Ingyinbin Journal: Pottery Making and Vipassana Practice

John, a meditator from New Zealand, spends extended periods in Ingyinbin each year, the home of the revered Webu Sayadaw and with his friend Ashin Mandala. This winter, he has decided to keep a journal, which he has kindly offered to share with us. His journal alternates between observation and poetry, between meditation practice and commentary about Burmese Buddhist society, from his learnings and his questions. The full collection of his musings can be found here.

1 February 

"Day trip to the pot-making factory Kyaukmyaung, near the Irrawaddy, west of Shwebo: 

Kyaukmyaung pottery: orange mounds of stone
crushed to fine dust, doused
& struck on the wheel: Vipassana.

Soon on to the Hanlin Museum commemorating the Pyu people’s civilisation, but before that the group is shown various artefacts and scrolls assembled in the upper monastery room occupied by the visiting Russian academic, researching nineteenth century Buddhist Sangha texts - co-incidentally the same person we met a couple of visits back in an ancient cave in the Sagayan hills where he was painstakingly taking photographs of images in the cave and appeared equally distracted. But Kyaukmyaung: a tiny aperture low at the rear of one of the five or six large brick kilns (each some 20 meters in length) allows us to view the fire capering over the pots, a wafting and deadly light. A worker feeds different grades of pre-cut firewood into another of the several kilns: one day to build the fire, having it burn for three, letting it cool a further three. The young woman who carries a few bricks at a time from a large pile of bricks wears cloth mittens, her clothes thick with dust. Children in the adjacent field containing piles of uncut logs carry and drop bits and pieces. In a bamboo chair, a worker, enjoying Uposata, watches a Burmese soap on the old tube television housed in a dusty box of wood. Women in yet another shed produce more than 50 small elegant clay pots each day: one shapes, taking only a few minutes per individual pot, while her companion spins the wheel in a regular motion by swinging her own leg to and fro with a push with each swing, reminding me of the boatmen on Inle Lake. The larger pots made elsewhere are transported using a 6 inch diameter length of bamboo pole, the pot suspended between two Burmen doing the carrying. Jamie can’t resist, and as carrier he does a fair job, just as he did swinging his leg and spinning the pottery wheel."

Ingyinbin Journal: "Vipassana Begins"

John, a meditator from New Zealand, spends extended periods in Ingyinbin each year, the home of the revered Webu Sayadaw and with his friend Ashin Mandala. This winter, he has decided to keep a journal, which he has kindly offered to share with us. His journal alternates between observation and poetry, between meditation practice and commentary about Burmese Buddhist society, from his learnings and his questions. The full collection of his musings can be found here.

27 January 

"Leaving the breakfast hall, in the overcast sky I see a spread V shape of birds, up to 80 ibises in dark shadow, moving to the east, above the pond and tamarind. Sharp at the leading edge, and splaying outward from there, a few individuals cross from one side of the V to the other, edging in there. As the group moves, the lines of the shape undulate, as if it better belonged to the sea. Extraordinary.

One evening, returning from our daily walk to the canal and back, we see in succession three or four such formations, each one containing up to sixty birds, dark in outline, outliers to the main group forming of between two to five birds, soon re-assimilated as the direction pointed is headed in. Children near us, stopping at their top-spinning game gaze upward, reciting something that expresses their own amazement. Similar sights pull our eyes and thoughts upward in the coming days and weeks.

I walk by myself to the hut. Vipassana begins. The mind moves to observe sensations in the body. Attention narrows. Language itself oversized:

                                    Thoughts too large to   

                                    pass through this mental sieve -

                                    inexact fragments!

Sitting is very quiet and soon I cannot remember a happier time being so still a couple of hours. Contented, centred, tranquil, not wanting anything to be otherwise.

                                    Initially confused - does it contain

                                    or is it contained? - or perhaps body’s simply the element

                                    of wind, blowing about.

Very quiet:

                                    An orange peeled

                                    sealing nothing -               

                                    this body!"

Ingyinbin Journal: "The Moon Cares Little for my Despondency."

