Ghost Train to the Eastern Star (42 page)

The Strand Hotel was almost alone in having been extensively fixed up, restored to its former glory, with a palm court and ceiling fans and a spruced-up lobby, and flunkies wearing immaculate frock coats and white gloves. The Strand's fine-dining restaurant served "grilled beef tenderloin 'Mulwara' topped with foie gras" for $34. The price of that one dish fascinated me, because it so happened that in Myanmar, where education was despised and considered suspect, schoolteachers earned $34 a month. Only the army got richer; everyone else was struggling to get by, hustling and hawking and in the money-changing business—the official exchange rate was 300 kyats to the dollar, the black market rate five times that.

In this sort of tyranny, without any opposition, everyone was forced to wheedle and whine, negotiate, horse-trade, and tell lies. But if the military in Myanmar was odious, the people I met were soft-tempered and helpful, and it was perhaps the only country I passed through where I met nothing but generosity and kindness. And the Burmese were the most ill-treated, worst-governed, belittled, and persecuted of any people I met—worse off than the Turkmen, which is saying a lot.

I didn't stay at the Strand, though I had done so long ago. It was ridiculous to pay $450 a night for a single room. I found a perfectly adequate (which is to say somewhat dreary but cheap) $45-a-night hotel near the Shwe Dagon Pagoda.

"Train is full," Mr. Nay Aung, the ticket agent, had told me at the station. He suggested that I come back the next day.

I waited a day. I walked to the Shwe Dagon and around the city. I saw hardly any tourists, not much traffic, all the signs of a dictatorship: selfishness and paranoia clinging to power, epitomized by well-dressed soldiers in heavy boots, threadbare citizens in rubber flip-flops. I was full of admiration for my younger self. Yangon had been ramshackle
then, but I had no money; I had succeeded by improvising, flying by the seat of my pants. One of the lessons of this second trip was that I had been a hardy traveler, and yet I knew it was not so much hardiness as a desperation to make the trip fruitful.

"You are so lucky," Mr. Nay Aung said to me the following day. "We have a cancellation."

He sold me a ticket to Mandalay: first class, but with four people in the compartment. The train would leave around one in the afternoon and arrive in Mandalay at three the next morning. This improbable schedule—only one train a day—Mr. Nay Aung could not explain.

"Yes, it is not convenient to arrive at three o'clock. It will be so dark then."

I remembered the Mandalay train as basic, the trip an ordeal. This train was in better shape, but it was no less a ghost train, a decaying relic of the past, taking me from the skeletal city haunted by the military to the northerly ghost town of Mandalay. I felt that strongly as we set off. I had no idea how accurate that vision of Mandalay was, as a city of wraiths and the living dead, of people being screamed at by demonic soldiers.

In the sleeping compartment a young Frenchman was lolling in his berth, his sinuous Thai girlfriend, in her teens, wrapped around him. I said hello and then went to the platform to buy some oranges.

A monk with a bundle slung over his shoulder was being pestered by a ragged Burmese man. The monk was speaking English and trying to give the man some money—some folded worn bills.

"No, two dollah," the Burmese man said.

"This same, these kyats," the monk said.

"Two dollah," the Burmese man said again.

I said, "What's the problem?"

The ragged man was a scooter rickshaw driver who had taken the monk to the station. He insisted, as many Burmese did of foreigners, on being paid in American dollars.

"Here," I said, giving the man the two dollars. The man took them with both hands, fingers extended, then touched them to his forehead.

"You're a stranger," the monk said. "You don't know me."

I had been reading a Buddhist text, the Diamond Sutra, as background for another Indian novella I was writing, "The Gateway of India," so I was able to say, "The Diamond Sutra says that you should give and not think about anything else. You don't speak Burmese?"

"I'm from Korea." It turned out that he was on this train to Mandalay, the fourth person in my compartment. He said hello to the Frenchman and the Thai girl, and soon after, with a clang of couplings, the train started to move.

I looked out the window and marveled again, as I had on arriving in Yangon. Nothing had changed on the outskirts, either—after the decaying bungalows and creekside villages, it was just dry fields, goats cropping grass on the tracks, ducks on murky ponds, burdened women walking, looking haughty because they were balancing bundles on their heads, slender sarong-wearing Burmese, and befouled ditches.

