how to drive a car and upload a digital photo than how to cook a simple meal of beans, greens, and grains from scratch.  And once quotidian food preparation techniques like making sourdough bread or fermenting a crock of kraut are practically obsolete in mainstream  America.  There’s a lot more that can be said on the subject of our “national eating disorder,” as Michael Pollan puts it, but as that wasn’t really meant to be my focus in this post I’ll refer interested readers to his by-now seminal The Omnivore’s Dilemma instead.  My contribution here is this: people should eat real (ideally, local, seasonal) food in appropriate quantities, yes.  But what if that’s not enough?

Most of the people I see in my capacity as an Ayurvedic/herbal health consultant have something in common.  They are craving nourishment.  I don’t mean that they are wasting away, suffering from calorie-deficiency, but they find that they’re not as satisfied by their food as they would like, or they feel a nameless hunger for something beyond what they’re getting.  This hunger has spiritual dimensions as well, of course--the hunger for meaning that typifies the postmodern era--but I’m talking about the physical plane.  Perhaps its simply the people I attract--I, as someone who has struggled with issues of nourishment and who envision my work in this world as an act of nourishing, broadly-defined; maybe it’s the spectacles I wear that see everything in a nutrition-tinted hue--but I don’t think that’s all of it.  Across the nation and the world, people are hungry.

As I learned to see from Ayurvedic teacher Claudia Welch, how many Americans are weighed down with weight that doesn’t really belong to them, sheer ballast that’s standing in for true nourishment?  Eating nutritionally empty foods can lead easily to a vicious cycle of hunger for nutrients, a hunger which is then fed with more junk, which creates weight but leads to ever more ravenous hunger...even for those who eat a reasonably balanced, mostly whole-foods diet, there is the same craving for grounding.  

Grounding: this mysterious-sounding idea bridges the gap between physical and non, and ties in another symptom of post-modernity: we live too much in our heads.  Our lack of nourishment is inseparable from our lack of sensitivity to our bodies, and to the earth.  It might be said--I’ll say it--that we hunger, at root, for connection, for the umbilical cord linking us to the great mama underfoot.  “Alternative medicine” abounds in ways to talk about this: the root chakra, the earth element, sacral vibrations...these ways of conceptualizing all share an association with the lower parts of the body.  Maybe what we lack, on some collective level, is the ability to shake our metaphysical booty.  (This isn’t so far-fetched: health would be a lot more marketable if people realized the connection between it and their libido.) 

So what to do about it?  I haven’t even mentioned the myriad stresses we’re subject to, from traffic jams to conference calls and jet lag, environmental toxins, you name it.  From an herbalist’s point of view, luckily, these issues and those of grounding and nourishment all point to a common set of remedies.  For nourishing, for grounding, for cooling our feverish appetites, for building our reserves and stabilizing our frayed nerves, sweet roots are what the order of the day.  My staunchest allies, the herbs I find myself reaching for more than any other for myself and other people, belong to this class of nourishing, adaptogenic roots:  Ashwagandha.  Shatavari/Asian asparagus species.  American Ginseng.  Licorice.  These can be taken as powder or tea or even tincture, but my favorite way is simply to eat them, gnawing on the tough Ashwagandha, chewing the sweet Asparagus rhizomes like gummy candy, sucking and chewing up a slice of licorice root until the sweetness is gone.  All extremely safe herbs (the only contraindication for any of these is with licorice, which due to its watery nature shouldn’t be used in cases of water retention or hypertension), they can be chewed freely.  I’ve even been known to give a Christmas present of a jar of “nourishing roots to gnaw” to a certain family member who, I was reminded, loves to do just that.  

