l with the shaved head. All the monks shave their heads together on every full moon, and the Thai Buddhist monks also shave their eyebrows; they are the only ones who do this. The story goes that it shows loyalty to the king. Back in the ancient days in Ayuthaya, the old capital of Siam, the monks found out that a Burmese spy was coming disguised as a monk, and so they all shaved their eyebrows so the spy, not knowing about it, would be revealed. Another example of the tremendous popularity of the monarchy in Thailand.
Ajahn was born in 1949 (“the year the Communists took over China”) to Laotian immigrants living in Thailand, a farming family. He showed promise and his mother worked hard to get him an education, and he lived with his uncle at a soldier’s camp. His uncle would beat him every day, and he saw that the life of a soldier “had no value.” He won a scholarship to a famous school and lived there and in the temple for two years but didn’t become a monk. He didn’t like monks. He thought the meditators were locked up in their own minds, ignoring the world, something I was feeling as well. He eventually went to a famous university for agriculture and animal husbandry, and he “lost awareness” of the sin of taking any life. He was elected student council president and led the students in a massive demonstration over some complicated tuition changes, and even met with the then dictator of Thailand in parliament. He was subsequently kicked out for embarrassing the university. The student body collected money to send him away to finish his education overseas, but instead he joined the Communist Party—because he was angry. He became an important figure in the underground, organizing in high schools and universities. There were power struggles and a coup d’état in Thailand, and in 1976 he was forced into hiding and spent years in the forests, as a deputy political commander of the Thai Communist Party, fighting and hiding. “I had so many names,” he said, laughing, when I asked what his real name was. In those days he was Somdet.
Later, the international movement for communism died down, and China changed its policy. The Thai government allowed the former illegals to return with amnesty, and so he came back, and even went to Australia. He gave me a secret smile and said, “I have a joke: I am a failed animal husband and farmer, and a failed in the business and a failed revolutionary, so now I am a Buddhist monk, where they cannot fire me!”
He had an equally tortuous path as a monk, but finally, after a seventeen-day intense retreat where the meditation went on for thirteen hours a day without stopping, he realized that the million different thoughts weren’t real; the walking was real. He has worked with HIV patients and built temples and had visions of an interfaith meditation center, and he was reading a lot about Tibetan concepts of death and dying. He had even thought he might be a holy man once, but now he just wanted to teach meditation everywhere and help people find the truth. His bluntness and lack of mysticism were refreshing, and he delighted in poking fun at mystics.
We had a few dialogues at night, over tea, sometimes joined by Britta and then another foreigner, a young man from Singapore, who came later. The dialogues wandered, and at times it was hard to understand Ajahn’s heavy accent, but his good nature was encouraging. When I first met him, he mentioned that he had read in the paper that a man had been in an accident and lost his legs, and his eyes teared up instantly, brimming with compassion.
It was rainy season, “the Wet,” and although Bangkok was dry, the north wasn’t. The rains came often, first with a breeze and then a wind rushing in the trees, swirling and threshing the foliage in ponderous whipping circles, and the sky cooled and darkened. Sometimes there was thunder, but sometimes not, just the spattering that might turn into a real barnstorming downpour, or it might stay at a steady patter for hours, dripping among the broad heavy leaves.
Alone in my room, with heightened senses, I could hear the lizards on the roof as they patrolled the tops of the windows for insects lured by the light. Sometimes I would catch very clear rock or Thai pop music wafting through my windows, and at first I thought it was from the town below. Man, someone is pumping that crap up, I thought. One day, when I was just finishing a thirty-minute seated stint, in started the techno, and I burst outside, looking for the source, and found it was coming from the basement of my cottage. I banged on the door but received no answer. Later, when I spoke to Ajahn about it, he was contrite, and said, “Oh, yes, that’s a monk, he’s my cousin.”
“Can you ask him to use headphones or something?”
Ajahn gave me a long look. “We’ll move you,” he said finally. “He’s a little crazy.”
If I ever do a stand-up routine about living in a Buddhist meditation retreat in northern Thailand, it will certainly have a bit called “The Monk in My Basement.” Another monk, a Thai who had been to college in Indiana, fell into step with me a day later and commiserated. “That’s too bad, to disturb you like that,” he said. “Here you are to be in isolation and he’s blasting techno. What the fuck, huh?”
On the fourth day, after evening chanting, when everyone was standing slowly to start walking, Panyavudo came across the hall to me and asked directly, “Have you ever had black magic practiced on you?” in the manner of asking an obvious drunk, “Have you been drinking?”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“I can see these red bands around your chest, right here over your ribs,” and he motioned with his hands right over my damaged ribs. I was fairly shocked.
My ribs had been bugging me, and perhaps he had seen me massaging them, but I certainly hadn’t mentioned them to anyone.
He led me to a quiet corner, where I sat down, and he sat behind me with his feet against my back and directed energy through me to loosen the bonds, and who knows? Maybe I felt better.
Afterward he said, “You have to be careful. Sometimes a fighter will be given something to eat or drink, or a curse may be put on him several days before a fight.” Had I eaten something that made me feel funny? Common practice in Thailand.
It took some time, but I eventually got Panyavudo to talk to me about black magic. There are certain monks who do magic, who understand it and work to counteract the bad magic they find, the ones who make blessed amulets and who work with the more superstitious Thai people. Apparently, Panyavudo was one of them. Ajahn Suthep, emphatically, was not. He would laugh, then tell a story of a famous magic monk who made powerful charms, “but he still go to the hospital when he is sick. Why? He still gonna die. I don’t believe.” Ajahn would giggle like a fat happy kid.
Panyavudo had been told to ignore the magic, and he had tried to, for four years. Recently, he had decided that he had to embrace it, discover it, and then he could let it go and move on toward enlightenment. He felt that to understand it was now part of his duty, a very important concept for the monks.
“Magic is about intensity of concentration,” he said to me, his eyes blinking behind thick glasses (but not as thick as Ajahn’s). A practitioner can concentrate, find you mentally, and affect your mind with alien thoughts. The way to combat this is with awareness, with mindfulness, and you can keep your mind strong and able to defend itself, to recognize thoughts that are yours and thoughts that may have been planted.
“You must not give out your time of birth to anyone,” he said, as apparently that will help them locate you. To counteract, you must be aware and know yourself, and trust your feelings. If someone hands you something to eat, feel it for a few minutes, feel the vibe of it.
He said that my practicing tai chi would help, as would meditation and awareness. I could also try “compassion meditation,” where you reflect good thoughts on people you love, people you like, people who are neutral to you, and people you dislike. Keep it to the same sex. “But not dead people, because that can bring spirits around.” The pain may be residue of spirits that have been injured—the spirits of the ants I washed off my toilet, for instance, or the spirit of someone whom I have wronged. That last got me thinking.
“Negative forces can come back to us, and we have eighty years of life [he said that so carelessly], so be careful, because it can accumulate and hurt you. Give loving kindness.”
Panyavudo was an intelligent, educated man, who lived in the Netherlands and Germany between the ages of two and twenty-four and who had had import-export and parliamentary jobs in Bangkok. He was not a silly superstitious native; he’d been a part of the modern world.
He looked at me for a long time and then said, “There is a band of metal around your head, around your forehead, a narrow gold band,” and he gestured around his temples and around his head. “Does that mean anything to you?”
I shook my head.
“Well, you might want to look into that,” he said, and as always, gave me a huge smile. “You need to see