residing at ingynbin^[1]

[8]  Back after an overnight break together at Shwebo, the pagoda spire shines clearly from a kilometre away, a citadel. A burgeoning of the heart:

                         blue wispy moon
                         white ibises
                         alight & fall silent

[9]  Lemsip brings relief before sitting, coffee after! Despite a head cold and running nose, there is surprising vitality in the body, even if at times it wobbles uncertainly, drearily:

                         start again, the body
                         next the body 
                         concerns neither

Through breakfast, the moon slides among the uppermost branches of the trees, illuminating ibises, adjusting themselves before launching into the air. Their concerns, like mine, seem largely their own, albeit the spectacle is a marvel to behold.

                         morning
                         radiant ibises 
                         unlacing tamarinds

Elegant in departure, in contrast to the stumpy egrets, who hunch smaller bodies before propelling steadfastly upward and outward – quite different birds who engage with the sky. We meditate like this, the dancer and the engineer, turn by turn.

[10]  I walk with Kwau Soe to the patipatti compound, where shortly we are joined by An Yuan Shwe, swathed in three sweaters, complaining of the cold. He wants to memorialise the room in which U Ba Khin had resided when he was ordained under Webu – to establish a library, restore the wooden roof, and dedicate the entire building to Vipassana meditation practice. The dilapidated building at the rear, where a visiting Minister of Railways used to stay during regular short visits to serve Webu, is another structure An Shwe has an eye on.

We enter a nearby two-storey building and climb the stairs to where female students will stay during the upcoming commemoration meditation course. In the bare room, pieces of paper, sequentially numbered, are stuck on the floor where beds will be placed. Other signs, on which we read ‘Ariyo tuõi bhave’ (Nobility in silence), are pinned to timber posts. Mind you, that admonition means little to a lone pigeon that is trapped inside and wants to escape the room. Panicked, it scuttles against the closed wooden shutter, futilely seeking the same open spaces that the ibises and egrets escaped into earlier this morning. We open the shutter and it escapes.

[11]  From the crumbling pool ledge, Kwau Soe plucks tiny thumb-sized tortoise, head withdrawn, legs flailing – a reminder of the panicked pigeon upstairs. When returned to the murky water, jutting its head and scrambling its legs, it promptly disappears beneath the water’s surface. Its sky. Further along, we spy an old-style gnat altar atop a pedestal (‘2005’ the inscription), with a couple of trays decked in ageing foliage placed before it. Kwau Soe explains how the monks, in arahant Webu’s day, sneaked outside at night and surreptitiously approached the nearby raised platform raised, where they’d stand dumbstruck for hours watching the monk’s elevated physical form. His body hovered for hours, utterly composed. Cleary a feat beyond the small tortoise’s—or distraught pigeon’s—or my—capability!

Also… clearly beyond that of Webu’s dilapidated vehicle, brought here to the west side of the monastery for restoration. The old Valiant Plymouth had been used to transport Sayadaw over the local roads, mostly dirt with occasional clumps of stone, impossible to negotiate in the rains. A devotee has had it towed back from neighbouring Kin-Oo. But it’s in poor shape: faded blue paint, rusted hubcaps, gashed tyres, no

[12]  On approaching the residence, I am informed of recent break-ins, resulting in smashed and emptied donation boxes. However, to our surprise, once inside we are greeted by a local woman who is arranging fresh smelling bouquets into vases scattered around the place:

                         entering the hallowed abode
                         wavy perfume—
                         an elderly devotee arranges flowers

Indeed, the story goes that on one particular night, on hearing movements within his rooms, Webu rises and promptly removes the clock from the wall. Smiling, he offers it to the young intruder, who declines the offer and quietly leaves. Adorning the walls are numerous photographs of the much-loved Sayadaw, invariably attended to by a phalanx of monks and lay folk. He is depicted stepping over the loosened, spread hair of several women, who prostrate themselves before him as he walks, again unshakeably serene. Another group of photographs tracks him through his final hours of life, sitting before an extravagant meal prepared by his devotees. After taking a final difficult walk to the toilet, on his return he collapses onto the floor. Supported—borne—to the wooden dais situated in the corner of the room, where he usually sleeps, he loses consciousness, dying in the arms of the present sayadaw and another, equally composed, elderly monk.

