Wat Sukato

Driving through Bangkok after the long journey home from the wat. These packed sidewalks and bumper-to-bumper traffic seem especially odd after the empty rural spaces of the wat. I will have to take it slowly to understand what the experience at the wat meant to me. Today, still in the car 11 hours after leaving the wat at sunrise, I have done remarkably little processing of the experience—probably because meditation practice pushes you away from analysis and reflection and into the mindful awareness of the moment and the quieting of the brain. I think I’ll go the Buddhist way and describe the experience first—to name my physical experience and then see if something arises for me to say about the emotional experience.

We were traveling to a province about which my guidebook had said “You’re more likely to see a tiger than a foreign tourist—and this is not a province known for its tigers.” We arrived at the wat after a full day on the road (rather than the 4 hours the monk says it takes!), a couple of those after-dark on red dust roads with more potholes than flat. The nun who had traveled with us from Bangkok had gotten hopelessly turned around, and in a place with no lights or street signs (or street names) it finally meant getting out of the car at each intersection to ask anyone who might be visible for directions to the wat (since many of the houses didn’t have solid walls, there were often people visible). I had surprisingly few moments of panic—we were hours after dark, hours from the last village—but I figured we were likely to find our way to someplace at some time. The only real trouble was how bad bumps are for the bladder. (One word here about toileting issues: zowie. I have still not quite learned the rules in this new land.)

Finally, we found the wat—a far cry from the magnificent “town wats” we had toured or passed in Bangkok and on the route north. This was a rough concrete structure on a red dirt road. The kitchen area was behind it, a concrete block floor with some chain link walls and a rusted metal roof. As we pulled up, we could see through the mesh walls to the bald nuns sweeping with twig-bunch brooms. They had cooked us a vegetarian dinner—most generous since the nuns cook (and eat) only once each day at breakfast. I was exhausted and not a little overwhelmed, and wanted food like I wanted another couple of hours on the back roads. But we ate to be polite (Aeh ate much more than he wanted to make up for my eating so little), and then I was shown to my hut. This hut had two rooms—each about 8 cubic feet. The first thing I noticed about the room was how clean it was—immaculate. Then the cause of the cleanliness—it was utterly empty. Not a table, not a lamp, and, alas, not a bed nor a cot. I was grateful for the screened windows. It wasn’t until the next morning that I would discover the hut’s two best features: the occupant of the hut’s other room who was a marvelous woman of about 75 who had been to and loved New Zealand and who had a handful of English words in her vocabulary, and an honest to goodness flush toilet. (It was later that day that I discovered the showerhead from the wall in the bathroom, the hole low in the wall for drainage and the sorry single tap, for cold water on hard or soft.)

It was a surreal first night, the roosters believing that the best time to begin their pre-dawn crowing was at midnight, six hours pre-dawn (the next night was to prove that they had slept in). I huddled in the sleeping bag Aeh had brought me (it’s the winter season here and gets actually chilly in northern Thailand) and rued my decision not to bring my travel pillow on this part of the journey. At 3am, the sound of the good-morning gong reverberated through the forest, haunting and magnificent. At 4 am, the gong again, quickly followed by the chanting voices spreading through the trees. With only a few hours of rough and uncomfortable sleep, surrounded by the chorus of chanting and crowing, I felt joy spread through my body: I had come a long way to be in a different world, and baby, I had arrived! I stayed awake until I heard my hutmate make her way up the stairs and into her room, and then I fell asleep long and hard to find the sun shining and Aeh knocking gently at my door. 7 am. Time for the breakfast ritual.

The walk from my hut to the kitchen was down the red dirt road and past the lovely ponds which would be my favorite places during my stay. I was starving but anxious when we arrived to find mostly old women in rows facing the two rows of orange-clad monks. I would later learn that these women were mostly from the surrounding area, and they come to the wat each morning to deliver food in lovely baskets, to stay for the morning chanting, and to watch the monks begin to eat the food they had brought. Then, their baskets empty, they head back into the town. Before anyone eats, though, there is chanting. While others chanted, Aeh taught me how to bow before the Buddha. Forehead to the tile floor with the murmured sounds of Pali all around me, I had a nearly out-of-body experience. For real was I here in a forest wat in Thailand bowing in front of a golden statue? The nun we had traveled with came to tell us that the nuns had prepared a vegetarian meal for us—the second of many meals they would prepare, unrequested, just for me (the bags of food we had brought with the assumption that there would be only one meal a day were donated to the wat when we left). I watched the monks eat their meal (first) and then went into the kitchen to get mine and then bring it back to eat in silence with the others gathered to worship on the floor of the wat. Breakfast, day one.

Aeh and I took off on our own (after washing our plates in the incredibly rough but systematic washing system) and wandered around the pond, wondering what to do first. His mobile phone rang (his worked, mine didn’t), with our friend the nun telling us that the abbot of the wat (the monk who had come to my seminar) had arrived briefly and was free to talk to us. We came in, bowed three times, and found the monk waiting for us next to the Buddha. In deeply accented lovely English, he gave me my first teaching. His message was, mostly, to be playful. Meditation was a kind of “serious play.” Nothing to be forced, nothing to make you stressed. Mistakes, wandering of the mind, emotion, all this is about learning, and practice is about learning, so “pay it no mind and just go on.” He showed us how he meditates when he’s tired, slumping against a pole and showing us seriously sub-prime mediation posture. He told us about how thoughts and emotions come to him and he just sends them away. And then he said something like:

Imagine that you are on the shore of the ocean. You watch the waves going up and down, in and out. You watch them, you see the motion, you don’t have any control over the up and down, the in and out. But neither are you wet, sitting on the shore. Sometimes the water calls to you and you go into the ocean, and now you are wet. Now the waves move you up and down with them. Now you are controlled by the waves. This is like the practice, watching your thoughts move but not being controlled by them. And if you are called into your thoughts or your emotions, you feel yourself going up and down with them. And then you remember to be mindful, and you go back on the shore. And you are wet, but you are not in the water anymore, so you will dry. There is nothing to be worried, just to watch the waves going up and down. This is the practice.

And I loved this man and he made me happy, and the happiness carried me through the first day. Now I’m at my hotel where, to my terrible dismay, my hot water was BROKEN! But they’ve fixed it and I’m headed to bed (ahhhh, how beautiful it is to mean that literally tonight!). More stories tomorrow. This is just to let you know that I survived—and maybe even thrived—at the wat.