In India, a journey from Hindu/yoga ashram to a Zen Buddhist center takes about five hours and about $11. A single en suite room with three tasty meals in a peacefully idyllic mountain-top religious retreat? Priceless is a cliché but true. Reality is better yet, only $5 a day!
Everywhere you turn in Bodhi Zendo, someone’s eye to detail and beauty is revealed. The courtyard’s Japanese garden with fat koi swimming in the serpentine water canals banked by moss and meticulously cared for flowers and plants sprinkled near a tiny arched wooden bridge and stone foot paths. To the back, a serene and sinuous rock garden lies between two brick gazebos on the terraced hills. Dwarf palm trees, banana trees, pines and bamboo pepper the landscape. Five feet tall orange, red or pink gladiolas stand like nature’s sentries along some of the walls. The garden looks across a steep valley to the tea tree plantations and uncultivated land on the next mountain. The American founded hill station of KodaiKanal sprawls precariously on that mountain’s shoulder. Except for bird sounds, the quiet is so absolute that it is almost eerie to an ear accustomed to Indian music wafting its wailing tones through the air, the dull roar and horn beeping of passing cars, and loud conversations at night. The rooms themselves have wood parquet floors, spotlessly clean and efficient and feel like a rustic Holiday Inn. This ain’t Kansas but it surely doesn’t feel like India either!
Founded in 1996 by Indian Jesuit priest and ordained Zen master AMA Samy, Bodhi Zendo’s 36 beds are often booked out months if not a year in advance. Some people annually spend weeks or months here when AMA Samy is in residence in the winter and spring. They can meet with him almost daily and work on their Zen buddhist koans or ask questions about his many published books or his talks. He’s 74 years old and his tall frame is gaunt below his peach colored robes but his eyes are kind and his smile is serenely warm and peaceful. During the 6 to 7 am meditation, a resident can leave their chant booklet out to indicate a request to speak with him. Meetings are usually rather brief as they involve a quick discussion on the person’s progress on finding the answer to the koan that AMA Samy has given to that individual or he just wants to greet a new resident. A koan, drawn from hundreds of years of Zen buddhist practice, is a question which helps bring the individual closer to enlightenment. The most familiar one to Westerners is “What is the sound of one hand clapping?”
As a spiritual novice who is reeling from the cultural shift, I don’t even think about wanting a koan. I just feel lucky to have gotten to stay for one week with only three weeks’ prior reservation and just plain blessed to have my stay extended one more week on my third day here due to a cancellation. The extension now encompasses the three day intensive silent meditation retreat held once a month. The number of daily zazen or meditation hours goes from 3.5 hours to 6 hours and AMA Samy speaks for one hour while now he only talks on an individual basis in the morning.
The meditation hall or zendo is a corner room with windows on three sides overlooking the valley. About 10 gray flat meditation pillows line each of the four sides of the room and everybody sits facing into the shiny wood planked floor except one side which looks into the curtained cupboard stuffed with meditation pillows and benches that people can use. In front of the cupboard, the altar is composed of a simple 3 foot wooden cross, a two foot high Buddha, a candle, flowers in a simple vase, and some incense sticks on a high table. Can’t get much simpler than that. There is not one wall hanging or painting.
The meditative session itself is also comparatively simple. No session lasts more than 25 minutes without either getting up to walk around the zendo’s meditation pad lined inner square for two to three rounds or outside for four to five minutes. Two sessions, the one at 12 noon and the one at 8:15 pm, only last a half hour. The longest session is from 5:30 to 7:00 pm when empty stomachs start rumbling around the room. I haven’t figured out exactly when we prostrate ourselves three times to the altar and then bow to it and then to the group but it seems to be at least once in the morning and once in the evening. I don’t mind the prostrations and the bowing to the altar upon entry and departure, it is the chanting that seems strange to me when it occurs in the longer meditation sessions. Everybody reads aloud and together Japanese or English verses or vows in this stiffly, monotone way. One long prayer is actually said in a stattaco (sp?) manner with a relentlessly unchanging beat of a Japanese oval wooden drum. So, for instance, you say ab-so-lute com-pas-sion with six drum beats. Even the now familiar Hindi lilting chant for peace, “shanti, shanti, shanti,” becomes flat except for an odd little burp on the last shanti. During my first experience of this “chanting,” I thought of adding at the end, “Thank you very much, Mr. Roboto” and almost started laughing.