To these grounding, building, soothing roots, I like to add some more specifically nervine herbs, especially in cases of heavier stress or where there is more heat and irritation (Pitta involvement).  With my Ayurvedic background, Gotu Kola (Centella asiatica) and Shankhapushpi (Convolvulus alsinoides) are my go-tos, but more recently I’ve been discovering the deeply cooling, calming, tension-relaxing nature of Motherwort and the nerve-feeding capacity of Oatstraw and seed.  A nice Ayurvedic trick is to add some calcium-rich bhasma (calcined mineral) preparation such as prawal or muktasukti bhasma, coral or oyster shell ash.  Given conservation issues, I go with oyster shell.  It lends a grounding weight to a formula and is especially nice for the Vata/Pitta conditions that so many people seem to be struggling with, and it isn’t expensive.  Finally, in cases where some extra grounding (bordering on mild sedation, such as in anxiety with insomnia) is in order, I will use something along the lines of Valerian root.  I prefer not to give heavy, dulling herbs for long periods, but they can be indispensably useful in the short-term.  

     Nourishing roots: Dong Quai (Chinese Angelica), Asian licorice, Ashwagandha, Tien Moon Dong (Asian Asparagus rhizome), American Ginseng

While herbs can nourish us and supplement the problematic food sources that are unavoidable, they are no substitute for deeper grounding work.  Depending on who, what, when and where you are, this might mean digging in a garden bed, sitting quietly and doing nothing for ten minutes, going for a walk in the woods, or playing soccer.  It almost certainly means unplugging yourself from the cyberworld for a spell.  In the spirit of practicing what I preach, I’m off to cook some dinner.  

That High, Lonesome Road

I’ve mentioned how finding the right metaphor for a situation helps clarify it, give it handles for the mind to grip.  Four days into a 10-day Vipassana meditation retreat in early March, the right metaphor wasn’t hard to come by: myself on a rocky path, silhouetted against an inky pre-dawn sky, toiling onwards and upwards through thinning air.  Dry.  Cold.  Alone.  What had I been thinking, signing up for this?  All my Ayurvedically-trained intuition was clammering for me to stop, turn back.  Dryness, coldness, harshness--these are the very qualities responsible for aggravating Vata dosha, the internal wind.  Ayurveda, “knowledge of life,” is predicated on balance; balance is achieved by treating with opposites, so cold is countered by comforting warmth, physical dryness by the lubrication of moisture or oil and psychological dryness by life’s master lubricant, love.  “Treat Vata like a flower” says one Ayurvedic adage.  Looking around the barren scree slopes around me, I see no signs of life at all.  No flower could survive here.  Nor would one have to study the ancient Indian science of life and longevity to understand that the remedy for loneliness is human fellowship.  But here I was, sworn to silence at the retreat center.  Warmth was parceled out in the form of two silent meals a day and whatever time one could find to spend in the shower.  Sneha--oiliness, love--was not to be found at all, it seemed, and this above all was what was getting to me on the fourth day of sitting.  And yet here I was living on the charity of others, their freely given gifts, so that I might have the same experience they found so powerful.  I was being fed, housed, served, instructed for free; this out of the way center in Northwestern Illinois was no prison camp but a temporary monastery of sorts, and I knew that behind the external roughness of the experience lay a vast reservoir of goodwill.  Still, I felt a thousand miles away from the fellowship and overwhelming feeling of accomplishment I knew would be waiting on day 10, when we makeshift monks would break our silence and prepare to return to the world.  

Day 4.  Underfed and overwrought, I returned to the meditation hall, my mind a seething sea of doubt.  This wasn’t for me.  I had been sick, needed nurturing, not the harsh treatment of this spiritual boot camp.  I wasn’t going to make it; that was OK.  There was no shame in that.  I would talk to this instructor after this group sitting, explain my reasons calmly, go reclaim my belongings and call Thandiwe.  She’d arrive by evening, understanding, loving, and take me home.  I’d have lost nothing.  But I knew I would be harsher on myself than that, that to leave would be to fail in the task I had set forth.  I gritted my teeth and prepared for another cycle of wrestling with myself.  But now it was time to sit again.  

