Later, the international movement for communism died down, and China changed its policy. The Thai government allowed the former illegals to return with amnesty, and so he came back, and even went to Australia. He gave me a secret smile and said, “I have a joke: I am a failed animal husband and farmer, and a failed in the business and a failed revolutionary, so now I am a Buddhist monk, where they cannot fire me!”
He had an equally tortuous path as a monk, but finally, after a seventeen-day intense retreat where the meditation went on for thirteen hours a day without stopping, he realized that the million different thoughts weren’t real; the walking was real. He has worked with HIV patients and built temples and had visions of an interfaith meditation center, and he was reading a lot about Tibetan concepts of death and dying. He had even thought he might be a holy man once, but now he just wanted to teach meditation everywhere and help people find the truth. His bluntness and lack of mysticism were refreshing, and he delighted in poking fun at mystics.
We had a few dialogues at night, over tea, sometimes joined by Britta and then another foreigner, a young man from Singapore, who came later. The dialogues wandered, and at times it was hard to understand Ajahn’s heavy accent, but his good nature was encouraging. When I first met him, he mentioned that he had read in the paper that a man had been in an accident and lost his legs, and his eyes teared up instantly, brimming with compassion.
It was rainy season, “the Wet,” and although Bangkok was dry, the north wasn’t. The rains came often, first with a breeze and then a wind rushing in the trees, swirling and threshing the foliage in ponderous whipping circles, and the sky cooled and darkened. Sometimes there was thunder, but sometimes not, just the spattering that might turn into a real barnstorming downpour, or it might stay at a steady patter for hours, dripping among the broad heavy leaves.
Alone in my room, with heightened senses, I could hear the lizards on the roof as they patrolled the tops of the windows for insects lured by the light. Sometimes I would catch very clear rock or Thai pop music wafting through my windows, and at first I thought it was from the town below. Man, someone is pumping that crap up, I thought. One day, when I was just finishing a thirty-minute seated stint, in started the techno, and I burst outside, looking for the source, and found it was coming from the basement of my cottage. I banged on the door but received no answer. Later, when I spoke to Ajahn about it, he was contrite, and said, “Oh, yes, that’s a monk, he’s my cousin.” “Can you ask him to use headphones or something?” Ajahn gave me a long look. “We’ll move you,” he said finally. “He’s a little crazy.”
If I ever do a stand-up routine about living in a Buddhist meditation retreat in northern Thailand, it will certainly have a bit called “The Monk in My Basement.” Another monk, a Thai who had been to college in Indiana, fell into step with me a day later and commiserated. “That’s too bad, to disturb you like that,” he said. “Here you are to be in isolation and he’s blasting techno. What the fuck, huh?”
On the fourth day, after evening chanting, when everyone was standing slowly to start walking, Panyavudo came across the hall to me and asked directly, “Have you ever had black magic practiced on you?” in the manner of asking an obvious drunk, “Have you been drinking?”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“I can see these red bands around your chest, right here over your ribs,” and he motioned with his hands right over my damaged ribs. I was fairly shocked.
My ribs had been bugging me, and perhaps he had seen me massaging them, but I certainly hadn’t mentioned them to anyone.
He led me to a quiet corner, where I sat down, and he sat behind me with his feet against my back and directed energy through me to loosen the bonds, and who knows? Maybe I felt better.
Afterward he said, “You have to be careful. Sometimes a fighter will be given something to eat or drink, or a curse may be put on him several days before a fight.” Had I eaten something that made me feel funny? Common practice in Thailand.
It took some time, but I eventually got Panyavudo to talk to me about black magic. There are certain monks who do magic, who understand it and work to counteract the bad magic they find, the ones who make blessed amulets and who work with the more superstitious Thai people. Apparently, Panyavudo was one of them. Ajahn Suthep, emphatically, was not. He would laugh, then tell a story of a famous magic monk who made powerful charms, “but he still go to the hospital when he is sick. Why? He still gonna die. I don’t believe.” Ajahn would giggle like a fat happy kid.
