So, in conclusion, you could say I wish India was experiencing an Indian summer! Har har!

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1.Preface to Vipassana

Ten days of silence. Not just silence but of frequent meditation, separated from books and music and anything to occupy your mind but your mind. I don't feel daunted or scared by the prospect but I am curious and uncertain to an extent. Uncertain about what it may churn up and about how I will feel about ten days of absent presence.

A lot has been said to us of Vipassana, often about how difficult it can be. There is a part of me that is suspicious about these statements. I wonder if they are in the same category as people claiming Delhi airport to be super hectic and chaotic; when we there we saw no evidence of that, certainly not to the extent people suggested. The poverty hasn't been as shocking as I've heard claimed as well, though that is not to dismiss the poverty we have seen as insignificant.

Yet I also know it won't be easy. When normally meditating the greatest difficulty has been thinking that I should be organising this gig or planning that day, etc. What E terms "restlessness". With nothing to plan and nothing to organise whilst on retreat, what will my mind lock onto instead? Perhaps anxiety about not having booked accomodation in Gaya? Or the lack of plans we have yet for Nepal? Or even the possibility of not being let into the US? Or something deeper and older? Who knows at this point.

I am looking forward to these 10 days with a mild level of curiosity and uncertainty, and will complete the second half of the article after exiting Dhamma Caka.

2.Varanasi to Vipassana

Though we were in Varanasi for three days it was really only one full day. After arriving into the train station we decided to walk to our guest house by the bank of the Ganga (Ganges), a journey that Google Maps said would take just over an hour. It probably would if you weren't dodging traffic and weaving through the crowd, frequently stopping to wonder exactly where you are and whether you're on the correct path. Even after we'd rached Chowk, the area the guest house is in, the multitude of tiny winding lanes required particular concentration to navigate. We reached the guest house over two hours after leaving the train station.

The room at Mishra Guest House was basic but at 300 rupees a night it was fine, although it was impossible to touch the wall without its chalky blue paint rubbing off onto skin or clothes. The building had a rooftop restaurant that claimed to have wifi but did not for the duration we were there. It did have wild monkeys climbing and playing all over it and they were cute so long as you didn't approach them, at which point they would likely chew your face off. We spent the first night doing little more than resting.

The second day was taken up by a walk along the ghats, a series of connected burial sites used by Hindus to burn the deceased on the Ganga. It was sunny and we spent much of the day not being hassled too much although there were occasionally men very eagre to give me free arm massages. At one point E and I spent 45 minutes sitting on the steps of one ghat, watching people live out their lives, and we weren't hassled once. That was pleasant, and belied the harsh cold we would face within just a couple of days. Later on in the afternoon we stopped at a burning ghat where the dead receive ritual cremation. The body was wrapped in white cloth and had wood built around it, leaving just the feet jutting out. The funeral party (seemingly only ever comprised of males) would then set light to the pyre and ensure it burned until reduced to ash. This happens 24 hours a day at the burning ghats, of which there are a few along the Ganga. We got an early night, preparing for a 5.15am start the next morning.

Like so much else in India, the dailly schedule seems chaotic and intense to my English sensibilities. The day often doesn't wind down until 2am throughout the week and begins again at about 6am. It is not a country that has much downtime.Waking for a 5.30am boat trip along the Ganga gave a rare opportunity to experience a quiet and peaceful Varanasi. We set off in the dark, a handful of others also staying at Mishra beside us in the wooden boat that was being rowed by a quiet local. We were taken down much of the length of the ghats, giving us an opportunity to experience our walk the day before from a different angle, and watched the day emerge from behind thick clouds. It must be stunning in summer, watching the sun rise above the far bank of the river, but it was no less magical watching it grey the morning sky. The magic was slightly undercut by rogue trinket salesman rowing up to our boat and offering to sell postcards/statues/birdfeed/opium though it was perhaps the first time I was genuinely impressed by their determination.

After arriving back at the guest house we had breakfast before packing up and heading to Sarnath, where we would begin our retreat.

Except it turns out Dhamma Chakka was not in Sarnath at all. It lay approximately 5km away in a village called Khargipur. A reoccuring theme of our time in India has been the fact that nothing is ever as straightforward as we (I) assume they will be. After some confusion searching for it in Deer Park, location of the tree under which Siddartha Gotama (the Buddha) gave his first sermon, we were point in the correct direction by a local tourism officer.

