Earlier in the night we crossed railroad tracks and someone waved me into the buddhist temple, Azure and I stalled at the door. A young monk walked up behind us and encouraged us to go in – he spoke really quickly, and not really in English, but in English. He kept repeating the same words: Pagoda, Buddha, and so on, to the point I couldn’t understand him hardly at all. He took us in to the major sanctuary and we prayed to three images of Buddhas – one of which was an American. I meditated for about three minutes and it felt great. The monk (from Calcutta) told me to make a wish, so I wished for the happiness of everyone around us in the temple. I think that was a good, manageable wish.

Closer to the images, Calcutta monk prayed out loud – he chanted quickly in an unevenly dropping tone, some kind of human noises I’d never heard, like a creative bird’s call or a controlled, rhythmic sigh. It sounded like a few people had choreographed the chant, but it was just him. The power cut out and his prayers continued to run, the thread that connected the darkness to the light. The lights flickered back on and he kept praying.

When we were all finished I donated $1 to the box in front of the image of the American Buddha.

Calcutta monk took us outside sanctuary (still in the temple) and brought out a book (which he carried on him regularly, I guess) that had monthly calendars going back to 1900. I found out I was born on a Saturday. Azure was born on a Tuesday. We walked around the pagoda and found the Saturday Buddha image and poured water on him nine times (good luck for each of our family members) then five times on the dragon underneath, and I’m not sure why. He took us to another Buddha room that had Buddha’s footprint. This whole time he was talking about things I wasn’t really following. He did say that they meditated from 4am to 7am, then collected alms at 8am. They then meditated for three more hours in the evening, which I think is when we met him.

The monk was gaunt – he seemed to eat almost nothing. He even said that he was weak. His teeth were bad and he looked years older than me, though he was only 28. At 18 he became a monk and left Calcutta for Yangon. Here in the monastery, they speak Sanskrit, and apparently he speaks Pali (what the Buddha spoke, maybe Nepalese?) and he says he speaks English. He said that he does not speak Burmese, which is strange considering he’s lived here 10 years. The monks study English, I guess, but it didn’t show: they were incomprehensible a lot of the time. A Bhutanese monk (we later met) giggled the whole time and spoke in such a weird cadence I’ve never heard before. Another Burmese monk spoke bad English as well.

He invited us back to the monks’ living quarters, which we were pumped to see. As we walked out of the temple something strange happened: a man in plain clothes started yelling at the monk, kinda challenging him. Calcutta monk kept walking and from behind we saw him raise a fist and throw it down to the ground, as if he were grabbing whatever anger he had and casting it off. After 10 years I’d expect him to be able to let that pass, but maybe not. There were several things that the monks did that I was surprised about, considering my understanding of the practice. For instance, Calcutta monk was showing us around as if we were his pets (ego) and was jealous when we talked to other monks. Also, he told us that certain things would be good luck, for ourselves, people we loved, our businesses, and so on. And my thought was, “Why the focus on self-serving things like business?” I guess there are people in all religions – young people – who are looking for something and latch onto religion. I think almost all the monks we met tonight might have been like that – just latching onto the practice for the sake of having something. I mean, that’s harsh of me to write, but I saw little evidence of their wisdom. The monks rattled off different Buddhas, different pagodas, they talked about a reverence for their teacher, but it was all kinda shallow stuff.

Calcutta monk took us to see his teacher, who, it turns out, was one of the leaders of the 2007 revolt. He didn’t speak any English (in fact the monks spoke less English than most people we met in Myanmar) so we just smiled and did some ritualistic stuff. Since I was dressed in my sarong thing I knew we’d attracted attention outside, and I could just imagine – as the monks rattled on – plain clothes policemen congregating outside the monastery waiting for us to come out. I’m pretty sure we weren’t followed, though. The teacher gave us each some laminated cards with pictures of Buddha that will make nice bookmarks.

The coolest part of the evening was when Calcutta monk led us into his room – the dormitory where the monks all lived together as in a fraternity. The part they lived in was a wooden addition to the concrete building – something like the wooden house we saw at Sam’s on Lanta. It was a wide porch with wooden boards and walls. We entered his room (after he knocked and told his roommates there was an American girl with him) and sat on the floor. His two friends (Bhutan and Myanmar) sat in front of us with him while people came and huddled behind us to watch the show. They were all interested to see the foreigners sitting in here. Calcutta monk brought out his English phrase book and showed us how he studied, but it was futile, even when I saw the words he was saying I hardly understood him. He was a nice enough guy – good intentions I guess – but just strange.

