Something of Ulysses in July

Near countless power plants and vacant apartments, the monastery was considered  “out in nature.”

It’s now Day 4 of the Silent Retreat. We sit with the blinds open on Long Quan Monastery and its simple gardens. There are birds chirping in another morning. Rain falls dimly over the flowers and rooftops and walks of the yard, and all is empty anyway, so be glad of moments like this.

I feel a great deal of promise today. While yesterday I meditated three stubborn hours through the morning, today I am in tip-top mood and have not felt this happy yet in China.

There’s a mud slide in the road outside the diamond-clear window. The monks put a walkway of splintered boards across the way. My shoes got muddy as I ferried laundry above the boards. My clothes are soaking wet after two days on a rainy line. The air is fog or smoggy water that dries nothing.

It’s a new dawn, it’s a new day. We did taiji in the drizzle at 5:30. My favorite move is the one punch in our sequence. Breathing through my dong tien (in Japanese, hara) has built my immune system into a stronger beast, in the sulfurous dew of the mornings. My acupuncturist friend, Rob, diagnosed me with low yang energy, and this subtle condition makes it hard to thrive in damp places, like Seattle. This tradition Chinese diagnosis was a loaded bowl of greens I hit every day and will continue on. More to come once meditation’s done.

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Night has come. 8 hours in meditations today. Another profound morning, as I sat 2hrs 30 min. Feeling the good chi rolling in my hara as I prep for dinner.

It was a tough day. As many or all of them are here. I carry a great contradiction in me. In one part, a burgeoning zen pirate who’s bound to love every robin that lays an egg, and gorge on the sunset over rum. In another port, a pious layman, nonchalant and anonymous, contemplating the dharma with his jasmine tea. In yet a third, further round the bay, a monk of flesh and bone, who travels the road west transmuting jing into all the higher faculties while meditating his winters away. It is but all three in me. Or not, for who is me, you cry on a rooftop in Taiyuan.

Postcards From the Edge

Below are some photos from my Buddhist travels paired with lines I wrote at random times of day at the monastery.

Everything shatters into dharmas

by Sam Gorman

Different ways of seeing the same thing see the same thing

Set forth tangible ways of seeing the truth of the way things really are

By training in the view of the Void

The Tao that can be thought is not the eternal Tao

The nature of truth is spoken of not by Polarity, but by Negation

Find truth by finding what it is not

Remember this: The bastion of Time is palliative

 

Not into the body, but the new state o mind

Sunday, July 17th

 

Your body is a telescope. You are looking at the sun of existence. The monastery is an oven and we are the bread. Two days since I wrote, 9 since I read. The mornings are murky at 5 in your head.

The man is not silent but yelling. The Chinese believe exercise also includes the voice.

We yawn even through a damp tai chi class. Seems I’m yawning, all day long. The sun is more like an orange on a french canvas than a star. It is a globular moon of the dawn. A ripe apricot. We watch it rise above Taiyuan, just beyond the pagoda.

5:25 AM march to Tai Chi square

The days pass like states through the windows on a road trip. They are long, and seem to stretch infinitely in every direction. The moods are myriad as atoms. The thoughts can’t hide in shaved hair. Can you spot me in the picture? Just below the podium. That’s Sankalp standing up in the front. He’s from Delhi, and Carl the speaker lived there, so they are friends.

This chapter called Monastery Days is a collage of change. I really am thinking less. The sun is out, or the rain is comin’ down, but either way the war is over. We have peace of mind. There’s that quote, “After me, the deluge,” by Louis XIV. So we are living in the deluge of the past. Well, either way we are free.

1/2 our program at Long Quan Monastery is over. The solitude here is like the floor of the sea.

About to get shaved by Program Director Guttorm

The temple walls have been here all your life. And longer, so empty your heart from the rafters on down.

Me and roommate Casey Dawson. Yifa is our program’s founder (far right)

They say this funny thing about being reincarnated in this life. Not into a body, but a new state of mind.

Tea Time with Taiji Master

Thinking of the 4th of July

Monday, July 4^th

It was an ordinary day. But it was not an ordinary day. It was the 4^th of July.

We wake up at 5:15. Am I a morning person? Yes that is an axe you see. We hold a warm-up pose for 10 minutes in the morning dew. Our muscles burn off sleep with the effort. This is what the Chinese call chi. The West names it lactic acid. I discover the chi sloshing in my navel, and the heat builds in my shoulders. This is the chi, too. It can be passed throughout the body, like a secret note. So this is chi, in China. It is common knowledge that this experience I’m having is real. Chi is real, so they say.

Did you know that? Well. We can hold the pose for longer and longer, they say. Every morning we get better with chi, they say. They slap their own shoulders. We eat breakfast in our robes, and we get better at this, too. We eat less food. Our bodies are calm. The vegetables, and sweet bread, and porridge, are steaming in the bowls.

Now, I write at the huge table, in the main lobby. Someone must be taking pictures of us.

The monks walk past me, in a meditative conversation with themselves. A new definition for Low Key Squad Goals.

The sleepy students walk from one side of the window to the other with a curious look in their eyes. It’s as if, to the Chinese, the early sky is only fog, but we know what the sky is. We look in disillusion at the morning, a disapproval in our oily, unwashed faces. Far above the smog and country there is a clear sky that burrows down upon our pious hamlet. I am so glad to know there is a sky above this all. Look, there it is!

I carry a play in my vintage backpack called A Long Day’s Journey into Night. You have wanted to read O’Neill for a long time, now, I think in my head. How long have you wanted to live at a monastery? How long ago was it you, a vintage 1930’s twenty year old, smoking hashish in a cold water flat on the Lower East Side 3 lives ago? “We’re so progressive we now have white people in the monastery,” the monks say. Words are so rare to them.

The journey is a play. Though our days advance without real worry, the traumas of our own minds are as real as ever, vibrant even in the dark of our bedrooms. And anything self-created is like liquid in a bottle. Temporary. Like a waning moon, changing from hot to cold. You are always so hot and cold on things, I think. Gotta fix that broken radiator.

The Buddha reminds is to not think. It is as basic to him as “Good Morning.” The birds are here to wake us from thought. And almost like bells, they sing the words, thinking, thinking. The Chinese are awake, and before us. And if you can find the monks meditating, they are just as you’d expect: Meditating. It is real quiet at this temple. No false sound. Now wasted words. All the stories in our hot heads are becoming cool, brought down from a gentle boil.