I won't give a day by day blow of my time at the Vipassana retreat centre because it was essentially identical day by day. Instead I will outline the conditions and, if you are interested in reading my thoughts about the theory and practice of the meditation technique, then look at section three.

We arrived on the 18th, around 3pm. It began with signing in and being assigned the rooms in which we would sleep for the next 11 days. I was fortunate in receiving a single bed cell, though all the females and most of the males were in rooms of 2 to 3 people. The evening of the 18th established two core principals that would remain until the morning of the 28th, Day 10: first, gender segregation; second, Noble Silence Noble Silence is not just a silence of the voice. Its intention is to silence all external stimulation as far as possible. This meant not only would we not talkbut also there was no reading, no writing, no music, no games, and even no eye contact with anyone else on the centre except the teacher. This applied everywhere, at all times, until the morning of Day 10. Noble Silence began at 6pm on the 18th, whilst Day 1 began at 4pm on the 19th.

Day 1 to Day 10 began at 4am,, when bells were chimed and tinkled wake everybody up. Between 4.30am and 6.30am we would sit in the main hall, or Dhamma Hall, after which a breakfast of porridge would be served. A rest break would follow until 8am when there would be a 3 hour block of meditation in the Dhamma Hall and two 5 minute rests. At 11am we would have lunch of Thali (curry, roti, and rice) followed by another rest before a 4 hour block of meditation began at 1pm. This also consisted of two 5 minute breaks. Between 5pm and 6pm we would have a minimal supper of boonpuri (puffed dry rice) before another hour of meditation that led to an hour long discource by Vipassana leader S.N. Goenka. After this there would be a brief 15 to 30 minute meditation before it was time to return to our cells and have lights out by 9.30pm.

The word "cell" is what the organisers themselves used and is not an inappropriate description. The room is made of bare concrete and has little more than a bed inside. The bed was a sheet of metal topped with 2cm of foam. There was an adjoining bathroom but the taps ran only cold water, with hot water needing to be fetched from a large pot over an open fire outside the hall of residence. There was no showering, only pouring water over yourself with a jug. Having not had the forethought to bring a sleeping bag, I made do with two provided blankets for a cover but this proved too little. Ultimately I ended up sleeping fully clothed - and I mean fully clothed, complete with hat and jacket ontop of a vest, t-shirt, long sleeve and hoodie, two pairs of socks and jeans. I still fell asleep shivering.

The nights were cold.

They were also very beautiful in a stark and haunting way. During winter North India experiences thick fog that gave the beautiful gardens of Dhamma Chakka a ghostly quality beneath the compound's blue-white lightbulbs. Beyond the walls a curious mixture of howling jackals, distant steam train horns, and an apparently permanent music festival could be heard. During the day the place was alive with crows, Indian palm squirrels, and the aroma of tropical flowers. Still, we weren;t supposed to be recognising these things so I pretended not to appreciate them.

The days were not easy. Ten hours of meditation a day is an intense process. Sitting on a 3"x3" cushion, cross legged, for nearly 100 hours over ten days was a sarcastic response by the universe to E's and my desire to stay in one place for a while after spending the previous 11 days almost constantly moving. I spent the first three days simply learning to sit cross-legged for more than five minutes at a time and can now reach about 30 minutes.

The food provided was delicious but the experience of sitting in a hall with 20 others, eating in silence and staring down at the tabke, was a unique one. Waking up at 4am was difficult at first but second nature by Day 3, although the morning meditation for me was comprised laegely of trying not to drift back into sleep. An uncomfortable bed did not make the night's sleep any easier either. The separation of genders was strange because although we slept and ate separetly, the meditation was joined. Being in the same room as E but having to ignore her felt weird, like we had broken up under auspicious circumstances but were trapped in the same house and social circles.

And finally the cold. I cannot emphasise how cold it was, and there was little respite from it. Even during mid-afternoon when the sun was out the opportunity to warm in it was hedged by the four hour meditation block. Yet having said all that I would not have changed a thing. Though I came away with chillblaines on my feet, I believe the harsh conditions reinforced the starkness of the meditation technique. Vipassana was hard but not in the ways I expected. The Noble Silence wasn't difficult because there wasn't much time to read/write/whatever anyway, and the amount of meditation stopped being difficult after the first day because there wasn't anything to pull me away from it.