We sat and went over the same information over and over again. There was some nice music outside, sounded like a Burmese version of swing music or jazz. I read before we came that the Burmese can talk for an hour and not say anything, and this was definitely a night where that happened again and again. The Bhutanese monk smiled and giggled a little nervously. The Burmese monk (who theoretically spoke the best English) talked with Azure as she struggled to understand.

It was very peaceful on their little porch – just evening time in a monastery. Everyone was relaxed. In the little room were some posters of famous monks (who are revered for their messages, as we would have a poster of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in our room). There were a couple hammocks that double as beds. There were woven mats on the ground, used as sitting surfaces or beds, as well. I don’t remember seeing any candles, but I gotta think they were there.

It was a fascinating night – we got to see how the monks lived, we walked down an intense market street at night and down the train tracks, we meditated as the lights went on and off in an enormous temple, we looked at the stars in the middle of a huge city.

As we walked home (we kinda had to force our way out of there) I imagined being in the middle of millions of people with the lights off, as people lived hundreds of years ago, on an obscure sea. A movie theater let out and the air-conditioned air spilled into the alley. We walked down a very dark stretch and felt completely safe. We walked down an alley with dozens of other people with colonial buildings rising on each side. People smiled at us. The boy who made us some sugar cane juice earlier in the day was still making it as we got back to the hotel, eight hours later. The stars were bright above Sule Pagoda, even in the heart of the city.

The system is a grid with about five main streets running East-West, then about 60 side streets running North-South. On all the streets there is a wide, frustratingly bumpy sidewalk upon which the world sits, chats, eats, cooks, sells, buys and so on. It’s tiring to walk because you have to watch your step, then look up and make sure you’re not walking into a grill, then maybe sidestep a person or hop down on the road to avoid something. Very tiring.

The cars stick almost exclusively to the main streets and they drive like bats out of hell. Imagine that driving down Montlake you discover that 1) 80% of the cars had disappeared and stop lights don’t really matter and 2) there are no traffic cops. Even careful citizens might push 90. Azure and I had a couple scares where it was evident that, no, really, they would hit a pedestrian without slowing down. Noted.

On the side streets, though, there are so few cars that it can be quiet in the middle of the day in the heart of the urban center. You can hear birds flapping their wings. Footsteps might echo between the high buildings. Kids play soccer in the street, people walk down the middle. At dusk, young men run a net across the street to play that foot-volleyball game, taking down one side if a car does come through.

When I first noticed this phenomenon of having fewer cars on the road (and even car-free zones), I wrote in my journal, “This is good for all the reasons that are so obvious that I don’t even need to write it.”

But then I started noticing all the other reasons that people don’t mention in the usual diatribes against cars:

Little people under trees.

Space
First, without cars my concept of the space was scaled down to human size, speed and volume. The city became human-centric, which is really the way a city should be. People walked anywhere safely, they called down the street to each other, they kinda lived out doors. Being outside in the city wasn’t unpleasant, which was kinda a revelation.

In most cities, people are pinned between cars and buildings. People are diminished by cars, they have to give up right of way, even if the law doesn’t say so. They have to, otherwise they’d be killed. Cars are the fastest, biggest, loudest and most dangerous things that are in our physical space. Cars dominate people, period. I hadn’t seen it this way before – I’d always thought, “I need to make sure I don’t get hit by a truck.” I didn’t even question whether a truck should be allowed to dominate human space.

Incense on a tree

Focus
Secondly, the attention of life refocuses on interacting with people. Walking down the street I looked forward to passing someone, to smelling what they were cooking, to kicking the ball away from the kids.

In most cities, yielding to cars tacitly legitimizes the purpose of those cars… cars or trucks will kill many people a year. Why are these bullies even allowed in our space? Commerce. So commerce is important enough to allow people to be penned onto sidewalks. This isn’t overt, it’s subconscious. I’m sure every one of us is thinking, “Yeah, of course I have to let a truck come down my street – they need to do business, after all,” and in the process we give value to conducting business even if it creates a space that’s not conducive to natural social living.

Penned-in.

Movement
Third, humans naturally move in patterns that don’t have anything to do with the patterns of roads. On the side streets in Yangon, people walked down the center of the road. They crossed at a diagonal because there was no rush. Someone might drift a couple feet off the side walk and stop to talk to someone there in the middle of the right lane. Kids played wherever – their ball hitting a wall, bouncing across the street, hitting the other wall.

Before this trip I hadn’t understood that, just because I might be killed, my movements in most urban spaces are completely unnatural.

