and shaping his mouth in an O of surprise, trying to convince his opponent that he was already beaten, the fight was over. There was a deadly finality to his kicks, but Steve was unconvinced and fought him tough, pressuring him, and at the start of the third round bum-rushed him with a few elbows and caught him with a knee to the head and knocked his ass flat out. It was a good thing, too, because there was no way Steve was going to win a decision—not against a Thai ex-champion who was kicking well and stealing rounds on the queen’s birthday.
I was sitting next to Bart and shook his hand afterward and said, “Well, that went pretty well.” He nodded. “It almost didn’t,” he said. “He was here without me for a few hours, and he was feeling really badly so his [Thai] trainer took him to a store for some Gatorade—and when I heard that, I nearly walked away, because if he’d started in on that he would have felt better, and about fifteen minutes into the fight he would have crashed horribly.” Steve had luckily waited for Bart and kept to the regimen.
I had Bart give me the whole rundown as we sat there and waited for the crowds to diminish. “Well, normally I’d take all the salt out of his diet about two days before the weigh-in, but in this case, we didn’t have time, so I used a potassium-sparing diuretic. Sodium holds water in the skin, and potassium holds water in the muscles, and we don’t want to touch that muscle—the heart, after all, is a muscle. You know that steroids aren’t banned from bodybuilding shows—just diuretics. Too dangerous.
“Now, everyone is panicking in the morning, when Steve still weighs seventy-six kilos, but it was just the start of the process. Basically, Steve had to piss all the water out of his system, out of his skin, and if he stops pissing, you have to make him start again, by giving him water, which seems counterintuitive. Get him flowing, and his body starts flushing, and overflushes, without touching the water in his muscles. He made seventy-two kilos for the weigh-in. The trick is putting it back in; he’s dehydrated and needs electrolytes, and he feels like crap.
“Every half hour I’d ask him how he was feeling, and slowly put the electrolytes and carbs back in him. Don’t give him anything high in sugar—he’ll spike his insulin and then he’ll crash—and in the beginning nothing with salt, only an hour before the fight. It’ll help him hydrate. I gave Steve potato chips: salts, fats, and carbohydrates. As we got closer to the fight, more sugary foods, chocolate bars, electrolyte drinks, an apple. He was feeling pretty bad until about an hour before the fight, and then he started coming back. But you saw how he maintained.”
With his composure and his prophecy, Bart had secured Philip’s trust. It was all the more impressive because Steve had not been highly touted going into the match. In the end, though, it was Steve who did it. He showed tremendous heart, and he obviously had been in excellent shape. Two weeks earlier, he had fought for free, just to get a fight, and now he was a name. Now he had a belt. Bart had gotten him there, had put him in the right position, but Steve had made it happen.
When I had first come to Thailand, Apidej, my teacher, used to meditate sometimes after training. He’d sit alone in the quiet ring cross-legged, with his eyes closed and his hands neatly in his lap, for ten or twenty minutes. The young Thai fighters would roll their eyes and shake their heads, but you couldn’t really do that to a guy who’d won more muay Thai titles than anyone else in history. He’d been doing something right. When I asked him about it, he said meditation had been very helpful to him before fights, to see everything an opponent might try to do.
I was still waiting on word from Myanmar and hadn’t heard anything—about either training or fighting. In the meantime, I thought I should examine meditation to some degree. In Thailand, nearly every male will spend a rainy season at a temple at some point. It’s a part of Buddhism. Beya spoke wistfully of becoming a monk, once his fighting career was over. It was what he wanted more than anything. Many of the Japanese martial arts have a meditation component, the Zen. Apidej said it had helped his concentration, and maybe it could help mine. I knew from Virgil how important concentration could be.
I found a somewhat famous meditation center far in the north, called Wat Thaton, near Chiang Rai, close to the Myanmar border. The wat practiced vipassana meditation, although I couldn’t have told you what that meant. I knew you were supposed to be silent the whole time. That sounded like a challenge. Which led me to Chiang Rai and being picked up by a monk, Panyavudo, from the temple, who spoke perfect English, and a driver, Sukhit. Panyavudo asked me if I wanted to take a tour of the Golden Triangle. If I would pay for gas, we could do one.
