Meditating With the Buddhist Nuns in Banrai

Sunrise at the center

Written February 14th

I am sitting in a small temple. Miles and miles of fields stretch around me, rich with palm trees, sugarcane, and marijuana plants, laced with snakes and lizards and countless critters. 

Four Buddhist nuns wrapped in orange robes sit in front of me. All of them are cross-legged and silent. 

I am trying to focus on the now.

I have been staying at a Buddhist nunnery near the village of Banrai, Thailand for a week and a day now, meditating every day for forty-five minutes in the morning and thirty minutes in the night, and this is only the second time I’ve felt myself come close to something like presence. Even so, it only lasts a few moments before my thoughts begin to chatter away, but this time I’m trying to imagine them blowing away like incense smoke on the breeze of the fans that keep us all from sweating through our shirts. 

I breathe in. Breath is all that is real. The world outside disappears like smoke. My identity disappears. For a moment I am remembering something else — a fragment of a dream, a past life spent in some other field as some shepherd’s daughter, herding goats under a mountain — but that dissipates too. The past is smoke. The future is smoke.

All there is is now. 

For a moment, my mind clears, and I see it — the vast vistas that meditation can open up, that only true presence can conjure.

Then it’s gone and I feel my foot falling asleep, the familiar prickles a common enemy during my meditation sessions here.

I’ve read so many descriptions of meditation, enlightenment, and all forms of transcendence. I’ve studied scriptures, read up on the philosophy, and yet I’ve never even come close to taking the first actual step towards them, I think, until being here.

All there is is now.

Days here go like this: we awaken at 4:30 to the sound of a bell, then meditate. Then we go and help the nuns gather alms from the village, or clean the kitchen area, and then we prepare breakfast. 

There are five other volunteers staying here, and all of them, I can tell, are here for similar reasons. We are all at some kind of juncture, trying to figure out what’s next, and trying to understand what’s under the world of illusions we’ve all sensed and suffered from.

After breakfast there isn’t much structure. Sometimes Luangmae, a nun who lived in the United States for 20 years and speaks fluent English, will tutor us in the art of meditation, and sometimes we’ll have a Dhamma talk: an hours-long conversation with her about the nuances of Buddhist theory, philosophy, history, and so much else. Two days a week we tutor schoolchildren, and we also tutor the nuns in English.

The night is capped off with chanting and meditation from six to seven.

In between, it’s often too hot to do anything but sit at the table and read while the fan blows, so I did just that for most of the day today.

A friendly chicken underneath the shrine

During this meditation session, my mind swirls with the Buddha’s insights, but also with another’s words.

This is the kingdom.

That’s a quote from Sophie Strand’s The Madonna Secret, a retelling of the Gospels from Mary Magdalene’s perspective. 

This moment, on this Earth, is the promised land, Mary realizes near the end, after witnessing Jesus die on the cross.

Mary Magdalene is a mysterious figure, depicted briefly in the Bible as one of Jesus’s followers. She has been painted as a prostitute, and as Jesus’s wife.

In The Madonna Secret, she is indeed Jesus’s wife but she is also so much more. She is his equal, his partner in mysticism and healing, the divine feminine counterpart to his masculine essence.

In Strand’s retelling, Mary watches in horror as her husband’s overtakes him near the end, forcing him into delusions of grandeur that lead to his death. She sees that his and his followers’ actions will lead to cycles of healing and destruction.

She also sees, as he does, that the kingdom come that he speaks of is the moment. This moment. The Earth. In its chaos and destruction. She sees that nothing lasts, but everything is a part of everything else, and everything is reborn.

Today, in between researching Buddhism, I have been researching Mary Magdalene, including the Gospel of Mary, a text discovered in the 20th century that retells some of Mary’s story. Her insights are remarkably similar to the ones Buddha realized under his Bodhi tree two thousand years before. 

They all agree, it seems. All the ones who have really seen.

This is the kingdom.

So I am sitting cross-legged in this temple. I am trying to breathe. I am trying to focus on the now.

Thoughts of the future and past creep in but I imagine them as smoke.

My body feels alright now, but it has been in so much pain for most of the past meditations. My back is always aching, and my thoughts have been uncontrollable, overwhelming. Meditation has always been this way for me. I have never been able to quiet my mind. 

But Luangmae is clear that meditation is not actually about shutting off our thoughts. In fact, she has told us many times, if you are trying to stop thinking, you never will. Instead, meditation is about observing our thoughts neutrally, and realizing that we are not our thoughts. Just like we aren’t our body, or our pain, or anything else. We are actually not ourselves at all as there is no self.

The bell rings. We bow to the altar. While our eyes were closed, the sun sank below the mountains. Now a half-moon glows from above.

Walking back from the meditation, I think about how in The Madonna Secret, Strand’s Mary has a vision of a post-climate-apocalypse future. The Earth returned to nature after all the people have gone. The kingdom will come at last, but with no people.

The end goal of Buddhism is for everyone to escape the cycle of death and rebirth. To escape all this suffering. To not come back as anything with a mind at all. 

Perhaps, the goal is for the earth to simply be trees and wind and stone again — though with no mind to perceive it, it would also be nothing.

Maybe that is all we really are. Maybe that’s the garden. The breath of the wind over the stone. 

Nothing.

All our cities just shadows on the walls. 

I suspect this is the case; many great thinkers seem to agree. But I understand this only with my thinking mind. To really understand, I know I have to go into somewhere much deeper. Somewhere that will require abandoning my many attachments and desires and compulsions for something greater. 

Just before the meditation I walked around the beautiful plot of land where the nunnery rests, cradled amid smoke from the manmade fires that raze the nearby fields, taming the crops into submission. A pink whipped-cream sunset was spreading over the hills. I stopped to pet a little white cat who lives on the property. I wandered through some trees, heard the quiet peals of someone’s guitar that quickly grew dissonant and faded into silence.

I tried to focus on being where I am. Looked at the arms of the trees stretching upwards, mirroring the shape of our lungs. 

I have so much to do, so much to plan for the future.

But I’ve also been planning and trying to get to this place for years. Dreaming of it, imagining it. If I can’t be here, how can I be anywhere?

Then again I know it could all end at any time.

This is the kingdom. The emptiness that is the essence of everything. 

My mind understands, but my body doesn’t at all. 

I still have so many questions, but I won’t find answers outside of myself.

Part of me still thinks that all religion might just be a metaphor designed to get people to be kind to one another. I don’t know if that would make it more or less beautiful.

The bell rings at 4:30 AM. I will try again tomorrow.

(Scratch that — I won’t try, because trying is antithetical to this practice).

I will show up the best I can.

I will watch.

I will observe.

I will let my thoughts become dust.

I will remember that change is the only constant. Anything is possible at any time — great loss, or great healing, or great miracles.

I will close my eyes in darkness. When I open them I will see the sun.