Presence
Finally, on carless, human-sized street, it’s a lot easier to be mentally present. When we host dinner parties, Azure will often make two rules: 1) Leave your cell phone at the door and 2) don’t make any other plans for later that night. If you can’t follow both these rules, don’t come. The reason she makes these rules is that the experience is so much better if people are thinking about what’s going on here, in front of them, being present.

I found that taking away cars had the same effect.

We walk down the street at a human pace – the bubble of space that we’re conscious of is pretty consistent, about 20 feet in either direction. People see us coming and going, they anticipate us stopping, they anticipate smiling at us. We see food, we smell it, we stop. This is the rhythm of being in one place and moving at human speed.

Cars imply ELSEWHERE. They move so fast that they symbolize coming from somewhere else, going to somewhere else. We sit in one spot at human-scale but they’re engaged in some other activity that has nothing to do us. A passing car implies an origin and a destination, neither of which are HERE. It DIMINISHES the present.

And because they’re the fastest, biggest, loudest and most dangerous things in our physical space, they DISTRACT from the present and demand our attention, even if it’s as slight as changing how we walk.

And why do we sacrifice our space, focus, movement and presence? For ease of commerce. These are four aspects of being human that are tough to measure but have an impact on our mental health. They’re the things I recognized in the Rio favela when I thought, “This neighborhood is different and I can’t figure out why. How is it that I’m envious of the way people are living in a slum? There’s something natural about this life.” It was human-centric space.

First off, in May 2008 Cyclone Nagaris swept through and killed 138,000 people in region. (pause for effect). The government wouldn’t let relief in before it was far too late, and disease spread in ways we haven’t ever seen before (except during the 2005 tsunami aftermath) or since (except during the 2010 Haitian earthquake aftermath).

The second reason the city feels small is that in 2005 the dictatorial government started construction on a new capital city and relocated all employees, and necessary services, by force. So all of a sudden, 925,000 people were removed from their lives and told to start over in a development that looks sickeningly like the Issaquah Highlands. Our bus drove smack through the middle of this manicured new capital – about 4 hours north of Yangon – so I can report on it firsthand, through a bus window.

There are perfectly manicured roads for homes that don’t exist. The homes themselves look like suburban American homes. At dusk one night, hundreds of people were walking miles from one construction site back to somewhere, wherever the hell they lived, because there are almost no cars in the country (more on that later). As these people walked, they didn’t walk past any food stalls or stores, just curbs. Most importantly, the new city feels STERILE. In order to understand why this is so different to an unluckily relocated Myanmar resident, you need to compare three ways of life:

First, a picture of the streets of Yangon. Take this in:

Life lived on the streets as in most major urban areas. Next, a picture of village life (this one from Bagan):

Immediately an hour outside of Yangon the living situation goes from urban poor to rural. I’m not talking about American rural where people wear ugly jeans and live in quiet but clean homes, but ancient rural like using a caravan of oxen to pull your carts up a river. Huts made of whatever natural materials (palm fronds, etc) are around. Farming for your food. I can’t imagine the people in these small villages have much commerce because they don’t seem to have many possessions. The above photo is taken from the center of a very large village in a tourist town, so even this area is more developed.

Anyway, point is that these are two of the common ways of life for a Myanmar person: Yangon urban living and ancient rural. Which brings me to the new capitol. Here is a picture of the Issaquah Highlands which, I swear to god, is exactly how the streets of the new capitol look:

(photo courtesy of Jeff Youngstrom’s Flickr page)

It makes me hyperventilate.

I guess what I’m trying to show with these pictures is the cruelty of the government not only in moving so many people without their permission, but moving them from a rich civic space to a bleached suburban space. In Yangon’s urban center, people don’t seem to buy their food in grocery stores, they buy them from ladies selling produce on the sidewalks. If you can afford to eat out, the food vendors are on every street corner and up and down the side walks. Kids play in the streets, people chat on the sidewalks, that’s where life is lived. The streets of the newly constructed capitol were manicured, clean and deserted.

Finally, in an effort to clean up the city center, the government forcibly relocated 15% of the urban population, all squatters to a township outside the city center, I guess. I don’t know much about this.

Anyway, the reason that it feels like Yangon’s population doesn’t fill its urban space is that it can’t – people have been moved by force. In this way, it feels post-apocalyptic in the urban center, with most buildings falling into disrepair as the tropical climate starts to take them back.

I LOVED this feeling: life is being sucked out of the buildings and back onto the streets. I can only hope that’s how our apocalypse goes.

