Deep Time, Full Moon Celebrations, and the Cave

I’ve been at the center for just about two weeks now. I know this because when I arrived it was a new moon and the sky was ink black, and last night the moon was a full round eye that turned the whole night sky a dim, watery blue.

It was also an important Buddhist holiday — Makha Bucha Day, a celebration of one of the Buddha’s seminal discourses to his disciples which falls on the full moon of the third lunar month of the year.

In the evening, some locals, the nuns, and the rest of the volunteers filled flower-shaped cups with wildflowers, candles, and incense and took them down to the little temple in the woods. After a long chanting session, we walked around and around the hexagonal building, chanting and bowing to the altar on which numerous Buddhas sat in varying shades of silver and gold.

Afterwards we all sat on the steps and watched the gold moon rise above the hills, which were smoky and dotted with red from the wildfires the farmers had lit atop them. I could actually see the earth spinning forward, could see the moon rising higher and higher with each passing minute. 

Here we were, on a rock in the stars, just spinning. The enormity of it struck me — a feeling I’ve always loved.

I couldn’t imagine a more beautiful picture just then: the sweet laughing nuns, the local children running among their parents, us volunteers splayed out as a little white cat sat in front of us all and stared with huge blue eyes at the round orb above our heads. For a moment I forgot about everything but the moment. This was what I had come across the world to find, this was what I am always searching for, this kind of equilibrium, this ritual, this community, this silence, this peace.

Of course it did not last. We got up. We went home. I couldn’t sleep. 

There is always suffering in the world, Buddhism teaches, and anything we desire or covet or dread just pulls us closer and closer towards that suffering. In order to truly escape the cycle of death and rebirth we have to let go of desire, of clinging, of judgment, of attachment to our sensory impressions, of belief in ourselves as individuals.

I had received some difficult family news the night before the ritual, and had spent the previous evening silent in the temple. There were no candles and no songs that night, just the silence, the lizards hollering outside, the screaming cicadas, the nearly-full moon, the spiders weaving their webs above my head.

There is never true peace, never true equilibrium in this life of forms and figures. Everything around us is always fleeting. That’s the first lesson of Buddhism, the way in.

I can get behind that, but I have trouble, as most people do, with the whole actually relinquishing desire part. I want so many things. 

I want things to be more beautiful. I want people to suffer less, now. I wish the world was kinder and gentler; I wish it didn’t give us people and places and things we love so much only to cruelly steal them away, to wash them and us with suffering again and again. 

Yet this is not the nature of being, we are reminded here over and over again. The nature of being is ephemerality, of change, of fragmentation, of disarray. 

Still, Buddhism isn’t really about giving up our desires for things that benefit us, the head nun Luangmae (also called Dhammavijjani) has told us. It’s more about reflecting on and observing our desires from a measured distance.

All we can do is be good people, Buddhism tells us. Tend to our inner and outer worlds. Try to find a deeper ocean of peace, beyond our clinging to worldly things.

Easier said than done.

But if it was easy then everyone would do it.

A Cave on a Mountain

The next day, after the celebration, a few of us went to find a nearby mountain cave called Phu Wai. I’ve become quite fond of some of my fellow volunteers — one from Turkey who is the most advanced meditator of all of us, and one from Canada who has such a steady, supportive energy that I felt safe around them, and here at this center, from day one.

We drove through town, passing dirt roads and shacks markets and little temples hidden in the jungle until the world grew wilder and the evidence of human existence became more and more difficult to spot. At last we reached a monastery at the end of a long dirt road. 

We were introduced to our guides, two eleven or twelve-year-old girls armed with giant flashlights, and they led us on an incredibly steep yet mercifully brief hike up a mountain. I found myself breathing heavily, realizing I hadn’t hiked like this since before injuring my knee nearly three years ago.

When we arrived at the mouth of the cave, my knee didn’t hurt but my lungs burned. There was a Buddhist shrine just inside the entrance, but past that I could see only darkness.

We passed the shrine and entered another world. 

The ceiling soared easily a hundred feet above us. Bats dangled above our heads and on the walls, huge clusters of them lining the entire roof of the cave; they chittered angrily when our flashlights crossed over them.

But the stars of the show were the huge stalactite and stalagmite towers glittered and shone every way I looked. Some of them were so massive and old that they stretched all the way from the ceiling to the floor. Some swelled ten or fifteen feet across or more. 

They looked like old gods or giant, primordial jellyfish. It was easy to imagine that once we left them alone in the darkness, they might start to move and dance, leaping up in slow-motion and shaking the earth as they fell. They gleamed white and caramel brown, their masses etched with whorls and streaks — the physical evidence of the thousands of years they had taken to form.

Drip by drip. Moment by moment. The slow movement of water had delicately carved these behemoths, slowly but surely, day after day, century after century.

