What We Want Most Is Freedom from Suffering 

A major challenge for meditators is the discomfort that can arise inside the body in the absence of distractions for the mind. Such discomfort may include back pain, an urgent need to use the toilet, tension in the neck and shoulders, and, in the case of my brand of standing meditation, tired legs. Since meditation is an ongoing process and since we are organic beings not robots, the arising and falling away of such discomforts make every session unique.

This morning’s experience for me is quite fraught. While the park is quiet, the weather gentle, and the air clean and clear, last night’s dinner has not agreed with me and I am plagued by digestive woes. In response, one part of my Daoist training says not to push things, not to go against the body’s messages, and not to insist upon practice when the body says no. Another part of me values discipline, consistency, and routine and argues that there is always something that can keep us from practice, whether it’s a chore that needs doing, the demands of a boss or family member, or some departure from physical well-being.

This wrestling match keeps my turtle mentors at bay for a good half hour, during which time a pelican makes a deposit upon my freshly shaven bald head. It is an impossibly large, gooey, and noxious glob of dung, and it reeks of fish. A few passersby giggle at the sight of me, drenched, distracted, and wiping myself. The stench persists even after I’ve cleaned up. I can’t help but think it’s a heck of a coincidence that both the bird and I are commanded by what we’ve eaten. Perhaps it’s a message from on high, perhaps a version of avian humor, or perhaps just a vote of sympathy. Either way, when I finally do enter the immortal world, I discover I am standing at a urinal inside an airport men’s room. I temper my surprise by reminding myself that it’s a monk’s job to remain humble and accept lessons when and where they come.

The bathroom is small and reasonably clean. Leaning on her mop, a nearby female attendant stirs a bucket full of cleaning solution with a toilet brush. Her bucket says Koh Samui Terminal, which tells me I am in Thailand, on what used to be an island nirvana but is now a crowded travel destination overrun by motorbikes and tourists. Balanced upon the pitted chrome base of the flushing fixture is a pyramid of empty beer bottles. Straight ahead of me is a large aquarium set into the wall and against a window on the far side. Through the window, rippling in the filtered water of the tank and dimmed by the less-than-clean glass, I can make out a pond and a garden of thick tropical foliage and flowers. Plastic plants, thick-leaved and tied to the lip of the tank with wire, wave in the stream of water issuing from a filter box.

At first, I take the football-sized object on the bottom of the tank for a rock. I pay it no particular attention, believing that the inevitable turtle encounter must be awaiting me in the terminal outside. I finish my business and am about to turn away from the urinal when the rock extends legs and an orange head pushes off the bottom of the aquarium and hangs onto the edge to look me squarely in the eye. I recognize him as a male giant Asian pond turtle.

“Greetings, Monk,” he says.

“Oh. This is a surprise. I didn’t notice you in there.”

“That’s because I shouldn’t be in here. I’m a terrestrial species. Oh, the situations we immortals put ourselves in so as to teach you what you need to learn.”

“I’m sorry,” I say.

“You know you’re constantly apologizing, right? None of the old Daoists did that.”

“Times have changed,” I say. “Even the most luminous of those old masters could not have foreseen how bad things would get. The truth is, I am sorry for the plights I find you immortals in.”

“Yet you understand it’s only proper we should exploit the situation so as to get to the heart of things.”

“I do. Do you eat well at least?”

“Not at all. I’m so malnourished I’d go for a lizard, a mouse, even a rat.”

“A rat!”

“I’ve got strong jaws and I need protein. All I get are fish pellets. When I was a baby, I would hide in the leaf litter by the edge of the stream so I could stay wet and swallow worms more easily in the shallows. The larger I get, though, the more fruit I need in my diet, melons and berries in particular. Say, are you going to flush?”

Embarrassed, I do so. Then I wash my hands. Using the handle of her mop to push along her rolling bucket, the attendant walks past and out, presumably on her way to the ladies’ room. The door to the bathroom clangs behind her.

“A hunter scooped me up when I was just the size of a big berry myself. Sold me to a Daoist temple as a symbol of Mother Earth and pure feminine energy,” the turtle tells me.

“I didn’t know there were many Daoist temples in Southeast Asia.”