John, a meditator from New Zealand, spends extended periods in Ingyinbin each year, the home of the revered Webu Sayadaw and with his friend Ashin Mandala. This winter, he has decided to keep a journal, which he has kindly offered to share with us. His journal alternates between observation and poetry, between meditation practice and commentary about Burmese Buddhist society, from his learnings and his questions. The full collection of his musings can be found here.

24 January Uposata 

"Under the ramshackle wooden tiers of the old hall,the young Bhante paces delivering Uposata
to the children, themselves loosely tiered before him."

25 January 

The weather is warmer but I am on day 3 of a head cold. Surprising, with that and the poor night’s sleep, how cluttered and disconsolate the mind quickly becomes: dreaming of failure at work and with others, constantly tripping over and failing myself. A Lemsip before and a coffee after the morning group sit seems to help. I think of Bhante-ji, enduring a similar cold over a number of days.

Bante-ji, 83 and 40% total hearing,
burnt himself testing barium
for Indira Ghandi and the atomic programme.

*

Starting again, the breath gradually
distils to something finer, then the body,
until neither’s perplexed.

The moon and birds care little for my despondency. During breakfast the glowing spoon-hollow moon slips from above the trees to nestle among the uppermost branches, joining the ibises, which occasionally honk and shift position, before taking flight to other places and the day’s purposes. Looking like the concord, the bird lifts or dips slightly towards its long, curved beak, and is elegant in flight despite the initial dragging of the body and the straggling legs and the repeated short pump of its wings. The egrets are the engineers of flight, economical and precise. There are other birds, one a dark and narrow bird, maybe some kind of shag. At the lakeside a small frog, half the size of my thumb, hops away on hearing Karen’s footsteps and heads to the water’s edge, where it pauses.

The night traversing the sky, in the morning
the radiant full moon slips alongside
the ibises among the tamarind’s upper branches.

Ingyinbin Journal: "Tiny Irregular Crumbly Chunks"

  

John, a meditator from New Zealand, spends extended periods in Ingyinbin each year, the home of the revered Webu Sayadaw and with his friend Ashin Mandala. This winter, he has decided to keep a journal, which he has kindly offered to share with us. His journal alternates between observation and poetry, between meditation practice and commentary about Burmese Buddhist society, from his learnings and his questions. The full collection of his musings can be found here.

17 January

Sitting alone in the early morning, shutters closed due to the chill, I no longer hear the solitary pink-robed nun whose early chanting near the Mahamuni statue usually reverberates in the hut.

I sit with the breath flattening, as if it has lost its volume, only a thin intermittence half free of the body. More attention is given to the area of contact between the breath and the upper lip, something which until now I have given less attention because I have been intent on distinguishing (distracted by) the visual nimitta - usually for me a bright if rather broad light - and anyway the sensations that are felt on the upper lip and those that well unbidden within and through the entire body are quite distinct. In turn, the awareness of the breath becomes sharpened and clearer, until it reaches a stage where it breaks up almost into tiny irregular crumbly chunks.

Now too with the more deliberate focus at that place, the sensation fines to a needlepoint or roughens to one or two grains of dust. Outside someone is sweeping, short brusque strokes, pausing intermittently, resuming:

Endless brush strokes
sweeping through the mind,
settled on namarupa.

Sitting further, I become aware that the body is composed of innumerable, so many, individual flecks that appear insubstantial, unfixed; and while I remain aware of the body as a whole neither are these flickerings simply the same ones recurring.

1000 points
sweeping mind and body,
settled in namarupa.

On our evening walk through Ingyinbin village, again we are greeted with unguarded warmth by the local people, again the girls are just leaving the weaving factory. Looking back after them, I notice the dust clouds stirred up by the returning oxcarts and motorcycles: sunlight and fine dust particles hopelessly enmesh and the lightness of one and the heaviness of the other holds them together in suspension.

Rust-coloured, the late sun
bound in the dust of returning carts; gathered at their gates,
children dash towards us, smiling.

The following morning rain falls. Dust that last night wouldn’t settle will do so now for at least a day or two. Aum Pyee worries that the remaining unharvested rice will be ruined should the rain continue into a second day. Looking at the ground, I see particles of dust coagulate as they become absorbed into large misshapen droplets.

