9:30 ... time to meditate again.
With distaste I turned from the desk, where I'd been studiously composing a paper on the Sutta usage of the word vibhava. The desk was long since finished, but the typewriter was still snarled up in red tape. Perhaps after it arrived I could use the red tape in place of typewriter ribbons. In the meanwhile I used the desk for scholarly pursuits.
"I have a private dictum," Ven. Ņanavira had written. "Do not imagine that you understand something unless you can write it down." But the correlative didn't hold, that if you could write something down you could understand it.
The prospect of sitting quietly for the next hour trying yet again to achieve concentration and clarity didn't fill me with cheer. I'd had to establish meditation hours which had, of late, become increasingly difficult to hold to. How easy, and how comfortable, it would be to be neglectful of even the time set aside for meditation.
I found within me a strong temptation to drop the practice altogether, to convince myself that I'd attained to something, to anything, and therefore needn't go on struggling. Or, just as good, to convince myself that I was incapable of attaining to anything and therefore needn't make the effort. Either way, the case being then closed, I could move on to easier pleasures than those obtained by this difficult practice. But I couldn't do it. The self-deception involved in legitimizing that sort of position was more than I could muster.
I postponed sitting for a few minutes by limbering up on the ambulatory. Doing so, I'd found, made a significant difference in the length of time I could sit in a full lotus before my knees would ache so severely that I had to unfold my legs. I preferred the lotus position because it gave the body a triangular base on which to rest, eliminating physical wavering. (Saying from a Zen collection: When standing, just stand. When sitting, just sit. Above all, don't wobble.) I also preferred the lotus position because I had a good one which marked me, as much as my russet robes, as a meditator.
I walked the ambulatory to limber up for meditation, and also to delay as long as I could the oppressive task of sitting down and facing again the need to train a mind that no longer wanted to be trained.
A leaf insect huddled in a corner, disguised as a small brown serrate-edged leaf with several disease spots that didn't fool me at all. I paused in my pacing and swept it off the cankamana with the broom. Not only did leaf-insects sometimes get disconcertingly underfoot but also the mongoose, if it happened along, wouldn't be fooled either. He would chew up the hapless but crunchy bug as if it were an hors-d'oeuvre on a cracker. The insect skittered wildly across the ambulatory floor, bouncing blindly off the walls. I pushed it out the gate and watched as it scuttled sightless on the soft jungle earth. It humped up against a small rook where, fully exposed, it huddled motionless, dreaming dreams of anonymous sanctuary.
As I walked I looked down at my feet. One after the other they entered my field of vision, then disappeared beneath the folds of my faded brown robe. Without enthusiasm I put my attention on the walking, and observed how it felt to walk. "Walking" was a composite of a number of separate perceptions. I chose several. I observed the feeling on the sole of each foot as it touched the ground, first the heel, then the ball of the foot, then the toes in a glissando from the little to the big. Then the other foot.
Awareness: heel ball toes; heel ball toes; heel ball toes ... all the way to the end of the ambulatory. When a stray thought entered it was to be observed as a distraction and dismissed. I didn't name each part of each step; I simply observed. It's only in describing "mindfulness" that it becomes necessary to use words.
Thoughts: ideas appeared. They arose, the Suttas said, and they endured, and they disappeared. And, the Suttas said, they were to be observed. But I could see no more than their enduring. When I tried to watch a thought arise I found that as soon as I saw it it was already risen and I was too late. And whenever I tried to watch a risen thought disappear I found that I didn't know how to watch something that was no longer there. And as long as it was there it hadn't disappeared yet. So what did the Suttas mean by "arising" and "disappearance"?
Soon my attention began flickering between mindfulness of the walking and thinking about the projects upon which the mind fed. The mindfulness had very little direction to it, and was not easy to stay with. The thinking about was strongly directed, ontological, and compelling.
The desk had long since been finished. It was used now as the nerve-center of my further involvement in the Ņanavira project. For one thing I'd written an endless series of letters attempting to unravel from the government's endlessly tangled spool sufficient red tape to enable that damned import license to be granted. Then we could get the typewriter (which had special features we needed) and make a final copy of the New Revised Texts of the Letters. Such licenses, though, weren't granted as readily as I'd expected.
I'd gone so far, in this quest, as to take a trip to Colombo, with its hustle and bustle and double-decked buses. I didn't get the license, but I did get a heavy dose of frustration which reminded me of the frustrations I'd felt in Calcutta. It had been while seeking a government permit there that I'd wearied of the hassles and sought the robes. In Colombo I gave up the quest for an import license and returned to the Hermitage to seek relief.
While still pursuing the vision of a final typescript I researched references, standardized formats, obtained permissions to quote, copied key passages into my quotebook, and edited other bits of discovered Ņanaviriana. Even a little commonplace book yielded bits of treasure: Q: Why the Buddha rather than Jesus? A: Jesus wept. In my spare time I referenced and cross-referenced material, considered and reconsidered, and seized upon every task I could lay hold of. Except, perhaps, one.
