Rude Awakenings - Forest Sangha Publications

^0 L A N D I N G 06gone. And the diary too with all the details of where we had been andwho we had stayed with, the record that was to be our future offeringback to the Sangha. The past—gone; the future—gone; and the presentwonderfully free and unformed, unformable. We are going nowhere. Ifelt no need for direction. Just to rest in the Way It Is. To know that asmy heart’s intention was worth travelling for a lifetime to discover. I feltdangerously pleased with myself.The decision to report to the police had come from the vihara. Theywere anxious and concerned. The manager was insistent that we gowith Nick suitably bespattered with blood to make some deeper impression.And certainly our bags were still somewhere in the forest. Maybesome of the items that weren’t worth stealing but which were of thegreatest significance—film, relics, and diary—might be retrieved. Sohere we were, looking for reentry into the human world of owning andchoosing, a world I did not find very convincing. It seemed better to floatfor a while.N I C KIn Buddhism much is made of taking refuge in the Buddha and in thewisdom he represents. I had a real physical sense of that refuge, bowingmy vulnerable living body to that big stone image in the shrine room ofthe vihara. I also bowed to Ajahn Sucitto, as I felt that he had done theright thing in the forest, and I wanted to honour that. He kept calm andgave them what they wanted, but I resisted and the robbers got into afrenzy that could have killed us both. I could have left this world withthe same mind as that water buffalo they had hounded and killed earlier.It was an important lesson, the kind one rarely gets in a lifetime.We had lost nearly everything in the robbery. Of the things that hadgone it was not the expensive things that mattered to us most. Yet, ironically,it was those—the money, the traveller’s cheques, and the camera—thatI had tried so hard to save. I had even planned to do that in the2 4 5