The Far Shore

by Paul T. Scheuring

  To: Lily212993@******.com

  L—

  Is it an emergency?

  This one’s a very tough one to answer.

  Oh Christ, what do you say to the guy, after you’ve snapped him out of however many months of meditation?

  I’m taking a flier that the guy you met forty years ago was my grandfather, that he’s a key to a lot of money, and this is all time-sensitive and must be done now?

  That I just have this imperative in me—yes, a desperation if you want to call it that—and I need answers now.

  Can you do that, Lily?

  The good news is she doesn’t have to answer this.

  Because Kornfield follows up the last email with another, a few moments later:

  From: JKornfield@*******.com

  To: Lily212993@******.com

  L—

  Maybe what you could do is check out his book. Bennett wrote an account of his journey a few decades ago, which I’m pretty sure had a bunch of mentions of his teacher. I don’t have the book anymore and unfortunately don’t remember a ton of it. I’m sure it’s out of print. Maybe you could get it on Amazon? Failing that, you could go up to the monastery in the Catskills. They have a tiny bookstore there and might have a few copies. I can give you the address if you want. Let me know…

  XXIII

  The Catskills.

  Amazing how many monasteries there are up here.

  An ashram, an Orthodox Christian monastery, a yoga ranch, a Zen retreat center, a Vietnamese Buddhist monastery.

  Whole invisible communities attuned to things other than the day-to-day grind.

  Other than the mind space of cities and to-do lists.

  Who knew?

  All of this: as unknown a reality to her as Burma.

  Parallel truths totally lost to her because she has not thought to look.

  My God, the world is big.

  She is struck by the monastery in the same way she was struck by Kesuke’s retreat: there is nothing terribly exotic about it.

  It is largely built of local wood, with windows, electricity, even a paved parking lot.

  There are about a dozen live-in monks here.

  Americans who live in small huts, have little more to their name than their robes and sandals.

  They walk in the woods for the better part of the day, in silent isolation.

  Meditate in the main “hall,” which is not large.

  And eat all their meals before noon, after which food is a no-no.

  This is what she learns from the woman manning the bookstore.

  The woman lives nearby, helps out.

  Helps clean, helps cook, minds the bookstore when the odd visitor occasionally shows up.

  All of this, this hidden reality of seekers in our midst, is a passing fascination to Lily.

  It is one thing to want to take a blowtorch to your iPhone, throw it all away.

  It is another thing to do it.

  To be genuinely capable of doing nothing.

  Cultivating the mundane like it is an art.

  Staring at the back of one’s eyelids.

  Studying the tops of your feet as you walk.

  Christ on a bike, these people have capabilities she’ll never have.

  The book is here.

  Bennett Daniel’s book is here!

  (Bet no one’s ever reacted like that—sheer glee at the sight of the book—

  Because a glance at the cover, with its fading ’70s font—My Journey to Samadhi: Reflections on a Buddhist Aspirant’s Search in Southeast Asia—tells her it’s a sleep-inducer.

  But bring it on!)

  She considers Bennett’s picture on the back.

  Blue-eyed, but otherwise unremarkable.

  (You and me both, brother.)

  She buys the book.

  Small-talks with the woman a bit more, but gets out of there before the woman can use too many more foreign meditation words.

  As Lily heads out to her car, gets ready to climb inside, she sees a familiar face—through the fence, up the hill maybe a hundred yards across the compound—if only because she’s just looked at it on the back of the book.

  It’s Bennett Daniels.

  Twenty-five years grayer and gaunter.

  Moving in absorbed meditation.

  Staring at the tops of his sandaled feet as they move.

  Utterly immersed.

  Everything about the moment—slow.

  Full.

  Part of her wants him to look up, meet her gaze.

  Part of her doesn’t.

  She doesn’t want to be the one to interrupt this.

  It does seem a crime to force words into this place.

  He seems to be doing just fine without them.

  Besides, if she doesn’t get what she wants out of the book, she can always come back, and there can be words then.

