PHRA BURIN AND Ketsada, after their initial suspicion, warmed to us and asked us to stay for lunch, but we had to decline. We had a seven-hour drive ahead of us into the northeast. We set out, passing cement factories and industrial zones until we burst into rural Thailand, where a sugar cane harvest was underway. There were stubbled gold fields amid thick tropical foliage and bushes of yellow bells in flower. The skies clouded and there were occasional rain showers. As we headed to our hotel that night in Si Sa Ket, a provincial capital in an area known for its ancient temples and ruins, we drove through empty streets and past shuttered shops, the occasional family finishing a late dinner under tube light in an open-air restaurant.
Upon our arrival the next morning at Wat Pah Nanachat in Ubon Ratchathani province, which borders both Laos and Cambodia, Pratch and I decided to visit a nearby monastery where Bo had stayed during his time as a monk, putting a setting to the story we had been told some 360 miles away in Bangkok.
The monastery appeared magically out of a pastoral of freshly harvested fields, a dark thicket of swamp mahogany, bamboo and a local gum tree called mueat khon. The tree trunks bore tiny yellow-and-brown plaques with the sayings of Ajahn Chah, one of the great 20th-century Thai teachers. “Whatever you pass,” read one, “do not cling to it. Eventually the mind will reach its balance, where practice is automatic. All things will rise and cease by themselves.” This was the upadana, or grasping, that the Buddha sought to release us from. Reading it, I was struck again by how modest his claims on truth were; how accepting he was of a great variety of practice; yet also how devastating he was in his conclusions, namely that anything we sought to hold on to was destined for destruction.
Looking around, I saw men of various ages (postulants in white, novices and fully ordained monks in brown) swarming about. There was a main hall, an administrative office, an open-air kitchen and signs not to take photographs. All was bare and spartan. I got talking to one older man from Austin, Texas, who’d been ordained only three weeks before as part of an exception that allowed, in this case, the father of a monk (his Californian son, he said, “had been doing it for a while”) to undergo temporary ordination. Having retired from a career in aviation, the Texan had set aside 90 days to live as a monk. “It’s very difficult physically,” he said, referring to early morning chanting and alms walks, “but also very rewarding.” He was struck constantly by the warmth he encountered.
It was nothing I was destined to experience. At that very moment, the interim vice abbot — the Czech-born Ajahn Akaliko — scolded me for arriving at the monastery unannounced. I had begun to apologize when a Canadian filmmaker, who had been cycling around Thailand, recognized me from an interview I had done with a Canadian broadcaster five years before. The filmmaker, who was considering staying at the monastery, pleaded my case to the Czech monk, who relented at last but told us he had a school group arriving. He would see us in two hours.
