Ajahn Chan died in 1992. More than one million people attended his funeral, including the Thai royal family. I’m sure the ceremony was exactly what he would have wanted.
Wat Pah Nanachat itself continues to thrive. There are now over a dozen branch monasteries in Canada, Australia, Italy, France, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. (The Canadian ones are in Thunder Bay and Perth, Ontario, as well as Knutsford, B.C.) You can find more information on their website, including instructions for how to apply for your own stay.
Please tell them I sent you.
Jim is the only person I stayed in touch with from Pah Nanachat. We have remained close friends. He was best man at my first wedding and helped me through my divorce. Jim has mellowed through the years. He tells me he has found great satisfaction and some peace by working as a residential remodeller, reviving tired old houses and working with his hands. He lives in a smal Massachusetts town and lives in a house which was formerly a Catholic church which he gutted and remodelled himself, though he still finds Christianity absurd. (He can be reached at swimmingjim@me.com.)
As for me: twenty-five years have passed since I left Wat Pah Nanachat. But the time I spent meditating in the jungle stays with me.
To begin with, it drives my charming but bug-phobic wife, Teresa, crazy that I refuse to kill insects and spiders that she finds inside our house. Instead, I gently scoop them up and liberate them outdoors. It’s a small gesture, but it reminds me that my life is bound up with all living things.
I’m a vegetarian. I don’t avoid meat for strictly Buddhist reasons, but rather because of how the meat “industries” treat living beings. That chicken nugget came from a battery hen crammed in a wire cage. That slice of bacon from a pig kept in a box too small to turn around in. The cruelty of the factory farm is too intense to ignore. From time to time I do eat sustainable, farm-raised meat, however. For me, it’s not about being a purist. It’s about finding that Buddhist middle path.
I don’t cling to, or particularly crave, possessions. If anything, I have had to learn to overcome my monkish aversion to owning material things. Aversion, so the Buddha taught, can be just as much of a binding trap as craving. For me the middle path means being able to really enjoy the function and beauty of my possessions, without clinging to them as part of my identity. So I drive a twelve-year-old Subaru Legacy. We live in a decent suburban neighbourhood, which allows our children to go to good schools. Teresa and I have collected some sculptures and paintings from our various travels, which make the place beautiful. And, after so long in sandals and scruffy clothes, I’ve had to learn how to dress nicely for my day job, teaching development professionals in Washington, D.C., how to communicate better.
It’s harder, actually, not to cling to my work. I love to write. I’m proud of the five books I have written to date. I love teaching too, and dealing with communicating global economic, environmental, and development issues. Teresa and I have developed a great reputation, which has made us prosperous. But more important, the work we do keeps us involved and connected with the seemingly intractable problems confronting humanity in the twenty-first century: poverty, climate change, global justice, and most important, ending patriarchy so that men and women can be equal co-creators of humanity’s future.
Sometimes, the biggest challenge is unplugging from the Internet and phone, truly setting work aside to enjoy each other’s company, go for a walk, or go kayaking in the nearby wilderness with one of my friends. I find a regular connection not just with nature, but with wilderness, is really essential to my own sense of balance and happiness. I have been fortunate to discover a patch of the Potomac River, thirty minutes from my house, where eagles and great blue herons dwell, and deer and fox and beaver can be found along the banks.
Hardest of all for me used to be clinging to relationships. I would hang on long past the bitter end. It took me several failed relationships before I found Teresa, including a wretched first marriage and divorce. Time in a monastery did not make me any wiser when it came to dealing with women—just as time in a desert won’t make you any wiser when it comes to swimming. In fact, having spent time in the wat probably made my relationships worse. I stayed three years longer in my first marriage than I might have if I had not cultivated a view that suffering and unhappiness should be enduring and accepted.
A friend of mine, trying to sort out her own frustrated love life, once told me she felt she “just had to be more Buddhist about it.”
“Don’t do that!” I replied. “Being Buddhist about it will incline you to accept that you will suffer!”
In the end, I tore up the marriage in an ugly way. I cheated on my wife. Then I told her about it. And here’s what I learned: whatever difficulties you have in your marriage before you cheat, afterwards, there’s only one problem, and you caused it. So I don’t suffer so willingly any more.
However, three of the best things in my life came out of that most painful experience.
First, it really destroyed this story I had about myself as intelligent, spiritual, and in control of my life. That self-perception made me feel kind of superior, like I was special. I’ve travelled the world, I’ve lived in a Buddhist monastery, I’ve written books. . . . I would not have admitted this back then, but this was a really strong, thick crust my ego had built for itself. It really held my psychological pie together. My wife leaving me, taking my son out of the country—and telling everyone I cared about the reason why broke up that crust. Suddenly there was filling all over my hands and dribbling onto the floor.
This was a profound gift to me, and to those who loved me. My sister said it best. She told me:
“You know what’s great about this mess? I think sometimes you think we love you because we admire you, all the things you’ve done, how smart you are. It’s great to see you really fuck up, so you can get it that we love you for who you are, not for what you’ve done.”
Indeed my sister, brother, father, mother, and my close friends loved me, shared my grief, and helped me get back on my feet. What a fortunate man, not only to have such love, but also to know that you don’t deserve love, or win it through accomplishments. It’s a gift.
The second great thing that came out of this was my son Josh. If my family taught me how to accept love, he taught me how to give it. At the wat it was not really clear to me the difference between love and attachment. They taught that you can’t pursue the Dhamma as a monk can if you are burdened with a wife and children. A preference for one’s family clouds the universal compassion of the Buddha Nature.
