PART V
The Far East: The Last Days
October 1968–December 1968
October 15, 1968
The Pacific is very blue. Many small white clouds are floating over it, several thousand feet below us. It is seven o’clock in Honolulu toward which we are flying. We—the planeload of people on Pan American: the silent Hawaiian soldier, the talking secretaries, the Australians, the others who like myself had to pay for excess baggage. Lesson: not to travel with so many books. I bought more yesterday, unable to resist the bookstores in San Francisco.
Yesterday I got my Indonesian visa in the World Trade Center, on the Embarcadero, and said Tierce standing on a fire escape looking out over the Bay, the Bay Bridge, the island, the ships. Then I realized I had apparently lost the letter with addresses of the people I was to meet. However, I did jot down an address in Djakarta.
There was a delay getting off the ground at San Francisco: the slow ballet of big tailfins in the sun. Now here. Now there. A quadrille of planes jockeying for place on the runway.
The moment of take-off was ecstatic. The dewy wing was suddenly covered with rivers of cold sweat running backward. The window wept jagged shining courses of tears. Joy. We left the ground—I with Christian mantras and a great sense of destiny, of being at last on my true way after years of waiting and wondering and fooling around.
May I not come back without having settled the great affair. And found also the great compassion, mahakaruna. We tilted east over the shining city. There was no mist this morning. All the big buildings went by. The green parks. The big red bridge over the Golden Gate. Muir Woods, Bodega Bay, Point Reyes, and then two tiny rock islands. And then nothing. Only blue sea.
I am going home, to the home where I have never been in this body, where I have never been in this washable suit (washed by Sister Gerarda the other day at the Redwoods), where I have never been with these suitcases (in Bangkok there must be a katharsis of the suitcases!), where I have never been with these particular books, Evans-Wentz’s Tibetan Yoga and Secret Doctrines and the others.
The smell of one of the Australians’ cheroot. And, in the diffuse din of the plane, bird cries, waterfalls, announcements, and the pretty stewardess comes along handing out green mimeographed sheets of paper, or small blue cards, invitations to parties with the King of the Islands, perhaps. Someone holds high the San Francisco Chronicle with a big gray picture of a tiger skin.
Last week I had a dream about planes. It was at Yakutat, one of the small airstrips to which I had been flown in Alaska. There is a low ceiling and we are waiting to take off in a small plane. But a large plane, a commercial prop plane, is about to land. It comes down, and then I hear it leave again. The way is clear. Why don’t we take off now? The other plane is never seen, though it lands and takes off nearby.
Not long ago I was thinking about the level of communication—as a problem to be studied on this trip—with its many aspects. And the level of communion—problems resolved beforehand by the acceptance of “words,” which cannot be understood until after they have been accepted and their power experienced.
Hrishikesa, destroyer of Titans, ogres and canailles [scoundrels],1
Slaves flee the old group, embracing the feet of Hrishikesa, flying from Wallace,
Free champagne is distributed to certain air passengers “Ad multos annos [For many years],” sings the airline destroyer of ogres and canailles
In the sanctuary of the lucky wheel
Blazing red circle in the fire
We are signed between the eyes with this noble crim-Son element this Asia,
The lucky wheel spins over the macadam forts
Showering them with blood and spirits
The thousand bleeding arms of Bana
Whirl in the alcohol sky
Magic war! Many armies of fiery stars!
Smash the great rock fort in the Mathura forest
Baby Krishna plays on his pan-flute
And dances on the five heads
Of the registered brass cobra
Provided free by a loving line of governments.
Berceuse [lullaby]: to end the sorrow of mortals: talelo [lullaby refrain], riding the bull. Talelo. Riding the great blue buffalo. Talelo! They kill swine. They break the bone, eat the marrow of sorrow. The Tamil2 page cures in the dry wind, the inner aviation. You striding baby, you three-step world surveyor.
Weep not. Talelo.
Love has lotus feet
Like the new blossoms
Bells are on her ankles.
Talelo.
