Mediocre Monk by Grant Lindsley

Author:Grant Lindsley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Girl Friday Books
Published: 2023-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chill

Ajahn Sukhito had talked about learning and relearning lessons until, eventually, there was an actual transformation. That was all well and good, but I didn’t know what there was to learn from hunger. The only transformation I could imagine was the groundbreaking discovery of a missing section of the Pali Canon extolling the virtues of dinner.

I was tearing my hair out. Literally. My plug-in razor ran out of battery a couple of weeks after I arrived at Poo Jom Gom. I located the monastery’s single electrical outlet⁠—by the pantry in the kitchen⁠—but it didn’t work. While I relished the reputational cachet of living without electricity, I was less enthusiastic about having to shave my head, face, and eyebrows like everyone else did, with a single loose blade and a bar of soap. When I finished for the first time, I had unleashed a blizzard of dandruff and drawn a roadmap of blood. Neglected tufts remained behind my ears, and I looked like one of the feral dogs with mange I saw during alms round, slinking around, hungry for scraps.

My new tactic to combat hunger was to wake up even earlier, around 2:00 a.m., which shifted the meal deeper into the day, increasing the number of hours spent anticipating the meal, which were far more bearable, and decreasing the time spent agonizing over its passing.

I was losing weight and losing my mind. Afternoons were interminable. I delayed opening mail until loneliness brought me to the brink. One evening, I opened a letter from my grandmother with a cartoon cut from the New Yorker: two figures sat on a picnic blanket and stared at a piece of cake. The caption read, “Now we wait.” I was indignant. This was torture too close to home. It took me a day to realize the picnickers were anteaters.

Letters were few, and ultimately there was nothing to do but meditate, to actually do the thing I’d gone there to do. I tried sitting in the plastic chair by the peeling desk, but I grew restless and claustrophobic and fled outdoors.

At the streambed, I found a depression in the rock and sat on a sandal for a cushion. Time to meditate, I thought, for real. I set a timer on my watch for an hour, closed my eyes, and heaved the sigh of one who knows the cause is already lost.

Around eight minutes later, I fidgeted, stood up, and grumbled about not being able to stick it out for even ten minutes. Each day, the same cycle. I raged at myself for spending so much time thinking and writing about concentration rather than actually concentrating. I thought back to one of the signs posted on a tree at Nanachat. A quote from Ajahn Chah: “If you have something bad-smelling in your pocket, wherever you go it will smell bad. Don’t blame it on the place.” I sulked at the stream, seeing the movement of my mind in that of the water bugs, restless and darting nowhere across the surface.

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