  It is a sleep-inducer, no doubt.

  She’s stopped at the first Starbucks she can find on the way back.

  A large Americano counteracting the somnolent effects of the book.

  There is much backstory, much setup, most of it scannable.

  Then, halfway through the second Americano, this:

  …(p. 91)…I had been traveling for weeks in Burma, moving steadily north from Rangoon, into ever smaller villages and thicker jungle. If there was a place to find true renunciates, true meditation masters, it would be here, away from the world, in this tangle of rivers and overgrowth. So you can imagine my surprise, once I reached the temple, that the man introduced to me as my teacher-to-be was none other than a white man! I was initially disappointed, as I had visions of learning the secrets of meditation from wizened old Asian men, not the proto-hippie, as I initially considered Anagarika Ratha to be. He was—unlike the rest of the shaven-head, well-groomed Asian monks around him—a mess of hair. Like he had neither shaved nor cut his hair in years. In fact, at first glance, he seemed more of a Hindu holy man than a Buddhist. But he was held in high esteem by the abbot of the monastery, who felt that I would be best served by learning under Ratha, if for no other reason than Ratha was the only one with a command of English strong enough to be able to convey a lot of the more esoteric or complex aspects of meditation to me.

  Ratha from the start seemed a fish out of water here at the Pak Auk Forest Monastery, tucked back as it was in the remote Burmese mountains. As I mentioned, his appearance flew in the face of the strict discipline of the monastery—not only was he bearded and long-haired, but he neglected to wear the saffron robes of the monk as well. I wondered why they allowed this. I learned after a while that Ratha had never taken the vows of monkhood, and remained a lay anagarika, living in the small village just outside the monastery. He was quite serious about meditation and contemplation; he had simply never made the formal commitment to be a monk (though you could say that coming all this way, choosing to live in the village right outside the monastery and regularly practice with the monks was a profound commitment in its own right). I was to learn that the monks initially indulged him as they indulge all members of the community that come with a sincere interest in meditation and the calming of the mind. A monastery is never to turn anyone away who displays a sincere interest to learn Buddhism. Apparently, year after year, after Ratha had first shown up in the late 1940s, he diligently came to the temple, morning, noon, and night to meditate, to learn. The monks were fascinated, because for the most part this was the first westerner they had ever seen. So they taught him. And over the years, he seemingly absorbed it all, and it was not long before it was he who was teaching them. They even gave him the honorary name of Anagarika Ratha, though he thought it was unnecessary.

  Thus, I was in the strange position of learning Buddhist meditation from a teacher who was not even officially Buddhist. And it was sanctioned by the abbot of the temple! They felt that though he was an outlier, Buddhist history was laden with unusual and iconoclastic teachers, like Milarepa, who eschewed all formal training, and instead attained higher levels
of enlightenment through their own examinations and efforts.

  He was a reluctant teacher from the outset. Though it was immediately evident, once I’d gotten over my shallow disappointment at the sight of his Caucasian skin, that he was one of those people who carried themselves with a dauntless calm that was astonishing. He seemed fully at ease in the universe, absorbent of all that passed through his existence and experience, neither judging nor rejecting. Clearly, twenty years of meditation had done something for him. And yet what was most interesting about him was his reluctance to consider himself a viable teacher. He maintained again and again that he “had not closed the loop,” which is to say, he hadn’t been able to fully return to that original state of storyless experience that we are all born into. Zen Buddhists term this the “beginner’s mind,” that state where we see things for what they are, and don’t complicate or sully them with narrative, with judgment, with compartmentalization. The idea is that our problems are only problematic because of the narratives we weave around experience, and once we unwind those, and see experience for what it is, neither good nor bad—for essentially there is no such thing in Buddhism—then we are free from the judgmental chatter of the mind that is so divisive to the self and damaging to the world.

