By Douglas Imbrogno
EDITOR | Hundred Mountain

OCT. 2001 | ON THICK MAROON CUSHIONS, 40 of us sit in the meditation hall of the Bhavana Society, a Thervadan Buddhist forest monastery deep in the green hills of West Virginia.

It's a Thursday night, a little cool, and perhaps that's why the bullfrogs aren't croaking amid the lillypads in the temple pond. Their raspy burps are a usual soundtrack to evening meditation at Bhavana.

An airplane buzzes across the sky as we sit in hour-long silent meditation. Though miles from nowhere, the monastic retreat center lies in the flight path to the airports of Washington, D.C., about two hours due west. Usually, there are more planes, one right after the other. But these are not usual times. While the planes come only intermittently this night, the engine sounds pose a challenge to concentration far above and beyond mere noise.

We have come to a four-day meditation retreat devoted to the Buddha's teachings on "Dependent Origination." It's a teaching that is key to understanding how through delusion and ignorance, hatred and greed, we create and keep fueling the spinning wheel of suffering and rebirth known as "samsara" in Buddhist teachings -- a.k.a. reality as we know it.

Yet the long-scheduled retreat begins just nine days after the world-shaking events of September 11. We perch on our cushions, minds churning with nightmare images from the horrifying attacks in New York City, Washington, D.C., and Somerset County, Pennsylvania

We are guided to direct metta, a loving-kindness meditation, to the tens of thousands of shattered family members, the haunted survivors, the ground zero eyewitnesses up and down the land.

Talk about suffering. Talk about hatred and delusion.

And we do. We just can't help having Osama bin Laden and his heartless human missilemen sitting alongside us on the room's cushions.

As it turns out, you couldn't have picked a better place to be at such a terrible time. Or a better subject.

THE NEXT DAY. We have all unpacked our belongings in dorm rooms or inside the wooden huts known as "kutis," (pronounced "cooties") sprinkled by the dozens across the monastery's wooded 100 acres.

While we have settled in for the retreat, our minds are far from settled, as was soon to be demonstrated. We sit for another hour starting at 7 p.m. Friday, facing the head monk and Bhavana founder, Bhante Henepola Gunaratana (known to all as "Bhante G"). The Sri Lankan-born monk sits cross-legged on a cushion in front of an altar which is topped by a 12-foot-high golden Buddha in meditation posture. Vases hold sprays of fresh hibiscus flowers from the temple gardens.

Bhante G, author of the popular Buddhist meditation primer "Mindfulness in Plain English," taps a sonorous chime three times, signaling the end of meditation. The room lights are turned back up and he speaks on Buddhist teachings for a bit. He is then handed a small orange cardboard box full of slips of paper on which the retreatants have written out their first questions of the retreat.

Right out of the box, so to speak, jumps Osama bin Laden. "There are two questions related to, uh... terrorism," says Bhante G, peering through his glasses at the paper slips.

One is: "Is there any way or hope that the terrorists will soften their hearts and have less hate?" The second is: "I have a lot of fear right now -- like from the sound of airplanes overhead. Could you talk about working with this?"

Glancing at the slips in his hands, he finds a third similar one: "Could you talk more about ignorance and volitional formations in relation to the terrorists. What should our country's response be to this terrible deed?"

"Volitional formations" is a key concept for the retreat and in Buddhist teachings. The phrase signifies those decisive moments in our head when we cast our vote in choosing wholesome or unwholesome courses of actions, which then come alive through our body, speech and mind. And so we instantly create our karma, good, not so good and very, very bad, depending on these volitional formations -- and how aware we are when we form them.

Bhante G cuts to the chase, what with the mastermind and his henchmen who formed the volitions behind the terror of September 11 still on the loose.

"First, I'd like to answer this question. What we should do is send some kind of force and capture these people. And put them in jail for life -- never release them. That is a very compassionate act, compassionate toward all other beings and for themselves. That is not an unkind thing to do."

He talks about an article that someone e-mailed him that week. (Bhante G is a modern monk, who spends lots of time in front of a Macintosh G4 computer and travels with a Titanium Powerbook.) The now widely known article ran in Salon two days after the attacks, a cautionary piece by an "Afghan-American" named Tamim Ansary. In it, Ansary counsels that America can't "bomb Afghanistan back to the Stone Age," as some enraged Americans may wish. Already been done by the Soviets, he says. Make the Afghans suffer? They're already suffering, he says. Level their houses? Done. Destroy their infrastructure? Too late.

Says Ansary in the article: "When people speak of 'having the belly to do what needs to be done' they're thinking in terms of having the belly to kill as many as needed. Having the belly to overcome any moral qualms about killing innocent people."

Bhante G picks up the theme."By killing, there's no end to that," the monk says to us. "There are millions of Muslims in the world. By retaliating, by killing, it's not going to help at all."

Imprison the terrorists who can be caught. Educate those among them and their followers -- "even while in prison," he says --who are still able to be educated in human values, not fanatic ones.

"And give some humanitarian aid and support to those poor people who can become more powerful there and perhaps through the democractic process might overthrow this [Taliban] government. The poor people are just victims of these terrorists."

He pauses, sips from a cup of fresh tea that an orange-robed monk delivers to him. "This is unfortunately the disadvantage of having faith placed in a wrong way. Faith in God? They have abused it, and become fanatics."

He sighs, not a sound heard often from the usually forthright, quick-on-the-draw monk. "I don't know," he says, with a light chuckle. "This is my very simple, naive suggestion to this situation."

It is perhaps asking too much of a Buddhist monk to ask him to offer solutions to what are at bottom political, diplomatic, even sociological scenarios. His real job, it might be said, is to offer guidance and pointers on more deeply fundamental matters: the problems of the mind that create such suffering in the world. And how we deal with suffering once it smacks us down and down again.

As for airplane engine anxiety, you should not let paranoid feelings overtake you, Bhante G tells us. "Life is uncertain anyway. You remain mindful all the time, you meditate. You try to keep your consciousness clear. Remain mindful all the time."

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