You who came to drink on earth
Poisoned milk
Weep no more. Talelo?
The carp is leaping
In the red-rice. Talelo.
And in the open lotus
Stays the blackgold bee
The slow cows come
Heavy with milk
(Come, doll. Talelo.)
Kiss kiss one sandy sparrow
And coins tinkle on the wrist
Bells on the ankles of girls at the churns.
Talelo.
You little thundercloud
With red eyes
Lotus buds
Lion cub of yasoda
The girls go
To wash in the river
But for you
They do not pencil
Their eyes.
The Lion Baby. He got rid of all the athletes.
After Honolulu.
The very loud tour got out and Honolulu was hot. The airport was at times like Whitestone, Long Island, in 1929, and at times heavenly with the scent of flowers. Hawaii could be so beautiful—the dark green mountains rising up into the clouds! And I thought: “O Wise Gauguin!” But there is no longer any place for a Gauguin!
In the airport bar I met some people heading for New York via Las Vegas—no harm to be done. Then back in my waiting room, to get on Flight 7 to Tokyo, Hong Kong and Bangkok, and there was a whole new set. They were Asians, small anonymous types of no calculable age, and the sweet little Japanese girl—or Chinese?—poor, with a lei of colored plastic. When the stewardess began the routine announcement in Chinese I thought I was hearing the language of Heaven. Seven hours to Tokyo!
Ramanuja3 was anointing the head of his guru when the latter asserted that the eyes of the Lord were red as the ass of a mandrill. A red hot tear fell from the eyes of the disciple on the face of the master. When requested to explain his grief, Ramanuja said the eyes of the Lord were in reality as red as a delicately red lotus. The master then gathered the other disciples in secret and intimated that Ramanuja was an enemy of the true faith. They all decided to take him on pilgrimage and drown him in the river Ganges. Ramanuja took a side road and wandered off into the jungle. He met Vishnu4 and his spouse disguised as birdcatchers. They led him to a more reliable master.
“Mr. Feresko wants to see you, Captain.”
“You mean he’s conscious!” (Dr. Kildare in the comic strip)
“You born today are an ambitious leader, efficient promoter and a reasoner. You are a powerful friend and with your active disposition can be an equally potent enemy.” That’s for today in the astrology column, syndicated in the Hong Kong Standard. And the ocean is empty and deep, deep, blue. A Nixon victory will be bullish for the market, they think. They think. They think. They think too that Mr. Feresko is conscious.
I am over a wing and see only a lovely distant garden of delicate Pacific clouds, like coral, like rich and delicately formed full white and pink flowers, small enough for plenty of gaps over an ocean that has to be forever sunny.
It is 8 a.m. tomorrow in Tokyo, toward which we are flying. It is 1:15 Honolulu time and we are about to have supper. In San Francisco it is nearly 5.
Hong Kong beats Singapore to retain the Ho Ho Soccer Cup.
Offerings of flowers, water and fire: they please Vishnu. A soldier heading for Vietnam studies his Bible. But in the airport he was chuckling at a joke in the Reader’s Digest.
God protect him!
On this flight—no complimentary champagne.
The utter happiness of life in a plane—quiet, time to read. But long, long. Endless noon. Tuesday afternoon turns into Wednesday afternoon, and no matter how hard we try we won’t get much past 3 o’clock until after Tokyo, when we swing south, and the night will finally fall on us.
A Japanese (niseI) stewardess comes over and looks at this notebook and asks, “What is that?” I explain.
Long, long noon. Endless noon. Like Alaska in midsummer. In San Francisco it has long been dark. It is nearly 10 at night there. Here, endless sun. I have done everything. Sleep. Prayers. And I finished Hesse’s Siddhartha.5 Nothing changes the endless sunlight. And in this light the stewardesses come with questionnaires that we must all fill in. Why do we travel? etc.