  From my perspective, as a novice, he did not give himself a lot of credit. He was as calm as a mountain, steady as the stars in the sky. I was to learn later that I was the only student he took on, if only because he could not find a way out of it. I was the only seeker that had come—to that point—who had required in-depth, sophisticated conversation in English. If he had not relented and agreed to be my teacher, I would have been turned away. And that in the end proved to be too much of a dereliction of duty to him, it turned out (even if he didn’t officially have a “duty”). There was, in short, no one who could effectively teach me there except him and he knew it. I was fortunate that he took on the task, needless to say.

  As students, we are in some ways the sum not only of our experiences, but of our master’s experiences as well, for the events that coalesced to create our path and our problems—the ones we seek liberation from—are intermingled with the events that coalesced to create our master’s path, and the problems that drove him, or her, to that path. That is karma. Karma, of course, is understood here in its original context, which is, in shorthand, causality. We are the sum of the things that have happened before us, the waves of experience and event that have crashed into each other all the way back across the spectrum of time. We are the product of our mother and father, obviously, and they (and thus we) of their parents. We are the product of the oxygen the trees generate, product of the gravity that holds the earth in perfect suspension around the sun (any hotter, any colder, and no humans). We are products of the person who cut us off on the freeway, slowing our commute by five seconds, five seconds which saved our lives, because we later narrowly avoided a deadly collision ten miles up the freeway. That is the sort of karma that we’ll be dealing with in this book. The billion-trillionfold web of things that have come together to create the ever-changing moment that is our experience.

  I have already discussed the things that led me to Burma—the disaffection with my parents, with an unexamined life—but I feel it serves this narrative to briefly explore the things that led Anagarika Ratha to Burma, and ultimately to his intersection with me, for a lot of what I write now, and a lot of how I see the world, is because of his teachings, which in turn were affected by and distilled through his own personal experience (as all true teachings must be).

  It took some time to wrest his history from him, because for the first number of months, his only instruction to me was to sit and watch my breath. Conversation was initially forbidden, for conversation, it turned out, at least in Ratha’s estimate, was the source of a lot of our problems. We were addicted to conversation, primarily with ourselves. The first thing to learn was how to live in a place of silence, where the air both externally and internally did not need to be filled with words. It takes months and years to be able to truly rest in the silence of existence, without a need to elaborate on it, judge it, label it. To be present to the unfiltered truth of life. And thus, for nearly half a year, my interface with my master was largely one of a few words here, a few words there.

  He would ask me simple questions, about things that initially struck me as mundane, such as whether the leaves on my porch had been swept away, or if there was enough spice in my food. I had come all this way to have deep exploratory conversations about the esoterica of the mind, and what I got instead was small talk! I was utterly flummoxed; the only reason this man had been assigned to me was because we were the only two white people in the whole region! Still, I stayed with it, monitoring my breath, letting thoughts and sensations drift through my field of consciousness for months on end, and it occurred to me that these small conversations with Anagarika Ratha were not about their content, but rather about their process. About how they were conducted, with what outlook, with what attention. I came to realize the questions he asked were not for the purpose of seeking the content of my answers, but rather the texture of my answers. He wanted to see my mind state in my words and how I delivered them.

  Howness, I came to understand, was everything to him.

  The content of the world didn’t matter so much, not per se, but rather how it was lensed by one’s inner eye.

  He was disabusing me of content, I soon realized. Attuning me to the tenor of the mind. The very process of mentation, how one thing evokes another within the walls of our head, which in turn evokes another. He was interested in the interstitials, the links in this process, the connective associations we somehow formed in the nether regions of our minds between what was experienced and what was concluded from it. That was the great mystery of the mind, the great mistake of the mind: to draw connections between things, to assign judgment to those connections, to let the runaway thought patterns evoke increasingly more complex constructions of association and thought when in fact no such associations existed. Everything just was, one thing after another, passing through our vision of consciousness. It was what we did with it that caused our problems. We created scar tissue in our mind by incessantly scratching at the past, the wounds endured there, and as such the mind was brimming with scars of our own doing, for we had not allowed the pain of the world to pass properly through us, but instead dwelled on it, poked at it, questioned it, and held greedily on to it like a talisman.

