the spiritual side of fighting and self-defense, as well as the physical and mental. People train to build up the will to fight, and black magic can destroy that.”
By day six I had turned a corner of some kind, and my bouts of deep boredom were fading, because what is boredom? It’s just another feeling, just an emotion, just an illusion—it’s not real. Boredom is like the pain, it comes to show you the character of boredom itself. The pain arises to teach you about pain. Once I sat for forty-five minutes, and stopped more out of shock than out of pain. Ajahn, when he went into deep meditation, would sit for six and a half hours. My mindfulness was increasing, and I found it easier, could fall into it with more familiarity. Things did start to become clearer. I could see more angles on my thoughts—I was starting to see 360 degrees around all of my problems.
I also had adjusted to the lack of food, and the six hours of sleep, and felt energized and strong all day without the coffee crutch. In part, too, the contentment came from the lack of all the technological intrusions that had been part of my life, the endless electric hum of microchips that surrounded me. It was like being a little kid again. I rediscovered the ability to stare at clouds and trees for long periods of time. There was a sense that this could go on forever, but there was also the world calling outside my window, through the jungle. The wind would come winding and twisting through the thick trees and dense bamboo, the drops on the leaves. There was constant noise, the thrum of far-off engines, a scooter on the road, the wind, cicadas, the boys next door chattering in liquid Thai, solitary monks clumping past my window.
In the darkness on my tenth morning, I climbed into the car, back in my civilian dark clothes and out of my pure, simple whites that had been such a comfort, such an ease of mind to wear. I had deodorant on, and it stunk through my Bruce Lee T-shirt. All the chains and accessories of society—technology, money and credit cards, tickets and passports, and a friend’s borrowed cell phone: each heavier than the last. Ajahn invited me back to write a book about what he was doing, the meditation and the experiences of farang at different temples. I think he was inviting me in the sense that Buddhist monks sometimes invite laypeople to come and work with them, to build temples and so on, to build merit for themselves.
“Mindfulness can be brought to bear on everything, can be a part of everything, of your training, and of your fighting,” Ajahn told me. The monks had no trouble at all with the fact that I was a sometime fighter. “If you are mindful in boxing, then you can be aware and not trapped in a same movement, you can be formless, and formless cannot be beat—as long as you are strong inside and have your feet rooted,” Ajahn said. Virgil would have agreed with him.
As we wheeled through the misty countryside, past the tribal hill people in traditional garb walking alongside the highway, he turned from the front seat and said to me, “Mindfulness will help you see without illusion.”
I nodded and said, “Hemingway was all about writing the ‘true’ sentence,” almost to myself.
“The Old Man and the Sea,” he said to me, and smiled. “Good story.”
GAMENESS
A dog fight in the Philippines.
Paulo Filho, member of Brazilian Top Team, Brazil, December 2004.
But in the corrida, the matador is not exposed to physical and emotional damage by duty, or conscription—he is a volunteer, a true believer, a lover with his love. And there are no limits to love, it is quite merciless.
—A. L. Kennedy, On Bullfighting
I was lying awake in the heat and dark when the alarm went off. It was three-fifty a.m. I dressed, Tim knocked on my door, and we went quietly down the tiled halls, broad stairs, and through the lobby.
It was pitch-black and hot outside, not the roiling heat of the day but a friendly, swampy mush, the cooling sea not far off. We were on the outskirts of Pattaya, in Thailand, down near the gulf; and it was still the rainy season. The house dogs, disturbed as we left the hotel, rioted without ferocity. We clambered into the car.
Tim drove through the night, the low grass and jungle, to his farm, which was around the corner and down a rutted dirt road. We loaded Herbie into the crate after checking his weight. Herbie was dense, lean to the point of starvation, and muscular, a tawny red pit bull with a big head, a “head like a brick,” his co-owner, whom I’ll call Monty, said. Herbie was ecstatic to be off the chain, a dense ball of energy thrusting against his leash, tail lashing the air. He was an American pit bull, of course—serious dogmen wouldn’t dream of fighting anything else. Herbie was a decently bred dog, Tim knew his lineage back five or six generations, but today was his first fight, his first test. He was thought to be a good dog, if not a world beater.