Panyavudo had been told to ignore the magic, and he had tried to, for four years. Recently, he had decided that he had to embrace it, discover it, and then he could let it go and move on toward enlightenment. He felt that to understand it was now part of his duty, a very important concept for the monks.
“Magic is about intensity of concentration,” he said to me, his eyes blinking behind thick glasses (but not as thick as Ajahn’s). A practitioner can concentrate, find you mentally, and affect your mind with alien thoughts. The way to combat this is with awareness, with mind-fulness, and you can keep your mind strong and able to defend itself, to recognize thoughts that are yours and thoughts that may have been planted.
“You must not give out your time of birth to anyone,” he said, as apparently that will help them locate you. To counteract, you must be aware and know yourself, and trust your feelings. If someone hands you something to eat, feel it for a few minutes, feel the vibe of it.
He said that my practicing tai chi would help, as would meditation and awareness. I could also try “compassion meditation,” where you reflect good thoughts on people you love, people you like, people who are neutral to you, and people you dislike. Keep it to the same sex. “But not dead people, because that can bring spirits around.” The pain may be residue of spirits that have been injured—the spirits of the ants I washed off my toilet, for instance, or the spirit of someone whom I have wronged. That last got me thinking.
“Negative forces can come back to us, and we have eighty years of life [he said that so carelessly], so be careful, because it can accumulate and hurt you. Give loving kindness.”
Panyavudo was an intelligent, educated man, who lived in the Netherlands and Germany between the ages of two and twenty-four and who had had import-export and parliamentary jobs in Bangkok. He was not a silly superstitious native; he’d been a part of the modern world.
He looked at me for a long time and then said, “There is a band of metal around your head, around your forehead, a narrow gold band,” and he gestured around his temples and around his head. “Does that mean anything to you?”
I shook my head.
“Well, you might want to look into that,” he said, and as always, gave me a huge smile. “You need to see the spiritual side of fighting and self-defense, as well as the physical and mental. People train to build up the will to fight, and black magic can destroy that.” By day six I had turned a corner of some kind, and my bouts of deep boredom were fading, because what is boredom? It’s just another feeling, just an emotion, just an illusion—it’s not real. Boredom is like the pain, it comes to show you the character of boredom itself. The pain arises to teach you about pain. Once I sat for forty-five minutes, and stopped more out of shock than out of pain. Ajahn, when he went into deep meditation, would sit for six and a half hours. My mindful-ness was increasing, and I found it easier, could fall into it with more familiarity. Things did start to become clearer. I could see more angles on my thoughts—I was starting to see 360 degrees around all of my problems.
I also had adjusted to the lack of food, and the six hours of sleep, and felt energized and strong all day without the coffee crutch. In part, too, the contentment came from the lack of all the technological intrusions that had been part of my life, the endless electric hum of microchips that surrounded me. It was like being a little kid again. I rediscovered the ability to stare at clouds and trees for long periods of time. There was a sense that this could go on f
orever, but there was also the world calling outside my window, through the jungle. The wind would come winding and twisting through the thick trees and dense bamboo, the drops on the leaves. There was constant noise, the thrum of far-off engines, a scooter on the road, the wind, cicadas, the boys next door chattering in liquid Thai, solitary monks clumping past my window.
In the darkness on my tenth morning, I climbed into the car, back in my civilian dark clothes and out of my pure, simple whites that had been such a comfort, such an ease of mind to wear. I had deodorant on, and it stunk through my Bruce Lee T-shirt. All the chains and accessories of society—technology, money and credit cards, tickets and passports, and a friend’s borrowed cell phone: each heavier than the last. Ajahn invited me back to write a book about what he was doing, the meditation and the experiences of farang at different temples. I think he was inviting me in the sense that Buddhist monks sometimes invite laypeople to come and work with them, to build temples and so on, to build merit for themselves.
