A Fortune-Teller Told Me

by Tiziano Terzani

  The first days were very tough. When I first sat in the lotus position it seemed quite comfortable, but after a quarter of an hour it became unbearable, and after half an hour it was absolute torture. My knees were all pins and needles, my back was one big cramp, and the urge to move became overwhelming. Never, not for one second, did I manage to meditate. Instead of fixing my thoughts on the point where my breath touched my skin, my mind was “a monkey jumping from branch to branch,” as John put it, and I was unable, even for the briefest instant, to turn it into “a strong, solid buffalo, to put a rope round its neck and tie it to a post.”

  “Think only of that point, feel only that sensation of the breath touching your skin,” John repeated, very slowly, sitting on the platform like a great wax Buddha. “At the moment when your breath touches the surface of the skin at the nose, the nerve tissues in the skin respond with a feeling, a sensation, an experience of touch. Be aware of that sensation. Be aware of the in-breath and the out-breath, and thus greed, hatred, and ignorance will be unable to arise. The fires of craving and aversion will be extinguished and your mind will be calm, peaceful, free of fears and anxiety.”

  I kept my feet under my knees, my eyes closed, my hands still, but my mind, when it was not focused on the pain in my legs or on the desire to get up and scream, went rushing off in all directions; it fled, and I could not call it back. I did not dominate it; it was not mine. Useless. The pain became unbearable, and even before John announced the end of the hour, breaking the silence with his “Amen” (“may all our merits be shared by all beings”), I gave up, changed position and opened my eyes. I was frustrated to see how some of the others carried on serenely.

  At various times I was on the verge of leaving. What was the point of keeping one’s eyes shut when surrounded by the beauty of nature? What was the point of thinking, only to expunge every thought, and of artificially inflicting upon myself some of the pain which life sooner or later deals out to everyone? I listened to the first “sunset sermons” with irritation. “Everything in life is suffering. We cause suffering when we are born, we die suffering, we suffer for what we want, we suffer for fear of losing what we have…” said John, sounding like a Bible salesman. I was annoyed by his talk of “a higher level of energy,” of “refining the magnifying glass of concentration.” The idea was that by spending the first three days thinking only of that point where the breath touches the skin, the mind would become calm—an exercise called anapanaa. Both the exercise and its rationale struck me as intellectually demeaning.

  There were, however, some pleasures. One was the silence. In the opening ceremony we had formally pledged to observe, throughout the duration of the course, the Five Precepts: not to kill (that included any living being, even mosquitoes—hence no insecticides were used at Pongyang); not to lie; not to take what is not given; not to have sexual relations (“either with oneself or with others”); and not to take intoxicants (meaning not to drink coffee or smoke). We had also promised not to eat after midday, not to wear jewelry, not to use perfumes and not to sleep in an overcomfortable bed. And we had promised to keep the Noble Silence, not to speak or make sounds that might distract the others—and that was marvelous. When we met other participants between meditations there was no need to make conversation; a silent nod was enough. At table we did not have to talk merely to fill the at times uncomfortable vacuum with even more vacuous banalities. Each of us was alone with himself.

  This silence was a great discovery. Without the foreground of other people’s words, I realized that the glorious beauty of nature was in its silence. I looked at the stars and heard their silence; the moon made no sound; the sun rose and set without a whisper. In the end even the noise of the waterfall, the birdcalls, the rustle of the wind in the trees, seemed part of a stupendous, living, cosmic silence which I loved and in which I found peace. It seemed that this silence was a natural right of every man, and that this right had been taken from us. I thought with horror of how for so much of our lives we are pounded by the cacophony we have invented, imagining that it pleases us, or keeps us company. Everyone, now and then, should reaffirm this right to silence and allow himself a pause, some days of silence in which to feel himself again, to reflect and regain a degree of health.

