Teach Us to Sit Still

by Tim Parks

  The first time this happened to me, on the last session of that first retreat, the experience came together with three warm showers. Implausible as science fiction, that small area at the top centre of the head had begun to buzz, to glow, then overflowed in three drenching floods of warmth. A baptism. When the hour ended I jumped to my feet.

  In the car to the station at Maroggia the young man driving was furious. The whole five days had been an utter waste of time. The teacher was a charlatan, a fool. We had been taken for a ride. Anicca, Anicca, Anicca! The Buddha was rubbish. Nirvana was rubbish. Reincarnation was rubbish. There is no way anyone can feel the breath crossing his lip. Bullshit. He had been through the pains of hell trying to sit in that dumb cross-legged position when he could have been skiing. He could have been playing tennis.

  I believed in nothing, I said, least of all reincarnation, but it had been an important experience for me.

  The other man in the car was the gloomy, handsomely haggard fellow who had told us the position was not the problem. Session after session he had sat two places to my left on a cylindrical cushion in granitic stillness. He did not respond to the angry boy who dropped us at the station, but on the train to Milan he told me he ran a very busy car insurance agency. He had been to a dozen such retreats. These were the only days in the year that were truly his own. It was a rule of his, he said, never to speak of his experiences during meditation. However, one aspect of Vipassana still bothered him, indeed had come to bother him more and more, to the point where he was now ready to stop meditating. ‘What does it mean,’ he asked, ‘when they say the thoughts are not my thoughts? What can that mean? How can the thoughts not be my thoughts?’

  The Booker Speech

  NO LONGER MUCH interested in standing up straight, I found my back pulling upright by itself. It happened over the spring. Taking my familiar run across the hills, I was surprised to find myself aware of muscles at the base of the spine. How odd. Days later I could feel my shoulders. A slight warm presence. Finally my neck. It was as if skeletal spaces had been very lightly pencilled in. Becoming aware of the muscles turned out to be one with straightening them. Or letting them straighten me. I didn’t do anything. I just had to pay attention. The only difficult thing was getting used to seeing the world from a different angle.

  ‘Complimenti,’ Ruggero grinned. He insisted I looked ten centimetres taller.

  No longer interested in prostates, pelvic floors and plumbing problems, I found my pains were gone. Truly gone. Even the wolves had departed. I had stopped watching out for them and they had slouched off. The ease and lightness in my stomach and back made walking a pleasure that was at once a powerful sense of nowness and a memory of childhood. I walked very slowly, savouring my body walking. On my way to the café in the morning I nodded at the moustachioed man in the white cowboy hat. He nodded back, with new respect, I hoped. It became genuinely hard to believe the state I’d been in two years ago. Had I really written those desperate notes in my diary? Had it been that painful?

  Only the night-time trips to the bathroom remained, three or four. Irreducible to any pathology, they had stayed, I decided, to prevent me from growing too pleased with myself, or to keep the night present. My kayaking turns also had not improved.

  With varying results, I continued the meditation at home. Paradoxical relaxation was behind me. It had been directly addressed to the symptom and the symptom was gone. I fixed up a mat and a few cushions in a corner of the bedroom and tried to meditate an hour a day. It was at once more comfortable than at the retreat, and less intense. The warm showers did not return. Nor the fierce pains. It was liturgy after revelation.

  Knowing that I had scarcely scratched the surface, I signed up to a ten-day retreat in August. This time there would be a famous teacher, an ageing American, John Coleman. I made no attempt to find out about the man or to look up the philosophy that underpinned Vipassana. The last thing I needed was to turn Buddhist. I just wanted the quiet sitting, the increased perception of the body, the Noble Silence. I went confident that there would be no pain this time. I had sorted that out at home. I knew how to sit cross-legged. At times I even experimented with the Burmese position. It’s so hard not to feel pleased with oneself.

