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I AM TRYING TO REMAIN MINDFUL because otherwise I will fall out of the bed of a pickup truck. It's 8 a.m. We have finished our 5:30 a.m. meditation and afterwards eaten breakfast in silence with the monks arrayed at the head of the dining room. Now, each of us has an hour of work detail. I have signed up for outdoor work, thinking how much I need to get out of my head and into my body. I crouch in the back of a battered Ford truck. It's piloted by an American monk named Bhante Dammaratana or "Bhante D." The truck bed is full of logs cut from an oak tree that another monk had chainsawed to the ground and chopped up some days before. In a move toward self-sufficiency, one of the monastery's chief heat sources is a huge outdoor wood stove whose appetite for wood is enormous. Selective cutting and hauling of trees on the grounds is a constant task for Bhavana monks and their helpers. As we drive our load through the woods toward the stove, we pass another monk at the helm of a small Kubota tractor that he is using to haul heavier hunks of wood. The tractor is orange, nearly the same color as the monks' piecework cloth robes, which are the hue of sweet potato pie. The air is cool, the sun golden, the forest deep. How glad I am to be out of the newspaper office where I work and have toiled all week on post-attack follow-up stories! With gloved hands, I hoist the logs, which smell of earth and rain. I toss them out of the truck bed into a pile where they will later be split and stacked, split and stacked. "I'd like a word with you later," Bhante D says as we finish up. We are supposed to maintain what is called Noble Silence on this retreat. It's to deepen our mindfulness and avoid "useless speech," one of my favorite proscriptions from Buddhist teachings -- and a routine misdemeanor of mine. Ignobly, I break the silence to ask him what's up. He wants to talk about poetry, of all things, and an interview with a poet he had heard on public radio. "Do you know this poet, Billy Crystal?" We chew that one over -- he's a comedian isn't he? It turns out who he actually means is Billy Collins, the poet laureate of the United States. Public radio must have sought out Collins' poetic perspective on the terror attacks. I like this a lot -- a Buddhist monk touched by a poet who was talking poetry on National Public Radio. The cosmos doesn't get more cosmic than that. I tell Bhante D about an article that I and an English teacher buddy had written for my newspaper, to be published that Sunday. It quoted the works of great poets and writers -- Auden, Rimbaud, Virginia Woolf, Gary Snyder, T.S. Eliot -- seeking in their classic writing some guidance and solace in the face of the classic awfulness of September 11. "I like Gary Snyder," Bhante D says of the Zen Buddhist poet. I promise I'll mail him the article, which includes Snyder's poem "The Great Mother" from his Pulitzer Prize-winning collection "Turtle Island." The poem, in my view, seems to speak to the terrible karmic accounting that I feel -- or maybe in my uncompassionate, mindless anger of the moment that I hope -- the blood-soaked hijackers and their murderous mentors will face in their future incarnations. Here is Snyder's poem, in its entirety: Not all those who pass In front of the Great Mother's chair Get past with only a stare. Some she looks at their hands To see what sort of savages they were. 'So many lives we have had!' IN THE MEDITATION HALL, Bhante G is talking about bombing Afghanistan. He thinks it's a good idea. He has picked up on this idea after conferring with friends, borrowing a line which has been hopping across the Internet via e-mail upon e-mail upon e-mail. "We should bomb Afghanistan," Bhante G announces to us. "We should bomb them with medicine! Bomb them with food! Bomb them with shelter!" Our ears first prick up, then settle back at the mention of bombs out the mouth of a Buddhist monk. Later, he turns his attention to the more familiar Buddhist territory of karma, utilizing the word's less familiar Pali pronunciation of "kamma." However you pronounce it, the whole ballgame of existence -- whether a master terrorist or an average joe or jane -- it all comes right down in the end to the kamma you create. Kamma -- the wholesome and unwholesome volitions and actions for which we are intimately responsible -- shapes our destiny. It powers our rebirths. It lashes us tight to the ever-spinning wheel of samsara. "Our past lives are inconceivable. So many past lives we have had!" Bhante G says. The life you are now living is the merest fraction of our long wandering through samsara, he says. "In those lives, we have committed so many different kind of kammas." In the Buddhist view, we have lived out an unfathomable number of incarnations in various realms of samsara -- not only the human realm, but in the animal realm, the celestial realm, the "hungry ghost" realm and the hell realm. This is another thing I like from Buddhist teachings. Yes, you do have heaven in Buddhism -- well, various heavenly realms, actually. And you will really enjoy this luxury hotel stay for a long, long while -- kick back your heels! But exactly because you are so dreamy and comfortable, you won't attend to continued spiritual development. Through inattention, you will eventually exhaust the good karma that got you to these nice places. You will cycle back down through the wheel of samsara's other, less cozy places. But there are also hell realms in Buddhism, not to mention the "hungry ghost" realm, in which greedy, grasping unwholesome karma from your past brings you to ghosthood -- you are hungry as hell, for instance, and have only a pinhole for a mouth. Or you are a wandering spirit seeking the comfort you never had time to offer anyone else. Yet unlike the eternal hell of Christianity, you will also eventually exhaust the worst of the bad karma that brought you to such an unfortunate incarnation. You will cycle back around the wheel. PAGE 3: The Enchilada of Enightenment
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