Cheerless hours, old Bhante-ji departed,
three young puppies with their motherscattered. Nearby the hut, a notched bamboo pole

extended, the elderly woman snares
thin uppermost branches, stripping
the tree of its small, plum-like fruits.

Ingyinbin Journal: Ordinariness in Everything

John, a meditator from New Zealand, spends extended periods in Ingyinbin each year, the home of the revered Webu Sayadaw and with his friend Ashin Mandala. This winter, he has decided to keep a journal, which he has kindly offered to share with us. His journal alternates between observation and poetry, between meditation practice and commentary about Burmese Buddhist society, from his learnings and his questions. The full collection of his musings can be found here.

16 January

Back from Shwebo following a muddle over the pickup arrangements, and Karen with a heavy cold, the prominent gold pagoda spire seen at a distance of some kilometres foreshortens the distance. Return with evening-time.

Under the wispy moon in the still-blue sky
lines of white birds sweeping into the tamarinds.
Silent, graceful, landing as new leaves.

The following morning I walk with Kwau Soe to the patipatti compound, where shortly after Yan Aung Shwe joins us, wearing treble sweaters. We examine the U Ba Khin building, which Aung Shwe has recently upgraded adding new facilities and paint. He wants the small corner room with generous windows on three sides where U Ba Khin spent a week ordained to be reserved for serious mediation only. Beyond this building stands another, rather dilapidated one, used during Webu’s time by his donor, a former Burmese Railways Minister.

From a nearby tree Kwau Soe plucks from a tree vine several tiny orange berries each with a black spot at one end which he holds out in his open palm. He explains that in his childhood they used to thread these berries onto a thread of cotton to make necklaces:

Kauw Soe gathers the tiny orange berries
they once threaded onto necklaces:
the devas on their elevated platform are benign.

He also stops to pick up from a narrow ledge at the arahant’s pool a small tortoise, white on the underside and less than half the size of his palm, with two small legs occasionally emerging and flailing, while the head remains firmly ensconced within the body - until the creature is returned to the water, where its head and legs re-emerge and after a brief flurry it disappears beneath the surface of the stagnant water. Shortly after, we visit the deva platform, a place where Webu is said to have been sometimes found meditating; and to my surprise beneath the expansive banyan tree nearby there are a couple of gnat altars decorated by devotees with fresh cut sprigs placed in jars; then over we head to the monks’ quarters, where just today the aged blue Plymouth car donated to Webu some sixty years ago has been towed back from Kin-U, a mere shell but impressive still.

We enter Webu’s rooms, where Aung Shwe recounts for me the last hours of the Sayadaw’s life: a final visit to the toilet in the adjoining room followed by collapse on his return, immediately lifted and carried by his assistants to the dais where shortly he passes away, cradled in arms including those of the current Sayadaw on the pariyati side. Several events of the final days are captured in the photographs that hang on the walls and I look long at them.

Karen and I return to the hut after lunch and sit through the afternoon, re-entering it late but still bright and welcoming.

Leaving the hut, the warm sun,
the wavy leaved tree displays perfumed white flowers
which we saw yesterday cupped in the old woman’s hands.

Perhaps this is a reasonable juncture at which to digress and recount an event of a few days later concerning the now 81 year old Sayadaw and the 83 year old Indian nuclear physicist and physician recently arrived to take robes and meditate. On the morning of his ordination the Indian gentleman is sat down on a small wooden stool beside the concrete trough used for washing by the monks and a young monk proceeds to shave the remaining ring of grey hair from the elderly fellow’s head in quick straight bursts of the razor. From there Bhante leads him to the dining room, where he becomes a novice prior to receiving full ordination. Pali phrases are said and repeated, robes passed as dana to the preceptor are returned and donned with the help of a couple of attending novices. Next a large young monk directs us to the Sima Hall, where an animated preceptor Sayadaw proceeds gleefully to compare the ripened age of each the novice, he himself, and the Buddha; once again he points to the upper lip and repeats Webu’s injunction to hold the attention right there uninterrupted on the breathe 24 hours in the day. The village musicians start up prematurely, thinking the foreign guests (six of us at this time) who now vacate the hall include the entire ordination party. It’s another 30 minutes before their cymbals and drums sound again in urgent unison as the monks reappear and we have the chance to give to tach of them a modest dana.