... the book, Ven. Ņanavira had written of his Notes on Dhamma, ... the book is an invitation, or perhaps a challenge, to the reader to come and share the author's point of view ... My thoughts, when they strayed from awareness, nestled, like the leaf insect his rock, against the secure edifice which the Letters and Notes had come to represent to me.
Set against this edifice was the ongoing awareness of the falsity of any such security, even more so when predicated and founded on a teaching whose message, I had always to remind myself, was that rather than vainly seeking security the happiest choice was to give up the search.
Perhaps it was because of this conflict that, as I settled myself for meditation, I felt a growing uneasiness in the pit of my stomach. I ignored it, closed my eyes, and turned my attention to the tip of the nose, one long breath in. I strove with all possible energy to perceive each little particle of breath-consciousness, every tingle that presented itself for my inspection. My determination was such that my armpits became damp with effort, or tension, or both. I tried to keep out all other thoughts. I tried to ignore, particularly, the growing awareness that pressed resolutely for my attention like a starving beggar, an awareness of anger and fear at my own utter isolation, at my own frailty, and at the dissatisfaction that inhered in every movement of my being. That awareness added nausea to the anger, vertigo, and perspiration that were already upon me. I became frightened and felt light-headed, and knew that I had to stop.
What could I do? Could I face it? Could I go into (and perhaps through) the dizziness and vomiting? Or would I have to turn away? Would the vomiting be anything more than a distraction from that perception of my situation which I sought? If something could arouse such primal fears how could I ignore it? But the converse was equally pressing: if it aroused such fears how could I face it? Would I break my health and have to be sent home? And was that what I was really after? Did I seek the relief of not having to try any longer? Even failure became success if that was all I wanted. Before such ambiguities I was unable to choose.
I tried to think about it, but that was also not facing it. There was a fundamental difference between thinking about and observing, and without even being observant of what I was doing I found that I'd already somehow chosen to think about those fears rather than face them. I told myself -- perhaps truthfully, I shall never know -- that if I forced myself to continue facing the fearful fact of my impotence against the universe I would achieve nothing, except to vomit.
There was no question about the origins of this malaise. I wouldn't have to go to the hospital for this, as I'd once done with an undiagnosed case of withdrawal syndrome. "A liver problem," the doctors had mistakenly labeled the problem. "Existence" was the name I would give it.
I opened my eyes, feeling weak, and stared unseeingly at the wall opposite me, calling it mindfulness. I didn't need to look at the clock to know that I'd only been sitting a few minutes, but I looked anyway. There was still most of the hour to go. There was this hour before dana, an hour after dana, one more before pirith, yet another after it, and tomorrow's dawn would start another day, and the day after tomorrow, and days afterwards, without end, in which I would be forever with the choice.
I could begin now to appreciate why so few bhikkhus meditated. They'd given it up, if they'd ever begun, in despair or fear and turned to other ways of filling their time: scholarship, writing, preaching, building, social work, the lay life. At the bottom of my heart, I'd copied into my quotebook, I no longer desire perfection. For we who are taxpayers as well as immortal souls, must live by political evasions and formulae and catchwords that fret away our lives as moths waste a garment: we fall insensibly to commonsense as to a drug; and it dulls and kills whatever in us is rebellious and fine and unreasonable ...[3]
What could I do? I saw no alternative to agonizing. Perhaps if my anguish became great enough (and I nearly let myself smile at the thought) it would be deemed (by whom, pray tell?) sufficient atonement (for what, pray tell?) and I could obtain permission to stop agonizing. What I couldn't do was to face my existence without anguish, for anguish was the fact of my existence, and the choice for it, it seemed, had been made before the choice was recognized.
The only possibility of ever justifying giving up the practice was the attainment of the goal. I craved that egoless state merely for the relief it meant to me, so that I could lay down that burden which, I saw, was everything. It included the meditation, it included the nausea, it included both fear and flight. And it included too the depressing awareness that I would rather do anything than face it.
Anything!
* * * * *
The gray mountains were steep, glassine and jagged, and I was lost among them. I didn't look down. A distant figure scuttled from rock to rock, then crouched and disappeared before I could identify it. But I sensed something frightening -- a smoldering furtiveness rather than an open hostility -- in its presence, and that sense urged me to climb.
I ascended the steep slope, tense with the fear of falling, until some indefinite time later I became aware that something ominous was about to happen. I'd made no progress upwards, but before me now I saw a cave, dark and cool and beckoning: I started towards it to find refuge from that gray threat when there was an explosion, a flash of light exposing the distant figure falling stiffly. I hadn't made it quite to the cave's mouth. I was still trapped in the open beneath a jet-black sky. As I was knocked over by the blast I fell into an unseen pool of some depthless warm and sticky substance. I awoke and understood that I'd had a wet dream.
