Mediocre Monk: A Stumbling Search for Answers in a Forest Monastery

Leaf

We eyed each other from across the airport tram. For two people in Bangkok, we had a lot in common: white, early twenties, backpacks with hip straps. It would be easy to talk to her.

Ever since my first visit to a monastery, I’d made a habit of waxing poetic to pretty women about mindfulness. Maybe I’d start by asking if she had ever meditated. When she finished talking, I’d wait for her to return the question.

Actually, I might yell over the bar music, I spent a month in a remote forest monastery once . . . eight-day silent retreat, one meal a day, the whole thing. Yeah . . . I know, kinda wild, right?

Sometimes it would work, meaning the pretty woman would sleep with me, or at least make out on the dance floor, or at least think I was complex and psychological. Other times it would backfire. She’d light up and shout back, "Oh my God, have you read Eat Pray Love?"

I’d grit my teeth. "Yeah! Well, no⁠—I mean, parts of it. I know the story, at least. Anyway, what I did was way more intense."

The tram wobbled around a turn. The blonde backpacker and I steadied ourselves on a yellow handrail overhead. We both looked up. Our eyes connected.

I jerked my head away, trying to look intrigued by the view out the window, even though there wasn’t one. It was dark, and I was tired of reciting my sensitive-guy guru script. It went nowhere. Or in circles. In the three years following that month-long first foray into monastic life, I’d been genuinely disappointed to discover that talking about meditation yielded none of the benefits of practicing it, no matter how attractive my listener. That was partly why I was going back to monastic life now⁠—to return to practice, to escape my insufferable impulse to preach.

And this time, I was going big: venturing into the heart of the Thai Forest Tradition, home of the strictest Buddhist monks in the world. I hadn’t requested a couple of measly weeks of PTO for this trip. No, I’d quit my fancy health-care consulting job outright. I’d booked a one-way flight. No return for at least half a year. Maybe no return at all. I’d shunned romance, moved out of my apartment, cut ties with civilization. I repeated that phrase often in my head, cut ties with civilization. It felt glorious. Staring at my reflection in the tram window, I drew in a long breath and offered small nods of approval.

The tram banked around another bend. I glanced at the backpacker. She was looking right at me.

Hey, she said.

I swallowed. Hey.

Where you from?

Uh, Minnesota. You?

Alabama. Here for ten days to meet some girlfriends in Phuket, take cooking classes. What about you?

Um. I hesitated. I’ll be here a few months.

She raised her eyebrows.

I realized I’d have to say more. I’m heading to a monastery . . . out in the . . . eastern part. I spoke cautiously, for I could feel my old mating call, Mindful Man on a Grand Adventure, rising in my throat like the jingle of a TV ad, perpetually promoting the product of Me. I’d already undersold the length of my trip to downplay her interest. It hadn’t worked. Her eyebrows remained lifted like invitations.

Had I paused at that moment to notice what transpired in my own body, I might’ve registered a small flare of pride in my chest, an impulse to glance back at my reflection with a smoldering look that said, Still got it. I might’ve also glimpsed the conflict between my urge to dwell in total supreme solitude and my need to be seen and lauded as such a person. But I didn’t pause, and it never occurred to me that I didn’t actually want to temper her curiosity at all, that in fact, I sought the pleasure of feeling modest and the conceit from her interest. Restraint felt good. Attention felt better. I wanted both.

In ditching one script, I’d unwittingly picked up another. This new one congratulated me for being exhausted with my old self. It claimed my ego was already in the process of rapid dissolution thanks to this adventure⁠—and by virtue of grief. See, a young friend had died in a car accident earlier that year. Drinking and sex and professional prestige⁠—three of the most important things to me⁠—had all lost their allure. I mistook the ensuing numbness for an accelerated transcendence of all earthly pleasure. It was in this period of grieving that I’d quit my job and cut my ties and flown halfway around the world to get away from everyone and everything I felt was holding me back. Grief and adventure, I was certain, were transforming me into a venerable sage before I’d even shaved my head and donned robes.

The girl’s expression had lowered into confusion. I realized I had drifted off in thought.

I stammered, You know, um, I actually grew up in Atlanta. It’s nice to hear a southern accent all the way out here.

