Who Holy Fools
In our valley there are eight precepts. Six senses of restraint. Four noble truths. Two meals; the first at dawn, the second before noon. Three hundred stairs or more, these we climb five times each day. Ten hours a day we sit, the ardent may sit the entire night. Our great hall is double storied and inlaid in jade and gold exotic wood and lit by a thousand candles. There are a thousand monks, five hundred kutis, fifteen dogs or more that roam. These keep alive for karmic purposes. Above, pagodas stud the Taung Nyo mountain range. It has been said they are much the dishes of antenna, turned inside out. It has been said they may share a similar purpose. It is not done to discuss what this purpose may be.
The bell sounds at three. It is hewn from the barrel of a great forest tree and its sound carries through the blackness, waking the sleepers and those beyond sleep. I wake and make water and moult from my dream and stand before the door of my kuti and watch the white electric torchlight of the monks as they trace the procession of sulphuric lamps that hangs above the stair. On the climb I join them, we in our hundreds, old and young and defiled and attained, and watch the fall of their foot on the step above me. At intervals we pass depictions of Gautama Buddha in various scenes: beneath the banyan tree, with blue hair and golden skin, a snake wreathed about his neck; Gautama in his deprivations, his body a skeleton, eyes lost in the shadows of his eye sockets. At the crest of the stairs a holy fool sits beneath a limestone pillar. His eyes are closed and his body is filthy but his smile is pure and his being is radiant, haloed in mosquitoes.
In the back of the great candlelit hall I take my appointed place amongst the other novices and foreigners. Above our mats mosquito nets hang from hooks like wedding dresses. At the front of the hall sits a massive statue in dull gold and before it our figures in long broken rows like lesser reflections. On my cushion I cross my legs and wrap my net about me like a shroud and I close my eyes and unclench my mind and give up hope and watch my breath as it traces its figures of eight and devolves into thought. I circle in carnivals and drums and flesh and her smell and come back to breath then give it up then pounce upon it and hold it wriggling in my paws and watch as it becomes its own simulacrum. In the silence coughs and sighs ring like gunshots and before all the statue sits watching his doomed imitators with unsmiling eyes and his palm held up as if bidding us stop.
When the breakfast bell sounds I draw my legs beneath me and wait for the pain to subside and for the blood to come back. I stand and limp out the door with many others but I do not join them down the stair. In the conjoining courtyard a young banyan tree stands beneath a pond choked in algae and in its centre stands a great stone calendar crowned with molten candles. By its count this is the inauspicious year of 2563 and this is the last of the rainy season. The first light of day is graded violet and green and the air full of a strange carnal tension. I stand before the pond. Almost innocent. Before the day turns us all to iron — like Hesiod’s men: all things unattended degenerate in time.
Beneath his pillar the holy fool sits unmoved. As I pass him, he opens a red and crusted eye and studies me.
“You dreamed of flesh.” The holy fool’s voice is hollow and wet. “You dreamed of a bell made of flesh.”
I stop before the stairs and turn and face him. His eyes are closed again. He begins a hoarse and choking chant.
“Bhagavato, arihato, abbasanto.”
Once I have eaten I lie on the floor of my kuti. Outside the chicken yogi is sweeping the pathways. I hear a distant gunshot from the military base. In other countries it would seem a contradiction that a monastery borders a military base. But we, the Burmese, are at peace with paradox. It is not uncommon for a family’s first-born son to undergo ordination, and for the second to undergo conscription. They are not unalike. Regiment, regimen, suppression of self. The monk’s weapon is his mind and his target is his own continuation. In both cases our business is death. Theirs is the death of the body. Which is no true death. Ours is the death of the mind. Which is the only act of annihilation. Everything else is mere perpetuation.
On my way to the hall I cross a wooden bridge. In the stream below refuse has formed a dam. Translucent plastic bags and cigarettes packets and razor blade packets. Pinned to a noticeboard beneath the stairs are pictures of a girl in four stages of her decomposition. In the final stage her body is a blackened heap that looks almost botanical. We are the same, I tell her soiled corpse. All things.
Around the holy fool his mosquitoes have grown and multiplied. Someone has brought him a tin plate of rice and grains still cling to his hands like fungal growths. He lies against his pillar and rolls his head blindly and smiles and drools. As I pass him I close my eyes and master my breathing.
“You think you are close. But you are so far away.”
His eyes look at me with infinite mischievousness. “What is your name?”
“It was lost beneath the river.”
His teeth are jagged gold flints. “What is your name?”
“In 1484 it was cast. Two hundred thousand viss of copper, gold, silver, and tin.”
I feel like I’ve been punched in the stomach. “What is your name, bhante.”
“It was the greatest in the world. And in 1608 it was lost beneath the muds of that river.”
In the hall the air is close and cloying. Outside my nets the mosquitoes are circulating and screaming and a bead of sweat forms under my chin and trickles down my chest. My mind is damned with thoughts too many, too fast to catch. Outside a gunshot sounds and I clench my jaw and thrust my tongue into the roof of my mouth and attempt to crush mind with mind. I lose my breath then give it up then pounce upon it and hold it wriggling in my paws and watch. I drown in thought and counter-thought and breath and simulacrum of breath and I think of her skin and her smell and I remember my dream. Beneath my hands where they lie cupped on my lap an old muscle stirs.
When the bell sounds I am the first to rise. I walk out the hall and kick my sandals on and when the holy fool sees me he begins to laugh, a slow and raucous sound. I pass him. Behind me I hear him call: “And in 1613 he was impaled and it took him three days to die.”
I trot down the stairs where Buddha sits in his deprivations and past the notice board where the girl circles in mortification and past the dormitory and library and sanatorium and refectory until finally I walk along the long straight linking road that leads towards the lower monastery. The road is bordered on either side by plantations of rubber trees, their bark flayed in spirals, their white blood running down into halved coconuts. As I walk I watch them, the trunks as they align and form one then break. I pass a shrine that monks use to practise tracing kamma-formations through time. I pass a graveyard where a child-nun sits in absorption beside a grave and a plastic sign reads: “contemplate death.” I pass beneath a derelict archway and into a courtyard of pygmy mansions and overgrown pathways and pavilions with plastic chairs stacked beneath. On the far end stands a stone pagoda in the old Burmese style: squat and stolid, shaped like a great bell. There is no one in this place yet the air is full of a terrible presence. I wind around the massive base of the pagoda and into its damp shade and pull my cloth around my ankles and plunge my knees into the cool wet earth and think of her back and her armpits and her smell which is sex absolute and a light burns disgusting and the world vents its pressure and finally that foul bulb bursts.
When it’s done I wipe my shaking hands in the grass and walk back to my kuti. Above the sink hangs a picture of a man a flesh eating disease. I scrub my hands and groin with boiling water and I look at him.
When the bell sounds I climb the stairs but I do not enter the hall. The holy fool sits against his pillar with his eyes and mouth closed. The clothes hang off him like a scarecrow and I can feel his gravity. When I approach he opens his eyes and his eyes are very clear. He smiles at me, slowly stands up, and walks into the hall. I close my eyes, and take my appointed place beneath the pillar.