Rude Awakenings - Forest Sangha Publications

^0 P U R I T Y 06the Patimokkha because he could sense that one of the assembly was notpure in conduct—a senior disciple eventually took the offender by thearm and threw him out.In monasteries of my tradition, the sense of occasion of the uposathais heightened by shaving the head on the day before, so that eachuposatha day is like a renewal of the going forth. So after setting downmy bag, I went to the bathing area with a fervour for purity. In a kind ofcourtyard with a large cement-walled tank in the centre, I sloshed coldwater over my grimy body using one of the plastic scoops that sat onthe rim of the tank, soaped up, rubbed, scrubbed, sloshed, until my skinturned from brown to white, soaped up and sloshed again. While Nickrecovered enough to borrow our communal bar of soap, I started on thelaundry with a bar of blue soap and a lot of slapping and pounding onthe cement floor. We didn’t have a change of clothes, so nearly everythinghad been used and had to be washed in a shift system to allow oneto wear something. The skin-changing, pounding, and slapping becamelike a purification ritual on arriving at a holy place.At first, our meeting with the Burmese abbot, Ñanissara Mahathera,didn’t flow; our minds were in very different spaces. I realized later thatthe vihara was mainly set up as a pilgrim’s rest house, a place for coachparties of visitors from Buddhist countries to spend a night, have a lookat the ruins, perform a devotional puja, and move on. So people wouldnormally come to see him for a few minutes in their rushed itinerary toask about where to go next. Then again, people did not normally arriveon foot, with the intention of continuing their pilgrimage in that way.So his most immediate conversation—about where to go next—wasfine if one had a bus and could shoot off to Sanchi or Sankasya for thenext day; but when the nearest of those would entail a four days’ walk,it was not much to the point. It took a while to get across, over breakfastin his residence, that we were not in a hurry to go anywhere or seeanything, that we were interested in what he was doing and how thingswere working out for him.8 1