Lonely Planet describes McLeod Ganj as “a major centre for Buddhist scholarship”, or something like that. There was certainly no shortage of monks, nor of Westerners following them around hoping to absorb some of their austerity and self-discipline. The buildings of McLeod Ganj were papered with advertisements for a vast curriculum of Eastern culture and philosophy seminars, covering subjects like the Tibetan Book of the Dead, reiki and crystal therapy, Tai Chi, hypnosis, past-life analysis, and traditional Tibetan medicine. An “Introduction to Buddhism” retreat in the mountains overlooking McLeod Ganj caught my eye.

I mentioned this retreat to Sonam, and showed him the brochure. He politely laughed at my trepidation. While ten days of hauling myself out of bed at 6 AM into the chilly mountain air for hours of meditation, menial labour, and chanting wasn’t exactly appealing, Sonam had survived seventeen years of this, and seemed to think it no big deal.

I had a little experience with meditation, and found it to be worthwhile the few times I’d managed to sit still. But my experiments typically ended with the frustrated acceptance of my fate as a fidgeter. As for Buddhism, I barely understood a thing about it. Might I be willing to try one last kick at the can?

After a few days of deliberation, I realized there was no reason to drag my feet. I could always leave if I didn’t like it.

So I said goodbye to the JJI Cafe gang and began the trek up the mountain, along a steep path of monasteries and guest houses and packs of sleeping monkeys at the roadside, arriving at the Tushita Meditation Centre coated in a layer of sweat. My fears appeared silly to me at that moment, as fears always do once you’ve overcome them.

What follows is my account of these ten days.

Day 1

More of a half-day really, for registration and administration and such. We fill out our paperwork and take our seat in the spotless meditation hall underneath a giant, golden Buddha. The walls are hung with thangkas of the Tibetan Buddhist pantheon: Shakyamuni, Chenrezig, and a stunning Green Tara.

The retreat starts with a Q&A and introduction session in the main meditation hall (or “gompa”). The group is around forty people, mostly Europeans but some North Americans as well, including a large group of teenagers on an exchange program from America.

After going around the circle for introductions, they show us to our quarters. I was to share a room with two of the American kids, and a French guy with a woolly beard, who in his introduction had said he lives in Mali (”in the forest”) and studies Shamanism there. In fact he had Shamanistic tattoos on his temples and when he was changing clothes for bed I saw a strange celestial diagram tattooed on his back.

The retreat follows a strict schedule. Morning bell at 6 AM, followed by morning meditation. Breakfast, then a teaching, yoga. Lunch, more teaching, more meditations. Then a small supper, one more meditation, and then bedtime. Short periods of “free time” scattered throughout.

Also, the rule of “noble silence”–no talking and no communication, even visual, except at specified times–was in effect throughout.

Noble silence begins at bedtime.

Day 2

The morning bell rings, and that means it’s meditation time. We file into the gompa bleary-eyed and confused, and take our cushions noisily. The meditation instructor, a sprightly Aussie named Cory, shows us the basics of sitting in the half- and full-lotus positions. The idea is to use the knees and spine as legs of a tripod, with one foot on top of the opposite thigh, thus placing no undue stress on the ankles or circulatory system.

I try the half-lotus with some success at first, making it through a good twenty minutes barely moving a muscle, though it could scarcely be called “meditation”–within minutes, pain flowed into my legs, and my thoughts followed.

Cory rings a bell to commemorate the end of the forty-five minute session, and everyone immediately expels sighs of relief. A chorus of cracking backs and knees is heard throughout the gompa.

We file downstairs for a breakfast of rice porridge, bananas, and delicious Tibetan bread, taken in total silence. The American kids all sit at the same table and communicate to each other with gazes and giggles. Nobody else makes eye contact.

We file back into the gompa for the first teaching, the meat of this “Introduction to Buddhism” retreat. The class stands up (a Buddhist show of respect) as a tall monk enters the room in saffron robes, our teacher. He is an American monk with a smile as wide as the moon. Cory had called him “Bob” but the name given him was “Lobsang”, a Tibetan name. He looks my age and has an unmistakable glow about him.