We got off the tram and walked toward a line of waiting taxis, agreeing on the importance of the word y’all.

She opened the back door of a cab at the front of the line. Then she paused at the curb, turned, and looked back at me as if she had something to say.

The street was quiet. Past midnight. I held my breath. I knew what came next. I had spent the whole walk from the tram to the cabs fearing this moment.

She was going to invite me in. And if I accepted, we would hook up. And if that happened, I’d feel like I was betraying another woman, a woman named MJ, whom I’d met over a weekend in New York a few months earlier. See, even though I’d shunned romance after the car accident, and even though I was about to take an oath of celibacy for six months, if not the rest of my life, I had still, well, fallen completely in love.

MJ and I had video-chatted every day for weeks. I’d visited her for another weekend right before I left. We’d gone to Les Mis on Broadway and held hands⁠—both pairs of hands⁠—the entire show. The day before my flight to Thailand, I’d mailed her a box containing six letters sealed in individual envelopes, labeled for each of the months I knew I’d be off the grid. If I stayed longer or ordained, I had recorded her address in a diary buried in my backpack so that I could write to her again from the monastery. In my final moments of phone service, I’d called her from my gate at the Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport and told her I loved her. Which, in the moment, felt courageous and liberated on my part. It didn’t occur to me that professing my love on my way out of the country may have in fact been cowardly, offering such a connection while simultaneously severing it.

For MJ’s part, she had simply chuckled and replied, I was afraid you were going to say that. We had already agreed we wouldn’t commit to each other. She wasn’t going to wait for me, and I wasn’t sure I was ever coming back.

In other words, I was single. Still, some small part of me understood that sleeping with a stranger after saying I loved someone else a mere twenty-six hours earlier would make it difficult to maintain my self-image as a precocious spiritual practitioner. It would feel disloyal⁠—to MJ and to myself. I’d come to Thailand for cross-legged contemplation in the forest, not canoodling in the back of a cab in Bangkok.

And yet I hesitated. Flat-footed on the curb, I gaped at her, listening for once. If pressed to explain my stupor, I might’ve claimed I was doing something vaguely Buddhist-y, like impartially observing the situation or letting things be as they were. I couldn’t see the trap I’d laid for myself, alternately craving austerity and indulgence, unable to see why neither one worked. Nor could I see that if I couldn’t have both, then I wanted someone else to choose for me.

Well, she said, have a good trip. Sounds kinda crazy.

She ducked and closed the door behind her. The cab drove off and disappeared into the night.

I shook my head and scoffed at myself. Her invitation had seemed so inevitable that I’d skipped ahead to fearing I would accept it. This was exactly why I needed the severe isolation of the wilderness, I thought. I didn’t trust myself. I was the type of person who was drawn to extremes. Extremes made me feel like a warrior, which was great when so much had come easily in my life⁠—praise, stability, exceptions. Maybe too easily. I’d become slippery. A weasel, close friends joked. An imp, my father warned. They were right, and I knew it, but I still couldn’t help it. That was why I was diving into the most intense monastic tradition I could find on planet Earth⁠—because extremes also held me accountable. I needed from the outside what I couldn’t muster from within: discipline, insight, and self-reliance, all of which I thought I had gained the first time I went to a monastery. But they’d worn off. I had come to Thailand to get them back, to shove myself once and for all into enlightenment.

Clearly, I wasn’t there yet. I sighed and turned toward the second taxi in line.

From the back seat, I asked how much it would cost to get to the Bangkok bus station.

Five hundred bucks, he said.

I laughed out loud. A joke the driver probably told every American tourist.

OK, OK, three hundred, he said.

I realized he wasn’t saying bucks but baht, the Thai currency. I’d accidentally bargained.

We skimmed through a dark, wet city. After a while, the driver pulled over beneath a pedestrian bridge. He turned back to me, pointed up, and held out his hand for payment. I’d have to walk from here.

On top of the bridge were gray puddles, exposed rods of rebar, and a view of a building the size of a stadium. The bus terminal. On the other side of the freeway, I ducked between canvas tents on metal stilts with greasy stoves and men seated on plastic crates. I crossed a parking lot and entered the terminal, a single cavernous room. Small ticket windows lined the walls, which were painted pink and lime green and smattered with dense, curly Thai text. Zero English.