  Another pleasure came from the effort. As the days went by, the commitment to the various prohibitions acquired more and more value, and gave a sense of increasing strength. That strength, John said, served to “create a base of morality” for the next stage of meditation. Precisely by making the effort, one came to feel that one deserved some sort of reward. “In the last days you will understand. Everything will make sense. Everything will find its place,” repeated John, giving hope that by concentrating on that point where the breath touches the skin we would gain control of our minds, and with that new horizons would open.

  That was the real reason for my being there. During my year on the trail of fortune-tellers I had become fascinated by the mind’s possibilities and powers. I had come to believe that in the West, for various reasons, the use of the mind has become more limited over the course of time, and a great part of its capacity has been lost. I wanted to rediscover that forgotten path, if it had ever existed. Could it be that the mind is like a muscle which atrophies if it isn’t used to the full? I thought about myself. For years I have run a few miles every day, and exercised to keep fit. But when have I ever looked after my mind? When have I ever done exercises to strengthen it and allow it to reach its full capacity? The mind is perhaps the most sophisticated instrument we have, yet we do not even give it the attention we give to our leg muscles.

  Alexandra David-Neel, the extraordinary French explorer of the Himalayas in the 1930s, tells of Tibetan lamas who could dematerialize themselves through mental effort alone, and of others who could communicate with each other over long distances. All fiction? Perhaps not. Perhaps in the human mind there really was something that we have lost along the road. Some Europeans, supposing that somewhere in the world there were still human beings able to use their minds in that way, have gone to look for them in Asia. In 1924 a young Englishman, Paul Brunton, traveled to India to meet yogis, hermits and fakirs. He tried to find out how, through the exercise of the mind, they had attained a knowledge which he believed was being destroyed by modernization. The first step in all the different paths to that knowledge was meditation. Therefore it was worthwhile trying to understand what it was.

  I watched John meditate as he sat on the platform, wrapped in a large white blanket, immobile as a statue. He was relaxed and concentrated; his forehead was smooth and on his lips was a very light, almost mocking smile, as if—or so it seemed to me—with those closed eyes he saw something I could not see, as if with those large, long-lobed ears he heard more than the silence of nature. John had taken the step. I do not know toward what knowledge, but certainly toward a peacefulness that hovered about him like a halo.

  His was a peculiar story. He was born in 1930 in Pennsylvania into a poor mining family. He began working as a mechanic and then as a photographer. At the end of the Second World War he joined the army and was sent to Japan, where he was given the task of photographing accused war criminals as their death sentences were read out to them. After his discharge he returned to the United States, went to university and was recruited by the CIA. He was trained to open and close any lock without being detected—locks of houses, offices, embassies, safes. He would be sent to a foreign city where for weeks he would study a building and work out how to enter it, photocopy documents and get out again without leaving a trace. In 1954 he was posted to Thailand to train the border police. He became interested in Buddhism, and began to meditate. After a few years the CIA obviously decided their agent had lost his wits, and gave him premature retirement and an invalidity pension. For a while John ran the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok; then he married and had two children. He continued to meditate, and in the end made it his mission in life.

  In his third sunset sermon on dharma, “t
he way of the truth, of purification, of detoxification” (my stomach turned at this language), John said that Buddha’s great contribution was to have realized that the essence of the world lies in its instability, its impermanence—anicca—which is the origin of all suffering. To acquire knowledge of anicca is the only way of escaping from pain.

  And so, after three days of anapanaa, we went on to inner meditation, vippasanaa. This means to direct “that magnifying glass, that band of attention of the mind, sharpened by concentration,” to the contemplation of one’s own body. We were told to begin by fixing our whole mind on the point below the nostrils, and then to bring the mind up to the crown of the head—I finally understood why so many statues of Buddha have a flame at that very place. Then, from the highest point of the body, very slowly and without losing control, one moves the mind to the skin, under the skin, into the skull, into the brain, into the eyes, into the nose, and slowly down into the chest, into the lungs, the heart, the veins, the bones, the internal organs, down, down to the legs, the toes, the soles of the feet, never thinking of anything else. The mind is directed like a searchlight in a cave, constantly aware of every sensation and aware that all sensations are transient—pain, pleasure, sound, the touch of the wind, always fugitive. “Know anicca … continue to know anicca… anicca is all,” repeated John in a slow, deep voice. Know anicca. Hour after hour, day after day. Never speaking a word to anyone; and even outside meditation, being always conscious of each movement, each step when walking, each mouthful when eating, feeling each sip of water as it descends into the stomach and comes to rest.