For the past four days, we had been learning and practicing a technique called anapana.  Sitting upright, we were taught to bring our awareness to our breath, to its passing in and out of the nostrils.  This breath awareness is the foundation of many meditation techniques, and it’s notoriously difficult at first.  The mind resists the ball and chain of fixed attention, slips subtly out of its shackles to frolick free over field and fen.  Into memories and fantasies it travels, past and future, ever resisting the present moment.  Realizing the attention has wandered, the instruction is to bring it back, gently and firmly, to the breath.  Within seconds it is gone again, cherishing memories of past pleasures or reliving insults; tracing the contours of forgotten episodes from childhood, or plotting how to spend the first day of freedom once this Vipassana madness is over.  You realize you’ve been duped by your own mind again, and try and focus on the breath.  It’s been 10 minutes or so.  You are to sit quietly, not opening your eyes or leaving the room, for another 50.  Then you’ll have a break before starting again.  And again.  And again.  You’ll have a tea break, then watch the evening discourse and maybe even get to laugh once or twice at Goenka-ji’s all-too-apt characterizations of us fledgling students, our predictable trials and tribulations.  Then one more sit, and sweet bed in your cold little cell.  Tomorrow at 4:30 it starts again.  But what’s this?  Where has the mind gone? You were exhaling...

For the first three days we practiced this anapana, awareness of the breath, with increasing subtlety.  Once an awareness of simple inhalation and exhalation was established on the first day, however shakily, we were to refine our awareness to the place where the breath first touches the nostrils.  The new instruction is exciting for the first hour, before monotony sets in.  The endless task of dragging the attention back to the patch of skin where the breath blows back and forth, the inevitable loss of concentration, the interminable sitting.  On day three we moved our attention to the patch of skin below the nostrils and above the upper lip: a further progression from gross to subtle.  There were moments now of quiet focus, perhaps 10 seconds at a time, between the mind’s protesting interruptions.  Grudgingly, I had to admit, something was happening.  Since the teacher, Goenka, likened Vipassana to surgery, I began to picture my attention as a blade.  Drawing the steel edge minute after minute across the stone, it began to gain an edge.  I was able to feel my breath below my nostrils, whereas I knew that four days ago I would have thought this impossible.  And this exercise represented a finer-grained stone than the previous day’s had.  My awareness was sharpening, slowly but surely.  And I knew that soon we would make the first incision.  