[13]  An 83-year-old retired Indian nuclear physicist has arrived to be ordained. He sits down on a wooden seat alongside the trough regularly used by the young monks to wash their robes and their own bodies. A remaining halo of thin grey hair is removed from his head with deft, short strokes of the razor. The lathered hair flicks in clumps down onto the wet concrete area. Next he is led to the dining room, where the novice ceremony (that precedes full ordination in the Sima hall) takes place. Pali is recited. Fresh robes are passed to the preceptor by two assistants and immediately returned, to be donned by the old man – part manikin part fidgeter – with the help of the young novice pair, showing themselves adept at handling harvests of cloth.

[14]  In the Sima hall, delivering his ordination talk, an animated Sayadaw delights in comparing his advanced age, that of the new novice, and that of the parinibbana Buddha, all men in their 80s. Pointing to his upper lip, he reiterates Webu’s exhortation to maintain attention here throughout the day… and night!

                         old new bhante-ji
                         head of coconut shell
                         awash in cloth—prostrates

An eager village musician prematurely sounds up his instrument—and is quickly shushed. After the brief commotion, we foreign guests are requested to leave the hall. Another 30 minutes pass, before we hear the authentic sounds of clashing cymbals and drum, the latter awkwardly strapped to the musician’s shoulders, with remnants of red chord somehow entangled in his robes. Art Blakey blushes!

[15]  In the crumbling old teak building, Sayadaw sidles from his chair onto the floor to receive delivery of the relics, displayed under a glass dome. Set on top of the dome is a carved miniature pagoda, made of the same black wood used in the pedestal, which is studded with flecks of ivory. Inside the glass, a carved ivory lotus flower supports a small container within which are displayed about a dozen mustard seed sized bone fragments, set out on a purple cloth. Each petal of the lotus is individually shaped, the one nearest the relics extending upward in lavish style. In turn, each visitor has a white cloth placed at the top of their head, while another participant suspends the relic-holder above the cloth and head for a couple of minutes, during which time metta is given. Following, Sayadaw invites requests. ‘Snow’ unscrews a couple of narrow metallic tubes into which cotton wool is squeezed along with a single sliver of bone fragment, which she explains will accompany her on her return to Yangon. Oops, fingers clumsy—

                         Sayadaw scrambles
                         miniscule relics—
                         cats, medicines, newspapers, scatter

We assist dauntless Sayadaw as he searches on all fours, fluster-free – infusing an element of comedy into the drama – until, to the relief of all, the relics are recovered. What would be the alternative?

[16]  Karen and I, walking out on another beautiful still evening, are greeted by a number bright-faced young women as they end their day at the village factory. Giggling, they wave glinting tiffins. Children at their gates call out, eagerly gesticulate. Sunlight shines through

the dust that is stirred up by labouring oxcarts as they return from the fields and zippy, impatient motorcyclists. Perhaps counter-intuitively, everything here feels unabashedly settled and whole – perhaps this what community means?

                         rust, fire
                         cart-spun dust; children 
                         awhirl, faces brightly lit

[17]  Rain begins to spatter as we stroll to breakfast. Yesterday’s airborne dust is today’s mush. Meanwhile, Indian bhante-ji departs; seasonal routines reestablish:

                      Kauw Soe gathers berries
                      for kids to thread onto necklaces—
                      platform devas gaze away

                      departing bhante-ji
                      —puppies abandoned—
                      notches in the bamboo—

                      a birth-marked face— 
                      one after one—uppermost branches, snared—
                      green, small fruits—

Returning to the hut, I sit alone. I close the shutters due to the chill. Outside, I hear a chanting voice that I recognise belongs to one of the pink-robed nuns as she wipes the huge Mahamuni statue in a nearby temple. I picture the figure’s large black pupils dancing menacingly in the whites of its eyes. Return, observe the breath, again return, again. Soon after, there’s another disturbance caused by a flurried brushing of the earth outside the hut and a pair of chattering voices. The diligent groundsmen are understandably oblivious to the heartfelt endeavour of one in the silent hut, I sigh:

                         a hundred strokes,
                         a thousand, sweeping
                         namarupa

Each day I am drawn back. From time to time the entire body is lit up like the dust swirling along the village lanes. One moment a myriad things the next a single one, undifferentiated. Even the words roll loosely –

                         hundred
                         sweeping strokes
                         namarupa

Not to have to depend on self-urgency is relieving. The best serves, I reflect, here in the hut, insensible to matters distant or unmattering.

[18]  U Mandala arrives the following morning to take breakfast. Before touching his food, he lifts his head: ‘Burmese people—is very poor. It hurts in my heart’.

