Arrival at Dhamma Kuta

Encouraged by my positive experiences at Nilambe, I signed up for a ten-day course in Vipassana meditation in the SN Goenka method. The course ran from May 31^st till the morning of April 11^th at another center in the Kandyian hills called Dhamma Kuta. I did most of my packing on May 30^th and spent the morning of my departure crying and hugging Dan. I tried to trick myself and tell myself that I was only going away for a little while, but whenever I looked at him something deep inside me could feel the coming gulf of time I had to cross. I felt inconsolable by 10 AM when Manju arrived to take me up the mountain.

The trip to Dhamma Kuta was not as long as to Nilambe so I had less time to stress in the three-wheeler on the way there. I reminded myself of my positive experiences at Nilambe and told myself that I wanted to deep my meditation experiences. I recalled the handbook from the American undergrad study abroad program in Kandy, to have a positive experience it advised the student to take advantage of things that they couldn’t do in the States. “Well, I never do this back home,” I confirmed.

At registration in the office I surrendered my passport for them to keep in the safe and signed a document indicating that I would surrender all food, reading materials, writing materials. As an act of faith, I handed my journal over to the director and he placed it on a shelf behind his desk, but I hung onto my cell phone just in case. As of 7 PM on that night, I vowed to cease all contact with the outside world and the other meditators. Then one of the staff showed me to my residence called “D-Block,” a simple concrete structure that could accommodate ten women on small twin-sized beds partitioned by plywood dividers. A deep man’s voice chanting Pali was broadcast through a speaker in the residence. In the back of the building a bathroom area featured two sinks, a squat and a Western toilet, and two cold-water showers. I put the sheets I had brought on the little bed, put my backpack on the little wooden table, and went outside to call Dan for the last time. I cried as I told him that after 7 PM I could have no more contact. “I know I’ll start feeling better soon,” I re-assured him as well as myself. “If you don’t like it, then don’t let them make you feel like you can’t come home,” Dan warned. “You can come home any time,” he assured me. I hung up the phone and sat down on the concrete edge to the D-Block’s foundation and cried. As I was crying I became aware of the patting sounds of the leaves of a large Bodhi tree down the hill from D-block. The tree looked very pretty in the morning light and I realized it was strange to see a Bodhi tree “in the wild” in Sri Lanka, most of them having shrines around them. I listened to the trees leaves pat together in the breeze for awhile while I cried. When I stopped crying I felt exhausted, so I went back into D-block and lay down on my bed listening to the chanting. Occasionally the chanter would cadence to the end of a word in a long, gravely, rumble that I found annoying. One of the wooden rafters in the ceiling had an unusual knotted pattern in which I could see lots of shapes, like a chipmunk, and then a woman kneeling before a tree. I focused on the rafter and tried to see as many shapes as possible before I heard the bell ring for lunch.

Walking across the campus, shielding myself from the brutal sun with my umbrella, I realized that Dhamma Kuta was much larger than Nilambe, the guidebook has asserted that it could house 90 meditators. I counted four women’s quarters, but I did not go up into the men’s area to count. The large hexagonal main meditation hall sat squarely in-between the women’s quarters and then men’s quarters. The front and back sides of the hexagon were elongated into a sort of oval built into the side of the hill with a balcony running round the entire circumference of the building. The living quarters and the meditation hall were all white-washed concrete with clay-tile roofs. The teacher’s residence was an all stone building situated farther up the road, and a white stupa crowned the top of the Dhamma Kuta campus built into the highest point of the hill on this part of the larger mountain. The office and chow hall were farthest down the hill and reached first on the driveway from the main road. There was a small meditation hall attached to the clay-tile roofed office with a few blue cushions on the floor arranged into three neat rows.

Lunch was a simple offering in a run-in shed with a corrugated-tin ceiling, waist-high cement walls, and cement floor with the kitchen in the back. Curries and rice were served on a stainless-steel plate with a stainless-steel mug given for water. After eating and cleaning my plate, I walked up to the meditation hall and peeked into one of the open windows. White semi-circular pads were arranged on large rectangular light blue pads on cement floor in rows. Each row was defined by a strip of woven plastic mat reminiscent of tatami mats running the length of the hall. Each pad had a white rectangular foam brick placed at the back. “Well, there’s not going to be any leaning on the wall here,” I realized as I headed along the walkway toward the path leading up to the stupa. I walked along the narrow dirt path up to the stupa, through a few blooming frangipani bushes to a stone platform which served as the foundation for the little stupa, about fifteen feet high. Looking out over the roof of the meditation hall I couldn’t see the rest of the Dhamma Kuta campus the hill gave way so sharply. All I could see was the view straight down into the valley. Looking up I could see a familiar pine forest that led to Nilambe.

I knew that the first event would be an orientation at five in the main hall. In the afternoon I sat on a rock near the office in the afternoon, watching the Sinhala socialize and get organized. I was the only non-Sri Lankan on the campus until a first a German couple arrived, then a Japanese woman, and then one of the Junior Fulbright women, Delia, who lived in Kandy. Delia was 23, tall, slender, and her extremely refined Greek features gave the impression of a breathing Classical Greek statue escaped from the Louvre. I had met her at a few Fulbright functions and the sudden flash of recognition was almost shocking to me. I let her check in and as she started walking to her residence I waved to her as if I had been waiting for her all along. It turned out that she had been assigned to D-Block as well. I showed her to D-Block, showed her the chow hall and explained how men and women sat on different sides of the chow hall, taking and returning plates from opposite sides. We studied the daily schedule posted in the chow hall:

4 AM wake-up bell

4:30-6:30 Meditation

6:30-8:00 breakfast and rest

8:00-9:00 Group Sitting

9:00-11:00 Meditate According to the Teacher’s Instructions

11:00-1:00 lunch and rest

1:00-2:30 Meditate

2:30-3:30 Group Sitting

3:30-5:00 Meditate According to the Teacher’s Instructions

5:00-6:00 Tea Break

6:00-7:00 Group Sitting

7:00-8:00 Dhamma Discourse

8:00-9:00 Meditation

“Looks like a whole lot of meditation to me,” I remarked.

