I kept my eyes closed. I didn’t want any exchange with Marcia. I didn’t want to breathe the air she polluted. At the same time I knew exactly what Dasgupta was about to say: that just as this Service was a great opportunity to grow in Dhamma there was also the risk of slipping back, the risk of generating mountains of new sankharas, oceans of new unhappiness, while actually serving at the Dasgupta Institute.
‘“How can that be, Mr Dasgupta?”’ you ask me. How can that be? We come to the institute to serve, you say, and yet we make bad karma, we generate new sankharas, deep negative sankharas. Then we are worse off than if we hadn’t made dana. ‘“What is Dasgupta talking about?”’ you ask.’
I could hear Marcia shifting her hams in their nylon. I had known her only a few hours and she had poisoned my mind. Tell yourself she will soon be gone. Seven days. Her and the diarist. And Kristin. And Meredith. Cravings, aversions.
‘Dear friends, if you knew how many letters I receive from people who have come to a Dasgupta retreat, in this or that campus — California, Germany, Spain, India, Australia, doesn’t matter — and their experience has been spoiled by the servers. Maybe a server was rude to them. They asked this server a question and the server, he or she, didn’t even reply, didn’t give them the time of day, as they say. That is a very interesting expression, to give someone the time of day, to give someone your presence, your nowness.
‘Well, this server thought himself superior. He thought himself too important to waste his time responding to a silly student who knew nothing about vipassana. He didn’t listen. Or worse still, he answered with a harsh word, or in a harsh manner.
‘“You can talk about serenity and happiness till the cows come home, Mr Dasgupta, and vipassana this and vipassana that, it is all very well and very interesting, yes, but if your own servers who follow your doctrine won’t listen to me when I say I have a bad headache or I am not understanding why we mustn’t change our posture in the hour of Strong Determination, well, I am sorry but all your teaching is so much hot air.”
‘And, my friends, my friends, this is a sensible deduction. We know a tree by its fruits. We know a doctrine by how its disciples behave. A server is rude to a student and the student deduces that the whole doctrine is false, it doesn’t work. This is understandable. And you who came here to help and to grow in the Dhamma have only hindered. You haven’t grown. You have shrunk, my friends, you have withered. And I ask, for heaven’s sake, what are you thinking of? What are you thinking, my friend? This is madness. You came here to serve and instead you have chased someone away. It was better if you had never come. Better for the student, but most of all better for you.
‘Or I hear of backbiting between servers. “I am a better server than she is, I have more experience, I can sit stiller than he can, why wasn’t I given the more important job? I have been insulted.”
‘What? What are you thinking of, comparing yourself with others, worrying about your prestige, your sensitive ego? Oh dear, are we mad? Are we mad?
‘Dear friends in Dhamma, it is much easier to come to a retreat as a student than as a server. Of course it is. True, the students must sit for many hours, true, they get pains in their legs, pains in the back, pains in the shoulders, but what wrong can a student do here at the Institute, what sankharas can he or she cause? He has taken refuge in the Triple Gem. He has sworn to keep the Five Precepts. He is protected by the Noble Silence. It is much easier to keep the Noble Silence than to practise Right Speech. A silent man is a safe man, my friends. He is not tempted to gossip, to tell tales, to slander and disparage. In silence it is soon clear that the self is an illusion. What self can there be when I am silent, when I come to my meals with my begging bowl in my hand? But when we serve and there are jobs to do, ah, my friends, then we start imagining we are important. It’s true, isn’t it? We start to compete. We want to be first. “I’m the best server, I deserve the most important jobs.”’
Marcia sighed heavily. Opening my eyes I saw she had stuck the little finger of her right hand way up her left nostril. She was absorbed, listening to Dasgupta and exploring her nose. Without thinking, I jumped to my feet, dragged the door across the carpet, slipped out and shut it behind me.
Damn!
I stood in the porch. I was trembling. Why? To my right was the corridor and Mi Nu’s sitting room. I suppose it’s her sitting room. A small Buddha sat by the open door. It was faint, but there was definitely a smell. Of jasmine? Definitely an aura, a dim green light, like under leaves in a wood. A special stillness. It was drawing me in, the way, when you finally get close, your mind is drawn towards jhana, you can feel the stillness pulling, the emptiness pulling. So I could walk down there right now and ask Mi Nu that question. Why can’t I be good, Mi Nu? Was that the question? Why can’t I be happy? Or, Why do I want to be good, when I’m obviously not? What was I thinking of when I ran into the sea? Why didn’t I die, Mi Nu? Why didn’t I die? Why can’t I die? Now.
I stood in the porch. There was no need for me to sit with Marcia. Why had Mrs Harper asked me to do that? As if a practising lawyer couldn’t listen to the Dhamma Service talk on her own. Teach me to be like you, Mi Nu. How can I be like you, how can I live in your world? Maybe that is the question.
Is it?
Then I heard a strange sound. Someone was wailing. Or whimpering. Very softly. What was it? I advanced a step. A seagull? A kettle? Now there was a chuckle. Weird. Definitely a low chuckle. A growl!
I turned and walked out.
I walked out of the bungalow, past the Metta Hall, along the ivied fence that divides the sexes, down to the dining hall, through the female side to the kitchen, then back through the male side, out into the male compound and straight to Dormitory A and the diarist’s room.
I didn’t plan to go. I went.
Beth On The Bed
I acquiesce to my punishment. I can’t help it. I’m trapped.
THE GUIDED SESSION was about halfway through when I arrived. I had time. Mrs Harper thinks I am with Marcia. I settled on the bed.
I never realized how futile my mental life was. An endless loop, disconnected from reality.
One moment I had been planning to ask Mi Nu how I could become like her — there was that inviting light, that whiff of incense where the passageway opened into the stillness of the bungalow’s main room — and now I was stretched out on a man’s bed in a room that definitely had that smelclass="underline" the socks, the smoker’s overcoat, the slept-in sheets.
I took off my shoes and lay down. God. It was so like old times. ‘I’m modelling for a painting,’ I told his wife, when she found me there. I heard the key turning and saw a boyish haircut on an ageing head. ‘And he lets you stay in his studio and sleep in his bed?’ She seemed tired, not angry. ‘I was feeling cold,’ I said. Jonathan was shocked that his wife had come round without warning. ‘We haven’t lived together for years,’ he protested. ‘She only has the key for emergencies.’
I turned a page.
Just a disturbance, milling round and round, an eddy in a backwater, the same water turning round and round with the same dead leaves. My thoughts.