“Who said anything about many? It only takes one. I was in one for a while and people threw junk food at us—mostly strawberry cupcakes. Sometimes blueberry muffins. Of course, the Buddhists like us, too. I was in a Buddhist temple for a while. It’s all about karma. Temple-goers pay money, buy us, and set us free. As soon as we were, though, hunters came after us. Some of my kind tried to beat the system by simply not returning home. Instead, they traversed busy highways, crossed lakes, and navigated jungle understories. In the end, however, the relentless hunters captured them anyway. No matter what we do, we end up in captivity.

“The Buddhists I know are good people.”

“I’m sure real, awake Buddhists are, but those temple-goers knew full well they were being deceived. They just wanted to feel better for a little while. They wouldn’t face the fact that the never-ending cycle of capture and release is just another version of the wheel of samsara they face themselves, coming back as cockroaches or worms or dogs. They willfully supported cruelty and thereby greased the wheels of torture.”

“I’m vegan,” I say, as if that is somehow relevant.

“The attendant gets to my tank through an access panel in that room of hers. Would you get in that room and come and free me?”

I go to the door to the attendant’s room. I jiggle the handle but find it locked. It’s robust and I don’t see any way to force it open.

“You might have to kick it down,” the immortal advises.

I confess I haven’t ever done that.

“What kind of man makes such an admission?” he chides.

“You’re a piece of work. My grandmother could learn a thing or two about guilt from you, and in case you don’t realize it, that’s high praise.”

“Bring me a piece of papaya when you come—that’s the taste of freedom.”

“If I manage to set you free, won’t the hunters just bring you back?”

“Depends where you leave me. Then again, maybe it doesn’t. Maybe everything is predetermined. Pre-ordained. Fated.”

“I don’t think so,” I say, making a practice kick at the door.

“I can’t place faith in a man with such weak legs.”

“You sure know how to make friends. This is an airport. Security is serious business here. This door is industrial grade.”

“And here I was thinking monks were masters of martial arts.”

I kick open the door. I wait. Nobody shows up.

“I could be vegan,” says the immortal. “Especially when it comes to crayfish. I used to eat them, but now realize they feel things more keenly than the rest of us, despite their simple brains. Maybe it’s because they hunt tiny prey in murky silt and therefore must be sensitive to every little thing in the world. They scream like crazy when you bite them.”

“People say that about lobster, too,” I tell him, edging my way into the attendant’s closet. “Not about biting, but about dropping them in boiling water.”

“Sorry?”

“Big saltwater crayfish.”

“I know what a lobster is. Are you saying you boil them alive?”

“Personally, I don’t eat any conscious creature. Many people love to eat them, though. They’re a delicacy.”

“Unfathomable depravity,” says the turtle.

I turn on the light and find myself in a hallway that stretches in the opposite direction from the aquarium. “Climb out and bang on the glass,” I say. “I need noise to find that access panel.”

“If I could climb out, don’t you think I would have by now? There’s no land in here. Not a minute goes by that I do not long for the feeling of soft soil between my claws, for the taste of flowers and stick bugs and fish, for the sound of a thunderstorm and the taste of a fresh rain.”

“There must be some way to make noise.”

“You’re saying I’m stupid?”

“I’m saying I can’t find you without some help.”

“Maybe you should judge us differently. Maybe someone’s ability to figure out noisemaking isn’t as important as his capacity to suffer. And believe me, I suffer, staring at that crapper all day.”

I can’t help but laugh.

“Something is funny?”

“That you know that word.”

“Coined in memory of Thomas Crapper, like the word for shit.”

“Actually, there was a Crapper Plumbing Company,” I say mildly, “but the word crap is from the Latin for excess or chaff.”

“That’s fine, Mr. Monk-tionary. Argue and one-up me all you like. It’s human nature to be unkind.”

“Hey,” I protest. “That’s not fair.”

“I’m talking about humanity as a whole.”

I can’t dispute the assertion when he puts it that way, so I return to the men’s room and regard him once again through the glass. He’s upright now, his feet in the gravel at the bottom of his tank, his plastron pressed against the glass so tightly that I can see the lines running in starburst patterns from his midline.

“Your shell is very beautiful,” I say.

“Oh, stop. You make me feel so cheap.”

“And the margins of your shell are so dramatic.”

“Shut up and find me.”