I walked the perimeter, searching for a red-eye trip east. But every ticket window was empty. I tried not to groan. I’d have to sleep in the station. Aluminum chairs littered the center. I lined up four and lay across them. Overhead, industrial-strength floodlights hung from rafters and buzzed like the drill of a dentist. I draped one arm over my eyes and looped the other through a backpack strap and tried to sleep.

In the morning, I relocated to a wall of tall windows on the far side of the station. The street below bustled in the blue light of dawn. Parked buses grumbled and lifted to life. Pedestrians jostled through an intersection. Moto drivers waddled on their small bikes through foot traffic, dangling plastic bags from either end of their handlebars. Short honks. Black hair. Greetings in cheerful tones. A flash of orange in the crowd.

A monk! I leaned forward to get a closer look. But then, upon closer inspection, I slumped.

This was not a forest monk. His robes were not deep ocher⁠—not dyed in the traditional method of stirring cloth in a boiling cauldron filled with woodchips from the jackfruit tree. No, his was a robe one might find at a big-box store⁠—mass-produced, starchy material; garish color. He flailed his legs carelessly ahead of him. He smoked a cigarette.

This was a city monk. An imposter monk, I thought, pursing my lips, not a disciplined jungle dweller like the ones I would study under, like the one I hoped to become.

I turned from the street view to find my ride. Without Wi-Fi or English, all I could do was visit ticket windows one by one and repeat the name of the region I was headed to, Ubon Ratchathani, a rural province tucked in the far corner of northeast Thailand on the border of Laos.

Eventually, I found a bus and climbed aboard and settled into a seat near the front. I assumed, with no concrete information, that the trip east would last around five hours⁠—a solid chunk to get some real sleep.

I reached under the armrest for a button to recline. Nothing. I patted along the edges of the suede seat but found only a sticky residue that remained on my hands. No button. No lever. No exit row with extra legroom. My knees pressed against the back of the plastic seat ahead of me. I’m not large. I’m a lean 5'10" guy who quit basketball in junior high because the sleeveless jerseys revealed the horrific fact that my elbows were the biggest part of my skinny arms.

In this bus, though, I felt like a giant. My breathing grew short. We sped down a highway pointing directly into the rising sun. No tint in the windows. No shades to pull for relief from the glare. Within twenty minutes, I was sweating like a pack of ham in a VCR. I tried resting my head on the window, but my skull vibrated against the glass. Strip malls lined the road. Behind them, flat, sun-bleached grasslands stretched toward a horizon blurred by heat.

This irritated me. Dry fields were not the misty mountains I had envisioned. I prayed for civilization to dissipate. Two hours later, though, we were still in the suburbs. I noticed an outlet store with an English sign in all caps: TIMBERLAND. Later, we passed the entrance to a golf course with a brick-wall entrance and a sign that read, PINEHURST.

That was it. I couldn’t look out the window anymore. Fuming, I turned my attention back inside the bus. A small TV hung above the aisle. As if it had heard my thoughts, it fritzed on.

A commercial played. The volume was so loud as to seem accidental, but I checked my attitude. Maybe this ad was an opportunity. A chance to pick up some Thai. A cultural learning experience, perhaps. The ad showed a young guy with a gelled bouffant hosting a block party. He grinned and yelled and thrust something toward the camera⁠—a pack of mints? A SIM card? I couldn’t tell.

The ad ended, then started over from the beginning. A little annoying, but hey, I thought, a second chance to pick up some vocab.

Still, I could not decipher a single word or even where words began or ended. I took a breath, pushing away the creeping thought that it might’ve been wise to learn some Thai before moving to Thailand. Instead, I’d spent the months leading up to this trip telling myself immersion was the best classroom. That was my advice⁠—unsolicited⁠—to other travelers, too, as if the single summer I’d spent as a high schooler binge-drinking in Madrid had minted me an expert in language acquisition. That was also my approach to meditation. Rather than slowly building a meditation practice over the previous months, I’d gotten stoned and read books and fantasized about meditating in the woods. I trusted the magic of immersion, the power of the extreme.

The ad drew to a close. My shoulders softened. I decided it was fine that I hadn’t learned any Thai. After all, I would dwell mostly in solitary sylvan silence. Maybe I wouldn’t need Thai. Maybe I wouldn’t need any language⁠—English, even⁠—ever again.