When I first wore it out of the hotel room I was nervous, like I was taking a risk that I’d be stared at while walking down the street. I was one of the only Westerners wearing this get-up, and people would definitely notice the difference. I expected that locals would look at me and think I was stupid or trying too hard or whatever. A poser. Which isn’t that big a deal, I could cope with that, though it would be a disappointing reaction for a place that’s otherwise full of extremely kind people.

Of course the cynicism was not at all what happened. What happened is that I got a lot of thumbs-ups from delighted locals and those who could say it would smile and say, “That looks good! Very handsome!” For the most part, though, people did what they did before: they glanced at us and didn’t take much notice. It feels good when that happens.

Other Westerners, for the most part, DID look at me in the way I feared: “Who’s this poser?”

I don’t know if it’s personal or cultural, but this experience revealed the cynicism about standing out – that someone going outside the norm should first be mocked, then admired if closer inspection warrants. I think I’m a cynical person, and if someone, say, wore a cowboy hat in Seattle I’d react negatively about it even though I logically know it’s ok.

I guess the fear of standing out is the potential negativity, the judgment that I’m a person pretending to be something I’m not. But I’m sad to see young men wearing jeans and t-shirts. Others cultures have thrown away their own traditional dress, though it endures even here in a major city, the only major city in SEA where this is the case. I don’t think I can contribute to the preservation, but I can make a quiet statement (if anyone even cares) that what they have is beautiful, it’s enough for me, and I like it. Jeans are boring and ubiquitous. Why sellout your traditions for the symbols of Western consumerism? Why be the same as everyone else?

I called over the manager – a 30-year-old heavy-set man – to ask him about the boys. I could imagine him being intimidating to kids (big dude, lazy eye), but the boys stood tall when he approached, so it didn’t seem they were afraid of him or had ever been hit or anything. I started my questions carefully, “Why do the boys all work at this shop and not another shop?”

He said they have scouts in Bagan who find poor, uneducated families and want their poor, uneducated kids to work. So the restaurant takes the boys off their hands and brings them to Yangon. They promise to provide the kids valuable experience in the restaurant industry, considering tea shops are very popular in Myanmar. Tea shop workers can make good money, though not as much as educated people. (Educated people earn between 40,000 and 100,000 Kyat a month – around $40 and $100. I’m sure the kids at the tea shop are making way way less. $10 a month to sleep in the restaurant and probably work full days.) He says, “of course” most kids send money home – that’s the point – but a few waste it on sweets or games or whatever.

When you start talking about scouts in another part of the country sending children to work in the cities, it begins to sound very child-slavery-like. As Westerners we’re confident in our stance against child labor, so much so that we imagine it to be a universally held belief. But the manager told us all this stuff matter-of-factly, openly, with no concept that it might be a controversial practice.

When we left, Azure and I talked about how im-fucking-possible it is to pass judgment on this specific business because we just don’t know enough. Maybe the work will keep the boys from prostitution or drug use or crime. We don’t know. We wondered if the line about giving the kids experience in a reliable professional field was actually true.

What we can say with confidence are two things: First, the most pressing need is education, and that falls at the feet of the government. We suspect, however, that the Myanmar government intentionally makes people’s lives difficult so they don’t have the tools or energy to revolt.

Secondly, we can invoke the rule of labor we learned in Indonesia: If the job gives the worker the opportunity to BETTER THEIR LIFE, then the system is justifiable. If not, then the system has to change. Of course, the minimum wage is so low even in the US that people don’t have opportunity to improve their lives here.

Azure and I aren’t opposed to kids working in general, but with some major restrictions: It should be a family business, they need to be there by choice and the work needs to not interfere with some kind of more formal education.

Kids were working all over the country – selling things to tourists, selling things to locals, making and selling food, cleaning, serving, moving heavy stuff and so on. We saw kids working in Indonesia, I saw kids working in India years ago as well. It’s a fact of life in the Third World and to ban it outright without thinking of the consequences could be devastating for the families. To me child labor is not the problem itself, but the symptom of a disorganized (or worse, sabotage-minded) government.

I didn’t say a word to anyone for the day, a reminder of my aborted 10-day retreat in 2008. At the time I didn’t understand the point of meditation, but they also did a shitty job of explaining it – here, though, the monks did an excellent job explaining, in careful English, the foundations of Buddhism and how it’s separate from the traditions of Thai Buddhism. For example, women never touch monks. But that has little to do with core Buddhist beliefs and more to do with culture. (The fusion of spirituality and culture is at the center of many religious problems, in my opinion).

After a day of silence we split into discussion groups, each group with a monk, and let the questions fly. I unloaded my doubts on the young man from Laos:

“I know we’re not supposed to enjoy the food – that it should only be for nourishment – but I don’t see the harm in enjoying something as it’s presented to you if you can avoid attachment.” I remembered admiring Claude for savoring a poem by the fire, and the monk didn’t answer directly.

