White Thread Binding
Are you a spiritual man? The question caught me by surprise. Uttered in little more than a whisper, it skitters over the russet floor tiles of the Wat. It has a different tone to it than a routine enquiry. Several villagers momentarily stop their prayers to stare. He does not speak English. I do not speak Thai. We have only my wife on hand to translate as best she can.
We are in the temple of our village in the far northeast of Thailand. My inquisitor is a 32-year-old forest monk, apparently born in the nearby city of Kalasin. Inducted into the monkhood at the age of fourteen by an esteemed Buddhist master he seems genuinely pleased to meet me. Patiently he awaits my answer - blessing the white thread he is about to bind around my right wrist. Silence. He repeats his question - though more firmly on this occasion. Are you a spiritual man?
I have been asked the same question many times. Each time my response has been quick, practiced, assured. And each time I crafted a response that satisfied my need for evasion while brushing off the inquiry as trivial. I thought it was cool. To be candid it was smug.
But in this instant I am mute. Are you a spiritual man? Each word is a cruel incursion on my carefully groomed persona. He waits. And still he waits. Three times the white thread lightly brushes my skin. Seconds tick by. Shall I attempt to change the subject? Clearly he does not intend the question to be rhetorical - but how can I possibly answer with a singular truth? After 74 years of experiencing a life so rich in almost everything it means to be living on this Earth I am tongue tied. My mind searches in vain for an answer. A convincing answer. Actually any answer! But there is only an embarrassing void. My usual poise has abandoned me.
This is a one-sided encounter. He knows I claim to be a Buddhist. How then should I explain my denunciation of any expectation that I should allow my personal philosophy to be caged within an imposed set of rules and rituals of the kind he practices – rituals that define Buddhism in this part of Thailand?
Although I do meditate – primarily, I admit, in order to maintain a healthy alignment of mind, body, heart and intuition - the impulse of appealing to a higher power (for any reason at all) is completely alien to my nature. Pleading various forms of assistance, praying for good luck, or admitting my misdemeanours in the hope of receiving some kind of absolution, now or in a later reincarnation, offends me. I am a mature adult – at times wise and at other times rash. But I thoroughly embrace my faults, of which there are many. I alone am responsible for my thoughts and deeds. I have no desire to blame others for any weakness I might have, nor seek pardon for the more blatant of my inadequacies. If I cannot be vulnerable and culpable it is unlikely I will become a better person. Excuses are easy to come by.
Over the centuries religious men and women have gone to war, often using their beliefs as a pretext to perpetrate the most unspeakable horrors on each other and to rationalize such vile behaviour. From the 14th century Crusades to modern-day state-sanctioned terrorism I cannot resolve the obscenity of violence with the practice of spirituality, nor war-mongering with the pursuit of a spiritual life. Nor can I reconcile the base nature of those who use their supposed devotion to a God-concept as their reasoning for harming others whilst claiming to be virtuous. This seems to me to be the greatest folly of all.
I am a pacifist and a humanitarian – a world citizen. In that context I now consciously choose to value the spiritual dimension of my humanity. This choice was not evident to me as a child. Indeed I was always confused by those who used their supposed spirituality to 'deliver them from evil' – even on the eve of wreaking untold havoc on others who supposedly epitomized that evil.
Part of the problem, I have no doubt, is the religious piety I was force-fed, and to which I initially submitted, during my adolescence. I was raised in the rites and rituals of the Anglican Church where I was indoctrinated into believing the Christ-myth along with Christian propaganda. At first I fell for the ceremonies and the doctrine. My faith lasted only until I began to apply my own reasoning to the matter. That pious dogma failed to embed sufficiently in my psyche is hardly a surprise. By the age of 13 I realized I had no need for fantasies of any kind – even if it was a liberating kind of superstition. Predictably my teachers objected to this heretical view in one so young.
