 |
|
“Flying from one capital city to another is not travel to me. Travel, especially in Africa, must be overland and must involve the crossing of borders — negotiating on land, usually on foot, the national frontier. That experience teaches a great deal about the state of the country. Of course, it
Since I’ve traveled to (and at times lived in) Thailand every year since 1998, I’m occasionally asked to recommend a Buddhist meditation retreat for long-term travelers. I can easily recommend some specific starting points for practicing meditation in Thailand (and if you keep reading, you’ll find a few recommendations below), but over time I’ve found that it’s more instructive to just tell people this: Find your own damn Buddhist meditation retreat!
In saying this, I’m not being grumpy and standoffish — it really is good travel advice. Far too often, Western Buddhists (and prospective Buddhists) travel to Asia like it’s one big spiritual shopping mall, flitting from monastery to monastery without ever wandering out to truly experience the host country. And while I can appreciate these people’s enthusiasm, this is a very limited and superficial way to explore the Buddhist faith.
By pointing this out, I don’t mean to disparage the Thai monasteries that help instruct Western seekers. Rather, my point is that you shouldn’t pick-and-choose your spiritual quest like it was something that can be ordered from a catalogue. Religion may be divinely inspired, but it also comes into being within a socio-cultural context. Unless you allow yourself to wander away from the wats and see how normal Thais practice their Buddhism, you’ll only be “accessorizing” your own Western socio-cultural notions with convenient, smooth-edged Buddhist ones.
So my advice is this: Travel to Thailand, but save the monasteries for last. Give yourself a month (if you have the time — and I recommend that you make the time) to wander the country, north and south, jungles and beaches, Bangkok and Isaan. It’s dirt cheap to travel in Thailand, so knock yourself out. Go on a trek. Learn to scuba dive. Talk to everyone — Thais and travelers, rural villagers and middle-class urbanites — and listen to what they have to say. If it comes up in the conversation, ask people about Buddhism, or Buddhist meditation. Watch how people live. Enjoy the backpacker hangouts if that’s your thing — but try to get off the travel-circuit and explore small, everyday Thai towns. Learn Thai phrases and make Thai friends.
After a month of this, your visa will have expired, and you will have probably have fallen in love with Thailand. Perfect. Now pop across the border, renew your visa, and come back to Thailand. Not only will you know by then what kind of meditation center best suits your interests — you’ll also have an experience of Thailand that is far more intimate and authentic than what you’d have experienced walled up in some monastery. You’ll also have a better idea of the role Buddhism plays in the lives of the people who’ve been practicing it for thousands of years — and not just the role it can play in your California (or wherever) lifestyle.
Some more serious Western Buddhists might balk at this advice, claiming that they want to spend the entirety of their travel time studying meditation — not gallivanting around doing seemingly frivolous activities. But for these people, I think the normal experience of a Buddhist country is even more important: It will help them understand the socio-cultural context of their discipline. Even if your vacation time is short, it’s worth it to make the time to see Thailand (or any country) as a layperson as well as a seeker.
For people who are really serious about their Buddhism, I might also offer an additional challenge: While you are still in the West, seek out and spend some time with some sincere Christians and Jews. After all, if you were raised in the West, you probably have innate Judeo-Christian values (such as individualism and humanism) that don’t exactly mesh with certain Eastern values (such as duty and fatalism). Thus, unless you can appreciate the positive application of Western spiritual values, you might have trouble reconciling your old Western instincts with your new Eastern disciplines. Buddhism does not require the rejection of other religions, and many people (such as the Catholic monk and philosopher Thomas Merton, who met with the Dalai Lama back in the sixties) have found that the best way to embrace Buddhism is to use its principles to inform and expand their traditional Christian or Jewish faith. (This will obviously require a rather liberal reading of Christianity or Judaism — but just because you don’t see open-minded Judeo-Christians on the evening news doesn’t mean they don’t exist.)