On Day 10 we were able to speak though gender separation remained. I was finally able to speak to Connor, beside whom I had spent the last nine days yet knew no more than his surname. Talking to others such as Jason and Chirug I discovered that many people had come to the course without any previous experience of meditation. This was definitely a trial by fire. Though we weren't able to eat or sleep in the same room I was able to speak to E on Day 10, an unexpected pleasure. It felt like a long hard winter had moved into spring.

At 6.30am on the 29th we were able to leave. E and I walked through the morning fog along the bank of a stream until we reached the villages that lined the road back into Sarnath. We had momo soup at a Tibetan cafe then caught an auto back to Varanasi.

Our original intention was to head straight onto to Bodhgaya, where the Buddha achieved Enlightenment beneath a bodhi tree, but we decided against that plan as it would become too difficult to then make our way to Nepal. Instead we decided we would get an overnight train to Gorakhpur to begin the adventure northward.

But nothing is ever as sraightforward as we assume it will be. Missing out on getting a ticket for that day by little more than half an hour, we settled on remaining in Varanasi. After spending several hours attempting and failing to get US dollars for our entry into Nepal (here we were helped by a kind man with no expectation f anything other than a photo at the end, clarifying that not everyone in India is out for our money) we decided to head to a place recommended by Connor called Jyonti Guest House.

Though you will probably never read this, thank you Connor. It is a lovely, cheap place in a chilled our part of the city. It is just what we need to recouperate after the retreat. We have decided to see in the New Year here and have a ticket up to Gorakhpur for the 2nd of January. Cheers.

3. Vipassana: Theory and Practice

Vipassana is a form of meditation based entirely within the body. Its ultimate aim is to achieve equinimity through the mental and physical understanding of "anicca"(meaning impermanence, and pronounced ah-KNEE-cha). Closed eyes meditation is used to increase mental awareness of the sensations of the body, first through gross sensations such as changes in pressure, temperature, comfort, etc and onward to subtle sensations described as vibrations and pulses. By observing these bodily phenomena objectively, the mind cultivates neither positive ("craving") nor negative ("aversion") reactions to all forms of sensation because it recognises that all sensations are impermanent, being born and changing and fading away. The 10 Day course spent the first three days focused entirely on anapanna (mindfulness of breathing) to calm and focus the mind before teaching vipassana on Day 4.

My primary issues with retreat were in the discourses, hour long videos of Goenka developing and explaining his take on vipassana, that were shown at 7pm every day as well as a bonus debriefing just before we left on the 29th. One of the first things Goenka states in the first video is that "this is not preaching". By Day 3, I was pretty convinced this is the equivalent of someone saying "I am not racist but..." because the discourses were pretty heavy in promoting Buddhist ethics and philosophy in a way that made them seem like a sort of meta-philosophy that existed beneath and beyond all others.

This was underlined by Goenka regularly stating Dhamma as the "Universal Truth", a phrase which immediately sets off my bullshit detector. I do not believe it possible for there to be a universal truth, particularly within philosophy and ethics where subjectivity, history, culture, and even species (ie the points of view of non-human life) have the potential for near infinite possibilties. Even though the fundamentals of Buddhism as I understand them are fairly righteous, I think it would be a gross over indulgence to state they are a universal truth.

A second claim made by Goenka and the teacher of our course was that vipassana is "scientific". Again, the claim to science is something that sets off my bullshit detector as its most often said of things that are thoroughly unscientific. This statement is aimed directly at the notion that vipassana enables the practitioner to feel the vibrations of subatomic particles (called kalapas) through his or her body (and it is through observing this phenomena equinimously that one achieves Enlightenment). I have very little knowledge of physics or biology but felt this idea to be implausible. I believe that the practitioner might believe they can feel such vibrations but that this is at best an unconscious visualisation. Because Goenka adamantly insists that practitioners do their best to avoid visualisation, they they need to focus only on what really is there, and thus implying a genuine belief in the ability to sense subatomic vibrations throughout the body, I couldn't get past what I felt was a bit of hokery.

