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TIGERS AND PUSSYCATS

I STARTED LEARNING Buddhism in 1987, when I was fourteen years old. I went on my first seven-day Chan retreat at seventeen. I did other retreats of varying lengths when I was in my teens and early twenties. My parents were simple people, expatriate Chinese living in Singapore. I was training to be a genetic engineer, but Buddhism called to me.

My head was shaved by Master Song Nian at Singapore’s Mahabodhi Monastery on Easter day in 1997. I did sutra studies at Taiwan’s Buddhist Institute. After that, I wanted to experience different forms of Chan practice and I wanted to test myself. So in 1999 and 2000 I went on three-month intensive summer and winter retreats at Korean Son monasteries in Seoul and Gwangju. Son, the Korean form of Chan or Zen, had a reputation for being very rigorous. That was what I wanted, and I was not disappointed.

The daily schedule was brutal. We woke at 3:00 AM and finished at 11:00 PM. We had only fifteen minutes each for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Toilet breaks were five minutes, but the toilet was far from the meditation hall. We had no time, so we just went outside to shoot. For ninety days we did not take a shower. We had a basin of water that was filled from a bamboo pipe that ran down from the mountain and used a towel to scrub ourselves clean.

No break time, no time to relax, no nap after lunch. Sleeping after 11:00. Waking at 3:00. Most of us did not even have a room. We sat in the meditation hall on a folded-up cushions, which were also our beds. Each sitting was at least an hour, and we had to sit in full lotus. No movement was tolerated. If the monitors, who were senior monks, saw us move an inch, they’d hit us with the incense stick. In the morning, after waking, we had to do 108 prostrations in only ten minutes. Up and down, up and down. It looked like we were doing jumping jacks.

The Korean terminology for this kind of intensive retreat is Kyol Che, which means “very tight dharma.” You have to be very fast, very precise, always in the moment. There is no time to think, wander off, and daydream. If you fall behind, you get hit. There is nothing symbolic about these blows. Thwack! You dare not whimper or cringe. They punch and kick you, and you have to bow and gently say, “thank you.” In Korean.

And then there is pain, so much pain. Tears roll down from your eyes the moment you move your legs as you come out of the full lotus. There is so much pain that you don’t know where the pain is coming from. You try to massage your muscles, but it’s not the muscles. The pain goes into the bone. At the end of the day you are so tired you cannot move or stand up. You crawl to bed.

And then the food. Kimchi all the time, kimchi and white rice. The kimchi smelled like rotten eggs. It was repulsive, almost unbearable. It made me gag, and I had to force down every bite. It was the only food, so you either ate it or starved! A piece of tofu was an extravagance. We ate tofu three or four times in ninety days. The rest of the time it was kimchi with black beans and a few sprouts.

For seven days and nights in the middle of the retreat we were subjected to what is called in Chinese yong men jin jing, which translates as “great courageous diligence.” This was an even more intensive practice than your run-of-the-mill Kyol Che. For seven days and nights we were not allowed to lie down. Twenty-four hours of continuous sitting practice for seven straight days. We learned how to sleep while sitting, but when you were caught dozing, you were hit. You learned to sleep without moving.

Before going into the Son retreat they warned us that it was called the demon training camp. We called it the cave of the tiger.

Once you enter the cave of the tiger you can only come out in two ways. One, you die. If it’s summer, they will carry your corpse out of the Son Bang, the Chan Hall. But if you die in the winter, they put you under the table. It is so cold in the unheated hall that your body will not rot. Then they take you out for burial after the retreat is over.

The second way to leave Son Bang is to be verified that you are enlightened. Then you can walk away before the retreat ends.

Those are the two acceptable ways to leave the retreat. But sometimes, in the ninety days, the person next to you would disappear. They had escaped. In the middle of night, they had climbed over the monastery’s wall and run away. When that happened their name was published and the whole of Korea knew they had run. For the next three years, that person was blacklisted—banned from the Chan Hall and Chan monasteries in all of Korea.

 

I WENT ON the retreat with one of my friends, a Chinese monk from Malaysia. We had received the precepts together.

“Are you sure you want to go to the retreat?” I asked him before we traveled to Korea.

“Yes, I’m sure,” he replied.

“Have you settled everything?”

“Yes.”

“For ninety days you have to practice. It’s very serious. These are very extreme practices.”

“No problem.”

So we went on the retreat together.

On the third day, he pulled my shirt.

“What?” I asked.

“I want to go home.”

“Why?”

“I forgot some things I have to do in Malaysia.”

“Didn’t I tell you to plan and settle everything beforehand? Why didn’t you plan properly?”

“I forgot. I have to go home.”

“Try to endure,” I said.

The next day he said he had heart pain and his nose was beginning to bleed. We went to see the head monk, an older man, after everyone went to bed. His quarters were very simple, very basic. We exchanged formalities, bows, and prostrations to each other.

“What do you want?” he asked with stern and staring eyes.

“I have to leave because I forgot—” my friend began.

The head monk immediately interrupted. “I understand,” he replied. “All the best.” He dismissed us, and my friend was released.

After my friend left the Koreans laughed at us Chinese. They said that nowadays Chinese monks cannot practice, meditate, or endure hardship. They looked down on us Chinese and said Chinese Buddhism was finished. “In China, people don’t practice,” they said. “They’re all like pussycats. The pussycat has come into the tiger cave and become frightened and run away.”

I was unhappy. I felt I had to show the Koreans that this Chinese can take hardship. But throughout the retreat I thought of giving up and going home from the moment I woke up until I went to sleep.

How did I sustain myself? I kept coming back to the present moment, kept coming back to the present moment, kept coming back to the present moment. I learned to relax. There were six Chinese monks who went into the cave of the tiger. At the end of the retreat, I was the only one left. I completed the retreat and went for a second and a third. Altogether, 270 days.

 

WE CHINESE WERE not the only ones who bolted. A retreat usually started with fifty to sixty Korean monks and by the end there were maybe thirty left. In Korea, they have a lot of respect for monks from the Son Bang. They are called yi deng he shang, top class, grade-one monk. When the big monasteries select an abbot, they choose one from the Son Bang.

At this point in my life I was young and my health was better than it is today. I didn’t want to lose face, so I stuck it out. The retreats took their toll, however. In winter, Korea has a Siberian climate. It was freezing in the unheated Chan Hall. I was quite young, a junior monk, so I couldn’t afford winter clothing. I wore ten T-shirts, each on top of the other. No matter how many T-shirts I wore it wasn’t enough. There were no blankets for sleeping. I curled up, a shivering mess, on my thin cushion. After the retreat, my health was affected, and I coughed for five years.

This type of retreat may not have been healthy for the body, but it tested the will to practice. The retreats trained my perseverance, or as we say, dao xin—my “mind for the path.”

I returned to Korea nine years later to find that this type of retreat is not so common anymore. It is being lost. In any case, now that I’m in my late thirties, I don’t think I could withstand this type of the training. Kyol Che is for the young and healthy, and I think if I were to try it again, this pussycat would probably end up dead and frozen under the table in the Chan Hall.