October 17, 1968. Bangkok
Last evening, the plane was late taking off and we did not leave Tokyo until after dark. I unknowingly broke the rules of the airline at Hong Kong where I walked up and down in the dark warm sea wind under the plane’s huge tail, looking at the lights of Kowloon. This merited an implied reproof, a special announcement at Bangkok that passengers were under no circumstances to do this! Finally, after we passed over South Vietnam—where there were three big, silent, distant fires—we came down over the vast dim lights of Bangkok. We got out of the plane into tropical heat, a clammy night no worse than Louisville in July. Fascist faces of the passport men, a line of six officials in uniform to stamp a passport once, faces like the officers in Batista’s Cuba, and the same pale uniforms. Tired, crafty, venal faces, without compassion, full, in some cases, of self-hate. Men worn out by a dirty system. A conniving one made no move to look at any bag of mine in the customs. He waved me on when I declared fifteen rolls of pan-x film—as if I were a good child. And I was grateful. Why not? He showed sense. I am only in Bangkok for two days this time.
The soldier who was reading the Bible on the plane got out here, too. The nice mother in the white suit, with whom I had a whisky in the l(,kyo airport, got off with her baby at Hong Kong-a stopover before Vietnam. There was a list of dangerous places on a blackboard at Tokyo-plague at Saigon and three other Vietnamese airports.
At nearly 1 a.m., Bangkok time, after about twenty-four hours in the plane, I ride through the hot, swamp-smelling night in an “airport limousine” that is more accurately a fast and wildly rattling piece of old bus. There are three others in it: a Chinese and his wife, and a Hindu. They both go to the big fancy Siam Intercontinental. I go to the Oriental, which is thoroughly quiet. The road from the airport could be the road from any airport—from Louisville to Gethsemani in summer. The same smell of hot night and burning garbage, the same Pepsi billboards. But the shops are grated up with accordion grilles, the stucco is falling off everything, and the signs in Thai are to me unintelligible.
Bangkok.
This morning I made a partial purification of the luggage. What will I do with all those books that have to be thrown out? Leave them with Phra Khantipalo, the English Bhikkhu at Wat Bovoranives.6
I had breakfast on the hotel terrace by the river. A hot wind. Choppy water, and great activity of boats: motorboats waiting to take tourists on a tour of the klong7 markets, and rowboats as ferries to and fro across the river—one sculled by a strong woman who fought the current bravely and effectively, though I thought she and her passengers would be carried away!
Then about 10 I took a taxi to Wat Bovoranives. We drove through Chinatown with its clutter of shops and wild, dirty streets. Crowds. Motorbikes. Taxis. Buses. Trucks fixed up to look like dragons, glittering with red and chrome. Dirt. Camp. Madness. Enormous nightmare movie ads. And lovely people. Beautiful, gentle people—except those who are learning too fast from the Americans. A long ride to the wat but we finally get there. I pass through a gate into a quiet maze of shady lanes and alleys, large houses, canals, temples, school buildings. I ask a bhikkhu for directions and arrive at the domicile of Phra Khantipalo. He is extremely thin, bones sticking out in all directions. He has the look of a strict observer. But sensible. (“These people here are very tolerant and uncritical.”) Khantipalo is the author of two books on Buddhism. He says he is going to a forest monastery in the northeast part of Siam in four or five days. He will have a quasi-hermit life there, with a good meditation teacher, in the jungle. We talked of satipatthana meditation.
In the evening I met the abbot, Venerable Chao Khun Sasana Sobhana, who was very impressive. He was tired—he had just returned from the cremation of some bhikkhu—but he got talking on the purpose of Theravada. He spoke of sila, samadhi, panna (prajna), mukti, and the awareness of mukti (freedom), with emphasis on following one step after another, ascending by degrees. I enjoyed the conversation-there were occasional translations of difficult parts by Khantipalo—and felt it was fruitful.
The abbot told this story of Buddha and Sariputra.8 Buddha asked Sariputra: “Do you believe in me?” Sariputra answered: “No.” But Buddha commended him for this. He was the favorite disciple because he did not believe in Buddha, only respected him as another, but enlightened, man.