OK, having said all that, I’m sure there are still a few people out there who honestly don’t have the time to sniff out their own Buddhist experience in Asia. Thus, here are three good starting points for those interested in experiencing Buddhist meditation in Thailand:
For more comprehensive information about Buddhist meditation centers in Thailand, try these online guides:
Finally, if you’re new to Theravada Buddhism and the fundamentals of Buddhist mediation, here are three books that will lend insight:
“The bad news is what sells the good news. In other words, the way it works –and McLuhan makes this point brilliantly in Understanding Media in 1964 — most television is good news. The good news is the advertising. That’s what it’s about, and the bad news — the dead guys and the crime — is to get the suckers into the tent, get up the emotional pitch to set up the advertising. First they give you the vision of hell, which is what scares the person, the audience, the viewer. This is what sets up the good news, which is the advertising, which is the way the game is played. So the idea that the media as a whole does bad news is just not true at all. It’s part of the pitch. It’s the freak show in order to sell the snow cones.”
–Lewis Lapham, Harper’s, June 1999
Those of you who are considering moving overseas to live the expatriate life should check out a recent article by Newley Purnell, an American vagabonder I’ve know since my Salon writing days. Newley teaches English in Ecuador, and his essay about the process of pulling up stakes and moving overseas is short, clear, and easy to relate to. Perhaps counterintuitively, Newley’s decision to try expat living was influenced by the September 11th terrorist attacks. “The horror of that day made me understand that life is simply too short not to take chances and gamble with the unknown,” he writes. “As Mark Twain observed, ‘Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn
“Perhaps the most terrible (or wonderful) thing that can happen to an imaginative youth, aside from the curse (or blessing) of imagination itself, is to be exposed without preparation to the life outside his or her own sphere — the sudden revelation that there is a there out there.”
–Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume (1984)
In addition to getting a comprehensive checkup at Bangkok’s Bumrungrad Hospital a few weeks ago, I also got a piece of glass surgically removed from my foot. How it got there in the first place is somewhat of a freak accident (something that, in retrospect, makes me appreciate the unambiguity of the walking-on-glass scene in “Die Hard”). What happened was that I managed to drop a beer bottle in my Thailand apartment, and — a couple days after I thought I’d cleaned it all up — I stepped on a tiny piece of glass that imbedded itself deep into the ball of my right foot. For a week, I had a hard time walking without feeling sharp pain. And, for a good part of that week, I spent a good part of each evening digging around in the ball of my foot with a pocketknife and a pair of tweezers, trying to get the glass out. I suppose I figured that, if rock climber Aron Ralston could have self-amputated his arm with a pocketknife in Utah earlier this year, I could at least find and remove a piece of glass from my foot.
Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. At least one’s arm is easy to find (if not amputate); locating a tiny piece of glass in the tissues of one’s foot is next to impossible. After a week of pulling ragged red chunks of skin tissue out of my foot to no avail, I decided spring the $50 (which, apparently, is what surgery costs in Thailand) and have a surgeon find and remove the piece of glass for me. The glass was so small that Dr. Pricha, my surgeon, had to find it by sound and feel instead of sight. What he finally found was a shard of glass as sharp as a scalpel and about a quarter the size of a grain of rice. It was hard to believe that tiny shard was what had been causing all that pain, but I haven’t had a problem since.
Anyhow, after a couple more days in Bangkok, I boarded a $300 China Air flight for San Francisco via Taipei. I was later told by my friend (and former Paris student) Jennifer Lahue that getting on any China Air flight is a bad idea, since this carrier has a reputation for, among other things, driving planes the wrong way up runways. And the reason I mention Jennifer is that (although my flight got across the runway just fine) my China Air flight managed to miss my onward connection, and I was forced to spend an unscheduled day in Taipei, where Jennifer teaches at the local American School. Fortunately, Jennifer came to the rescue by bringing a bunch of booze and snacks out to Air China’s layover hotel and making me laugh (and not just because of the booze) for several hours. Among other things, she “double-dog” dared me to use the words “sea monkey”, “loincloth”, and “toggle” in a single weblog entry. (Unfortunately, Jennifer, I am not so easily manipulated, and the day I play your little games on this blog will be the day that loincloth-clad sea-monkeys break into the Pentagon and toggle all the levers on the Cheez-It vending machines.)