Lobsang sits on a meditation cushion at the head of the class and lectures us, on this first day, about “disturbing emotions”, and the Four Seals of the Dharma:

1. All compounded things and phenomena are impermanent.
2. All emotions are painful.
3. All phenomena are empty; they are without inherent existence.
4. Nirvana is peace.

Apparently, these are the four criteria for Buddhism. If you believe these four items, you are a Buddhist; otherwise, you’re not.

Lobsang is a terrific lecturer, moving effortlessly between detail and generality, and answering questions with aplomb (we were allowed to break silence during teachings). The discussion is lively and stimulating. He is simply incredible.

So far, so good. No mind-control tricks yet. I’ve never been much interested in Buddhism per se; to me, meditation is the most compelling part of the practice, and meditation doesn’t require much intellectualization. But I can’t say I’d given Buddhism a fair shot, either. The few books I’d read confused me greatly with their terse prose and aphoristic style, and a simplicity of outlook that was almost impenetrable. Like everyone else in here, I wonder how capable am I to believe in it. My mentality is that of a lawyer looking to find a slip-up in the available evidence, and I suspect I’m not alone.

For example, Lobsang and the other instructors start each session with three prostrations to the shrine at the head of the class. They don’t ask us to prostrate three times. But some of the students do, anyway. I’ll buy that these rituals help put you in the mood. But are they the only way? The answer is no, says Lobsang. So could I get in the mood by some other method like, say, listening to Russian techno music? Sure, he says, if it works for you. At what point, then, am I no longer practicing Buddhism but instead some other thing? That question, in various guises, comes up in every teaching. It seems that the primary question in most minds (including mine) is how many of the “traditional” customs we can slough off without losing the core of the philosophy.

Afterwards, we are ready to go outside to do some yoga. Men and women are separated, and us men are put through the wringer by a Dutch ex-soldier who volunteered as the teacher. We hold our power asanas a little too long, run a little too hard, and by the end, most of us can barely stand up from our Corpse Pose (”Shava-asana”).

Lunch features excellent, temporary-pleasure samosas, daal, rice, and dessert. The food here is just as good as anything you’d get in town. Never let the fear of bad food put you off a Buddhist retreat.

At the evening meditation, my inexperience starts to reveal itself. Within minutes of sitting on the cushion, my right knee and hip throb with pain. I’ve done some meditation before, but never longer than half an hour, and certainly not several times a day. Cory rings the bell and I stand up, legs quivering, and I hobble out of the gompa, not feeling anything like a bodhisattva.

Day 3

The solution, the instructor tells me, is to “observe the pain”. Observe it doing what? I asked. Turning my knee into goop? Observing, he says, is not the same as experiencing, for experiencing includes your reaction to the stimulus. To observe, you must instead restrain your body’s instinctual response to the pain, such as wincing or shifting positions, and instead watch that pain. Study it, observe its impermanence.

Well, screw that. My right femur was about to snap in half. Isn’t there a point where the pain is just too great to hold it at bay?

Sure, he says. But it’s only a forty-five minute session, and you’re not going to injure yourself. Just try playing with the pain.

Admittedly, there was something to this idea, for I occasionally lost track of the pain. Where’d it go? My mind would drift elsewhere, and as a result I’d stop noticing the pain in my knee. Only when I remembered the pain did it start to hurt again. “Shouldn’t you be in pain right now?” my mind seemed to ask. “Here you go,” my body obliged.

I have to think about this some more.

Day 4

Forest Man has been waking up at 4 AM every day and heading off God knows where. The world of McLeod Ganj seems far away.

No matter what happens during meditation, we can always count on a monkey attack. I’ve learned to regard monkeys as Satan’s minions, vessels of pure, undiluted evil. Their organized raids on North Indian towns call to mind the sack of Rome, degenerates trying to spread their culture and ideals, shrieking of revolution. The trees rustle in the distance as we take our seats on the cushions. By the time all eyes are shut in the gompa, hordes of marauding monkeys, sensing their opportunity at last, appear from the treetops like phantoms, swinging from branches onto the drainpipes and eavestroughs in single file, the babies following the mother, the mother following the chief. Tramping around on the tin rooftop, they wail in righteous contempt of the civilization under their feet. It is impossible not to look out the window while this is happening, and even harder not to snicker. Damn them.

The American kids have given up on the “noble silence” thing, and are now passing written notes around and taking long, clandestine walks down to the tea shop in their free time. In the other students, there is palpable irritation.