  John began his hours of meditation with a prayer which we awaited with joy:

  May all beings be peaceful and happy.

  May all beings be free of all ignorance,

  all cravings and all aversions.

  May all beings be free of all suffering,

  all sorrows and all conflicts.

  May all beings be filled with infinite loving kindness,

  compassion and equanimity.

  May all beings be fully enlightened.

  For my part, I awaited his “Amen,” which put an end to the hour of torture. I made no progress. With great effort and pain I managed to sit still better than in the beginning, but my aim was to learn to meditate, and in that I was hopeless. One could say of me exactly what a famous monk-meditator had once told John: “I have seen a hen hatch her eggs without moving for three days, but I’ve never seen an enlightened hen.”

  As the days went by I found John more and more convincing. There was nothing false in him, no pretense. He was a simple man who believed he had understood a great truth. He was a layman who did an exercise, an exercise that was not necessarily religious, but spiritual. Entering and leaving the meditation terrace, he turned to the Buddha and saluted him with hands joined in front of his chest: a gesture of thanks for having shown the way, the dharma. In John there was nothing of that vulgar sanctimoniousness one sees in other converts.

  Was he the “superior person” whom, according to the young fortune-teller in Kengtung, I was destined to meet? The facts seemed to chime perfectly with that prophecy; and when John described in his sunset sermon how at first in Thailand no one wanted to teach him meditation, and how he had finally found his great teacher in Rangoon, my spine tingled. “I learned from U Ba Khin,” he said. Yes, the very name! “Follow his method,” the young man in Kengtung had said. “It is the best for people like you.” And here I was following it!

  U Ba Khin was born in Burma in 1899. He had entered the English colonial administration, and when the Burmese Union became independent in 1948 he was appointed Accountant General for the Ministry of Finance. A devout Buddhist, he had been interested in meditation since his youth, and he resolved to bring within the reach of laymen this spiritual practice which the monks had kept for centuries as a monopoly for themselves. Either one became a monk, or there was no way of meditating.

  He began by giving courses to his subordinates in the ministry; then in 1952 he founded the International Meditation Center in Rangoon. By his death in 1971, meditation had become a spiritual exercise accessible to everyone—as it was 2,500 years ago in the temples of Buddha. U Ba Khin’s method was to concentrate all the teaching in a ten-day course, so that afterward the pupil could return to his normal life and continue meditating on his own.

  According to one of the anecdotes John told to lighten his sunset sermons, U Ba Khin’s first pupil was a stationmaster. While traveling in a remote part of Burma, U Ba Khin went with the manager of the only station in the region to pay his respects to a famous hermit monk—an arahant, or enlightened one, who lived deep in the forest. They came to a tall pole, at the top of which was a sort of nestlike hut made of bamboo leaves, where the monk had been meditating for days. A little door opened and a cloud of flies came out, followed by the head of the arahant.

  “What are you seeking?” he asked.

  “Nirvana,” replied U Ba Khin.

  “And how do you expect to reach it?”

  “By understanding amcca.”

  “Excellent. Then teach it to others,” said the arahant; then he closed the door and returned to his meditation.

  U Ba Khin immediately ordered the stationmaster to assume the lotus position and to breathe, focusing his attention on the point where the breath touches the skin. A new tradition had been born.

  As meditation was brought within the reach of all, the practice spread to the West. John was one of the first pupils of U Ba Khin, who authorized him to teach, especially in Europe.