When my wife left me in Ottawa to move to Washington, D.C., taking Josh with her, she said to me on the phone: “You are free now. You can go travel the world again. I don’t want child support or anything. That’s what you really want, isn’t it?”
I took a long bath that evening and thought about that world of freedom. Yeah, I longed for it. Then I thought of some of my friends who had divorced and saw their kids only from time to time. They had a certain hollowness. I could feel what that hollowness would be like in me. I thought of my son, just old enough that he was beginning to walk. He could live his life growing up without me. He would probably never remember a thing about me. But I knew I couldn’t do it. It would break something.
So I convinced my estranged wife I should come down for a visit. Then I stayed, living in her parents’ guest bedroom. They were not at all thrilled to have their cheating son-in-law around the house. Whenever my mother-in-law would get angry, she’d yell at me: “You just can’t keep it in your pants!” After a few months, I moved out—well, they told me to move out. My wife and I tried to reconcile, but eventually she filed for divorce—and sole custody. A nasty court battle ensued, resulting in a full joint-custody arrangement that left me with Josh every other week, from the age of three and a half on. So I had this intensive, but part-time, parenting routine during which I was the sole parent. Many dads slough off much of the grunt work on their wives—diapers, cooking, play dates, and those mind-numbing hours at parks and kids’ parties. But I got it all. It worked for me because my job as a writer did not tie me to an office desk, so I could schedule my parenting days as a full-time parent. What I discovered, though, was that it’s in the grunt work, the dull work, that you get this great parent-child bond.
That bond defined the rhythm of my life until Josh turned seventeen. Then one day, early in his senior year, while I was in the middle of screaming at him for not doing his math homework, he told me he didn’t have to put up with this. He was going to live with his mother full time. And he did. He refused to see me or speak to me for six months. Sure, there were lots of reasons for this, and it was not really about the math. But I have never been so angry in my life—at his mother, as much as at him. I couldn’t shake the resentful feeling that she had “won” and I had “lost” this final battle for Josh. Where’s your Buddhist calm, now? I would say to myself.
Because I was no longer invested in myself as the best pie on the shelf, I was genuinely able to lean on Teresa, my family, and my friends to get me through this rough period. Eventually I asked my mother to talk to Josh and help us reconcile. And when we did, because of the support I had received helping me deal with my feelings, I was able to let go of my anger and hurt. I told Josh I did not want the old parent-child relationship back, but that we should use this break between us to start a new relationship, adult son to adult father. He’s now a huge, strong, hairy, talented young guy in his sophomore year in a B.F.A. theatre program, and we get along great.
While the monks may say that such attachment keeps us from realizing Dhamma, I found that through loving Josh, I began to care more about the whole world—including the future world his children and grandchildren will inherit.
The third blessing of the break-up of my marriage is that it brought me to D.C. and left me unattached at the right time to meet my second (and final) wife, Teresa. You may be amazed to hear it, but I never would have met her if not for What the Buddha Never Taught.
Teresa worked as a journalist for the Voice of America. I got a call from her office out of the blue one day, asking if I would like to do an author interview for VOA Radio. Teresa was the host. It was the best interview of my life, and when the taping was over, she and I decided to keep on talking. We got married in 2003. For that whole story, and for what helpedme evolve from a man with serious commitment issues into one who is able to really love with my whole heart, readers will have to pick up Savage Breast: One Man’s Search for the Goddess.
You see, neither Buddhism nor Christianity gave me what I needed to fully grasp the interconnectedness of life. These two religions view the life as a problem from which we must escape. They see the world as “fallen” or samsara, a realm of sin or delusion. Salvation lies in somehow extricating oneself from that muck. Eventually I gravitated to a much older religion—a faith in the Sacred Feminine. I spent three years exploring the myths and temples of ancient Europe, the topic of Savage Breast. This journey helped me find my way to a sense of the earth as our mother. I believe we spring from her at birth, return to her in death, and in between we dwell as her children, connected with all other beings. And this was not something I could learn in a monastery or from a book. I was lucky that I found it while thrashing around in the muck of my own life.
However Buddhism has given me one last and really important gift. When I can keep in mind the Buddha’s teaching that the self is an illusion, it opens me to change. It makes it easier for me to let go. But I don’t see the ego as something bad we should seek to rid ourselves of. I see it as a constructed self that plays an important role. As children, we build this self according to whatever blueprints our culture gives to us. It’s very practical. It helps us organize our feelings, thoughts, frames of reference and behaviour into consistent patterns. It makes us feel secure. We know who we are. But then we get attached to these patterns. They become the “beliefs” that “I” possess. Sometimes we get so attached to these patterns that we will kill rather than surrender them. To me the best of Buddhism is the meditation techniques that help us glimpse this grand illusion. It’s not that the world is “fallen” or samsara. It’s how we look at it. This will be the topic of a future book.
And so, a final observation from my time in Wat Pah Nanachat: I remember looking at myself in the mirror after my first monastic head shave and thinking, “Hmm, not a bad skull.” Some of the other community members had heads that were kind of bumpy and pitted, like poorly paved roads. But I liked my smooth round dome. “When the time comes,” I told myself, “I will be able to face the baldness I know has been genetically preordained for me.” Now, at age fifty-one, I have arrived at roughly fifty percent cranial deforestation— with compensating hairs coming out my ears and the back of my neck. So once more, I am having my head shaved.
(Number three on the electric trimmer, not quite the razor’s edge.) And when I look in the mirror, I see someone with a head very similar to the twenty-six-year-old who lived in a jungle hut. I like the skull. I like not trying to hide behind a comb-over. I embrace the middle-aged bald guy. It’s pretty easy these days to look in the mirror and laugh out loud.
Tim Ward,
Washington, D.C., 2010