What is the “knowledge of freedom”? I asked. “When you are in Bangkok you know that you’re there. Before that you only knew about Bangkok. And,” he said, “one must ascend all the steps, but then when there are no more steps one must make the leap. Knowlegde of freedom is the knowledge, the experience, of this leap.”
The abbot’s table was piled high with presentation books for temporary bhikkhus who were disrobing and leaving the wat at the end of the rains. A boy student, on his knees, presented hot tea, but behind me. Khantipalo motioned for him to kneel where he could be seen and the tea reached.
The noise of a big motorboat on the river. I am falling asleep. I had better drop this and go to bed. (10:30)
The Thai Buddhist concept of sila, the “control of outgoing exuberance,” is basic, somewhat like the Javanese rasa. There is a good pamphlet on the “Forest Wat,” the idea of wisdom, beginning with sila. This small book, really only an extended article, “Wisdom Develops Samadhi” by the Venerable Acarya Maha Boowa Nanasampanno, a translation from the Thai published in Bangkok, is a spiritual masterpiece.9 The author is apparently, or was, one of the masters in the Ghai forest wats, abbot of Wat Pa-barn-tard in the jungle of north central Thailand.
Kammatthana: “Bases of action,” practical application and experiential knowledge, dharma teaching. This controls the “heart with outgoing exuberance.” “The heart which does not have dharma as its guardian.” Such a heart, when it finds happiness as a result of “outgoing exuberance,” is a happiness which plays a part, increases the “outgoing exuberance,” and makes the heart “go increasingly in the wrong direction.” Samadhi is calm—tranquillity of heart. “Outgoing exuberance is the enemy of all beings.”
Anapanasati: awareness of breathing in and out.
Khanika samadhi: momentary, changing.
Upacara samadhi: “getting close to the object.”
Apana samadhi: absorption.
The method should suit one’s character. After correct practice one feels “cool, bright and calm.”
Inside is “the one who knows”-a function of citta. Preparatory incantations in kammatthana aim at uniting the one who speaks and the one who knows. Attention to breathing: in order to unite breathing and citta: “it becomes apparent that the most subtle breath and the heart (citta) have converged and become one.” This leads to “finding that which is wondrous in the heart.”
Problem of nivritti (vision) in upacara samadhi. Danger of madness.
October 18, 1968. Bangkok
Mass of St. Luke in a big church. A cathedral? Has it a bishop? It’s just around the corner from the hotel. Little girls were singing in choir behind the old high altar while a priest said Mass in the center. Only a few people were present, some Americans or Europeans. A somewhat dilapidated side altar. The altar cards were old, stained with damp. The linens old, too, and the Sacred Hear
t statue more toneless, dowdy, dusty than many a Buddha. (Many of the Buddhas here seem too golden, too smug, too hollow.)
Yesterday afternoon I was driven out into the country to see Phra Pathom Chedi, one of the oldest and largest stupas. Rice fields. Coronet palms. Blue, shiny buffaloes. Endless lines of buses and trucks traveling like mad. A small wat in the fields. Many of the Buddhas were flaked with small bits of gold leaf stuck on by the faithful. At another tiny country wat, a side Buddha had had his face masked and buried in gold by some benefactor-as though he were being smothered by it. Behind the entrance and around the stupa was a cloister with desks, books, little bhikkhus studying Pali. A master was correcting a bhikkhu who had written something wrong on a blackboard. Khantipalo and I circumambulate the stupa with incense and flowers, he in bare feet and all bony and I sweating with my camera around my neck. The gold-roofed temples against the clouds made me think of pictures of Borobudnur.10 There were men high up on the side of the stupa replacing old tiles and a boy up there pulling out weeds that had grown in between the tiles. Then I wandered interminably around under the trees (mostly frangipani), looking at small, good and bad Buddhas, stupas, reproductions, imitations, a run-down meditation garden confided to the Chinese. Buddhas smothered with gold, one enormous, lying down with chicken wire at his back, a protection against graffiti.
The Other Side of the Mountain Page 25