I dozed, I woke up; the Frenchman and his girlfriend had separated and were asleep in the upper berths. The monk sat opposite me.

He was a Zen monk, and his name was Tapa Snim ("Snim means monk in Korean"). He had just arrived in Myanmar. He was fifty. He had shifted his small bundle; it was now in the corner of his berth. He was a slender man, slightly built, very tidy, with clean brownish robes and a neatly shaved head that gave him a gray skull. He was not the smiling evasive monk I was used to seeing, who walked several inches above the ground, but an animated and watchful man who met my gaze and answered my questions.

"How long have you been a monk?" I asked.

"I became a monk at twenty-one," Tapa Snim said. "I have been meditating for twenty-nine years, but also traveling. I have been in a monastery here in Yangon for a few days, but I want to stay in a monastery in Mandalay."

"How long will you be here?"

"Meditation for six months, then I will go to Laos and Cambodia—same, to meditate in a monastery."

"You just show up and say, 'Here I am'?"

"Yes. I show some papers to prove who I am. They are Theravada Buddhist. I am Mahayana. We believe that we can obtain full enlightenment."

"Like the Buddha?"

"We can become Buddha, totally and completely."

"Your English is very good," I said.

"I have traveled in fifteen Buddhist countries. You know something about Buddhism—you mentioned the Diamond Sutra."

"I read it recently. I like the part of it that describes what life on earth is:

A falling star, a bubble in a stream.
A flame in the wind. Frost in the sun.
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud."

"A phantom in a dream," Tapa Snim said, the line I'd forgotten. "That's the poem at the end. Have you read the Sixth Patriarch's Sutra?"

I said no, and he wrote the name in my notebook.

"All Zen Buddhists know this," he said, tapping the name.

We traveled for a while in silence. Seeing me scribbling in my notebook, the Frenchman said, "You must be a writer."

He had a box of food, mainly potato chips, pumpkin seeds, and peanuts. He shared a bag of pumpkin seeds with us.

Up the great flat plain of Pegu Province, dusty white in the sun, the wide river valley, baking in the dry season. Small simple huts and villages, temples in the distance, cows reclining in the scrappy shade of slender trees. Tall solitary stupas, some like enormous whitewashed pawns on a distant chessboard, others like oversized lamp finials, under a blue and cloudless sky.

The bamboo here had the shape of giant antlers, and here and there pigs trotted through brambles to drink at ponds filled with lotuses. It was a vision of the past, undeveloped, serene at a distance, and up close harsh and unforgiving.

Miles and miles of drained and harvested paddy fields, the rice stalks cut and rolled into bundles and propped up to await collection. No sign of a tractor or any mechanization, only a woman with a big bundle on her head, a pair of yoked oxen—remarkable sights for being so old-fashioned. And then an ox cart loaded with bales of cotton, and across a mile of paddy fields a gold stupa.

I walked to the vestibule of the train, for the exercise, and talked awhile with an old toothless man going to Taungoo. When I asked him about the past, he seemed a little vague.

"I'm fifty-two," he said, and I was reminded how poverty aged people prematurely.

When I went back to the compartment, Tapa Snim was rummaging in
his bag. I watched him take out an envelope, and then he began knotting the two strands that made this simple square of cotton cloth into a sack.

"Do you have another bag?" I asked, because this one seemed improbably small for a long-distance traveler.

"No. These are all my possessions."

Everything not just for a year of travel, but everything he owned in the world, in a bag he easily slung under one arm. True, this was a warm climate, but the sack was smaller than a supermarket bag.

"May I ask you what's inside?"

Tapa Snim, tugging the knot loose, gladly showed me the entire contents.

"My bowl, very important," he said, taking out the first item. It was a small black plastic soup bowl with a close-fitting lid. He used it for begging alms, but he also used it for rice.

In a small bag: a piece of soap in a container, sunglasses, a flashlight, a tube of mosquito repellent, a tin of aspirin.

In a small plastic box: a spool of gray thread, a pair of scissors, nail clippers, Q-Tips, a thimble, needles, rubber bands, a two-inch mirror, a tube of cream to treat foot fungus, a stick of lip balm, nasal spray, and razor blades.