  Since there were sixty participants, the retreat was in an ex-monastery, in the Tuscan hills. Less chic than you would imagine. On arrival, in the fervour of conversation that precedes the vow of silence, all the talk was of Coleman and what a fantastic teacher he was. ‘My teacher,’ someone said. ‘Il mio maestro.’ ‘I switched to Coleman from Goenka,’ said another. There was a general rush to place one’s mat and cushion towards the front of the meditation room, near the charismatic guru. May all beings be free from all attachment, I remembered, but, not wanting to be left out, I hurried along with them. I got a good place.

  Coleman was on his last legs, shuffling, pushing eighty, fat, sometimes fatuous. He spoke slowly in a sonorous voice between heavy sighs, sprawled in a deep armchair, wearing loose jeans and sloppy sweater. A bland smile suggested he too was pleased with himself. Sitting on a table beside him, a young man with only one leg translated his words into Italian in a grating, high-pitched voice. At once this translation business irritated me. It hadn’t occurred to me that language would be an issue. Much of the translation was inaccurate and all of it expressionless. There were occasions when it was hard not to shout out better solutions.

  Coleman talked about the three refuges, the four truths, the five precepts, the seven stages of purification, the eight-fold path to enlightenment, the ten perfections, the Buddha, the Dhamma, the Sangha, karma, anicca, anatta, samsara, dukkha, suffering, the root of all suffering, the remedy for all suffering, the bodhi tree.

  What drivel this was, I thought. And why do all faiths – because this clearly wasn’t science – share this mad appetite for numeration? The Trinity, the seven sacraments, the ten commandments. It wasn’t worth translating properly. On the other hand, I always tell my students that translating accurately is a pleasure in itself regardless of the inanity of the original. Certainly I was suffering more for the poor translation than the mystical content.

  Every few minutes the man behind me – and he was very close behind me – sniffed three times in rapid succession, then cleared his throat, then coughed. To my dismay, when the meditation proper began, fat old Coleman had someone fetch a large kitchen clock and place it at his feet. It was the kind of clock I could have heard ticking about ten miles away. Immediately I thought of all the guestrooms, classrooms, university offices and rented apartments, where the first thing I’d done on arrival was remove the battery from a ticking clock. What a satisfaction that is, killing the sound that constantly returns you to the passing moment, that stops you being elsewhere in your head. Here I was helpless. This will be hell, I decided.

  And I hadn’t conquered the pain at all. Twenty minutes into the first session I was in agony.

  Nor had I learned to sit up straight. My back collapsed, doubled even. My nose was at my feet (my aching feet). Why? This was worse than Maroggia. I should never have come.

  The meditation room was narrow and very long and I was about four rows from the front in ripple and cross-ripple of fidgeting and buttock shifting. Every time I thought I might at last be getting a hold on my breathing, every time the pain began to ease up as the mind focused on the skin of the lip, from behind, came, Sniff, sniff, sniff, er er hemmmm! At once the clock ticked more loudly. Sniff, sniff, sniff, er er hemmmm! Tick tick TOCK TOCK! The volcano that was my haunches threatened to erupt.

  ‘If there are feelings of pain,’ the would-be hypnotic Coleman crooned for the nth time, ‘just make an objective note, pain pain . . .’

  So what would a subjective note be, Mr Coleman? Or a note that was neither subjective nor objective, for that matter? Why pretend there is anything reasonable about all this?

  For the nth time the one-legged man on the table translated – fare una nota obiettiva (does anyone say, ‘fare una
nota?) – his voice as bored and mechanical as Coleman’s was sonorous and rhythmic.

  I now felt homicidal.

  From the corridor came the din of someone wheeling a trolley full of plates and cutlery along the monastery’s uneven, unending, stone-flagged corridor. First you heard it approach for a minute or more. At the crescendo, it stopped, right outside the meditation-room door. Now I was waiting for it to start again. Was it going to go away or wasn’t it? It was teasing us. I couldn’t meditate until it moved off, or until I knew it was staying. Then just when you thought it was staying, off it went with a long drawn-out squeal followed by a great clatter of plates, knives, spoons and pans, like a goods train at dead of night, the rattle, bang and boom sustained for another minute and more before the din began to fade at what I judged must be the turn of the corridor. How many clock ticks before it is gone completely, I wondered? Twenty? I counted. Tick tock. Tick tock. No, ten ticks more. Still the clatter echoed faintly off the stone surfaces. And the rattle. Fainter and fainter, but still faintly there. Tick . . . tick . . . tick. The guy was deliberately going slowly! And a jingle of teaspoons. Tick tick tick. Still ever so faintly. Perhaps he was taking a step back for every two steps forward. He was deliberately choosing the uneven flagstones, he was rattling the cutlery trays!