When the ad began playing for the third time in a row, I straightened and sought the gaze of fellow passengers. All appeared twenty years older and twelve inches shorter than me, and none seemed to notice or care about the unfolding travesty.

I still couldn’t figure out what the ad was even peddling, so I directed my anger at the producers. They should’ve known to communicate the core message visually, without sound, because didn’t they know people mute commercials? In our living room growing up, my dad would hover his trigger finger over the mute button with a sniper’s focus, and I’d come to appreciate the quiet breaks. But I was too shy to stand up and ask how to turn the volume down. I didn’t want to be that American tourist. It didn’t occur to me that, having landed in Thailand with no language preparation whatsoever, no address for the rural monastery where I planned to live, yet total confidence that it would all work out, I already was that American tourist.

More than that, trying to mute the TV would amount to an admission that it bothered me, which in my mind indicated a failure of spiritual strength. I was on a mission to train myself to withstand anything. Besides, I thought, the ad was almost over. After three times, some show was sure to resume. I let out a simmering exhale and tried to think a good Buddhist thought. Just let it be. Let the ad be.

When it played again, I turned my ire upon the story. It was unrealistic! No teenagers would dance with such abandon unless they were wasted! The fifth time the ad played, it dawned on me: creating the ad must have been worse than viewing it. The main actor with the gelled hair must have bared his teeth in that desperate smile shape through dozens of takes. By the seventh repetition of the commercial, I grew sympathetic to the young man. I pictured him at home, practicing his smiles in front of a mirror. Maybe he would shut his bathroom door like I had done, listening for the creak of approaching footsteps from my parents or sister, rehearsing a whole suite of suave expressions and clever lines in a whisper only I could hear. As I remembered this, the actor suddenly disgusted me again, and I crumpled into a kind of full-body pout in my undersize seat.

The ad played again, and soon I lost count.

Samsara. The word popped into my head⁠—the Buddhist idea of life as an endless cycle of wanting, getting, and wanting more. This ad was a metaphor, I realized, for the endless cycle of pursuing shallow pleasure. That was it! The ad might have been on a samsaric loop, but I didn’t have to be.

I sat up and smiled and nodded. I get it! Lesson learned, universe! We can get on with the show now, thanks!

But there was no show. Only this ad. Over the first hour of repetition, I initially tried to adopt the ear of an anthropologist, straining to glean insight into cultural norms or unique Southeast Asian advertising practices. Something. Anything. Cinematography. Soundtrack. But the frenetic pace and nasal tones precluded such study. In fact, I was horrified to register a budding aversion to the sound of the Thai language.

Next, I began limiting my focus, on each repetition, to single parts of the main actor’s face. In isolation, his mouth opened and shut like a machine, revealing rows of straight white stones that, to my eyes, betrayed some deeper truth⁠—underneath all the enthusiasm of the actor’s face was a sphere of bone with open sockets and a fixed grimace that would long outlast the flesh.

On the next run-through, I zeroed in on his eyes. They looked desperate. I felt I could see behind the scenes. I imagined his story. He was about my age, twenty-five. He’d shouted his way through this script fifteen times that day. The muscles of his mouth were sore. Perhaps professionally feigning excitement had begun to inspire a brooding skepticism of joy itself. That had been my experience as a consultant, at least. Perhaps he’d been complimented all his life and encouraged to become what he’d become. Boy wonder. He’d grown to like the idea of a lead part with the cameras rolling. And now his bright eyes cried for help, trapped inside his beaming face. He’d gotten exactly what he thought he wanted. He didn’t know what else to do.

Six hours later, the bus groaned onto the road shoulder and exhaled into dust under the midday sun. Passengers rose and filed into the aisle, leaving their bags behind. We’d been on the road an hour longer than I expected, but I still saw nothing but dry grassland in every direction. I rose and approached the driver and said, Is this . . . ?

He made quick small bows and said in English, Half.

I gaped. Half . . . halfway?

He nodded and grinned and bowed some more.

I melted. Hobbled down the stairs. Squinted in the shrieking sun. Looked both ways and crossed toward a gravel lot, where a lone cinder-block structure stood crumbling by the roadside. From a few open windows, the other passengers took trays of food.