So, I miss the humor of the ashram’s satsang and the joyous, swooping sounds of the hindu chants. I also miss the anonymity of a group of 70 people sitting in haphazard rows trying to meditate. At the ashram, I would try to time my shifting of a leg that has fallen asleep or the inevitable twitching to be hidden by the passing sounds of a truck, car or motorcycle. If none passed, who was to say, beyond my immediate neighbors, was it me or someone else who had moved? At the Bodhi Zendo, there is no way to hide when most of us sit facing at least 8 people across the room and we are supposed to be meditating with our eyes half closed. At least there are no mosquitoes as the temperature is in the 50s at night and only up to the 70s during the day. Thankfully, they have small wooden meditation benches here which makes all the difference in relieving pressure on the back and knees. Besides, there is only that 25 minutes to endure.
I can always think about the upcoming meal for three of the four sessions if I get frustrated in my feeble efforts at meditation. While predominantly south Indian vegetarian like the ashram, this place has amazingly good food with an wide variety of tastes and textures. This cook knows how to use spices! At lunch, there is even this garlic and scallion based vinaigrette to pour over the cooked vegetables and there is always a green salad picked fresh from their garden. Some of the dishes are spicy and there is salt and pepper on the table. It seems almost strange to me to use a fork, knife and spoon again and eat off of a real western dinner plate and small soup bowl. We regularly run out of food at the buffet line but there are always bananas and bread available to fill out any remaining stomach corners. Did I mention they have COFFEE? Yes, blessed coffee at breakfast and at the 9:30 am and 4 pm tea and coffee break. I’ve traveled around the world but never pass up a morning coffee. Breakfast, at 7 am after an hour meditation session, has now twice given me the moral dilemma of eating the offered fried egg and thus breaking my vegetarian streak from the ashram. So far, the egg is winning out. Supper is usually soup, bread and/or roti, and bananas as one is supposed to eat light if there is early morning meditation.
The final difference between my stays within these two different communities is the amount of free time as AMA Samy feels strongly that discipline and freedom should be in balance. As you saw by the ashram schedule blog entry, free time was a precious commodity. Except during the intensive sessions, there is the scheduled silence/personal work time between 10:30 and 12 and between 1:30 and 4:00. I can stretch that even longer by not being social during the abutting coffee break times. I’m actually trying not to be social so I can update this blog, read, do yoga, review the yoga course manual and class notes before I send it home, take a brisk solitary post lunch walk along the road, and just take advantage of this rare window of peace and quiet in chaotic India. We are not supposed to talk from 5:00 pm to 7:10 am.
The other residents that I have met are mostly European (primarily German or English) or Indian and seem to be mostly in their mid-60s or in their 20s. The karma yoga time, called samu or selfless service here, is from 8 to 9:30 and I am assigned to cutting vegetables (including banana flowers, odd squashes, kohlrabi, and some other stuff I don’t recognize) this week. Between 10:30 and 11:45, the excellent library is open and we can check out two books at a time. Ah, and then there is actual hot water so I can take my dreamt of hot water bucket showers whenever I want during the free time.
Different schedules, names, and settings but at the end, the journey between the two places may only take five hours but both are ultimately just stops along different paths up to the same mountain top. As the leaders of the both places have either said or have written, there are many pathways to that same mountaintop – just find a path and earnestly follow it. I’m still looking for the right path for me but I’m more convinced than ever that I know there is a mountain top and I agree with them on the location…which is inside the self.
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- the Japanese rock garden
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- The rear garden from the 3rd fl rooftop
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- The courtyard – the zendo on right