Late in the afternoon the guests enter the Sayadaw’s quarters in the ramshackle old teak hall, rows of empty Red Bull cans lining the inner entrance. Sayadaw sidles onto the floor with us and the priceless Buddha relics are brought out. A new glass dome has replaced the old one which has been roughly glued together following an earlier mishap. It is topped with a small black carved pagoda and the same wood serves as a pedestal, studded with lips of ivory. It is an ivory lotus that houses the tiny container which contains the dozen or so ‘mustard seed’ sized bone relics, wrapped in a small piece of purple cloth. Each petal has been individually carved, so that one that is near the relics curves up from the rest of the holder almost perpendicularly. Each of us in turn has a white cloth placed on our head while another holds the relic holder over the head for a couple of minutes. This has happened for me before, and at least this time the mind remains composed even though there is a strange and unsatisfied sense that there should be a ‘special’ experience or sensation to report. Ordinariness can feel like a major disappointment! Finally, it is Snow’s turn; as I rest the relics on her head a sudden buzzing sound is immediately followed by an itchy sensation and I realise a mosquito has just landed and bitten me on the cheek.

Sayadaw scrambles after almost spilling
a ‘mustard seed’ bone relic.
Cats, medicines, newspapers, plus one freshly ordained monk. 

Cats race the roof as the black wooden bowl
housing the Buddha relics gets held in turn
above each head. Still within the mind kicks. 

I hold the relic holder above Snow’s head
two minutes; knees pretty unsteady; hands
occupied, a mosquito stationed on my cheek.

As if I hadn’t appreciated the ordinariness in everything, later bhanti-ji, quite hard of hearing, explains that he had heard little or nothing, and asks why the grains of rice had been treated so reverently and whether it was these that had been referred to as ‘mustard seeds’.

The Sayadaw himself, surprisingly impish and bright-faced, each day perambulates the compound with his walking poles, using them to indicate this or that or else to admonish recalcitrant novices:

81, more a jaunty 18, soiled
robes and hugely calloused feet, this
Sayadaw held Webu when he passed.

Ingyinbin Journal: Not to Get Carried Away

John, a meditator from New Zealand, spends extended periods in Ingyinbin each year, the home of the revered Webu Sayadaw and with his friend Ashin Mandala. This winter, he has decided to keep a journal, which he has kindly offered to share with us. His journal alternates between observation and poetry, between meditation practice and commentary about Burmese Buddhist society, from his learnings and his questions. The full collection of his musings can be found here.

11 January

Interesting to read Aya Khema and find recounted in intenser and more developed form some of the experiences that have started to occur over the past couple of weeks during Anapana. Not that what is experienced is within a long pole’s reach of the jhanas, but these days have given a more sustained settledness when meditating than hitherto and this is heartening. I walk to the hut with some degree of mindfulness, contentment and a feeling of positive anticipation. Walk through the grounds, say hello to the three young puppies who continue to refuse to be petted, and climb the five concrete steps into the hut, leaving my jandals on the platform outside the gate, which I close behind me, and then settle onto my cushion, having, on the cooler days, closed the shutters on two of the three walls and face the other. 

The body is quickly comfortable and relaxed, although the mind continues intermittently with uninvited thoughts and it can take a good 30 minutes until a stage is reached where it too feels contained and settled, not leaning out after things or feeling that things reach in after it, odd sorts of distractions really. The mind is settled yet doesn’t remain unwaveringly on the breath, a number of times it gets lulled into extraneous thoughts for up to several seconds, or even between times there continue to be fleeting little distractions, sometimes fleeting images or forms of half-thought that are not yet verbal or properly formed. Balancing this, to some extent, the mind is progressively absorbed in the calming, pleasant, upwelling body sensation that begins in the head region and slowly incorporates section by section downward the rest of the body, sometimes skipping from chest to feet and legs and then working back through the hips and torso. 