Day 5

Each of us was given a “karma job” at the start of the course, a daily chore to keep us humble. Some people had to dishes, others scrubbed johns or swept walkways. My job was to teach English to a resident monk for 45 minutes a day, much like I had with Sonam. But the monk has only been around one day of the four so far. I guess monk schedules are just as busy as anybody’s. In spite of the lovey, let’s-everyone-pitch-in atmosphere here, I can’t help but feel good to be relieved of the duty, because that means more free time.

I spent most of my free time reading books on Buddhism from the Tushita library. I grew to like Nagarjuna, Mayahana Buddhism’s first “scholar” of the 3rd century AD, the best. He is fond of writing things like:

Life is no different from nirvana
Nirvana no different from life
Life’s horizons are nirvana’s
The two are exactly the same.

and

How can seed, empty of mangos
create mangos?
How can seed, not empty of mangos
create mangos?

Buddhism has always positioned itself as a religion supposedly based on personal experience, not dogma, and it makes no effort to resist scientific inquiry (The Dalai Lama: “The contemplative method, as developed by Buddhism, is an empirical use of introspection, sustained by rigorous training in technique and robust testing of the reliability of experience.”). I’ll buy that.

But today, on his last day of teaching us, Lobsang has been straying into the more esoteric strata of the Tibetan tradition: hell-realms and hungry ghosts, the Eight Leisures and the Ten Endowments, mundane and super-mundane paths. He lectures with the same enthusiasm as on day one, but my attention is becoming fractured. I can relate to disturbing emotions and craving, but fall short when it comes to obscure Tibetan mythology.

What makes Lobsang a good teacher is that he anticipates all our suspicions and doubts, because he knows the inner lawyer in us all. He knows that if he posits something called “hell-realms”, some European is going to demand evidence of “hell-realms”, or at least a reasonable explanation. There is a tendency—perhaps Western, perhaps not—for students learning new material to probe the logical boundaries of that material with an assault of “what-if” questions, or demands for proof. All this is very good, and in fact Buddhist scholarship demands it. Lobsang punts a few times, offering these things up as traditions of Tibetan Buddhism rather than laws. He repeated a few times that he was only presenting the material as it is, and wasn’t “trying to convert anyone.” The lions are, for the time being, sated.

Questions nag at me, too. For example, the sheer amount of numerical classification in Buddhism boggles the mind: the Eightfold Path and the Four Noble Truths and the Three Poisons and Nine Stages of Mental Abiding. On and on it goes. I wonder how the gurus arrived at these numbers and not other numbers. Do these correspond with observed phenomena? Does the neurochemical state of someone in the sixth Bhumi differ from that of someone in the third?

For that matter, what does it mean to “believe” in hell-realms and hungry ghosts? How does a mere belief affect one’s life? If someone truly knows hell-realms exist in the same way he knows standing in the rain will get him wet, he would take great care to avoid landing in a hell-realm just as he would remember to pack an umbrella. But a person might believe in hell-realms without behaving as if they actually exist (Daniel Dennett calls this “belief in belief”). Belief is an imperfect thing. What’s the use of believing in hell-realms without actually fearing hell-realms?

“Take a break for lunch,” Lobsang says, “and we’ll come back to talk some more. About suffering.”

Day 6

The morning gong rings. Forest Man is gone again, presumably to his native habitat.

In the afternoons, there is an activity called Discussion Groups, the one time we’re allowed to talk freely with each other. They divide us into groups of five and hand us topics to discuss. The phrasing of the topics tends to steer us towards the Buddhist answer (”Can suffering truly arise by means other than craving?”), though in the austere surroundings the answers seem to form on their own.

But as the groups are generally unsupervised, the conversation meanders everywhere. We talk of our motivations for taking the course, tell a few stories, compare our Tushita experiences thus far. I am surprised to hear that others had found “noble silence” the hardest part. For me it was the easiest. Eating rice porridge every morning was the hardest.

After lunch, I struggle to teach the monk how to make a “vvvv” and “ffff” sounds (i.e. labiodental fricative, voiced and unvoiced). He has no idea how to do it, and I have no idea how to show him.