  Gone, it was suddenly gone. But now the clock’s ticking had got into my skin and was stitching my lips together, each tick was a stitch, up and down, through my lips. How could I feel my breath with a needle sewing up my lips? I imagined the first major massacre at a meditation retreat. ‘The assailant was a man in his fifties known to be searching for inner peace. It is not clear why he came to the monastery armed with a Kalashnikov.’

  At the same time I recognised this package of feelings all too well. This is me, I thought, me of old. Unredeemed TP. Old resentments, dramatisations, would-be black comedy. You are getting off on being angry now. You’re enjoying it, imagining yourself imaginatively angry. À la Geoff Dyer who himself wanted to be à la D.H. Lawrence. Gritting my teeth, I hung on to the end of the session and stumbled over a fizz of pins and needles to collapse on the lawn in the garden.

  The monastery was supposedly in a secluded area, high on a steep hot hill and surrounded by an impressive stone wall, but the village immediately beneath the hill had arranged its summer fête for this week. At eight in the evening rock music began, as poorly played as Coleman’s meditations were poorly translated. The summer air filtered out most of the treble leaving only a dull beat of drum and bass and the lament of a direly strained voice.

  Added to which the Olympics were now under way. From the windows of the convent located directly across the courtyard from our meditation room came the sound of nuns cheering on Italian athletes. In China. If there is one thing I loathe it’s the Olympic Games, festival of empty pieties, crass patriotism and sophisticated performance drugs. It was extraordinary how excited and patriotic those old nuns were. Apparently it did not occur to them they might be disturbing us. What a terrible, terrible farce all this was. Ten days of my precious and very busy life wasted!

  Still I hung on. I had no idea why. My diligence was a mystery to me. One day I wondered if they had deliberately arranged for us to be assailed by these noises to test our meditative stamina.

  The routine at these retreats is that you eat breakfast at six thirty, after the wonderfully quiet early session, lunch at eleven, then just a piece of fruit late afternoon and nothing till the following morning. ‘A little hunger in the evening will do no harm,’ fat Coleman smiled. The food, all strictly vegetarian, was not as good as the homemade fare at the smaller retreat in Maroggia. Brought in from outside, the pimply caterers grinned at us as if we were picturesque eccentrics. They seemed to take special pleasure in banging down the knives and forks when they laid the table and then shaking them vigorously in their metal trays when they collected them again, as if panning for gold. The fruit in the evening was chiefly kiwis. I’m not fond of kiwis. How can you peel a kiwi without getting sticky fingers? Fifty people queued around two kettles for tea. I had the distinct impression that old Coleman was enjoying little natters with the prettiest woman on the course. I had caught them three times at the turn of the staircase. Talking.

  Where was the Noble Silence?

  Every other afternoon, for an hour, there was a so-called ‘check-up’. In alphabetical order people were invited, four by four, to bring their cushions to the front, sit before the teacher and report on their progress. On the second day, almost everyone spoke of their pain with the sitting position, their difficulty eliminating their thoughts; many complained of a film playing out before their closed eyes, some old drama rehearsed a thousand times with no solution, as when a ghost appears again and again in the same place in the same clothes – an ex-husband, a dead sister – makes the same gestures and is gone, then back. Never there, never not there.

  ‘I’m in a loop,’ one man said. He found it distressing.

  ‘I have a big decision to take when I get home, I just can’t get it out of my mind, I see the conversation over and over.’

