After breakfast, one of the younger monks and comes up to me and proclaims, “I teach you how to ca-pot.” I am making a mess of my bows to the Buddha and superior monks are noticing.

Sometimes my brain puts things in the wrong file. My mind put all Buddhist monks as in the same easy going folder as Jamaican Rastas. But there were rituals and traditions I was flubbing what the older monks had been noticing in silence, the younger monks seemed happy to help me learn.

In a 1,000 print run Thai/English booklet Mott gave me to read, a wandering Thai monk responds to the question some pose to why traditions are important in a tradition whose central tenet is detachment from things, traditions included. He compares the core teaching to core of a tree and tradition as the bark. A tree needs both to survive.

I receive my ca-pot lesson and the other novices, a few monks and I hang out behind the temple. We shoot the shit, exchange Thai/English words, and Mott translates so I can talk to everyone and everyone can talk to me. Ess, who I was with that morning for our alms rounds shows me the tattoos he got on his arms before he became a monk, fierce flying dragons that you can tell he’s proud to have, though as long as he remains a monk can’t add to.

He tells me about s temple 40km away called Watt Thasung, ancient and made from glass. There he says the meditation is supernaturally done, which can hypnotize (a word that shows my skepticism) people into out of body experiences. “You can go to heaven or hell,” Mott says, likely meaning something a little different than how it sounds literally in his good but not fluent English. I tell him I will visit sometime after my stay at Bear Paw Mountain. This elicits a broad smile. Ess seems genuinely ecstatic about having me at the temple, which I will gather in a few hours might not be quite how the abbot feels.

Mott asks, “Why do you believe in the Buddha?”

I pause to prevaricate. There’s a lot assumed in that question. Do I “believe in the Buddha?” What did that really mean and what does Mott really mean in asking it. Sensing my hesitation, Mott encourages, “I sometimes wonder why I believe in the Buddha.”

Rather than take him through my usually neglected 15-year relationship with Buddhism and its favorite son, meditation, I tell him I am attracted to the central tenet of, “See reality as it is, not as you wish it to be.” From the present looking through my emerging person, I could see that at times I am quite adept at dancing little Irish jigs around truth and part of my draw to Buddhism is the belief that life might be better the less self-evasive jigs I danced.

Sitting at the table of novices and monks in this evocative monastery, with them, one of them, I feel an unrepentant humiliation. An hour slips by without remembering I am injured and I forget to be anxious and uncertain about it. In my mind, I detail my path here. I am here because I met Akbar, I know Akbar because I met Joe Cummings, I met Joe Cummings because I know Bruce Northam, I know him because of a soccer game in Kenya, I was there because of my brother was adopted, my parents adopted him because his parents died of AIDS – there are an infinite of pathways one can trace as having led to the present. Each is truth, yes each edits out a million other equally true reasons. I feel very very good, I have most of the morning to feel this way, since and my meeting with the abbot is not until 11am.

 

Read more from my series, “Being Buddhist in Thailand”