[19]  And walking past the school that afternoon, Karen and I notice the corpse of a dog that has been dragged into the ditch beside the main path:

                         bluebottles?
                         eyes & mouth, hind legs 
                         robe-bound

Gazing up, in the sky we see a formation of flying ibises. Trailing birds move from one vector to the other, the group realigning as it flies. The children, pausing at top-spinning in the yard, gape upward, mouths reciting.

[20]  The wide spread of green weed covering the lake recedes, due to the cooler weather. Lilies appear. A black drongo lands on the same branch of the bodhi tree that it had landed on yesterday, skimming the water surface to get there. Swallows zag & swoop in the process of feeding—

                         smooth stone dropped
                         in water
                         —clup

A couple of workmen chisel clumps of bark from the piquant thanakha, felled by our meditator friend Jamie in order to clear a view from the new pagoda across the miniature lake. Evening exposes a patchwork of cut logs with luminescent yellow woodgrain with a sweet scent.[21] 

Another evening stroll, this time a few kilometres as far as crossroads bridge, where three women are collecting donations for a monastic project (one of several in the vicinity). They rattle tin trays filled with stones at the motorcycles and vehicles as they speed through, dispersing clouds of dust. In the roadside shack, with an open book of suttas on the rough sawn table where he sits, an elder village Burman, eyes set wide on a face that converges to a narrow triangular point at his chin, intones into a dangling microphone. The voice ricochets through nearby speakers, riven with static. Despite a lack of teeth, his recital lifts and subsides unfalteringly. From time to time, a male companion leans across and strikes a small bronze gong, hung from an overhead rafter. Our modest dana to the women brings in return from them a few hardboiled sweets: in this community, to give is a safeguard and enriches one’s future – in this case, literally as well as spiritually!

[22]  Andrew departs and Humbert arrives. Nervously settling in, he tells us he is here to take robes. The next day, his shorn hair drops, as did bhante-ji’s, onto the concrete beside the washing trough:

                         lake weed
                         recedes, scalp hair—Agganana—
                         lathered clumps, tumble

[23]  Shortly after, the annual novice ceremony sees the entire village dress up, men in white jackets and fresh lungyis, young women in especially colourful makeup, eyelashes looping attractively, in gold or pink outfits. In the fairground, a makeshift palace façade adorns a newly-erected stage on which the band performs. Among the children, some boys brandish plastic toys or guns, other children sip enthusiastically from plastic cups through straws, or lick ice-creams. A girl beside me shows off a wristwatch: the digits 9:27 shine out.

Under one of the monastery’s profuse red flowering trees, older novices gather to witness the long procession slowly perambulating on the far side of the harvest field. One cheeky lad fills his hand with the pulp of a fallen flower and throws it at his fellows. Shoving, back-slapping, uproarious laughter.

[24] Om Pyee delivers a hammer and saw. I nail mosquito nets in place at the bathroom windows. At the edge of the lake, three crouching children clutch small plastic containers and beside them they have placed a broken bowl of crockery. From the bowl they transfer tiny black objects (less than ½ cm in diameter) into one of the containers. Coming closer, I see the small black objects are snails, asymmetrically writhing. One child lifts a hand to high-five with me. They are immediately reabsorbed and I continue on my way.

I settle into my sit, aware that the busy birds outside must pursue their own daily imperatives, rightly oblivious to whatever preoccupations I might have and other goings-on.

At dusk the ibises cluck and groan, weighing on the branches until gradually everything falls silent. Come morning, at half-light, they rouse themselves and peel off, singly or in groups, arching over their shoulders as they lurch away. Upper branches shuddering slightly. Departing birds subside into the strength of their own wings, quickly stabilise, and continue westward. A bitten arrives lakeside, where it remains poised motionless for what seems interminably, until some small unsuspecting creature is snapped up, and the disciplined predator moves on.

Outside, the same two workmen, one wearing a brimmed hat, continue to chip away at the thanakha bark. Chips fall (mostly) on the prepared sacking and, on completion, the entire debris, including straggly upper branches, is removed from the water. Meanwhile, the lake responds with increasing water surface under diminishing weed cover:

                         half lake, inside my body
                         sparkling—
                         chipping thanakha

Sitting is this, without insisting to pull everything together, a continual gathering, holding, relinquishing. Perception is an allure – until that too fades.

note

[1] This is the third and final part of a sequence of reflections upon a one month residence in 2016 at Ingynbin Monastery, written while residing in the pariyatti side of the property and meditating across the road at the patipatti side. The striking photographs are Karen’s.