“Mindfulness can be brought to bear on everything, can be a part of everything, of your training, and of your fighting,” Ajahn told me. The monks had no trouble at all with the fact that I was a sometime fighter. “If you are mindful in boxing, then you can be aware and not trapped in a same movement, you can be formless, and formless cannot be beat—as long as you are strong inside and have your feet rooted,” Ajahn said. Virgil would have agreed with him.
As we wheeled through the misty countryside, past the tribal hill people in traditional garb walking alongside the highway, he turned from the front seat and said to me, “Mindfulness will help you see without illusion.”
I nodded and said, “Hemingway was all about writing the ‘true’ sentence,” almost to myself.
“The Old Man and the Sea,” he said to me, and smiled. “Good story.”
7
GAMENESS
A dog fight in the Philippines.
Paulo Filho, member of Brazilian Top Team, Brazil, December 2004.
But in the corrida, the matador is not exposed to physical and emotional damage by duty, or conscription—he is a volunteer, a true believer, a lover with his love. And there are no limits to love, it is quite merciless.
—A. L. Kennedy, On Bullfighting
I was lying awake in the heat and dark when the alarm went off. It was three-fifty a.m. I dressed, Tim knocked on my door, and we went quietly down the tiled halls, broad stairs, and through the lobby.
It was pitch-black and hot outside, not the roiling heat of the day but a friendly, swampy mush, the cooling sea not far off. We were on the outskirts of Pattaya, in Thailand, down near the gulf; and it was still the rainy season. The house dogs, disturbed as we left the hotel, rioted without ferocity. We clambered into the car.
Tim drove through the night, the low grass and jungle, to his farm, which was around the corner and down a rutted dirt road. We loaded Herbie into the crate after checking his weight. Herbie was dense, lean to the point of starvation, and muscular, a tawny red pit bull with a big head, a “head like a brick,” his co-owner, whom I’ll call Monty, said. Herbie was ecstatic to be off the chain, a dense ball of energy thrusting against his leash, tail lashing the air. He was an American pit bull, of course—serious dogmen wouldn’t dream of fighting anything else. Herbie was a decently bred dog, Tim knew his lineage back five or six generations, but today was his first fight, his first test. He was thought to be a good dog, if not a world beater.
Herbie was slightly above weight, a hundred grams or so, but a good shit and a piss would take care of that. “He drinks a lot of water,” muttered Tim in his broad Australian accent. “I’ve never had a dog do that. Usually, by the end, when they’re in condition, they don’t drink much.”
Tim CEK (Combat Elite Kennels, his personal group and the name he wanted me to use) was a bookish man in his early thirties, gray hair starting to belie his youthful face. He was half Thai and half Australian, and although he was perfectly fluent in both tongues, he was often mistaken for farang in Thailand. He was my guide to the dog world. He was the expert. He had about fifteen dogs, and he and Monty (a white British safety engineer) were co-owners of Herbie. “You’ll see yards where they have hundreds of dogs, but those dogs are all shit, and they don’t know what they’ve got. They’re just hoping to get lucky. You need to keep your yard small, with high-quality dogs, so you can understand what you have,” Tim said.
International dogfighting is a mixed bag of enthusiasts. Tim’s friend Ike X was a relaxed Asian man in his late thirties or forties who had been to Harvard and spent ten years as a cowboy in Montana. He was now basically a professional dogman. We didn’t talk about Harvard.
The weigh-in was for six o’clock. They wanted to fight the dogs early to avoid the heat of the day and also to limit the visibility to prying eyes: Dogfighting was illegal in Thailand, as it is in most places. The dogs were supposed to weigh 18 kilos, just under 40 pounds, and Tim’s opponent, Art, weighed his dog first. The dog (also an American pit bull) was meek and yellow, his tail whipped down between scrawny legs, and he weighed in at 17.9 kilos. They weighed the dog on a hanging electronic scale slung from a low beam, with a strap made from an old seatbelt cinched around the dog’s body, right underneath the forelegs. The dog hung there nearly upright, twisting idly, tail twitching slightly but otherwise still, eyes staring. He was a good-looking, friendly-faced dog with soft eyes.