On the morning of Day 4, a sign posted in the dining hall proclaimed that this was Vipassana Day and listed a new set of rules and explanations.  After the previous day’s heroic push up a long dry slope, I felt ready to begin the real technique, the one we’d been honing our awareness for, the mysterious Vipassana.  But Day 4’s morning meditation dragged on, still concerned with our upper lips.  We were told now to notice sensations, not just the breath.  Perhaps there were some feelings, like tiny pricklings and itchy spots.  Christ, I thought,  how much longer can this go on?  Finally, after hours of morning practice and the afternoon group sitting, it came time to listen to the Vipassana instructions.  We were not to leave the hall for the duration, and the first instruction explained that we were now to practice adhitthana, the strong determination not to shift positions, move our hands, or open our eyes at all.  I felt the path steepen, the air growing even thinner, colder, the wind more biting.  After the previous day’s feeling of accomplishment and the confidence that went with it, I was now back in the jaws of fear and doubt. The instructions continued to unfold, Goenka’s gravelly voice on audiotape telling us to move our attention over the surface of our bodies and notice any sensations we might find.  It was crucial, he explained, not to react to the pleasant or unpleasant sensations we would encounter, and this was why we were not to shift positions or even scratch an itch.  Oh cruel technique, oh torturous technique.  I hadn’t seen this coming, this sadistic twist: the path seemed all but impassable now.  I labored upwards, trudging blindly, frostbitten.  I found my legs could keep moving somehow through the snow, even has they lay there crossed on the meditation cushion; flogged into submission, my attention and stayed mostly on my exterior and on the sensations that greeted it as it moved across my skin.  When the guttural sounds of Goenka’s chant signaled the end of our first proper Vipassana sit, I was a charged mix of emotions.  All through the past hour and a half I had been telling myself I would leave, would turn back.  Now there was a giddy high feeling that shot through me as well--I had made it, had sat adhitthana for over an hour.  I felt stretched to the breaking point, slightly mad.  Coming to the surface of my turbulent emotions once again was doubt.  This was the revolutionary technique?  Scanning the body for sensations?  I might be able to make it through six more days, but what would be the point?  What did this have to do with “purifying the mind,” creating new habit patterns in the consciousness, following the Buddha’s steps towards enlightenment?  I didn’t know exactly why I had felt compelled to come to the retreat, but surely it wasn’t to do this all day.  Outside the meditation hall I spied Josh, the manager of the men’s dormitory, an old student volunteer who served behind the scenes and sat the three daily group sits with us.  Early on I had noticed his inner quiet, his kind expression.  Someone I’d like to meet, I had thought.  He was the one person I was permitted to talk to besides our assistant teacher, and the only one with whom I felt a glimmer of possible communion.  Speaking with Josh was technically reserved for material concerns, so conversations with him should be strictly limited to a whispered “Josh, there’s no more toilet paper in my bathroom,” at which he’d nod and conjure up a roll.  On impulse now, as a last resort, I approached him and asked shakily, “are pep talks in your job description?”  He smiled a little, ruefully, and replied “not exactly,” but beckoned for me to step aside with him and talk.  Days of pent-up anxiety and doubt came tearing forth in a few short sentences.  “I--I’m not sure why I’m doing this,” I said.  “If I stay it’ll just be because I don’t want to quit.  But I don’t see the point.”  I looked over at Josh, putting him on the spot.  I was asking him point blank to give me a reason to stay, a purpose for the profound discomfort.  He looked at me with his deep, liquid eyes and said simply and slowly, “it...does change everything.”  Standing in the grace of his compassionate presence, I believed him, though such cryptic words might have only alienated me further.  Instead I felt my doubts melting a little in this ray of human warmth.  Echoing a feeling I was becoming aware of, he went on, seeming to choose his words carefully: “And everything changes with this sit,” meaning the beginning of Vipassana proper.  “I can see that, I think,” I replied.  Looking back over my shoulder, I saw the path plummeting precipitously below, and realized I had come to a pass.  The path ahead was rugged and wild, but I had reached the high country.  And I had made it through the first crucial phase of acclimatization.  I had made it through an hour of adhitthana without moving; though I would have to do this again and again, nothing more difficult would be asked of me.  Overcome with a slurry of emotions, I gave Josh a heartfelt “thanks” and walked in the late afternoon light into a grove of silver maples on the men’s side of the retreat center grounds.  I stood facing west in the circle of trees bare trees and let my tensions well up and out of me.  I cried hard, hardly knowing why, for a few minutes, letting the tears flow down my cheeks and into the mud at my feet.  My fear flowed away and carried much of my doubt with it, leaving a strange fierce joy.  I knew somehow that the worst was behind me.  I had had my crisis, and now I could get on with the journey.  

                      

         Image: Buddha displaying the Abhaya mudra (gesture of fearlessness) in Manang, Nepal

Vipassana is a Buddhist technique, in the sense that it originated with the historical Buddha, Sakyamuni.  And though steeped in a quintessentially Southasian worldview in which the concepts of karma and rebirth are assumed, Vipassana itself is simply a technique.  It is free from theology, and S. N. Goenka, Vipassana’s great modern promulgator, emphasizes the non-sectarian nature of the practice.  This approach follows directly from the Buddha’s teachings, for the Buddha offered his dhamma, or path, as a remedy for a universal malady.  The malady, what in Sanskrit is known as duhkha, is no more or less than the miserable human condition.  