  “Then, master, knowing the West, you won’t be offended,” I told John when I was called to his bungalow to report on my progress in meditation, the only time I was allowed to break the Noble Silence, “if I tell you that in all these days I have not meditated for a single minute. That my mind, instead of concentrating on my nose, has gone off in all directions, from repainting my house in the country to a plan for enlarging my library. Instead of thinking about breathing I’ve thought about things to write, and about how silly it is to be here. When you tell us to think of the throat I think of strangling yours, since you force me into this torture. When you say ‘legs’ I think of those under the skirts of all the Thai women here, even the ugly old one in the back row.”

  John laughed merrily. “Don’t lose hope,” he said. “These things are transitory. They will come to an end. Perhaps for centuries your mind has never been brought under control. And now, all at once, you expect to master it in a few days? Wait. Hold on. Continue to know amcca.”

  I really had to laugh at the idea that in “all my previous lives” my mind had never been exercised. But who knows? It could be true. What I have always liked about Buddhism is its tolerance—the absence of sin, the absence of the deadweight that we Westerners carry with us, the cement that holds our civilization together: the sense of guilt. In Buddhist countries nothing is ever terribly reprehensible, no one ever accuses you of anything, no one ever preaches at you or tries to teach you a lesson. Hence these countries are very pleasant to be in, and many young Western travelers, seeking freedom, feel at ease there.

  Buddhism leaves you in peace, it never asks anything of you—least of all to become a Buddhist. Among the various prohibitions—an interesting one forbids boasting about one’s progress in meditation—there is one that forbids a monk to teach the religion to anyone who does not specifically request it. Buddhism always lets you be what you like. It says not to kill, but everyone kills. What about murderers? That’s their business. Their next incarnation will not be a good one. Nobody tries to impose justice here and now: of all things, not that. It is not up to us. Charity, then, is not a moral obligation—on the contrary, by helping the poor one hinders their liberation from bad karma; caring for a leper impedes his redemption through suffering and his favorable rebirth. Is your neighbor’s house burning down? It must have to do with his former life.

  Even more than a religion, Buddhism is a way of life; it is an interpret
ation of the world from the point of view of a peasant society which is close to nature and needs to explain its absolute cruelty. In nature there is no justice, no reckoning. Then why look for it among men, who after all are part of nature?

  Buddhism, then, has no aspirations for conquest, no sense of mission; it does not go fishing for souls. You want to be a Buddhist? Go right ahead. It’s up to you. That is why they have never even taught meditation; and it is no accident that the spread of Buddhism today—apart from the Tibetan phenomenon—is mainly the work of Western converts who, not having lost their native crusading instinct, are opening centers for the spread of the religion throughout the world.

  At the heart of Buddhism, if it is taken seriously and carried to its ultimate ends, lies a negation of civil society and, obviously, of progress. If everything is transient, if there is no escape from the law of cause and effect, and the only salvation is to acquire an indifference to life—to flee the terrible cycle of birth and death through meditation—then everything is irrelevant, everything is useless, everything should stop. It is a vision of great pessimism, with nihilistic consequences.

  What kind of society would it be whose members followed these ideas to the limit? A truly Buddhist society could only be stagnant, inert. In practice there has never been such a society. Those that exist have survived thanks to a formula of great tolerance: they have left meditation to the monks (and usually to the less gifted among them, while the more intelligent devoted themselves to doctrine), and they have left the people to “acquire merits” by making donations to support the monasteries. Ordinary mortals continued to live according to nature, while the monks set an example to remind them of all the virtues to which they could not aspire. This created an equilibrium which allowed society to move forward and forget the pessimism of the doctrine.

  During the difficult hours of meditation I thought of all the Westerners I had come across in the course of the year who—as the Buddhists say—had “taken refuge” in dharma: Chang Choub, the Dutchman Bikku, and all the meditators around me sitting on their feet. Was I like them? Twenty years ago I had come to Asia to try to understand Mao and Gandhi, and here I was attempting to meditate with an ex-CIA agent and a retired Thai police general. And not even successfully …