Rude Awakenings - Forest Sangha Publications

^0 T H I R D M O O N 06a ministering angel—an English one with a very proper accent. We toldher all about the robbery, the police, and our trials of the past twomonths. She listened attentively and reacted in all the right places. Thereis nothing quite like the concern of a sympathetic woman.Katie had encouraged me to get to Bodh Gaya in time for Christmas,and we had just made it. Tomorrow morning, she explained, therewould be a big gathering on the veranda in front of our rooms to whichwe were invited. It happened each year. Most of the Westerners stayinglong term in Bodh Gaya came for a shared Christmas breakfast.At some point—I think it must have been later, after we had had ourfirst warm shower and rested—we were taken to meet the monk incharge of the vihara. Venerable Nyaninda was Burmese, probably in hisfifties, and was sitting on a chair outside the old building. This, we soonlearned, was where he could be found most of the day, smoking aBurmese cheroot and available to talk to anyone who came by. Thereare a lot of people “coming by” at Bodh Gaya, and as often as not hewould be sitting there listening to someone’s problems. He was a niceman, quiet but affable, with a laid-back and slightly ironic tone to hisBurmese English; he had seen it all from his chair outside the vihara. Hetold us that we were welcome to stay as long as we wished, that weshould join him for the meal each day, and that we were not to pay foranything while we were there.A J A H N S U C I T T OWe had to visit the Maha Bodhi Temple, the shrine at the site of Siddhattha’sgreat Awakening. Of course, I tell myself, Bodh Gaya is justa place on the planet, a scruffy Indian village among a hundred thousandscruffy Indian villages, though marked by its fame with clustersof rickshaw drivers, beggars, and the rest. Transcendence is nothing todo with a place, I tell myself. So the brain holds on, grateful for the ordinariness—thedingy chai stalls, the indeterminate drab buildings—2 6 8