I return to my room to the sight of a large monkey trying to jimmy the lock. He runs off. I couldn’t see his face; I’m sure he was laughing.

Day 7

Today is a special day, for we’re being taken into McLeod Ganj to see a lecture being given by His Holiness, Tenzin Gyatso the 14th Dalai Lama, in the temple across the road from his residence. We’re allowed to talk freely to everyone, including non-retreat heathens. Security is tight; our bags are searched to the bone and Indian men in plain clothes patrol the aisles of the temple with automatic rifles.

The Dalai Lama walks past our section, surrounded by an entourage of fellow monks and security guards. He stops for a few minutes, waving and smiling and touching our hands. He is downright giddy, and seems almost overwhelmed by his own joy. His handlers nudge him forward towards the stage. As he walks away I see him shake his head, as if to stir himself out of his happy stupor, in preparation for serious business.

His teaching is on the Three Principal Paths of Lama Tsongkhapa. He gives the teaching in Tibetan, and it is translated on the fly into English, Chinese, and Russian and broadcast over radio into our headphones. The translation is stilted and most of us barely understand a thing, but the serious Buddhists that are His Holiness’ intended audience hang on every word. It is a fun day and we novices are grateful just to be there.

Day 8

Eight days. If we measure days by number of showers taken, I’ve only been here two.

The last two full days of the retreat are devoted almost entirely to meditation. We are to do guided meditation, walking meditation, chanting meditation, vipassana meditation, and probably some other kinds too. Physically, I don’t do very well at this, but after the third or fourth session I notice a change in my mental state. The chatter filling my brain begins to recede. It doesn’t disappear, it just moves a little to the left. If I listen to it, it pulls me back into the cyclone, and I’m off again.

This feeling is new to me. I’ve had moments where the chatter has disappeared completely, but never where my mind is merely ignoring it as if it were a fly buzzing around.

They’ve got us doing other types of meditation now. Chanting, visualization, compassion, other guided meditations. Admittedly, I’ve ignored most of them, because they required a level of concentration that I simply do not possess. I can’t even sit still and listen to my breath; what makes you think I can visualize a bunch of Buddhas extinguishing flames with their fingers?

I’m beginning to feel like the definition of “meditation” could be expanded to include just about any human activity there is. Even the simplest meditation involves some direction of the will towards a stated end (in this case, watching the breath). In Hindu philosophy, yoga is considered more meditation than exercise. What about ultramarathon running? Or practicing the piano? Everything can be done meditatively, that is, with full awareness of the presence of distraction, disturbing emotions, and craving. Traditional meditation is a means of practicing this awareness, and so are all of Cory’s guided meditations. But it is not the only way.

Day 9

I teach the monk one last time. He is overly interested in learning the phrase “mashed potatoes”.

Instead of the evening meditation, we were given a multimedia presentation by a representative from an Australian NGO about some kind of global educational reform incorporating Buddhist ideals of peace, love, equality, etc. Forest Man stood and left the room right away; I wish I’d followed. The presentation was chock-a-block with the worst assortment of nauseating “do-gooder” tropes, including pictures of starving children, the music of Jack Johnson, and all the “think globally, act locally” bromides you could ask for. I’ve long felt that the dreamy progressive NGO-neverland is ripe territory for satire, and I tried to enjoy the presentation in that light, but it dragged on so long that most of us could barely muster a round of tepid applause at the end. Comments during the end-of-retreat feedback session were particularly harsh about this little interlude.

For our final “meditation”, we go down to the stupa in a clearing at the edge of the Tushita property and perform a Tibetan “candle ceremony”, which amounts to lighting a pile of candles, walking around the stupa (clockwise, of course), and thinking good things. Thankfully the instructors do not try to imbue it with much spiritual significance. The group leans on the mountainside, well above the reach of McLeod Ganj’s mosquito hordes, and we watch the sparkling stars. Someone gets the idea to start naming things to be grateful for, a kind of secular prayer, so the group takes turns enumerating their blessings and remembrances aloud, veering ever closer to the banal with every passing plea but only truly attaining it with treacly mock narratives of motherless children and elderly rotting away in nursing homes. I see Forest Man slink off immediately. I wonder if there might be Enlightened beings walking amongst us after all.