Eventually I made it out of Taipei, and managed to survive a China Air flight to SFO, where I snagged a red-eye flight to Kansas, where my family lives. I’ve said before on this blog that Kansas is a kind of “home” to me, since I grew up there, but that (as Pico Iyer recently wrote) home can be a moving target if you’re always traveling from place to place and culture to culture.
This return to Kansas, however, was different than the rest, since — for the first time ever — I returned to a piece of land I can call my own. Indeed, some months ago I went in on 80 acres of farmland with my sister’s family, and this was the first time I’d had a chance to see it since we’d been out shopping for land last winter. And I must say that it’s a beautiful little farm: 30 acres of timber (mostly elm, cedar, and Osage orange), and 50 acres of wheat (which is leased to a farmer) midway between Gypsum and Salina in the Smoky Hills of Saline County. (This being Kansas, of course, the “hills” of the Smoky Hills are more like “bumps”.) Kristin, David, Cedar and Luke have fixed up the old farmhouse on the property, and when I stay there I sleep, Mel-Gibson-Lethal-Weapon-style, in a small trailer at the edge of the timber. The September weather was perfect when I visited — cool mornings and calm, sunny afternoons — though David told me that, given Kansas’ infamous weather fluctuations, that was a lucky fluke. “If the weather was always this nice,” he told me, “this place would be crawling with Californians looking to buy land.”
Someday, when time and money come together properly, I hope to build a little writer’s cabin in the timber and live there for a season or two each year. And when I do, you’re all invited out for the cabin-warming party.
In the meantime, however, I have moved on to California, where I have a great new adventure in store for the next several months — one that will take me overland across Mexico, Central America, and South America to Tierra del Fuego. I know I’ve been coy about this upcoming adventure (and my departure from Asia) for quite some time, but I’ve wanted to get the facts and plans down before I announced anything. Expect those details (and the first of many dispatches from this Latin American adventure) sometime next week.
“Never board a commercial aircraft if the pilot is wearing a tank top.”
–Dave Barry’s Only Travel Guide You’ll Ever Need (1991)
This month, I am interviewed about Vagabonding and the writing life in Student Traveler magazine. I’ve blogged an outtake from the interview below.
Elsewhere this summer, I was interviewed in issue #5 of the excellent alternative travel magazine Motionsickness.
September/October 2003 issue
interview by Claire Smith
Describe where you are right now
“Today, I think of travel as anything that extends one’s realm of experience or expands one’s lexicon of acquired convictions — and occurs beyond the backyard (thus distinguishing it from reading). It is a moment that comes when we are out of our element and allows us to see, or feel, or think, anew. I grow weary of people who declare that travel is dead, who complain about McDonald’s in Paris and go off to Namibia in order to avoid being a tourist. It’s like saying experience is finite. Yet, if you go to the McDonald’s and meet some locals, maybe wrangle a tour of the city or an invitation for coffee, you’re more of a traveler than those who fly into Windhoek and book a group safari. A vivid, childhood travel moment for me was visiting the home of a friend who lived, not as I did in a leafy suburban development, but on a narrow street of modest row houses a block back from South Main. As we walked through the living room, his father put down the evening paper and told his younger brother, who was sprawled on the floor struggling with his homework, ‘Spelling is bullshit.’ The language, and the sentiment, were so alien to everything I associated with parental guidance and middle-class home life that I felt as if I were in a foreign land. And I was; and it was exhilarating.”
–Thomas Swick, A Way to See the World (2003)
Note: Thomas Swick, who I interviewed at RolfPotts.com late last year, is in my opinion one of the best travel writer-editors in America. He edits the travel section of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, and his second book, A Way to See the World: From Texas to Transylvania with a Maverick Traveler was released this month by the Lyons Press.