While wars had exploded outside, while wildfires and storms razed the land, while civilizations rose and fell, droplets had steadily fallen from the roof of this cave to the floor. Ever-so-slowly they had built upon one another, twining together silt and matter to form these magisterial beings — these alien rock formations that truly belong to this earth, and know it, more than any of us. 

We ventured deeper into the cave. Strange scorpion-like creatures skittered on the walls while grey, faceless worms writhed below us. 

At one point, we all decided to turn off our flashlights. 

The moment the last light shut off, the darkness was complete. For a moment my eyes retained a memory of light, which looked like a door in the far, far edges of my vision, but then even that scattered. I could not see a single thing. It did not feel like I was in the cave anymore. It felt like I was in deep space, or in some kind of womb. It felt like a very old memory.

It felt peaceful.

I wanted to stay there. It was nice to have a moment away from the world of flashing lights, of things constantly screaming, of constant change and departure. 

To stay in the stillness.

In hindsight I really would not want to be alone in that blackness. I needed to know the others were there. It would have been utterly terrifying in solitude. 

This is just my take, but I don’t think Buddhism’s end goal is total absence, total abandon. I think it’s reintegration back into some kind of greater whole. During one of our Dhamma talks, Luangmae told us that the Buddha had said once that before we became human, before we were animal and flesh and sinew and atom, we were all once beings made of light. And there was no hunger, and no death. 

But then, somehow or other, there was an explosion — that fundamental shift that opened a primordial fissure. Afterwards, the beings found they were able to see some kind of yellow water that had not been there before. And they were curious, and they drank of it. And then they developed hunger, and then they found they needed to drink the water to survive where once they needed nothing at all.

Eventually, he said, most of the beings forgot their original states, but a few still remembered that they had once been light. These people decided they would live in caves and try to renounce sense pleasures in order to find the wholeness they once inhabited.

In that framing, we are all descendants of pure luminosity. I do think we all still have tiny fragments of that light inside us, and I think that many of us remember that somewhere in our being, and we ache for it. Somewhere in us we remember our true nature, which is total connection, with no absence, and no hunger, and no decay, and no death. Just pure abundance and connection with source energy, with our literal mother and with the cosmic mother. 

That’s not the world we live in. But I think it may be the real one.

In the cave, we stood in the nothingness. It was beyond simple darkness, eons past it. 

Bats whizzed around our heads, dangerously close. 

Then one of the girls, bored of our antics, turned her flashlight back on. Light exploded on the face of the deep and we were all reborn as flesh beings.

The other volunteers and I all wanted to spend more time in the darkness and insisted on turning our lights off a few more times before leaving. All of us were like kids in a candy store, and I think we probably all would have stayed there for hours if we could have.

After leaving the cave we surfaced on the other side of the mountain, into a yellow-green bamboo forest washed with sunlight. We clambered over steep rocks and eventually reached a viewpoint where we could see over the entirety of our little temporary home, this little village in the center of Thailand we had all chanced upon. Behind us, paths stretched into the lush green wild; the cries of an unidentifiable echoed from the distant depths of the jungle. 

I think a lot about Plato’s allegory of the cave, that story that says that all we think we see and sense in the world around us is just shadows dancing on the walls of a cave, and the real world is outside, if only we could walk out and see it. 

In order to see shadows there must be light. What if the way out of the cave isn’t away into the sunshine? What if it is further into the darkness? What if it means we must turn off our lights, and relinquish our desire to see and form images and protect ourselves and separate ourselves from the infinite?

As we headed home, I felt grateful to have spent the day out in nature, which always reminds me of what’s true. Grateful to have been in touch with timescales beyond the scope of my own life. Timescales that turn on and on regardless of what we do. 

Long before I was here and long after I am gone the droplets will still fall inside that cave, slowly gathering together until they become something new — something that appears solid but that is really the process of countless tiny movements. That’s what we are, according to Buddhism. We appear solid but are really collections of tiny shifts and changes. In reality, in this world, nothing is permanent, everything is ephemeral. 

Maybe in the world where we were made of light, that’s where everything lasts. I hope we’re going there.

I find myself very moved by one section of our chanting sessions each night — the metta session, where we pray all beings are liberated from suffering, that all beings reach nibbana.

In meditation, you can also practice this. It mostly involves thinking, May all beings be free. May all beings be happy. You start with yourself: May I be free, may I be happy. Then you expand to those in your circle. Then beyond, finally ending with your enemies. May all beings be free. May all beings be happy. May all beings be at peace. 

I hope we all are liberated from suffering someday. May we all remember our true nature, our true light or our complete darkness that is so dark it doesn’t even suffer from any kind of absence of light. Here’s to doing our best, living as best we can, until that day arrives.