I was displeased, as I lay there, that sexual desires were yet so strong in me. The shepherd of mindfulness was a lazy lad who fell asleep (under a haystack?) many times each day. While he slumbered the mind sometimes strayed (again!) into the clover patch of erotic imagery. I struggled to my feet and went outside, to the washstand on the porch. This kuti had no cankamana. I was also displeased that on the sanghati, the outer cloak which served by night as a bedcover, there was now a moist stain, for I would have some washing to do this morning. But I wasn't at all unhappy that I'd had a wet dream and was free, for now, of this growing physical sensitivity.
Except in a dream intentional emission was a serious offense for a bhikkhu (and I was no longer just a samanera), entailing not only confession before the entire (local) Sangha but also the temporary suspension of certain seniority privileges. And yet concealment of the fault was itself a fault which increased daily, like interest on an overdue bill, continuously extending the illegitimacy of such a position. I was glad, therefore, to have found that an end had been made to these difficult days without my having done violence to the relationship I had with the Patimokkha.
The chaffing of the robes had been sufficient stimulation to produce a pulsating ravenous erection, and I'd bathed at the well often, walked the ambulatory, and talked with Crackers.
"It's just a phase of the withdrawal symptoms," he told me with some pleasure, and I told him what I'd learned while on carika of the sex habits of monkeys, rousing that tired memory to do battle yet again against the fantasies that stalked my attention.
"All I can suggest," Crackers suggested, "is that if one thing doesn't work maybe something else will. Make a change."
"What kind of change do you mean?"
"If you can't change yourself, change your surroundings."
"Leave the Island?"
"It did you a lot of good last time. Maybe you didn't notice, but I could see when you got back how much calmer and happier you were."
"I'm not sure leaving wouldn't be running away."
"How can you run from yourself? It would be moving, not running. I've thought about leaving myself. Maybe set up on my own, like 'Sumana. But I can't advise you; I can only tell you what I'd do. If you don't want to leave the Island, I'll tell you what. You can stay in my kuti. All you need is a change of surroundings, anyway. This place should do fine."
"What'll you do? Go on carika?"
"Oh, no. I'll stay at your place. I don't mind."
"I wouldn't want to inconvenience you. I know how you like this kuti."
Crackers laughed. We both knew how anxious he was to leave his cramped hut.
"But it's a good suggestion. You deserve the exchange of kutis for thinking it up, whether or not it does me any good. I'll try it."
But Crackers' dank kuti had been no improvement, and I'd tired of resisting that sexuality which skulked about just below the level of full-blown thought. For as resolutely as I steered the mind away from sexual images, to just that extent was there peripheral awareness of the images, so that it was like a lamp on the sea's horizon, at night, implying much.
I traced the flight of a firefly and wondered: How had Ven. Ņanavira managed? "With an effort I can ignore it for a few days at a time," he'd written of his erotic stimulation. "But it remains always in the background, ready to come forward on the slightest encouragement." Yet for three years he'd resisted both the strain of satyriasis and the "strong temptation to return to the state of a layman," for he had not "the slightest intention of giving in to it." But that wasn't so easy.
"Bluff common sense," he admitted, "is scarcely adequate." Also inadequate were "constructive suggestions how I should employ my time." Yet with such a disease he must have been hard-pressed to resist lustful images. How had he managed? "The cure," he learned, "is essentially a matter of raising the mind above the waist and keeping it there. But this treatment takes time and is hard work." And that didn't cheer me at all.
I went inside and tried to meditate. It was the third watch of the night, late enough to be striving for awareness, but when I attempted it, even leaning against the wall for ease, a dull and diffuse backache robbed me of energy. After a while, realizing that I wasn't going to get any concentration done this morning either, I gave up and stepped outside again.
I walked down to the dock, climbed into the rowboat, and set the oarlocks in place. The lagoon waters barely rippled around the oars as, very gently, I propelled the boat forward. The moon was still two hours from setting: it lit the world in pale shadowy tones, enough to see by. I rowed out a ways and then drifted, far enough from land to be out of range of mosquitoes, paddling occasionally against the slow drift of the boat.
I couldn't stay any longer. To stay would mean facing the same indestructible needs, the same indisputable dissatisfactions, and in the somnolence of enduring frustration I would find myself plagued again with thoughts of sex. On carika energy was used before it had a chance to devolve into a sex drive. On carika eroticism had not been one of my problems.
But I couldn't leave, either. To leave would mean quitting the Ņanavira project. It would mean giving up my dreams of publication. What could I do with my books? What about the desk? Who could I talk to? Could I give up all that for a life of solitary wandering? Out there I would face the rigors of a loneliness without diversion. Out there was a world without purpose, endlessly repeated. I couldn't go out there again.
Between the alternatives of enduring the frustrations of the Hermitage and facing the uniform purposelessness of carika I chose neither. Between the relief of the occasional diversions at the Hermitage and the relief of no pressing sexual urges on carika I chose both. At odds with myself, I sat quietly and drifted in silent water.
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Footnote:
3. Jurgen, by James Branch Cabell (Penguin Books, 1946) p.258. [Back to text]