Herbie was slightly above weight, a hundred grams or so, but a good shit and a piss would take care of that. “He drinks a lot of water,” muttered Tim in his broad Australian accent. “I’ve never had a dog do that. Usually, by the end, when they’re in condition, they don’t drink much.”
Tim CEK (Combat Elite Kennels, his personal group and the name he wanted me to use) was a bookish man in his early thirties, gray hair starting to belie his youthful face. He was half Thai and half Australian, and although he was perfectly fluent in both tongues, he was often mistaken for farang in Thailand. He was my guide to the dog world. He was the expert. He had about fifteen dogs, and he and Monty (a white British safety engineer) were co-owners of Herbie. “You’ll see yards where they have hundreds of dogs, but those dogs are all shit, and they don’t know what they’ve got. They’re just hoping to get lucky. You need to keep your yard small, with high-quality dogs, so you can understand what you have,” Tim said.
International dogfighting is a mixed bag of enthusiasts. Tim’s friend Ike X was a relaxed Asian man in his late thirties or forties who had been to Harvard and spent ten years as a cowboy in Montana. He was now basically a professional dogman. We didn’t talk about Harvard.
The weigh-in was for six o’clock. They wanted to fight the dogs early to avoid the heat of the day and also to limit the visibility to prying eyes: Dogfighting was illegal in Thailand, as it is in most places. The dogs were supposed to weigh 18 kilos, just under 40 pounds, and Tim’s opponent, Art, weighed his dog first. The dog (also an American pit bull) was meek and yellow, his tail whipped down between scrawny legs, and he weighed in at 17.9 kilos. They weighed the dog on a hanging electronic scale slung from a low beam, with a strap made from an old seatbelt cinched around the dog’s body, right underneath the forelegs. The dog hung there nearly upright, twisting idly, tail twitching slightly but otherwise still, eyes staring. He was a good-looking, friendly-faced dog with soft eyes.
The Captain, who fancied himself judge and referee (even though he was neither), was an older man of Afghan descent, a skipper in the Canadian merchant marine who had sixty years experience with dogs. He was a stickler for details, and his watch beeped urgently at six a.m. Herbie still hadn’t shat or pissed, and despite some vigorous walking, came in at 18.1 kilos. The Captain, with some satisfaction, gave Art the forfeit money.
When you agree to fight dogs, you set a weight, and if your dog doesn’t make the weight, you must pay forfeit money, maybe a quarter of the money you put up to fight, and then it is up to the opponent to decide if he still wants to fight.
The forfeit was twenty thousand baht (about five hundred dollars U.S.), and Tim was a little annoyed because he had given Art breaks before with weight; they had fought many times, and all he needed was ten minutes to get Herbie to void his bowels. Art was glad to give him more time, but Art’s partner took the money, and Tim said, “I’ll remember that.”
In the world of dogfighting, I found, there is a fanatical adherence to the rules. Honorable dogmen, good dogmen, have a very strict code of behavior, predicated on camaraderie and desire for fair play and a fair test of their dog. They look down on dogmen who are just in it for the money, trying to build a name for themselves and hyping their dogs out of proportion in order to sell pups. They are also secretive and incredibly tight-lipped, and word of mouth and reputation are everything.
The pit had been set up, the dogs were washed, and the handlers, Tim and Art, came out carrying their dogs like toddlers who had grown too big to be carried easily, legs dangling and awkward. They clambered into the pit, and huddled over their respective dogs in the corners. The pit was a simple wooden square, just a few feet high, and the opposite corners—the scratch lines—were supposed to be fourteen feet apart.
Suddenly, the moment arrives (the referee calls, “Face your dogs—release!”), and the dogs dash into each other like brown streaks, spinning arou