a chat with a monk

My first day here, Heidi decided to take us to one of the temples for a ritual called “monk chat.”

From what I can tell, it’s sort a cross between an English lesson for the monks, and a sort of Buddhist version of the Scientology stress tests administered in the New York City subways.

Buddhism not involving any extraterrestrial deities bringing enlightenment from planets made up by a failed sci-fi writer (I think anyway), and also being sort of in need of advice, if not, perhaps, a confessional, I decided to chat with a monk.

My monk’s name was Kavi. He was 23 and from Burma. He had been training to be a monk since he was 12, I think. He said he left home then, and returns home to his family so infrequently that they often didn’t recognize him. He wore a pair of thin-rimmed glasses, which I think he exhaustedly took off at some point during our two-hour conversation.

I don’t really know if you’re supposed to ask monks for relationship advice. I sort of think you aren’t. But, after running the gamut of initial knee-jerk journalistic questions, I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

So, I told him about my life, and about the decisions that I have made recently – to leave my life in New York and to start a new one in Guam. And I think, in typical misguided fashion, I was seeking some kind of sign from him about the choices I am facing, and guidance toward the path I should choose.

I realized very quickly, however, that telling a monk, who has eschewed all worldly and emotional entanglements on a path toward enlightenment, about the ways in which I have done the exact opposite, and lived to find happiness through people and things and new places, was not going to get me the answer, or any answer, that I wanted.

Instead, he told me the basic principles of Buddhism, about how life is suffering, and that love is suffering. And that the more people you love, the more suffering you will undoubtedly have.

And he told me that everything changes. And that I cannot live in the past. And that he tries to live in the here and now, with no attachment to things and people he has loved in other days.

I knew all this vaguely, having a very cursory understanding of Buddhism, from like, having read Siddhartha in high school.

And to some degree that is very attractive, to give up past things and live in the moment.

I don’t really think Buddhism is about living in the moment, however. I think it is about transcending the moment and getting to a place where you no longer feel or want or need or love or cry.

And my current relationship drama notwithstanding, I like all those things. I am greatly attached to feeling and wanting and crying and missing things and people.

And I have made a lot of mistakes, undoubtedly, because I have sought out those things with impatience and a flurried impulse toward self-gratification at the cost of many things. And in those moments, the days I have lived with other people, marveling at the world and feeling loved, I have found a kind of peace that I never really thought possible.

So maybe I will be paying for it karmacally, in this life or the next. But I am not sure that in this life, at least, there is any enlightenment worth having that does not come with pain and love and the impulse to connect with other minds and bodies.

The monk also told me that no meetings are accidental. And that people meet again and again, in different lives.

And to some degree, I feel like lives must be like days. And if that is in any way true, then the people we love will always come back to us.

So, while I am waiting to once again be reunited with my love forlorn dog, now buried underneath a sapling tree in my parents’ backyard in Nebraska, I will also trust that no love is lost, just changed.

And maybe on another day, things will work out differently.