Day 10

Any remaining pretense of noble silence is now gone. The only activity of note today is the picnic lunch, where we’ll peel off the veneer of seriousness and start living again. We mingle freely, and I finally get to meet everyone. Plans for dinner are discussed, emails exchanged. The American kids can’t wait to get out of this place and back to McLeod. Forest Man turns out to be a really nice guy. The NGO woman from last night is there, and we’ve all forgiven her by now, for we are free at last.

So was it worth it? I suppose even making it through the ten days counts as an accomplishment. The retreat didn’t feel like work. It felt more like a vacation, a vacation from me, from the immediacy of my thoughts, my habits, and my opinions (”Opinions are absurd,” says Nagarjuna). Having your mental life scheduled out in minute detail by someone else is an oddly liberating feeling. There’s no need to worry about anything because your life has no scope beyond the borders of the Tushita centre. Removed from the pressure of unending external stimulus, existence takes on a relieving determinism, quieting the mind and bringing into focus the irrationalities we all so foolishly carry along with us.

I walked the slope down into McLeod, not with a new sense of purpose, not with a rekindled joie de vivre or appetite for world conquest, but with a sort of passive stupor that felt a lot like immediate experience of life.

And then I realized I forgot my damned shoes under the bed, and had to walk all the way back up. So much for mindfulness.

JJI Cafe became our usual hangout. Each new day started with a JJI Special (eggs, Tibetan bread, stir-fried vegetables, and hot chai) and ended with a Tibetan thentuk or momo soup at the very same table, overlooking the valley. At night we’d go downstairs to the owner’s apartment to watch a movie or have a jam session (everyone in Dharamsala seems to be a musician).

One day some friends brought along a monk named Sonam, which means “fortunate one” in Tibetan. He wore a maroon fleece over his robes, with big floppy sandals, and a messenger bag filled with books. Sonam shook my hand silently, turning the corner of his mouth up into a smile. He was looking for a private English tutor. Teaching engagements in Dharamsala are fairly ad hoc, staffed by itinerant backpackers in their spare time. No time commitments, no curriculum, no obligations. Just sit with the monks and talk.

I was tired of travel already. Not tired of Asia but of moving around so much—a day or two in each town, see the sights and get out. Travelling this way allowed me to cover a lot of ground and keep my days busy, but it had become a little tedious. I certainly was not so smitten with sightseeing that I could justify quitting my job and hopping on the first flight overseas for it. Any traveller will tell you that sightseeing is only the backdrop; the main course is everything else.

I came to appreciate the cardinal rule of travel: don’t overplan (that is, if you plan at all). Most fellow backpackers I’d met in India had no idea what they were doing, no direction whatsoever, claiming to be in India just “to exist for a while” (you hear that phrase a lot). India is the perfect country for drifters; it’s cheap, slow, and endless. Plus they give you a six-month visa, renewable ad infinitum at the Indian embassy in nearby Kathmandu.

So I said Yes to staying in Dharamsala and teaching Sonam for a while. Why not.

We were to meet daily on the patio of Nick’s Restaurant over a pot of ginger-lemon tea, and read from the books in his messenger bag: a children’s adaptation of Siddhartha, a grammar book, some pro-Tibet political pamphlets, and several notebooks filled with assorted English phrases, all given him by previous teachers.

At our first meeting and I asked him some basic questions. He spoke enough English to make conversation. He was born in a small village in the east of Tibet and had come to India when he was eight years old via the familiar Himalayan hell-passage, suffering severe frostbite from which it took him months to recover. He spent the next seventeen years in a monastery in Karnataka state in south India, studying the Tibetan canon and meditating in the sweltering heat, rising at 4:30 AM each day for hours of tedious morning chanting, taking breakfast and lunch but no dinner. He had met the Dalai Lama eight times, and spoke of him like an old buddy. Sonam was twenty-eight years old; he and I were born only eight days apart. Aside from us both now being in McLeod Ganj at the same time, our lives had been different in every imaginable way.

Sonam had a curious demeanour. While I was eager to accommodate him and make him feel comfortable, he watched me with some good-natured suspicion. Rapport was difficult; he smiled at everything. He understood my words, but not how I said things. Even the simplest Western conversations have complexities that never really occurred to me until I was presented with this blank slate.