“Yup,” Delia replied. “I wonder what ‘Meditation,’ is as opposed to ‘Group Setting,’” she mused.

“No idea,” I replied, shaking my head. Adding up the hours I realized that we would be sitting for about eleven hours a day.

Before orientation, the women clustered around the women’s entrance and then men clustered around the men’s entrance on the other side of the hexagon. Delia and I joined the throng. One of the “Dharma Helpers” called out names and handed us a card with our name, bunk number, and seat number on it. I was number six and I went to the pad with number six marked on it. Delia was to my right at the other end of my row at position number ten. As I settled down onto the foam brick I realized that I would be spending quite awhile in that spot. As the other meditators took their spots I noticed two monks sitting on a platform at the front of the hall on the men’s side. In the middle of the hall at the front there was a seat on a platform draped in white sheets with a desk lamp directed on it. On the women’s side three small platforms lined the back wall. The center director walked to the front of the hall told us that there were 45 mediators taking the course and began to list some of the center guidelines such as strict segregation of the sexes and maintaining the Noble Silence. He informed us that there would be one main teacher and two assistant teachers for the course, all women. The women would have three volunteer “Dharma Helpers” and the men would have two. There would be a Dharma Helper in each residence who we could ask practical questions. He then instructed us not to point our feet to the empty seat, the “Dharma Seat.” “Now,” he told us, “Take your card and tuck it up under your cushion. That way, if you are not on time we know where to look for you,” he warned us.

Looking around the hall I noticed that most of the Sri Lankans, both men and women, wore all white. I also realized that the division of the sexes was about half and half, but while there were women off all ages on the women’s side, other than the young German man, all of the men appeared over the age of sixty. On the women’s side I noticed two Sri Lankan women in their mid-twenties and a few in their thirties, but the bulk of the women were in late middle age along with and two elderly Sinhala ladies. The director asked all returning students to raise their hands. Almost all of the men raised their hands and about a quarter of the women. “You will be on eight precepts,” the director informed them. “That means you get no evening snack, just tea,” he finished. “Just like monks,” I thought. “This is like space camp for the Sinhala,” Dan had told me before I left. “They get to leave their ordinary lives and do what the monks do. For them, the monks are like astronauts to travel into space spiritually,” he had explained. The space camp image struck me as I looked around the room at the Sinhala in their all-white. “But, this is the world turned upside-down,” I realized, turning my attention to the monks again. “Here are two monks, one young and one old, who are here to participate in a meditation course taught by lay women,” I thought. “Dan’ll going to love this.”

After the director’s speech given first in English then in Sinhala, the English speakers were asked to go to the second meditation hall attached to the office to watch a DVD of Goenka while the Sinhala were to remain in the hall to listen to a taped translation of the talk. Delia and I walked to the small hall in silence. As we settled onto the blue cushions I wished her a solemn good luck, she nodded in return just before the DVD was started. The DVD had been recorded at a course Goenka had taught in America. It showed him sitting at the front of the room next to his wife. I knew from my prior research that Goenka was an Indian Hindu born and raised in Burma. He had been a successful businessman, but his crippling migraines motivated him to seek training in meditation under the Burmese teacher U Ba Khin in Rangoon. Judging by the completely shell-out look on his wife face, I figured that he must have been a real son-of-a-bitch before discovering meditation. “Man, she looks like a husk of a woman,” I marveled as the camera zoomed into to show only Goenka. Goenka himself bore a strong resemblance to end-of-life Marlon Brando with long, deep jowls and thick lips. He spoke slowly but with excellent English.

In the first DVD he covered the basic issues, the five precepts that the new students would take and the eight that the old students would take. “These are non-sectarian, these are natural law,” he explained. The five precepts were no killing, no lying, no stealing, no sexual misconduct, and no intoxication. He went on to explain how all of these were the law of nature and by living by them we made our foundation of basic morality, or sila. The five precepts of basic morality I could understand as laws of nature, but Goenka failed to defend the next three precepts as laws of nature, not eating after noon, to refrain from sensual pleasures such as dancing, jewelry, and attending concerts and shows, and avoiding high and luxurious beds. These principles, intended to create a foundation of basic acseticsm, seemed very cultural and religious to me. I realized with frustration that I couldn’t ask questions to the TV screen. He then went on to describe the form of meditation we would practice for the next few days, Anapana, or observation of the breath. “Through observing respiration you will develop Samadhi, concentration,” he explained. “The foundation is Sila, then Samadhi on to of that, then we will be able to develop pañña, wisdom, true wisdom” he told us with deep satisfaction and began to chant in Pali. I realized that it was his voice I heard piped through the residence on the first day. At the end of the DVD the camera panned back out so that we could see his wife staring into space next to him.

After the DVD it was time for our first little meditation. When I sat and tried to feel my breath at the tip of my nose I suddenly realized that I could not feel it. I realized that when I took away awareness of my belly and my ribs I was totally unable to perceive my own breath. In the DVD Goenka instructed us to breathe as hard as we needed to into order to feel the breath. I felt as through I was snorting like a pig just to feel my in-breath. If we had difficulty concentrating he also instructed us to breathe a bit harder. My mind drifted back to how much I missed Dan, how much I was looking forward to going back to the States, and our 22 stop-over in Dubai on the way home. At the end of the hour meditation, while walking back to D-Block, I reviewed my errant thoughts and realized that I was a pretty happy person.