These lunches looked nothing like the dishes I thought I knew from Thai restaurants in the US. These had bird feet, gristle, tufts of hair. In theory, I craved cultural immersion. I fancied myself as one who would relish the novelty of every unknown dish. Maybe I’d banter with the cooks, and they would take a liking to me and share a couple of anecdotes of their family histories through the lens of food, and we’d all part ways feeling as if we’d briefly grasped some paradox about how the world was both so big and so small, or how we were all at once so different and yet the same. Basically, I wished I was the host of a cooking show, which I wouldn’t have admitted because it felt uncool and like cultural appropriation⁠—and because I couldn’t bring myself to be adventurous in practice.

Alone, disgusted with my fantasies and my inability to act on them, I ate white rice off a disposable plate and took in the dreary scene before me. Clouds of flies hovered above emaciated feral cats that slept as flat as puddles in scant spots of shade. I brushed flies from my own face, put the plate aside, and lowered my head to my knees.

This was nothing like my first trip to a monastery three years ago. I’d been personally greeted at the airport in Auckland, New Zealand, by the head monk himself. His nephew had come along⁠—because monks aren’t allowed to drive⁠—and we’d cruised through rolling hills of green farmland and pine forest until arriving at a bucolic hermitage, one of the many branches of the Thai Forest Tradition that had spread around the world since the 1990s. The head monk had escorted me down a grassy path to my own private lodging⁠—a rustic 8'-by-10' hut with cedar shakes that smelled inside of sandalwood.

Instead, I was now bent over at a bus stop, covered in sweat and dust, getting a sunburn. When I heard the bus wheeze to life, I was the first back on board.

Over the next six hours, I slid into a clammy, claustrophobic fog. The commercial resumed on the small TV. The sun eventually gave up and left us in darkness. I slouched into the mark of a question and, for a moment, began to wonder what the hell I was doing here. But I pushed the thought away. I had to be here. This was what I wanted. I didn’t know what else to do.

Finally, the bus halted. Ubon Ratchathani. End of the line.

No sooner had I limped down the steps than a small crowd of men surrounded me. They shouted in tones of accusation. For a moment I gripped my backpack straps and thought to run, but then I realized they were moto drivers, offering me a ride.

Despite my twelve-hour language immersion course, courtesy of the ad, I understood nothing.

Wat Pah Nanachat, I said⁠—the name of the monastery where I was headed.

They stopped talking. Looked at each other. Shrugged.

I tried again. Wat Pah Nanachat?

Still, no go.

I said the three words slowly, pausing in between. Wat, I did know, meant monastery. Pah⁠—forest. And Nanachat⁠—international. The international forest monastery. I gesticulated, tracing a roof over my head, clasping my hands, and closing my eyes as if in meditation.

At this, one driver exclaimed, exactly as I thought I had said it, Ah, Wat Pah Nanachat!

Yes. That.

I followed the man to his moto, basically a dirt bike, and perched on the back tip. He shook his head and beckoned me closer. I scooted up an inch and placed a tentative hand on his waist, feeling transported back to the awkwardness of a junior high dance. The bike accelerated, and I nearly flew off. By the time we reached the road, I was clutching him like a koala.

From over the driver’s shoulder, I saw a surprising midnight rush hour. At a stoplight, vendors on foot weaved in between idling vehicles, peddling snacks in plastic bags. Suddenly, as if a sack had broken from above, it started to pour. Vendors scattered. Traffic slowed. The driver and I ducked, but we sped onward, our view reduced to blurry bulbs of light.

I grew scared. The road was slick, and we were top-heavy. The thin bike tires could easily slip and send us skidding into one of the oncoming trucks stacked with chicken cages. This is how it happens, I thought. This is how it happened. Ice had sent my friend’s car into the path of a semi.

I began planning how to survive a crash. Maybe, after impact, while my body flew through the air, I could curl into a ball and land on my backpack and slide along the asphalt to safety. I found myself rehearsing this twisting acrobatic maneuver in small twitching movements. The driver must’ve felt my quivering because he soon pulled off the road and under the canopy of a car-repair shop. We dismounted, stood on either side of his bike, and waited for the storm to subside. I let my shoulders relax, but when