Today at tea, after small talk and the daily exchange of English for Thai words, Mott asks me, “Can I ask you a question?”
He said he saw me writing all the time and asked what one needed to do to become a good writer. At the end of the year, when he halts his trekking across Thailand from temple to temple, he thinks he may go home and write a book. He wants to write a novel or a book of short stories.
I tell him to be a good writer you must be a good reader, and not just read a lot, read while noticing how the writer has chosen to tell the story. Just because a person drives a lot doesn’t make them a good mechanic. You can drive all your life but not know how a car works unless you take it apart and study the individual parts to see how they work individually and together.
Starting Each Day Asking for Alms
Bintabot is my favorite part of the day. After morning meditation, I go out with Mott, Ess and Nam and we walk through the forest to the village just as the sun rises. I’ve already attempted to describe the scene as we walk through rice fields and a bamboo forest. The sunrise lasts for the full two-hour walk, growing and evolving through different stages of incomprehensible colors which work together to leave me wishing I could gather the whole world of everyone together to watch the spectacle.
Today at Bintabot, Mott and I talk about technology and I tell him how I feel it is the antithesis of mindfulness. Mott says, “I believe if we have people with the pure mind, we have civilization. My teacher tells me that technology is a ‘babilion’ (distraction). Through meditation we can know everything.”
I feel like what he is saying is as unrealistic as when people say that the only book you need is the Bible.
“Maybe, “I tell him, “but there are some things that can only be known through the process of science. Meditation didn’t bring us the computer, or the electricity at the temple, or the bus that the other monks rode in to ask for alms in villages too far away to walk to.” I stopped there, not wanting to instill challenging and competing ideas into Mott’s already beautiful thought process.
Maybe his teacher was right, that all the development of technology is just making us into beings marching towards progress at the expense of compassion. On the New York subway we are all together yet all alone. People shy away frightened when eyes meet. We retreat into the cell phones, headphones, and books because anything seems better than being a human among other humans. How did we get like this? How can we get beyond it?
Do you believe in Reincarnation?
“Do you believe in reincarnation?” Mott asks me after a few minutes of silence.
“Maybe I do, maybe I don’t.” I reply. “I don’t believe in answering such questions with yes or no. They’re too big. If I do believe we come again, I believe in something called the eternal recurrence.”
“Imagine,” I say, “that the whole universe was only two particles. They’re would be only so many positions they could be in. They could be side-by-side, with one to the left one to the right. Or they could be one on top of the other one. Knowing the universe, there are many many more particles. So many, we can’t even understand the vastness of the number. Scientists tell us the universe started about 16 billion years ago at a show called The Big Bang. But they only say that because the tools they have to see the universe only goes back as far as that.
“But everything in the universe that we see is a cycle. It is the rainy season, then the dry season. Trees grow, flowers bloom, and then their leaves fall. Big stars die and then small stars like our sun can be born. Maybe all the particles in the universe repeat themselves in as many patterns as so many particles can produce and maybe right now we are in one pattern that always eventually comes up and has existed before, and will exist again, and will exist slightly differently, and sometimes will not exist at all, but will keep coming and going and going.”
Read more from my series, “Being Buddhist in Thailand”