There is a slight tightness, often, in the legs that can linger, but it is not particularly uncomfortable, indeed the feeling is generally muted because along with it there is a smooth and active feeling of ease throughout the legs and the entire body. The mind tends to feel anchored in the chest or head area, but sometimes when I focus on this I realise that that is a notion more than a place and the mind can move freely and inhabit various portions of the body, not necessarily in any order, nor is it jerky. And where the mind arrives it quietens, soothes, warms and kind of stirs; the body seeming to remain body in its shape, but again on reflection that is notional and the mind and body prove a perfect accompaniment where they are together all over. This can fill a two hour sitting, although the feeling of fluidity and fullness varies from sit to sit. Much piti, both of an energetic showering kind (which seems to emanate mostly from the surface of the body) that brings refreshment and eases any tightness, and another upswelling kind that seems to emanate from or reside deep within the body itself - and the feeling that - almost that - the mind can generate or facilitate either kind, though not in an easily controlled or predictable way, rather there is a feeling of confidence to be able to bring a feeling of calm and settledness to parts of the body by concentrating the attention on them.

Like a glass of milk
topping the brim:
nothing to be added.

Agitation, where it occurs, is mental rather than physical, a feeling of eagerness to keep developing, pressing towards certain sensations occurring, or the mind being more one-pointed, or desiring the suffused sense of light, lightness of the body, to become a full-fledged patibhaga nimitta. Too eager.

Not to get carried away, the morning and evening group sittings bring me down to earth. I remain self-conscious when sitting with others, especially because I am often noisy in the throat and tend to be -

Breathing.
Commotion barely discernible.
Surrender in and out.

Listening to Pa Auk’s or U Jotika’s talks also sets me back in my modest place.

Ingyinbin Journal: A Krishnamurti Color

John, a meditator from New Zealand, spends extended periods in Ingyinbin each year, the home of the revered Webu Sayadaw and with his friend Ashin Mandala. This winter, he has decided to keep a journal, which he has kindly offered to share with us. His journal alternates between observation and poetry, between meditation practice and commentary about Burmese Buddhist society, from his learnings and his questions. The full collection of his musings can be found here.

10 January

From the traditional music emanating from nearby loudspeakers at 4am we know it is to be another donor meal day. Bhante arrives soon after 4:30 and we sit with the music still sounding over the grounds. The breakfast is lavish, satisfying, a hindrance to meditation. Lunch more so: beans, mint, salad, bamboo and other roots, ground nuts, white rice and biryani (including a few sultanas), grapes, apples, little oranges, banana cake with nuts in it. 35 Kin-U teachers from their association have banded together to give this dana: and the benefit to them is clear in their faces, the way they serve the monks and then us, waiting on us with care and pleasure. The retired headmaster, wearing a black leather jacket over a rough sweater and other layers, and with his black hair swept over the bald part of his head, not unlike Krishnamurti color = excepted, enquires regarding our comfort, chats with us a few minutes about family and origins, and tells us something of his own history.

Ingyinbin Journal: Morning Sadness

John, a meditator from New Zealand, spends extended periods in Ingyinbin each year, the home of the revered Webu Sayadaw and with his friend Ashin Mandala. This winter, he has decided to keep a journal, which he has kindly offered to share with us. His journal alternates between observation and poetry, between meditation practice and commentary about Burmese Buddhist society, from his learnings and his questions. The full collection of his musings can be found here.

9 January: Uposata

On the way to the hut I notice several pairs of children’s sandals discarded at the monastery gate. Some of the children are playing with their spinning tops in the school yard. One sits in the area in front of the classroom and is using a broken brick to hammer a finger-length rusted nail deeper into the nut or berry that serves as his top. A string is wound round the nail and top and pulled until the top is released. It flips onto its nail end and the young monk regathers it before it slows and tumbles onto the ground by looping his thread round the nail and flipping the top to catchable height.

Morning sadness.
The pigeons on the high pagoda ledges are muted.
The breeze through Webu’s hut door is chilly.

