I am staying in the mountains east of Mandalay in a meditation centre.
Here I donate my time and labour for the purpose of supporting other
people here to meditate. The centre has a little over 50 foreigners
here doing a 2 month intensive meditation retreat. They get up at 4.00
am and do about 8 hours of sitting meditation each day up till about
9.00pm. Most of the people are of chinese descent from Singapore,
Malaysia, Indonesia, Taiwan, Australia, Hong Kong, and mainland China.
We have nuns, laywomen, and a few men. To support them there are about
10 burmese, 2 chinese, and myself. This support crew cook, buy food,
run the office, fix the pumps, and the burmese nun who started the
place teaches meditation. The whole place runs by donations from the
participants and others who have been here in the past.
My own task is to liase with the local government agencies especially
immigration and report who is here and who has left. 14 copies of
documents each time someone new arives to 4 different locations from
village headman, police, immigration and township council. Then I also
buy food and supplies in the market. To do all this I have a motorbike
to get around on.
The centre was built 3 years ago and in the google map attached you
can see our centre and I have made the area of land belonging to the
centre a darker green. About 50 acres. At the top of the picture you
can see another green area of trees. That is migadawun monastery where
I lived as a monk for 6 years and we planted trees there 23 years ago.
It is now a nice forest. I plan to make this place forested too over
the next few years on areas of land we will never use for building.
In my spare time I get to meditate too, mostly at night. It is a lot
of work to keep everything on track, but it is quite nice to be here
and have time to meditate myself. I have been in this town on and off
for 23 years now and I know a lot of interesting people here. From the
simple and hardworking villagers to govt officials and even one of the
most interesting surgeons in the world. More about him later.
As I meditate and help out here I see more and more how unique and
rare is a place like this where people can retreat from the world to
search for inner peace and understanding. It is worth the effort I
think to help them to find peace and happiness and find release from
the suffering of the rounds of rebirth.
I also get to see how good are the hearts of burmese people and how
fortunate I have been to have their support and the support of the
government here to be able to study and practise Buddhism here. It is
a privilege I can never forget, and for which I am always grateful.
The retreat here ends on March 28th but I plan to stay on afterwards
till June and do less work and more meditation. I am looking forward
to it....