The Captain, who fancied himself judge and referee (even though he was neither), was an older man of Afghan descent, a skipper in the Canadian merchant marine who had sixty years experience with dogs. He was a stickler for details, and his watch beeped urgently at six a.m. Herbie still hadn’t shat or pissed, and despite some vigorous walking, came in at 18.1 kilos. The Captain, with some satisfaction, gave Art the forfeit money.
When you agree to fight dogs, you set a weight, and if your dog doesn’t make the weight, you must pay forfeit money, maybe a quarter of the money you put up to fight, and then it is up to the opponent to decide if he still wants to fight.
The forfeit was twenty thousand baht (about five hundred dollars U.S.), and Tim was a little annoyed because he had given Art breaks before with weight; they had fought many times, and all he needed was ten minutes to get Herbie to void his bowels. Art was glad to give him more time, but Art’s partner took the money, and Tim said, “I’ll remember that.”
In the world of dogfighting, I found, there is a fanatical adherence to the rules. Honorable dogmen, good dogmen, have a very strict code of behavior, predicated on camaraderie and desire for fair play and a fair test of their dog. They look down on dogmen who are just in it for the money, trying to build a name for themselves and hyping their dogs out of proportion in order to sell pups. They are also secretive and incredibly tight-lipped, and word of mouth and reputation are everything.
The pit had been set up, the dogs were washed, and the handlers, Tim and Art, came out carrying their dogs like toddlers who had grown too big to be carried easily, legs dangling and awkward. They clambered into the pit, and huddled over their respective dogs in the corners. The pit was a simple wooden square, just a few feet high, and the opposite corners—the scratch lines—were supposed to be fourteen feet apart.
Suddenly, the moment arrives (the referee calls, “Face your dogs—release!”), and the dogs dash into each other like brown streaks, spinning around and up and down with a continuous snapping, snarling frenzy. They writhe furiously like snakes, twisting and spitting and slavering, growling like bears. Fury epitomized. Their tails are wagging, this is what they are meant to do, and they’re fulfilling their purpose, they’re becoming. There is blood, but the dogs don’t care, turning and pinning, fighting off their backs and then clawing their way to standing. They’re biting, and letting go, and biting again, searching for new holds, for a vulnerable spot. They feel no pain—or any pain they feel is overwhelmed by the desire to get the other dog. I know that feeling. The fight stretches to fifteen minutes, to twenty.
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br /> Tim said to me the day before, “It’s not the best dog that will win, it’s the best man. You are fighting the man, not the dog; the dog’s just a weight.” In a sense, he’s right, and the dogmen always talk about “when I fought him” as if they were doing the fighting themselves; but of course that comment was absolutely shimmering with irony. I was reminded of something Willie Pep, a great boxer, said: “I had the bravest manager in the world—he didn’t care who I fought.”
In this fight, the dogs were evenly matched, and neither one had a “hard mouth” (a big crushing bite that can break bones or rip off flesh), so the outcome would come down to conditioning. Which dogman had conditioned his animal better?
The dogs bite and bite, their mouths locking onto each other with a horrible clack and snap of fang on fang. The teeth sometimes grind together and sound as if they are breaking. Herbie is more active and a better wrestler; he often has the other dog pinned down. This isn’t necessarily bad for the other dog, as long as he’s getting good “holds,” or bites, but it isn’t really good, either (a little like jiu-jitsu). The dogs go silent, panting, and when they freeze “in holds,” their bellies work like bellows, desperately breathing to try to shed heat. Blood covers Herbie’s face and teeth, as the other dog has chewed up his jowls a little.
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