We don’t have to look further than the Buddha did from the walls of the palace he was born into to see this misery, this suffering all around us: we all grow old and die, and we mostly spend our healthy years yearning after things or people we don’t have or cursing the circumstances we do find ourselves in.  Even in moments of peace and plenty, we are seldom content with out lot: the mind strays ever from the present, fixing itself on phantom or illusory objects.  On a broad philosophical level, our problem is attachment to impermanent things.  Even if we get what we want, it won’t last forever.  Our fair maiden lover will wither and stoop; our beautiful child may die a terrible death before his time, or simply disappoint us again and again with his choices, so different from the ones we had envisioned for him.  Moments of true happiness are rare, and, helpless to occupy the present, we usually recognize them only in retrospect.  Then we seek ways to regain the pleasure we remember, but such yearning does not bring peace.  Rather, it  paves the way for addiction: if not to drugs, alcohol, sex, or food, then to power, authority, making people laugh, to our own egos.  Or, when we encounter things unpleasant to us, we create addiction’s opposite: aversion.  We habitually shy away from pain and discomfort, from a rumbling belly or an unpleasant sound or image.  This is the difficulty in facing the present: the present is not always pleasant, and it is almost never as pleasant as we can imagine or remember it.  According to the Vipassana tradition of Goenka as passed down by Burmese Vipassana instructor Sayagyi U Ba Khin, all of our addictions and aversions, our attempts to replace the present reality we’re experiencing with one we can imagine or remember, are at root a single addiction or aversion.  This, tradition tells us, was the insight of the historical Buddha, the key to his enlightenment.  We are not addicted (or averse) to external objects themselves.  There is always an intermediary.  A heroin addict does not derive pleasure from heroin, but from the sensation the heroin causes in him.  Similarly, fear of heights is unpleasant because it causes us actual physico-emotional discomfort to look over the edge of a cliff.  With every pleasant or unpleasant experience, there is always a sensation on or in the body.  It is these bodily sensations we react to and, in reacting, grow addicted or averse.  

This is where Vipassana intervenes.  The technique trains one to develop and maintain equanimity, a state of not reacting to bodily sensations.  ‘An itch arises on my nose?  Ah.  An itch.  It may be unpleasant now, but it shall pass.  I will refrain from scratching it.  A lovely tingling up and down my arms?  Quaint.  It will be gone soon, and that’s OK.’  Through changing the mind’s habitual tendency of blind, unconscious reaction, it becomes possible to change the way one relates to the world.  When someone causes us anger, there is again a sensation on the body that makes us feel bad.  We are angry because we have been caused discomfort, whether or not we are aware of it as such.  If we notice the sensation and cut off the knee-jerk reaction, it is possible to bypass the ultimate reaction, anger.  

This, at least, is the theory upon which the immense body of Buddhist meditation practice rests.  First calm and focus the mind through anapana (or other similar practices, all of which fall under the category of Samatha or calming meditation) practices, then use the mind’s sharpened faculties to gain experiential knowledge of the nature of existence.  Experience the habit patterns of craving and aversion and work to change them at the root level, while realizing the truth of anitya, impermanence.    Ultimately, it is taught, this practice of samadhi (control over the mind) and panya (experiential insight) leads to full liberation as long as it is build upon a firm foundation of sila, moral conduct.  

And in practice?  How does it work?  After a month of Vipassana practice, I don’t feel much closer to enlightenment.  But I do feel a bit wiser, more focused and disciplined, and with that comes renewed confidence.  And then there’s the compassion that develops through better understanding the human condition.  I don’t expect to reach enlightenment in this lifetime, and I don’t know that I’ll ever really try to break all of my attachments to the material world.  But I have succeeded in adding a few drops to each of the 10 jugs with labels like “determination” and “loving kindness,” the paramita or qualities it is necessary to perfect in order to reach the final goal--and which just might come in handy in any case.  