Ingyinbin Journal: The Scratchings of a Broom

John, a meditator from New Zealand, spends extended periods in Ingyinbin each year, the home of the revered Webu Sayadaw and with his friend Ashin Mandala. This winter, he has decided to keep a journal, which he has kindly offered to share with us. His journal alternates between observation and poetry, between meditation practice and commentary about Burmese Buddhist society, from his learnings and his questions. The full collection of his musings can be found here.

8 January 

Each day on the way to breakfast we walk over dust that has been swept, at least from a ‘here’ to a ‘there’, the scratchings where the broom has passed forming an interesting pattern, more watery than the lake. Meanwhile various white birds are still settled in the trees; in ones or twos or threes they depart. The patterns left in the dust by other birds as they stroll about are in contrast tangled, like ripples.

Nearby, sweetly intoning monks; on mp3
U Jotika expounds the citasikas; & entering
at the window light, blend of blends.

Around the corner a monk reclines in his chair of wooden boards, reciting what is on the sheet before him. Someone has dropped a fresh gladioli stalk onto the ground, its serial flowers still fresh in the dust. A couple of schoolboys respond to my greeting and we high-five …otherwise it is mainly dust on the ground all the distance round the crumbling perimeter wall of the monastery to our sitting hut. I do notice, near the gate entrance, a couple of ox-carts loaded high with rice hay, the driver precariously balanced atop; and a sweet-looking light brown-grey bird of reasonable size, a firm beak and I think russet on the upper breast. Another bird like this, maybe larger, is perched high in the tamarind tree immediately opposite the entrance, where often we see the little squirrels take a leap from the bare electric cable on the wooden poles onto the tree, a good metre or two’s gap.

Half the length of its tail, the squirrel
scampers along the aerial cable:
earth its mirror.

Ingyinbin Journal: "I Would Stay Here Unmoved"

John, a meditator from New Zealand, spends extended periods in Ingyinbin each year, the home of the revered Webu Sayadaw and with his friend Ashin Mandala. This winter, he has decided to keep a journal, which he has kindly offered to share with us. His journal alternates between observation and poetry, between meditation practice and commentary about Burmese Buddhist society, from his learnings and his questions. The full collection of his musings can be found here.

6 January

Walk from one monastery to the other along the grooved tracks used by carts and motorcycles.

Eyes downcast; nothing
in the fields, feet dust-covered;
mind undisturbed.

It is in the ordination (sima) hall where our teacher U Ba Khin was ordained for one week where we sit. Recently refurbished, it sits under three tiers of manufactured tile sheets - clean, and the pigeons like to roost there at times, although they prefer the shallow stone shelves high on the pagoda, where their ongoing commotion reminds us of the rumbling of a train, like those passing in the distance from time to time. Birds chatter throughout the morning and, sitting late in the hut, we hear the hollow wood struck, followed by a metal gong, struck in twos, and next across the road the pariyati [side] bell, struck repeatedly in threes. The dogs howl bark and whimper en masse - their lunch too! One sits with the body welling pleasantly and the mind settled in a place where it feels content to remain:

Birds continue to clamour,
dogs howl when the meal bell is struck, pounding wood:
I would stay here unmoved.

Ingyinbin Journal: Returning to Each Breath

John, a meditator from New Zealand, spends extended periods in Ingyinbin each year, the home of the revered Webu Sayadaw and with his friend Ashin Mandala. This winter, he has decided to keep a journal, which he has kindly offered to share with us. His journal alternates between observation and poetry, between meditation practice and commentary about Burmese Buddhist society, from his learnings and his questions. The full collection of his musings can be found here.

4 January

Pigeon hoots in Mahamuni hall - dogs wanting to be petted - one bullock cart, bamboo mat floor & slats with a rail made by hand - a child with its mother and infant brother, his eyes peering examining us from under the sibling’s arm - the mother at intervals with a switch in her right hand slapping the white bullock pair - a final hard pull on the reigns brings the lumbering beasts to a standstill - staggering we disembark - passing villagers on their motorcycles laugh and wave or are slightly dumbfounded.

Returning to each breath
Itself a harvest,
a hundred byways.