That was not the only thing which troubled my teachers at the time. I developed an impulse to challenge them at every juncture. This got me into heaps of trouble. I lost my faith in certainty. Erudition became inconstant. Like ignorance, its alter ego, the knowledge I was acquiring at the hands of my tutors appeared to have very little to do with intelligence, or my own experience of the world. On the contrary, it seemed to depend on fairly tenuous representations of memories that morphed upon each remembering - grains of sand in a vast desert of unconscious unknowing.
Ironically, I felt the most treacherous knowledge of all was that most valued by my instructors, and society at large. In vogue, yet somehow artless and innately capricious, this information was incessantly thrown in my face, obscuring alternatives, taunting me with an infantile need to recall facts and figures that were uncomplicated, fixed, and that could be passed on easily from one person to the next, like some tedious musical game. Real mindfulness, I figured, was far more allusive. Pluralistic, forever shifting, relying not merely on cognition but on deep feelings of empathy and reflection.
In spite of the indignation expressed by some of my teachers, who demanded respect by virtue of their assumed intellectual superiority, I knew that my own experience of the world did matter. Much more so than even the most agreeable of them were prepared to admit.
Once I left school most of the ‘truths’ they had carefully constructed unravelled in an instant. I was alone in ignorance once more. Prepared yet intoxicated. I remember feeling a renewed purpose and energy. I sensed a satisfying and intimate wholeness - a belonging and an identity that was truly mine and yet universal somehow. Best of all, I had a new world to explore. And a voice. A voice that had not let me down. Until now… He waited still.
My thoughts were racing. One thing was clear. Without a more-or-less continuous cascade of novel ideas, cultures, experiences and situations to explore, my response to life’s most critical questions would have resulted in a rigid, overly-simplistic, regurgitation of other people’s truths. I would have become like many of my teachers, with minds tightly shut to any possibility other than the unambiguous or the mundane.
I found their certainty asphyxiating. Appreciation for the exotic, the aesthetic, the moral or the spiritual was always brought to a premature halt - relegated to parochial musings and farcical rationalizations. Did that mean I was a spiritual man? If so how might I reconcile that form of spirituality with my passionate denunciation of any conventional channel for accessing what was perceived to be a state of grace, and which my teachers considered a necessity?
I have always found many more reasons to reject blind faith than to embrace its quaint fictions, assurances, and mysteries that seem to differ profoundly from one translation to the next. My faith, if indeed it is that, does not depend on the existence of a higher intelligence in order for me to be, and remain, the concept 'I' with integrity and relate to 'Us' authentically. In fact the only external agency I need to feel spiritual is an 'other' I can relate to in some capacity. Constructed less around conviction and public piety, my personal beliefs are more concerned with the intimacy of connection: connection with and through nature; connection with place, beauty and form; connection with poetry, music, design and architecture; connection with other living creatures; and connection within the shared communion of our humanity.
Perhaps I am not a spiritual man because I am constantly dumbfounded by the non-spiritual, materialistic essence at our core. Perhaps this is why I get so frustrated and angry by the predatory, vulture-like, exploitation in neoliberal capitalism.
Complicated questions, too, always seem to prove the lack of a benevolent higher power. Questions like, why is poverty so difficult to expunge from the world when human beings have learned to perform so many other miracles? What factors, buried deep within the human psyche, cause us to be so intolerant of beliefs that happen to differ from our own set of misconceptions? Why do nations so readily resort to menace, oppression and violence in order to get their own way? And how can we possibly claim to be civilized when we are so eager to unleash violence on our fellow beings?
These questions, and others much more profound, tease and perplex me to this day. Could that make me a spiritual man?
Time was stranded and the slabbing heat sucked any intelligent response from my thoughts. In truth it was a brief moment - but it seemed like many minutes had passed.
He continued to bind my wrist with the white thread. Yes I am a spiritual man. My response came from deep within my being. Water spattered over me. He smiled - nodding quietly. A serene smile. The smile of a spiritual man.