Then there were two problems I had with the fundamental approach of vipassana. The first is with its mechanisation of the body. As stated above, vipassana uses bodily sensations to develop equinimity. To do this the technique asks the practitioner to take sections of the body and sit with them until a sensation arises, or if there are no sensations then for a minute or two, before moving onto the next section. As sensations become more frequent and subtle, the size of the section decreases. At the most advanced stages the practitioner will be taking fingernail sized sections and sweeping up, down, and even through the body. My issue with this is that it turns the physical body into little more than a tool for the mind, that our bodies are just a means for minds to become ever more powerful. I cannot get on board with this. Our bodies are things in themselves, with each limb and muscle and bone and cell and all the bacteria that exist amongst them having existences that our mind, powerful though it is, might never know. Sometimes we are a mystery to ourselves, and that is okay. The reduction of the body into a whetstone for sharpening the mind undermines that.

The second problem I had was more personal but relates to the way in which vipassana transcends the body versus the way in which anapanna meditation does. Vipassana I found awkward in a similar way to metta bhavana in that it requires an active engagement of the mind whilst simultaneously trying to discourage engagement of the mind. Conversely, anapanna's pure focus on breathing in and out decreases the need for active engagement of the mind. As vipassana practice strengthens the meditator will eventually reach a stage where they feel (whether scientifically possible or not, it is fairly irrelevant for these purposes) their entire body to be vibrating and through this vibration they are able to experience complete impermanence of the body and thus achieve a total dissolution of their physical and mental self.

At university I remember we undertook detailed analysis of Alice Oswald's epic poem Dart, analysing stanzas and verses so finely that by the end they almost no longer made sense. This is what I believe vipassana encourages, at least within me. To me this makes sense only as a sort of physical version of semantic satiation, the name for that moment when a word or phrases no longer makes sense because you have said or read it too many times. I find this to be negative for the same reasons as stated in problem one, that it is almost becomes a rejection of the body. When undertaking anapanna I have once or twice reached brief moments of what I would also call a dissolution of the self but in a much more body-connected way. My mind simply ceases to be tethered to my body. I can still feel its existence and its reality and solidity, but because my mind feels as though it has opened up a non-space about itself, it feels more like a coexistence than some triumph of mind over body. I analogised this to E as vipassana being like an explosion of the body and anapanna being more a tunnel through the prison wall of the mind.

There is nothing inherently bad about vipassana and I believe it is a technique that will work for and benefit many people. However the discourses definitely erred toward implying that vipassana is the only form of meditation worth putting most of one's efforts into. This brief analysis has been an attempt to illustrate why I feel this is not necessarily the case.

4. Details from Vipassana

There were some memorable moments throughout the course. Here are some I committed to memory.

- The paths are dotted by occasional blue-white lamps that make the grounds ghostly amongst thick fog. Because of Noble Silence the others stare at the floor as they measuredly pace back and forth along these paths, and because of the cold they are draped in blankets that sway with each step. This place is a colony of revanents.

- One afternoon I watched a crow feed on a mouse. Looking up through a tree, a small grey body swung from a branch. Its pink innards were exposed and trapped beneath the crow's claw as it pecked at the eyes. The crow saw me and hopped one branch further away, turned, knew that I was still watching, and continued hopping to further branches until it was happy that I won't try stealing its dinner for myself.

- Within 20 minutes the weak winter sun turns from layering the world in a champagne gold to becoming a deep red disc descending through an orange sky strayed with pinks. As it slouches below the wall and beneath the horizon, everything above turns a bruised blue-purple and leaves the earth a gathering of silhouettes. The moon is stuck like horns above a tree.

- I can hear jackals but I will never see them.

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Comments

[taracloud]

Happy faces!
Well, you certainly look happier in this photo than in your profile one--was it the Vipassana? I'm from California and have done a couple of 10-day retreats that are much easier on the body than this though equally rigorous and perhaps richer on the inner planes. The US and England both have big Vipassana movements and great sanghas and retreats. They teach more from a Western perspective than from Goenka's. My first was Insight Meditation in the Vipassana Theraveda tradition and my first book was Jack Kornfield's A Path with Heart. Really good and non-dogmatic. Looking forward to reading about your adventures in Nepal.