He picked up a spoon, slowly, carrying it without any wasted movement to the tea glass, stirring it three times, then pulling it out and laying it precisely on a napkin. All his movements were careful and deliberate. Grasping the rim of the glass with three fingers and raising it to his mouth, he sipped perfectly, and then set the glass down on the exact same spot, and turned the glass clockwise to face him. He turned each notebook page with similar care, easing each page gently over the metal binding, and wrote with the smoothest hand, even in English (Tibetan uses a different script, as does Hindi, both of which he spoke fluently).

I offered him a bite of my brownie (Nick’s Restaurant is famous for them), and he firmly shoved the plate away with a smile. Always with a smile. It would appear offering sweets to a monk is a faux-pas. I began to feel like my cordial affectations were indecipherable to him. Why would I give a brownie to a monk? I felt like a fool.

When I asked him what his long-term plans were, he said, learn English. Nothing could happen until he learned English, and his plan was to spend all his time learning English.

“That’s all?”

“Yes.”

He said this in a way that made me the silly one. A monk living in poverty could be perfectly happy with his life the way it is, he was telling me. The cultural gap between us yawned. The idea of having such genuine and bone-simple conceptions of one’s future just sent my head spinning.

My mind now erased of good conversation topics, we moved on to the reading. He preferred Siddhartha so he opened it to the appropriate page. An American lady gave him this book, he said. I saw her address in Georgia written in his notebook, under the words “SONOM, YOU ROCK!” [sic]

“She crazy girl, very loud” he said, with a laugh.

He wanted me to read each chapter first, out loud, and then he would follow, and he’d ask about the words he didn’t know and I’d draw him a picture or explain it in simpler terms and he’d spend the rest of the session blurting out these words at odd times, sometimes scribbling them on his hand, getting me to re-pronounce them, over and over. Sonam practiced English every night by himself, reading each page out loud ten times in a row.

We read a chapter of Siddhartha per day. After two or three sessions I could see that he didn’t understand a word of it. I figured every Buddhist monk knew the Siddhartha story but he wasn’t following a thing, didn’t know what a naga was or why the Prince fled his father’s palace.

It didn’t take us long to become friends. At the end of every session he always tried to pay for the tea without me noticing. It became a little contest between us (I knew that he had almost no money, so we didn’t get carried away). He once asked me how much it was costing me to travel around the world. I told him the amount I had saved up, and he could not believe the number. Couldn’t even understand the number; he’d never heard of a person having a sum of money that large. What strange place did I come from? What was my life like back home? He wanted to know everything, but he hadn’t the slightest interest in trading places with me. There was only one place in the world he wanted to be other than Dharamsala, he said, and that was Tibet.

He drew me a little floor plan of the apartment he shares with three others: one small room, one hot plate, and enough floor space for all to sleep, but no bathroom. Instead, they walked to the other end of McLeod Ganj to use the public toilet (yes, Indian public toilets). His living expenses were about thirty dollars per month. He cooked all his own food, and showered once in a while at a friend’s place. And he was as happy as could be.

I saw Sonam often around McLeod Ganj, and he walked along the road with me, ignoring the beggars as I did, asking me about my day and how long I was staying. He always wanted to know how long I was staying in Dharamsala. Sonam was always laughing, except when the topic was my departure, when he became very serious. In fact he’d been asking me for weeks, always trying to figure out exactly how long we had left.

The day before I left McLeod Ganj, Sonam stood up from the table and looked me in the eye. He produced a white scarf, and put it around my neck. He then knelt, put his head down reverently, and handed me a beaded bracelet, a “mala” used in Tibetan chanting. He said something in Tibetan, stood up, gave a prayer-bow, and thanked me for helping him with his English. Stunned, I could only slide the mala on my wrist with a smile and thank him quietly. He was clearly dismayed that I was leaving, and frankly, so was I.

Perhaps my definitive memory of Sonam was when someone in our group got a laugh by teaching him a kind of “gangsta” hand gesture. You make a gun with your two fingers and thumb and flick your wrist while making the appropriate goofy facial expression and you say “Yo!” Sonam took this gesture very seriously. He asked us over and over to show him how to do it. And for the rest of the day, whenever I looked over at him, there he was, this maroon-clad, shaven-headed monk from east Tibet, studiously practicing the gangsta hand gesture to nobody, out loud, ten times in a row.