  People couldn’t identify the place on their lips where breath met skin. When they did identify it, they couldn’t focus their attention there, they lost it. ‘It must be my moustache,’ one man thought. He would shave it. Perhaps they felt the breath going out, but not the breath coming in. Or they could feel it in their nose, but not on their lip. Why was it so important to feel the breath on the upper lip?

  ‘I have a pain in my shoulder, from an accident a few years ago.’

  ‘I keep getting this fierce headache right behind my eyes, it won’t go away.’

  ‘My feet are on fire.’

  ‘I’ve got period cramps.’

  To all these people, sitting cross-legged on their cushions before him, Coleman, enthroned in his armchair, gave the same advice. ‘You must say, doesn’t matter, pain, pain, not my pain. You must say thoughts, thoughts, doesn’t matter, not my thoughts.’

  He smiled and settled his bulk.

  I felt rage.

  Given my place in the alphabet, I knew I wouldn’t be invited to present myself to the grand old man until the third day. Try as I might to eliminate the mental chatter from my mind, I began to go over and over what I planned to say. I would mention my surprise that while I had no problem meditating at home, here I was experiencing all kinds of pains. Why? I sat up straight at home, here my back collapsed. Did he have any advice beyond, pain, pain, not my pain?

  I thought of all kinds of attractive ways of phrasing this little speech, ways that would make it clear that I was neither an absolute beginner nor a practised meditator. I would say something different from the others. And of course I would speak in English, rather than going through the translator, the lousy translator. Perhaps I could take the opportunity to offer my own translation services.

  Then I was angry with myself. What was this, a theatre? A TV show? I remembered how, on being told I was on the Booker Prize shortlist, I had been unable to stop a modest acceptance speech from playing itself over and over in my mind for weeks before the event. Literally for weeks this acceptance speech had driven me crazy. From the moment of the phone call telling me I was on the list to the moment of the announcement that someone else had won, my acceptance speech refused to stop accepting the prize in my head. Each time with some tiny addition, some precious new flourish. The experience was simultaneously infuriating and immensely gratifying. It really was such a clever, ironic, modest speech. People would not be impressed immediately, I thought. They would just think what a nice ordinary guy I was. Only later would they see what a clever speech it had been. Then they would think me doubly clever, and doubly modest for not having wished to impose my full cleverness on them immediately, but with delayed effect, like those fertiliser sticks you put in the ground that dissolve slowly for months.

  On and on this speech performed itself for me, on and on and on. And now I was doing the same thing for Coleman. At every new pain a
nd ache and itch that arose, every sound that irritated and interrupted, I revised my little speech. I polished my speech, shortened my speech, lengthened my speech. Which was insane. At least for the Booker there was an audience. Would have been an audience. T.V.! If I’d won. Here there were just sixty people living in silence, trying in silence to achieve some better relationship with themselves, with existence. What could it possibly matter how I came across to them? They didn’t care about me. I didn’t care about them. And then, how can it ever truly matter how one comes across? What on earth could anyone care about a Booker acceptance speech? For Christ’s sake! And then, I had known from the beginning that I couldn’t win the Booker with the novel I had written. My chances were not six to one but six million to one. It was a miracle they had put me on the list with such an angry book that had sentences more than two pages long. They’d never let it win. So preparing my acceptance speech was doubly ridiculous. At least here I was bound to get a hearing. From sixty people. The speech would happen.

  Or maybe not. Because now it occurred to me that what I must do was ask to be excused from saying anything. That was the solution. Then I could stop playing the speech over and over in my mind. I might simply announce: ‘Please, Mr Coleman, I would rather say nothing.’ Or, ‘Teacher, I wish to take refuge in the Noble Silence.’ That was good. Then people would know that I did not want to draw attention to myself. Perhaps I would speak in Italian, so they weren’t obliged to marvel at my being English. Except there was my accent, of course. There is always something that gives you away. Then they would be obliged to marvel how well I spoke Italian. Despite the slight accent. And of course I would immediately translate what I had said into English so that Coleman wouldn’t have to hear my carefully chosen words from this incompetent one-legged wonder who disturbed us all from time to time by dragging himself in and out of the room on his crutches. Presumably to go to the bathroom.