I try the closet again. I follow the hallway farther this time and find a spiral staircase I could swear wasn’t there before. It’s metal, like something one might find on a ship, with drainage holes and corrugations on the steps. I descend it slowly, step after step, my hand on the hard black metal railing. The lower I go, the more miasmal the air becomes. It gets harder and harder to breathe. Holding my breath, I continue my descent until I’m in a veritable fog, but one pleasantly redolent of flowers and comfortingly warm. My lungs aching and my heart pounding, I wonder if I’ve found the Garden of Eden and if the immortal has me, as I did at Olduvai Gorge, once again exploring the history of my own species.

I’m gasping, so air-hungry I’m about pass out and die, but when I reach the last step and see water before me, I can suddenly breathe again. I sit down, inhaling in greedy gulps, the stars behind my eyes receding, the world stabilizing, my heart slowing. The water glows in an inviting way that makes me eager to enter its primordial depths and discover its most intimate secrets. I remove my black-and-white kung fu slippers and slide in. The water is warm and welcoming. I submerge. My robes spread about me like a monochrome orchid, keeping me afloat, preceding me, following me, escorting me. The tips of my toes touch the bottom.

“Recognize where you are?” asks the pond turtle immortal, surfacing beside me.

Suddenly, I do. Impossibly, I’m inside his tank.

“You tricked me,” I say. “Distorted my senses. Messed with my mind. Took advantage of my desire to save turtles.”

“And you wished to be tricked,” he says, his voice no longer plaintive and thin but now resonant and strong. “Some minds are like that. They can only access their true nature if they are beguiled, manipulated, and goaded into acting.”

“So your pitiable complaints, arguments, and accusations were all contrived to help me see how far I would go to help?”

The immortal does a pretty good job of bringing his forelimbs together as if he is clapping his hands, something I’ve seen before. “No, just to remind you of what a human being can do if he really wants to.”

“Well that was cruel. I almost died from lack of oxygen.”

A female voice laughs. It’s a beautiful sound, like a bell. I turn and see a radiant woman rising from the surface like the Lady of the Lake in the Arthurian legend. She graces me with a beatific smile. She is the bathroom attendant, but minus her rags and mop and bucket.

“I am Lady Yang Xi,” she says.

“The mystic who brought the revelations of my Shangqing sect of Daoism to the Xu family back in the fourth century,” I cry. “I’m honored! But how can you be here?”

“There’s no rule that says we can’t have company,” the pond turtle puts in.

“Then who are you?” I ask, suddenly suspicious.

“It is as if I put you down a well and had you look up at the night sky to realize what you did not know,” the turtle answers. “It is as if I made you a fish and then asked you to understand water.”

“Zhuangzi,” I exclaim, my chest bursting with joy. “The beloved Daoist writer!”

“ ’Tis I,” he laughs. “That inveterate spinner of tales, that stubborn, shining bubble of consciousness in the boiling water of your soul. In your eyes, I am a turtle. In truth, I am only that which comes from your own heart, your own longing, your own imagination.”

“I didn’t expect this,” I say, feeling tears hot on my cheeks and reaching out so that Zhuangzi, strong and solid as he is, will steady me. “I didn’t see where all this was going. I should have figured it out.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” he says. “You are, after all, the source of all you are experiencing here, the writer of your own play.”

“The urinal, the aquarium, the pond. All of that was your imagination at work.”

“Mine and yours together. Remember that nothing is as it seems, that your meditations are as real as the waking world in which you stand. After all, do you not find yourself as caring and moved in this world as you do by the people and creatures around you in that one?”

“I do,” I say, suppressing a sob.

“And do you not have just as keen and clear a sense of yourself in this world as you do in that one?”

“Perhaps keener,” I say. “Perhaps clearer.”

“Does not your compassion have control of the tiller of your ship in this life at least as surely as it does in the world in which your hands are now folded over your navel, your eyes closed, your breathing imperceptible, your bowels, if I may say, roiling?”

“It does,” I say.

“I ask you, then, will you help the rest of your kind see that it is the ability to suffer, and the desire to escape suffering, that is the thing that binds us far more surely than whether we have shells or scales or soft skin or hard, whether we have limbs or wings or feathers, cilia, antenna, compound eyes, or no eyes at all?”

“I will,” I say.

And with that I am under the water and looking at the real and three-dimensional paradise I could only imagine when I was a boy paddling a canoe on a river in Connecticut and saw my first turtle. The plants undulate in the gentle current and the fish flash past. Crustaceans wave from below, and above me, on dropped and floating leaves, ants take voyages that feel a million leagues to them.

And, everywhere, absolutely everywhere, there are turtles.