In my mid life a cluster of friends and relatives died, and I found I had never felt so fascinated by life and the possibilities for introspection, demands for it even, as the light flooded in through the existential crack. I began to wonder if a change in career was the right path for me. I have a Ph.D. in Physiological Psychology, and though I had to plow through the thinkers who had studied normal and abnormal personality, and therapeutic theories, my specialty was the influence of hormones on the development of sexual behavior – in rats. I was not equipped to be a grief counselor. Indeed, I had left even experimental psychology behind and had fallen into a career as a custom jeweler, which I enjoyed, and which was acceptably lucrative. But if I were able to educate myself, I wondered if I might find satisfaction in working with people who were trying to find healthy ways forward after bereavement. And I had a legitimate Ph.D. to put on the shingle, if you didn’t look too closely.
But here’s my story: While considering a career change, I took a course in a hospice program at a community college. I can’t remember the title that attracted me. We studied group therapy, inner-child theory, “studies” conducted without the controls I was prissy about, and Buddhist philosophy. These topics were supposedly going to help us deal with the dying – in overwhelmingly Catholic, Hispanic northern New Mexico. I kept thinking we should be meeting our clients and family on their own terms, maybe offering the listening ear for the dying to speak of things the family didn’t want to hear, or for the family to be similarly heard. Anybody’s inner child had best be sent to daycare. I was more than a little annoyed by the material.
So, there I was in class one day. A visiting teacher, presumably a devotee, was talking Buddhism. He related the story of the junior and senior monks who come to a fast-flowing river where a woman is asking for help to cross. The senior monk hoists her onto his back and fords the stream. As the journey continues, the junior monk, finally unable to hold his tongue after hours of festering, blurts out his distress and disbelief that his superior has broken his vow to never touch a woman. The senior reacts with surprise: I put the woman down back by the river. You seem to be still carrying her.
This is a zinger of a story to be sure, but I have a mixed reaction to it. I speak up and tell the class about a visit I made to a Buddhist monastery in Burma in 1971. Another traveler had told my then husband and me that the chief monk is a super realized being and that we must see him. We are not really seekers; I suppose we are just experiencing everything we can during a round-the-world year. We get to spend about fifteen minutes in the monk’s presence while he silently peruses papers. I can’t stop looking at the low table at his elbow that is packed with pill bottles. We do not detect any improvement in our beings. But when we leave the presence, we are taken in hand by a highly articulate English-speaking monk who settles with us under a tree for what stretches into a golden afternoon of philosophical questioning and exchange of ideas – religion, science, morality, much of the nine yards. He is a lovely human being – educated, intelligent, funny. We three come to the end of our visit reluctantly and continue our talk as he walks us to a train platform. Eventually, an immense colonial-era locomotive, belching smuts, screeches and howls to a stop. Before we board one of the equally aged cars, my husband shakes the monk’s hand. I extend mine – and it is rejected.
“That did not feel good. I don’t think that is right,” I say to the class. The teacher inclines toward me. His voice drips with condescension masked as compassion. “Oh, you shouldn’t feel bad about being a woman.”
There is a silence as my temper rises and gets the better of me. What can I do? I am a redhead. My genetic makeup didn’t change as my hair turned white, and anyway it hadn’t turned then. I don’t laugh warmly and say that I certainly don’t feel bad about being a woman, though I can feel bad about being ill-treated as a woman. No, with steely eyes and those pauses between words that convey extreme emphasis, I say: “How did you find the worst possible interpretation of what I said?”
Excruciating discomfort all around. I have insulted the teacher to his core – or tried to. And he has actually assumed that I accept a low and unhappy status but might be induced to feel better about it if he, a man, assures me that I should. Bless his heart.
We somehow make it to the next topic. No mention is ever made of the incident again. But, like the young monk, I’m still carrying it, not out of shame, though it wasn’t my finest hour, and not entirely from the sheer amazement that the teacher could be made completely deaf to my point by his disdain for womankind – or maybe just me, assertive as I am. It’s thinking about the meaning of the story that keeps engaging my mind.
In intelligence testing, the testee may be asked the meaning of such aphorisms as “A rolling stone gathers no moss,” or “Make hay while the sun shines.” There are levels of understanding from literal to abstract that are scored as indicating levels of intelligence. I find similar levels of meaning in the story of the monks. Can there be something like cultural IQ – CQ? The highest rating leading to the least suffering for child, woman, man, animal, and planet? Don’t tell me all life is suffering. There are degrees.
The parable of the river crossing is generally understood to illustrate the value of mindfulness – not letting the burdens of the past or fears for the future distract from the experience of the moment. But the story hinges on woman as taboo, and I see a next level of meaning. I am surely not the first, though I thought it up all by myself. The older, wiser monk has recognized a stricture higher than his vow regarding touching women: that of kindness, of care of others, the category of others not being limited by sex. He fulfills this calling at the river and moves on, not peacefully only because he is practicing mindfulness, but because there is actually no past misbehavior to put aside. True, he doesn’t articulate this to the youth, or us, but we could say he teaches by example. The story does not suggest for a moment that he was wrong to carry the woman. It assumes he was right.
My lovely monk in Burma had not quite risen to this level of understanding. As I traveled in Asia I was often treated as an honorary man. I did things, went places and was interacted with as no local woman could be – the way the monk and I had spent that afternoon. He could engage with a woman’s mind for half a day, but then treat her as sexual temptation, as among the polluting class of menstruators, as instigator of The Fall, as, for whatever reason, an impediment in Man’s quest for God or Enlightenment.
Ah, well. Step by step. We’ll figure out eventually that it takes all of us to carry the wide variety of Goods needed for the journey across the river and beyond.
- Fraud - March 30, 2025
- Crossing the River - January 30, 2025
- A Visit to Don Otavio - December 26, 2024