Ingyinbin Journal: Meanwhile, Sitting Continues

John, a meditator from New Zealand, spends extended periods in Ingyinbin each year, the home of the revered Webu Sayadaw and with his friend Ashin Mandala. This winter, he has decided to keep a journal, which he has kindly offered to share with us. His journal alternates between observation and poetry, between meditation practice and commentary about Burmese Buddhist society, from his learnings and his questions. The full collection of his musings can be found here.

1 January

After breakfast we are met by Aum Pyee who offers his assistance. The ibises appear to have left their roost, and the matting of weed that covers the lake allows smaller birds to land and walk about on its surface. The new pagoda is at the east side, its stainless steel and gold-finished spire still brightly lit by the display lights as well as the new rising sun, a combination that absorbs the surrounding scene with a mirrored clarity. On the farther bank the younger nuns, fresh-looking in pink and orange robes, sweep the bare earth around the kitchen and outside their own quarters with coarse bamboo brooms. The trees are drenched in dust and sunlight. Outside the green cottage that was constructed by his family, a solitary older monk, as on all other mornings, appears at first light and proceeds to sweep the ground around his accommodation, leaving here and there little piles of dust and debris.

The rising sun, disinterested,

lights the trees, the white pagoda, the near-empty compound 

where the lone monk sweeps, clothed in sparkling dust.

Meanwhile sitting continues:

Leaves, birds, dogs,

one sound, three sounds: 

I slog on in my hut!

Webu Sayadaw, the reputed arahant who trained as a novice in the paryatti (learning) monastery in which we are housed and for whom on his return to the area the extensive patipatti (meditation) monastery, including the hut where we meditate daily, was built.

The little brown puppy with the unusable rear quarters munches on the beans and rice that Karen places before him. On Uposata day (On each eighth day of the lunar cycle layfolk dedicate this day to their Buddhist practice, taking eight precepts, undertaking of moral behavior, and spending time at their local monastery, as well as contributing the meal shared with those at the monastery) a local engineer, recently returned from America, arrives with his extended family to give dana and a shared lunch. Outside one boy makes another boy cry. An older woman smokes a cheroot as she comforts another young child beside the lake. The novices take turns sliding down the angled stack of coloured roofing iron, lifting their robes and grinning as they do so. A photo with the dana family and foreigners and they’re away! We take food with the monks; the Sayadaw and senior monks sit at the head table, others in descending order of seniority down to the most junior, who pile their plates with rice and add a morsel of vegetables. Some adults serve while others stand near us, marvelling at our plates loaded with various vegetables taken from several of the seventeen dishes that crowd the round table. The nuns, who have spent the entire night in food preparation, take a table together in the rear near the entrance door. As we leave, the men working on the pagoda approach the dining room: the straggler carries a mortar board and sings near the top of his voice. Nearby,

half the length of its tail, the squirrels

campers along the aerial cable:

earth its mirror.

In the evening we visit the family of Aum Pyee: two families and three generations share a large compound. We are sat down and offered fruits and bread and a sweet tonic drink and local tea. Everyone talks gently and convivially and with sweetness. The compound houses white bullocks and a cow with its calf, dogs, pigs, piles of cut rice stalks (harvest is near-finished and what isn’t stored indoors is sold in the nearby towns), tamarind and other fine trees, and various accommodations, the latest a tidy brick house occupied by the elder brother with his wife and their two children, aged 7 and 12 and both quite shy. We are returned by Aum Pyee to the monastery near 6pm, the distant sky golden and near dissolution as the white birds home in to the lakeside trees to chatter and groan before sleep.

Ingyinbin Journal: The Unguarded Mind

John, a meditator from New Zealand, spends extended periods in Ingyinbin each year, the home of the revered Webu Sayadaw and with his friend Ashin Mandala. This winter, he has decided to keep a journal, which he has kindly offered to share with us. His journal alternates between observation and poetry, between meditation practice and commentary about Burmese Buddhist society, from his learnings and his questions. The full collection of his musings can be found here.

31 December
It takes time finding a routine that suits. Sitting, it is astonishing how the mind teems with numerous unrelated thoughts. Occasionally, beneath a kind or morass, clarity gathers and briefly surfaces. It takes at least an hour on the mat before the concentration gains a steadier attention on the breath:

Following each breath
pull deeper
no bottom or top.