"Also very important," he said, showing me the razor blades. "I shave my head every fifteen days."

Neatly folded, one thin wool sweater, a shawl he called a
kasaya,
a change of clothes. In a document pouch he had a notebook and some papers, a photograph showing him posed with a dozen other monks ("to introduce myself"), and a large document in Chinese characters he called his
bhikkhu
certificate, the official proof he was a monk, with signatures and seals and brushwork. He also had a Sharp electronic dictionary, which allowed him to translate from many languages, and a string of beads—108 beads, the spiritual number.

As I was writing down the list, he said, "And this"—his straw hat— "and this"—his fan.

"Nothing else?"

"Nothing."

"What about money?"

"That's my secret."

And then carefully he placed the objects on the opened cloth and drew the cloth together into a sack, everything he owned on earth.

"Tell me how you meditate."

"You know the Japanese word
koan"
he said. It wasn't a question. "For example, in ancient China, a student asked an important Zen monk, 'What is Buddha?' The monk answered, 'One pinecone tree in front of a garden.'"

Out the train window I could see a village set in a bower of dense trees, offering shade, scattered groves of banana and coconut, more lotus ponds, people on bikes. And here before me the shaven-headed and gently smiling Tapa Snim.

"I meditate on that. 'One pinecone tree in front of a garden.' It is a particular tree."

"How long have you been using this koan?"

"Years. Years. Years." He smiled again. "Twelve hours a day."

"Is it working?"

"I will understand eventually. Everyone has Buddha-spirit in their mind. By reason of sufferings and desires and anger we can't find it." He rocked a little on the seat and went on. "If we get rid of suffering and desire and anger, we can become a Buddha."

"How do I get rid of them?"

"Meditate. Empty your mind—your mind must be vacant. Non-mind is the deepest stage of the deep stage." He asked to borrow my pen and the little notebook I'd been using. He said, "Every night I have a serious question in my head—every day and night. Look."

He set down six Chinese characters, inscribing them slowly, each slash and dot. Then he poked at each of them, translating.

"Sun-faced Buddha, moon-faced Buddha," he said. "For twenty-six years I have thought about this. If I solve this, I will know truth. It is my destination, my whole life, to solve this problem."

"But how did you happen to choose these images?"

"One day, a famous monk, Ma Tsou, was asked, 'How are you?' This was his reply."

"Why did you come here to meditate? You could have stayed in Korea."

He said, "Buddha traveled! So I travel. I am looking for enlightenment."

"What do you think about Burma?"

He laughed and told me that on the day of his arrival he had gone to the railway station but the ticket window was closed. So he waited on a
bench and, waiting there, had fallen asleep. When he woke up he discovered that the pouch at his waist had been razored open—literally, by a cutpurse—and some of his money stolen.

"But small money! Big money is in a secret place."

"You've been to India?"

"India can be dangerous," he said. "But I have a theory about India." He sat forward, eager to explain. "I see many poor people there, and I think, What is their karma? They are the poorest people in the world. Why do they receive this big suffering? Eh?"

I said I had no idea, and that the people here—right out the window—seemed miserably poor, living in bamboo huts and steadying wooden plows pulled by oxen, and laboring under the load of heavy bales.

"India is worse," he said. "This is my ridiculous thought. I know it is silly, but..."By"but"he implied that it was not ridiculous at all and that I should not be too quick to judge him. "Indian people have many bad karmas. In their history, they created violence; they destroyed Buddhist stupas and persecuted monks. They all the time blame Muslims, but Hindus have been just as bad. In my Indian travel I think this is the deep reason for the suffering there."

"What about Korea—any suffering?"

"Suffering everywhere! In Korea we have mad crazy Christians, because we are under the influence of the United States."

"Reverend Moon?"

"Many people like him!" Tapa Snim said. "I am glad to be here."

In the setting sun, the muted pinks and browns, the subdued light, the long shadows of the laboring bent-over harvesters. And in the dusk, the unmistakable sign of rural poverty: no lights in the villages, only the lamp-glow in small huts or the small flare of cooking fires at ground level, the smell of woodsmoke. All the train windows were open to insects and smoke and, passing a swamp or a pond, a dampness in the air, the malodorous uprush of the hum of stagnant water.