9/20/03

An
American in Asia:

His Quest for Cosmic Truth

(or at least a Decent Espresso)

Wat Ratchanada, where I met the abbot and talked about Heidegger

A while back I visited the shrine pictured above. I recently went again and watched huge rain clouds roll over from the top of the tower and talked briefly with the abbot, who I'd met the first time.

It was a Monday, and a day off for me at the time. I was exhausted from wandering around Bangkok and hopped on a boat to relax. It felt pretty great, rolling down the canal and looking at all the people who live over the edges of the murky water. The canals are fairly filthy. Recently a Thai movie star drove his car into a canal here and he is now comatose from a brain infection he got from exposure to the water. A little boy riding in front of me took the plastic bag off the stick of chicken he'd been eating, reached it over the side and carefully poked at it until it sank under the surface of the water.

I decided to ride to the end of the line and see where it left me. When I got off and wandered past the maze of little shacks on the shore, I came out on to a main street and saw Wat Ratchanada (Wat means temple, Ratcha is the same as the Hindi Raja, and I don't know what Nada means). A lot of the famous temples you'll see here are tapered cylinders covered in mosaics of shattered ceramics, but this one was a perfect box rimmed with high spinarets next to a golden-roofed school and a smaller temple.

I was the only visitor and it was a little eerie wandering around the vacant grounds. Occasionally a saffron robe would float out of a distant doorway carrying a bald brown boy inside it and disappear around a corner. I made my way around until I found the central building. I took my shoes off and stepped inside. It was a grey rainy day but there was no water on the floor and I guessed I was the first one to visit the whole day. The walls were all smooth white plaster and arched doorways without doors. The floor was laid with black and white stone tiles. I wandered through a maze of small square identical rooms. I soon noticed that the rooms were not only identical inside, but outside as well. When I stood in the center of any room, the view through the door in the center of each wall was identical. Through the north doorway, I saw an iron grill in the distance, depicting an image of the Buddha. Identical images could be seen East, West and South. I moved to the next room the view was the same. Every room led to another room, perfectly identical, with an iron-work Buddha down each of the four hallways leading from it.

I climbed a spiral staircase in the center and entered on the second floor. Here were more rooms but the view had changed. At the end of each hallway through every archway a golden statue of the Buddha sat in meditation upon a coiled serpent. Each one was swathed in saffron and carried fresh flowers in his lap. On the third floor, the Buddhas were gone and through each opening I could see an abstract triangular mosaic laid into a wall outside the building. On the fourth, there was through each window a pointed roof, as if the same building were somehow next door in every direction. On the fifth there was only sky.

The effect was profound as my suspense was built each time I ascended to a new floor. On the sixth when I exited the staircase I was free of the building and standing on the roof with a magnificent panorama of colored temples and white houses stretched below the dark grey-blue sky. At the center of the roof, stairs led up a square white structure to a small arched window. I climbed them and looked. Inside was a single life-sized golden Buddha sitting on a lotus flower.

On my way back down, my legs shook and cramped. I was surprised because I walk 10 or 15 kilometers every day. I put my shoes back on as I left and after I walked off the cramp, I looked for a place to sit down. The abbot was sitting on some stairs in front of the smaller temple and beckoned me over. He was wearing the darker saffron robe that denotes authority in the Thai church. On his nose round silver rimmed glasses framed friendly eyes. I couldn't help thinking of Gandhi.

His English was great. He spoke exactly like a textbook and I guessed that he had taught himself. He had a lot of questions for me about Western philosophy and its similarities with Buddhism. I had studied a bunch of phenomenology in university and a lot of people draw close comparisons between that and Japanese Zen (though my professor always hated that). He had read Husserl, which amazed me as it was difficult enough for a poor American college student to read. Husserl's student, Heidegger is even closer in parallel to Buddhism and is a bit of an easier read so I recommended that to him. We talked a lot about how the study of etymology and the history of language can shed a lot of illumination on human experience (the word 'truth' comes from 'derew', the old Celtic word for 'oak tree'). If he can find any Heidegger here it ought to be a bit of fun. Heidegger was really into the Greek roots of words and often strived to use words in their original sense.

After a bit we went into the small shrine. It wasn't open to the public that day and the abbot seemed to be living in it. Blankets were spread on the stone beneath a table, chair and tv beside a giant golden Buddha. In the back were stacks of other Buddhist sculptures and images. We talked a bit more about less esoteric things and I answered some general questions about how much I liked Thailand. Finally a young monk, probably in his early teens, came up for his lesson. One side of his face was covered with a purple birth mark from which hundreds of tiny hairs grew, giving the impression of fur. He was shy, but the abbot insisted that he practice his English on me. I said a couple of goofy things and pretty soon he was shyly laughing.

I left them to their lesson and made my way back to the boat. A thunderstorm broke just as the boat took off and rain roared on the tarp that covered the roof. We weaved up the canal, made flat and calm by the downpour. When I got off, I had to wait at the pier under a rattling tin roof until the rain let down a bit. Wet Thais rode by on boats or hid beneath the bridges and waited for the rain to clear. I had quite a wait before the rain stopped, but I had a lot to think about too.

Standing on the pier in the rain.

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Jeffrey Studebaker has been (in no particular order) a SE Asian correspondent for a Singaporean travel magazine, a teacher, consultant and translator in Japan, a guitarist with the band, Swoon 23 in every city of the US of A, a coffee roaster in Seattle, a bike messenger in Portland, a marine fire system repairman in Seattle, an osteoporosis clinic researcher in Providence, a mental ward counsellor on the night shift in Portland, a brief success in New York, and he has now returned to the US after nearly a decade in Asia to pursue a publishing career.