“There’s a guy in my hometown who murdered four policemen. What would Buddhism say a society should do with him? He’s a risk to kill again.” I didn’t mention that guy was already shot, but the monk avoided the question again.

“Would a good dog be reborn as a human?”

I think others in the group weren’t really interested in what I was asking because the subject was often changed to the monks’ daily life.

Monks live in temples and follow five main rules, etc. Here’s the interesting part: apparently there are monks who find the temples too rigid (or something) and take to the countryside. They’re called Forest Monks. My eyes lit up.

“There are Forest Monks? Where?” They wander! They’re nomadic! They walk (alone) across borders – Cambodia, Thailand, Laos, Burma – as they wish, popping in to villages to receive alms. Giving alms is a daily tradition here, a lovely beat in the rhythm of life. Every morning around sunrise monks wander around (towns, cities, villages, wherever) with their bowls out. Local laypeople come out onto the street with their donations – usually rice, but sometimes milk bottles or other foods – and set them into the bowls. The monks will stop and say a prayer over the donor.

So I asked where do these Forest Monks sleep? Do they take refuge in people’s homes or in local temples?

“They sleep in Monk Tents,” he revealed.

WHAT? “There are Monk Tents?!” I think everyone in the group could tell that I desperately wanted one even though I’m not supposed to WANT anything, definitely not at a meditation retreat. But to me this was bigger than WANT, this was like realizing that we are all, in fact, one pulsating energy field, but especially me and the Monk Tent. I had to have one.

“You can find them at Monk Stores. There’s a company that has a Monk Factory and makes Monk Accessories for the Monk Stores. It’s a really good business.” This was all blowing my mind. Monk Tents! We had to get one.

The next day, after saying goodbye to the monks and goodbye to Mathew (who’s now safely back in Seattle) we went on an excursion to find a Monk Tent. We went to the Wat and convinced them that, no, we don’t want regular tents, we do actually want a Monk Tent even though we’re not monks. They pointed us to one store. No Monk Tents. After a few missteps and misunderstandings, we finally discovered a store where they had Monk Tents! BUT… it wasn’t how I imagined it. The Monk Tent is two items: a traditional orange Monk Umbrella (for rain and sun) and an orange mosquito net. The umbrella is stuck into the ground, then the mosquito net is draped over it and the monk meditates or sleeps underneath. It’s actually a smart solution to the problem of sleeping unprotected: it’s lightweight, compact and the umbrella has several uses. But seeing how simple it was, we couldn’t justify buying one when it would be so easy to make… alas, we have no Monk Tent… yet.

The alms-giving, to me, is one of the most beautiful, thoughtful practices I’ve seen in all my time traveling. There are a lot of people who come out to give at sunrise. The monks don’t eat to enjoy, as I earlier complained, they eat to nourish their bodies so they can continue to pursue peace and the end of suffering. The people who donate food don’t do so out of pity, but reverence for the monk’s pursuit. This is so different than alms-giving in the West. In the West we often help out of pity, which strips people of pride. Either that, or a person asking for food (who may, in fact, be working for peace) is looked upon as parasitical. Certainly no reverence for the needy in Western cultures. In a lot of ways, Buddhist practices sometimes flip our Western culture on its head. Another way is that Buddhism invites its practitioners to think critically about the nature of the universe (vs. the advice we got at the Catholic convent last year to stop questioning things)… and another example is that Buddha is not a god, he was an actual person who gained understanding about 2500 years ago. And so on.

At the beginning of the whole thing, a lecturer said to us, “You know what -isms came before Buddhism in Thailand? Animism and Hinduism.” He gave an example of each, how they endure. “Then came Buddhism. You know what the latest -isms are? Consumerism, materialism. People extract their meaning from money and objects.” I’d never heard it so simply explained. It’s the latest in a string of religions. I thought about how last week we splurged on jeans, underwear, art, lots of food, and how completely disengaged that pace is from the rhythm of life at the temple.

I’m occasionally challenged to name places that would be “better” to live in than America. Politics, wealth, health care, weather, food, culture, lifestyle… there are a lot of variables. The variable I saw at the meditation retreat is something I’ve never even thought about as a part of a country’s make-up: peace – with oneself, with others and with nature. That’s the core of Buddhism and Buddhism has a powerful influence on Thai life.

So – early tomorrow we’re heading to Myanmar for about 10 days. We’ll be mostly out of touch, but you might as well visit the blog a few times just to drive up the stats.