  I understood after some time why he was so fixated on the past, so fixated on the wounds it bestows on us. His story was an interesting one. He’d been a soldier, a medic, in the final years of World War Two, and had witnessed an incredible amount of suffering. The suffering stayed with him, festered in him. It was such a monolithic thing that he could see the world in no other way than in the sickly twilit shadow it cast. “One could not go home with this,” he told me one time over tea. “It is too great a weight, too great a truth, to simply return to the normal day-to-day life that life back in the States promised, pretending that this great shadow of suffering did not darken all things, from the newborn baby and its promise of future pain to the stoop-backed old man with the cane, who was a walking portent of death.” Death and decline were the only things he was promised, he knew, and the road that led to them wended through perpetual peaks and valleys of war, whether the external kind, or the far more insidious internal kind. Everything was a circular, zero-sum game that led to suffering. He could not, he knew, simply go home and pretend that this horror did not exist. Unlike the war, this was not something he could be deployed away from. This sort of war was a movable war; you would carry it with you in perpetuity unless you stood and faced it. Tried impossibly to stem its onslaught. But how does one beat war? How does one beat the promise of suffering, the promise of death?

  It was not at home, he knew. And thus Anagarika Ratha, who was then Second Lieutenant Gray Allen of the US 10th Army, walked away. He had been liberated from a Japanese internment camp, bu
t chose to slip away from his comrades, to sink back into the landscape and disappear from the world. He had done his part for the war effort; now it was time to wage an even greater battle—against the chaos in his head, the merciless waves of thought, emotion, and pain that was existence.

  And thus he walked. Through the desolation that was war-torn Japan. No one knew who anyone was at that point—the Japanese assumed he was one of their vanquishers on his rounds; the Americans assumed he was tasked from another unit, as the occupation and rebuilding of Japan was in the first number of weeks a chaotic thing at best. No one knew anything.

  There is a certain trust that is required in being a monk. When one takes the vow, he commits to never touching money, to living off alms, to taking only what is given. As such, a monk will only eat if food is given to him that day during his alms-round. Without this support of the population—of one’s fellow men and women—the monk will die. It is radical trust. I reflect sometimes that I’ve been a monk for fourteen years now, and it’s said that the human body completely regenerates all of its cells every seven years—meaning that one’s body in effect is completely new every seven years—and as such, my body has been gifted to me twice-over by the nourishment gifted to me by my fellow man. I owe them my life twice over. I mention this all now because Anagarika Ratha was one of the first people to attune me to this fact, the radical trust required in the face of the certainty of suffering and death. There was a time earlier in the war when he’d gone AWOL, had disappeared into the landscape, and was sustained by the land: he drank from the rivers, ate from the plants and trees. He could very well have died, and he was prepared for that, but the world sustained him. And he reflected to me, many years after it happened, that the incident, which had occurred in perhaps no longer than a twenty-four-hour period, informed his spiritual path, even if he didn’t know it for many years. You have to let go of your fears in what might be perceived as a suicidal fashion—fully prepared to die—to see that the world, just for a moment, might catch you before you fall completely. It was in the back of his subconscious, this thought, this idea that he would radically trust the world, and set forth to see if that trust was merited, whether the world would sustain his pained but faithful attempt to find a way out of the suffering of existence. For if the world denied him that noble foray—an effort which sought to control no one, conquer no one, take nothing from anyone, but rather aspired to find a more beneficent truth, one that healed rather than destroyed, one that proved that death, greed, and decay were not our only birthright, one that could give positive meaning to our existence and could be brought back to the world of men, illumine their minds, erase the chaos that seeded the suffering and hate that are so foundational to wars both internal and external—if the world denied him that, if the world from the outset deprived him of the fundamentals of existence—he asked nothing more than the simplest things, enough food and warmth only for sustenance—if the world killed him off that fast, and was that unyielding, then in a way it was the answer to his question: such a quest ended in the same place it started—suffering and death. The world needed to show him otherwise. He was trusting it with his life.