Evening walk. We approach the village to the west of the monastery, greeted by couples who stand smiling at their gates. A group works the threshing machine in one dust-filled yard, tossing in bundled rice stalks that get separated on exit into a growing pile of stalks (to be chopped and fed to the cattle) into one place while in another the husked rice (paddy) falls into a neatly placed large woven basket that, near full, a young woman swings easily onto her head and carries with surprising elegance to the place of storage. The track leads us past a dozen or so simple thatched houses with yards populated with families and their charges, cattle, dogs, chickens, pigs, including an occasional cat. One young woman stops in her tracks when she realises she has been observed striking out at a large feeding sow in the pen. The unguarded mind excites in a scene supported by a hundred contrary things. And getting back to the monastery grounds, overhead we see groups of ibises, their wings stretched wide, almost stalling as they seek a place to roost high in the tamarinds beside the weed-covered lake:

Nadia points out the darkened
shapes arriving in small groups into the upper branches
of the tamarind & neighbour trees

that skirt the matted lake: birds
spilling onto the monastery,
masters of the evening sun.

Ingyinbin Journal: Arrival in the Village

John, a meditator from New Zealand, spends extended periods in Ingyinbin each year, the home of the revered Webu Sayadaw and with his friend Ashin Mandala. This winter, he has decided to keep a journal, which he has kindly offered to share with us. His journal alternates between observation and poetry, between meditation practice and commentary about Burmese Buddhist society, from his learnings and his questions. The full collection of his musings can be found here.

"The enthusiastic young student in the restaurant encourages us to return later to Kin-U and use her phone for wifi access if needed, given there is no internet available at the monastery. A few minutes later U Mandala arrives in a white car with the Sangha flag positioned mid-bonnet, his passenger a fellow meditator on a visit from Belgium, to drive us on the dirt and stone road, past multiple fields of mature rice plants interspersed by others containing only stubble on cracked earth, to the monastery.

Nearing Ingynbin 

egret buffalo buffalo egret: 

coming, staying, going.

Bhante is pleased to see us and clearly appreciates the National Geographic Atlas that, with other small gifts, we place before him following our prostrations. A new toilet is to be installed in the main building, itself freshly re-painted on the outside with a mixture of white green gold & silver; we also are shown the freshly painted white pagoda nearing completion that sits on a small mound between the guest house and the lake. Greetings ended, we pass by the dogs sleeping on the ground on the way to our accommodation and sit with the surroundings somehow seeming unshakeable:

Suddenly barking village dogs
enter an evening without disturbance
Already at home here.

The agreed time to sit is 5am; at 4:45 bhante’s torchlight appears at the glass panels of the metal door. The surroundings remain still until near 6 when the temple bell is struck in series of three calling the monks to breakfast - only to launch another crescendo, barks and yelps. Anapana together starts to reshape an internal sense of proportion:

A small boat 

smaller, smaller: 

sea everywhere!

When Karen and I in early afternoon head to the small white stupa in which Tamara said she had also meditated, it is the athletic young monks playing caneball who impress: some of them have draped parts of their red robes over nearby branches or tucked them round their bellies as they nimbly cavort. We see them kick the ball backwards over their heads or header it deftly to a teammate:

The cane ball repeatedly crosses the net 

dextrous monks!

- cane ball my mind.

The mythological duck placed atop the stone pillar adjacent our meditation place marks the historical extent of the monastery’s land. The elderly women with her few remaining blackened teeth who seems to be living out her life in one of the bamboo huts in the compound retains a wide smile as she fingers Karen’s lungyi ‘la la la’.

As we had done on the previous visit, now with Thierri we walk the local dusty lane, used by bullock carts leaving for the rice fields in the morning and re-entering the village near evening. Again the girls, at sunset, stream from the weaving factory, empty tiffins shining in their hands, smiling and laughing together, as they enjoy gazing at us and giggling:

A line of bullockcarts returning to the village: 

sunlight tangled in dust, 

girls smiling."