“Sure,” I said.
It was good just to be out of the oppressive heat and grit of Bangkok, healing for the heart to be out in clean air and the countryside, with the jungle dark dull green on all sides and rounded hills and mountains rising around us. We drove through a series of towns and wandered the grounds of the ancient wats; it was interesting being the walking companion of a monk in orange robes. The Thais were respectful and the farang curious and staring.
Panyavudo was a young man, maybe thirty-five, small and slender with an acne-scarred face, a pleasant smile, and thick glasses. He began to fill me in on some of the basic tenets of Buddhism. He had been ordained about six years before, and briefly disrobed (become a layperson) for two months to sort out some family troubles. He had an eagerness to please that was touching, and a tremendous amount of nervous energy. We walked around on ancient wat that was slowly being reclaimed by the jungle, and he stepped carefully around ants on the ground, stopping to pay respects to the chedi, the big stone column or cone with the Buddhist relics inside. We looked over the rows of amulets and statues for sale; grassroots Buddhism in Thailand has a strong current of animism, and there is a thriving trade in amulets, charms, and lucky statues.
Back in the car, competing with the roar of the windows, I explained myself and the book I was writing to Panyavudo by saying briefly, “I don’t want to hurt anybody. I just enjoy the action and striving.” I wondered if that was true.
We drove up along the Mekong, a broad brown eel with its tiny ripples like scales in the humid sun. More temples and shrines, and then a brief stop at the Myanmar border. Panyavudo walked frenetically—he would have been right at home in New York—and I realized that this was a real treat for him. He got to leave the temple every two months, and he wanted to look around. His ankles were strangely black and blue, and I wondered why.
Back in the car and driving to the wat, I asked him about meditation and what I was going to learn. “You become aware of the processes of the body and mind,” he said. “By becoming aware, you can understand that there is no ownership of body or mind, that thoughts are just illusions, and that suffering can be overcome.” Sounds good, I thought, and leaned back and watched the green hills roll by and become more mountainous as we approached Wat Thaton. We turned in through some massive gates and wound up past lower temples and outbuildings (the wat exists on nine levels on the mountain) until we reached the Meditation Center. It was dark, and Panyavudo showed me to my little cabin and said he would see me in the morning. No computers, no cell phones, no reading. Nothing but meditation and reflection, eating and sleeping.
The cabins for the meditators were small white cottages set on stilts on the steep hills, surrounded by thick jungle, with one room and a little toilet with a bucket and bowl for bathing. The bed was a one-inch pad on the floor; there were two folding chairs and about ten feet by fifteen feet of hardwood floor. There was a sense of reduced scale, a little like Tokyo—the light switch next to the door was at mid-thigh.
I fell asleep and awoke sometime later in the dark to the ringing of bells and then a sonorous, amplified nasal chanting that went on for at least an hour, and then I fell back asleep, and in the morning walked down to the Meditation Center, through a shaded road with about ten cottages like mine and dogs lying idly about.
The view was breathtaking, out over the low, flat floodplain with a river snaking idly across it, to some rows of high and mysterious mountains in the far distance, like a vision of ancient Asia from an emperor’s palace. And then I went inside and began meditating.
The kind of meditation practiced at Wat Thaton was dynamic (moving) vipassana (“to see things as they really are”), and the key concept is mindfulness. Through meditation, in which you focus entirely on the immediacy of the action, on the feeling of the action, you build up the strength of your mind and your awareness. As your awareness grows, you become better able to see your own thoughts for what they are: illusions. You become able to see things more clearly, to see the truth through feelings such as greed, jealousy, and even joy. This leads to an end of suffering and, eventually, maybe, enlightenment. I was down.
I started learning the various kinds of meditation; there are s