MonasteryNights
Ask not for whom the gong tolls... ~ The Bhavana gong
“Monastery Nights” is an Occasional Memoir of Visits to the
Bhavana Society Buddhist Monastery in West Virginia
and Encounters with Abbot Bhante Gunaratana
(excerpts each Thursday on WestVirginiaVille.com)
Chapter 1: The Karma of Moths
Chapter 2: The Good Friend
By Douglas Imbrogno
This memoir will attempt no authoritative explication of jhana meditation, a flavor of Buddhist meditation less known in the West than the more commonly taught insight or vipassana meditation. For more on jhanic meditation, I direct you to several writings by Bhante Gunaratana (chief among them, “The Path of Serenity and Insight”).
I have a more circumscribed, minor aim: to describe a bit of the scenery of an Appalachian Buddhist retreat, some of its feel and the feelings that come with it. I hope also to share the significance of a place that has become significant to me, as it has to so many people since Bhavana opened in the late 1980s, tucked back in the hills near the West Virginia-Virginia border.
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Bhavana is a Therevadan Buddhist monastery. For those unfamiliar with the varieties of Buddhism, or who may confuse its tenets with Hinduism, there is no guru in this tradition. Bhavana monks more fill the role of the kalyanamitta, the “good friend” or spiritual friend, one who gives guidance rooted in the monk’s own practice and experience. Bhante G, as he is known across the globe, has for decades been just such an essential spiritual friend to me and countless others.
I first arrived at Bhavana in 1989 to write a newspaper profile about its opening. “Walking the Forest Path,” was the headline, a story that earned me one of the few national journalism awards I’ve won. Bhavana, though, turned out to be the spiritual conversation and practice center I’d long been looking for ever since I retired as a Roman Catholic in my late teens. So, I kept coming back.
Thanks to the tutelage of Bhante G, and other monks and nuns, I’ve had long, if often erratically pursued, experience with vipassana or mindfulness meditation. I was less familiar with the highly focused concentration practice of the jhanas. The standard passage describing the attainment of the First Jhana notes that it is entered upon by one who is “secluded from sense pleasures, secluded from unwholesome states of mind,” as Bhante G quotes in his 1988 pamphlet “The Jhanas in Therevada Buddhist Meditation” (Wheel Publication No. 351-353, Buddhist Publication Society, Sri Lanka).
A classic Buddhist work, the Visuddhimagga, explains that there are several kinds of seclusion essential to the attainment of jhanas. I was taking the first step by getting myself to this lamp-lit hut at the base of Great North Mountain in the West Virginia outback: bodily seclusion or kayaviveka. As Bhante G describes it in his pamphlet, this necessary seclusion means “physical withdrawal from active social engagement into a condition of solitude for the purpose of devoting time and energy to spiritual development.”
Yep, that would about sum it up. I’d been out of sorts for months. Not clinically bi-polar — more roller coaster-polar. I was in a rut of racing through the days and weeks, exhilarating highs confoundingly followed by abject lows. If my moods had had their own meteorologist, the weather report would have been regular squalls of anger and whats-the-point-anyway despair followed by thunderstorms of self-pity and flash floods of fecklessness.
You might call that modern life. Or maybe the human condition. But when it goes on too long and frequently, I call it ‘bleck.’
As in: Bleck.
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I had changes I knew I needed to make. Making them — and making them stick — was the matter at hand. I was freighting this retreat with no life-changing hopes, a sure recipe for disappointment. In fact, I’d booked it nearly a year prior, hoping to have as much up close teaching time with Bhante G as I could before he moved on to his next incarnation.
Plus, I wanted to learn jhana meditation. I hoped to better understand how Bhante G was trying to reassert its significance and the importance of balancing concentration and insight — two sides of the same coin of enlightenment and Buddhadharma.
It just so happened that by the time the retreat came around, I was seriously weary of my usual pace of life. Wearied, too, by all those boomerang emotions. I suspected a chief culprit. So, a week before the retreat, I went out one dark night and stood at the edge of my property. Over the hill and into the weeds and woods, I heaved, one after another, all my alternative consciousness accouterments.
It was a really nice pipe, too. But when it came to an arm wrestle between weed and meditation, the weed always triumphed. So, into the weeds with you! I gazed as a pack of Joker rolling papers flung over the hill spilled open. The papers drifted down like fat snowflakes in the night. I turned and walked back in the house.
An overly wired life had also led to bamboozlement. I had only myself to blame for signing up for the Full Monty of the always connected, always posting, always updating and always exhausted digital life. So, I idled my Facebook account for an indeterminate period before leaving on retreat. I told friends I was torquing down the digital gain on a life whose volume dial seemed turned up to 11, “Spinal Tap” style.
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I also wanted to focus on writing. On writing something longer and more ambitious than a Facebook status update. I was tired of being pithy. (And — a roller-coaster-polar symptom — tired of being pissy, too.)
I had, however, taken my iPhone 4 with me on this retreat to a kuti in the hills. I eyed the device warily as it lay on the low table beside my simple bed. I’d brought it for its alarm. While I can usually instruct my body when to arise, more than once in past years I’d arrived at Bhavana spent from my project-driven, gung-ho life and had promptly slept through morning meditation. (I would arrive sheepishly for the 7 a.m. breakfast, wondering who was idly noting the wake-up wimp just now showing his groggy face.)
The gong on the Bhavana porch utters it basso profundo call to meditation across the forest at 5 a.m.: ‘Goooong-gooooong-goooong …’ To those who arrive worn by the exhaustion of modern life, and who have not yet recalibrated their body clock to monastery time, it might as well be sounding out: ‘Goooone-goooone-gooooone ….’
Not this time. Steve Jobs may have passed on. But his blessed offspring, the iPhone, lives on. It was going to keep this retreatant from missing out on kayaviveka quality time.
“Monastery Nights” by Douglas Imbrogno
Chapter 1: The Karma of Moths
Chapter 2: The Good Friend
October 26, 2011
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