After completing the 10 day course and returning home, I no longer look back to see a high, rocky path amidst snow peaks.  I took a difficult solo journey, it is true.  But I also built myself something solid and durable.  With no blueprint at first but blindly following step-by-step instructions, I lifted the heavy stones and set them into place.  By the end, I had put together a simple but sturdy hut.  Back in the world, the austere dwelling is a wonderful refuge.  It requires a certain amount of upkeep, but it pays me back with shelter and warmth.  It is far from indestructible, and I must work hard to shore it up and protect its foundations.  But it has the potential to grow into a magnificent structure.  Perhaps one day it will have room for guests, but for now if you’d like to stay you’ll have to do as I do and sleep on the dirt floor.  Or you can always build your own hut...

Vipassana meditation website: www.dhamma.org

Root Growth

‘Tis a wonder to find the right metaphor--the one so fitting that it almost seems the thing itself.  Pondering this current, quiet phase of my life recently, I hit upon such an image: root growth.  That’s the phase of development I’m in.  Sending shoots down into the dark earth in search of nourishment; grasping the bedrock in a grounding embrace.  Above ground there’s not much happening--some buds visible, perhaps, to the discerning eye, promising flowers and eventual fruit in some season to come.  

It’s profoundly satisfying feeling my root tips drawing closer to the source of strength and stability: it’s no longer so difficult to have faith in a purpose and a path.  A path, a purpose: the book of changes, Yi Ching, suggested “subtle penetration,” an image appropriate to both.  The suppleness of water wears down rock; softness prevails over the hard, the brittle.  The hexagram shows a broken line, representing the soft force of yin, infiltrating a series of hard, yang lines.  So water trickles into rock, so roots penetrate into the earth through motion so slow and subtle as to be almost imperceptible.  

Our society worships all that is yang: hard muscles, outward displays of wealth or bravado.  Our heroes are athletes, one step removed from warriors.  In this context, it is easy to mistake subtle yin motion for idleness, torpor.  Don’t just sit there, do something!  (As the roots slide deeper, anchoring the tree against rough seasons to come.) 

Nor am I immune to the enticements of yang, as I watch friends spreading their names on stage, taking concerted action, forging ahead in their respective domains out in the world.  In comparison, I am hiding, digging my heels into the earth.  My most significant pursuits these days are internal.  On Thursdays I go to see one Mr. Lee in Chinatown, and he teaches me the ancient movements of Tai Chi Chuan.  The first lesson he simply showed me how to stand: knees bent, frame upright but relaxed, shoulders and tailbone always sinking towards the earth.  The second time we stood, then moved on to an exercise called ‘rubbing the ball.’  Loose arms gently trace the contours of a sphere whose diameter spans the distance from navel to shoulders.  The hands float up around the back to the top, then sink back down in front of the chest, curling around the underside before rising back up to the top.  Since then, 10 or 15 minutes of every day go toward rubbing this invisible ball, smoothing out my own flow of chi.  Letting my mind sink into my body, my body into the ground.  

On m=Monday evenings I go down into a basement room of Rockefeller chapel and listen to a droll Brit named Tom explicate a Theravada Buddhist meditation technique called Samatha Vipassana.  We sit for half an hour, and every evening I practice at home, following the prescribed steps.  First counting the breath, placing my concentration on the numbers as the breath comes and goes through a series of pre-determined lengths.  Then ‘following’ the breath in and out, concentrating on its movement and quality while maintaining awareness of the varying length.  Then ‘touching,’ concentrating on the point in the nostrils where the breath creates a sensation, still maintaing an awareness of the length and direction of the breath.  The idea is to train oneself to concentrate on progressively subtler objects, curbing the relentless tendency of the mind to wander free o’er farm and field.   

When people ask me what I’m doing here in Chicago, I rattle off the things I’m keeping busy with--tutoring ESL, studying herbs, teaching myself Hindi, not to mention strengthening the foundations of an important relationship--but my real work is the internal alchemy of meditative practice.  I am thankful to have the time and money to be able to delve down into myself, to grow my roots, in the knowledge that it is giving me the strength I need to spread my limbs, burst into blossom, and ultimately bear fruit.