Dragon of the Mekong

When I visited Ubon Ratchatani, I stayed at Wat Kitivaro, a huge enclosed forest monastery; a shabby, unkempt, run down monastery. A pack of 20 half-feral dogs ran free-reign throughout the grounds, on friendly terms with the local monks, but aggressive towards visitors like me. I was on my constant guard against being attacked by the dogs when no local monk was present to fend them off.

Huge coconut trees, nearly fifty-feet tall, reach into the blue tropical skies above the monks’ wooden huts.

Venerable Siripunno, an old monk who was a student of the famous teacher Ajahn Fan, lived in a small hut near the back of the wooded temple compound. He had been a monk for 42 years, ordained in 1967.

Delighted to have a chance to practice his English skills, he came to talk to me several evenings during my stay in the monastery. He had learned to speak English when he was a boy, through his interactions with the American GIs stationed in Ubon Air Base, where he worked small jobs. He still feels affection for Americans, and nostalgia for his boyhood memories.

I asked him if the local people actually believe in the Naga, the Mekong River dragon. “The Mekong River is a Nine Headed Dragon,” Venerable Siripunno said. “The people do believe in the Mekong River naga. It has scales like a fish, rather than skin like a snake or eel.”

“The naga is crowned or horned,” he said. “It moves through the later like an eel.”

He demonstrated for me, in hand motions, how nagas move through the water.

How to understand this assertion of dragons as real; as a matter of fact?

I recalled Karl Jung’s statement that there are many things in this world that we don’t understand: “Rationalism and doctrinarism are the disease of our time. They pretend to have all the answers. But a great deal will yet be discovered which our present limited view would have ruled out as impossible. Our concept of space and time have only approximate validity.”

In the year 2000, the journalist Richard Freeman led an expedition to Thailand in search of the mythical Mekong River Dragon – the naga. The expedition was commissioned by Discovery Channel.

“The Naga is essentially a gigantic snake, usually found in Hindu and Buddhist mythology,” Freeman said. “It is supposed to bear an erectile crest on its head rather like that of a cockatoo, but made of scales, which it holds menacingly aloft when angry, just as a cobra opens its hood.”

“Legend says the nagas possess immense intelligence and magical powers. They can, for instance, transform themselves into humans and walk unnoticed in the world of men. It is believed they inhabit grand underwater palaces, rather like the dragons of China…the naga is not satisfied with being a legend and still rears its scaly head, being sighted up and down the Mekong River even today.”

Freeman interviewed a 70 year old man named Pimpa, who claimed to have had a personal, terrifying encountered a naga. Pimpa lived in “an extremely remote village in the forested hills”, where he came face-to-face with a dragon while exploring some underground caves, connected to the Mekong.

Freeman followed Mr. Pimpa into the caves into the naga’s lair, for about a mile into the narrow, dank, labyrinth of tunnels.

“The old man had been exploring by candlelight when he turned into the cave and came across a giant snake. Its head was in the shadows, but the visible portion of its body was 60-ft long. Mr. Pimpa had pressed himself against the wall in terror as the giant reptile crawled past at an astoundingly slow pace. Its scales were black with glossy green sheen, and it was around 2.5 to 3-feet thick. Finally, it had disappeared along the passage, and Mr. Pimpa had collapsed gasping in relief.”

Freeman tried to give a rational explanation to the persistent, unshakable belief  in the existence of the naga among the people who live along the Mekong River. “There was once a group of primarily aquatic snakes which reached immense sizes. The Madtsoids…were found worldwide…Reports from all over the tropics suggest that some species may have survived to the present day. As well as their great size, all these monster snakes seem to share strange ornamentation on their head. The manotauro or sucuriju gigante of the Amazon is believed to have horns, and Indochina’s naga has a crest. Horns are not unknown on snakes; the rhinoceros viper of Africa and the horned viper of the Middle East are just two examples. Although their horns are actually modified snakes.”

The Mekong River forests of Burma, China, Laos, Cambodia and Thailand is one of the most vast and unique regions of the earth, bounding in life, surpassing the richness and diversity of the Amazon Rain forest.

In early 2009, the World Wildlife Fund released studies that identified thousands of new species previously unknown, including spectacular insects, reptiles, amphibians, and mammals. Perhaps they’ll find a naga.

Personally, I’ll suspend judgment. There are things in this world that we don’t understand.

“You must go visit my home place in Nakon Phanom,” Venerable Siripunno  told me. “You must visit vipassana center Wat Sitep. It is the best place, the best teacher – Chao Khun Tep, long time ago.”

He described the beauty of his homeland to me, the forest and scenery of flora and fauna along the Mekong River. A look of longing and joy came over his face as he remembered the distant scenes of the beautiful mountain-scapes of Laos, across the Mekong River, standing against the eastern horizon.

               

***

“The Mekong River is a nine-headed dragon,” Venerable Siripunno said.

The Mekong River is the realm of Sisattanag (Seven Headed Dragon). The That Phanom Chronicle says the Mekong River was dug by the naga -- literally River-dug-by-the-chest-of-a-naga -- when Indra cast him from Nong Sae, somewhere in southern China.

Many naga serpent-dragons followed, came to live in his realm, Suvannaphumi – the Land of Gold.

The Mekong is not a border, but is rather a central artery to the forest tradition of Theravada Buddhism.

When you see the Mekong, you feel the presence of the naga and spirits. You know for sure you’re in paradise. Bewitched, led by the spirit of the Mekong, by a mystery of the beauty of the place, you sense the real presence of the spirits, and realize the actual magic.

Such a beautiful world, so strongly seductive that one simply cannot leave it without sadness. There is something about the Mekong which, even years later, makes you want to sit down beside it and watch our whole life go by, writers waxed poetic under its spell.

The Mekong River is alive. It is the Dharma River. You will be actually enchanted, and commune with the spirit of the Mekong. It is a presence and mystery, and it will flow through you, as it spreads out into ‘nine heads’ of the Mekong Delta, and empty in the jade-green waters of the South China Sea.

The naga is protector of the Buddha.

Future Ain't What it Used to Be

I talked to an old hippie girl on the metro bus

today

She was over 65 years old, living in senior housing 

Eyes still sparkled, though she was

     gray haired, wrinkled and fat.

"When I was young, I hated to hear

the old people complain about 'the 

    world today' - how bad everything 

    is, how good things were in the

    past; how everything gets worse 

    and worse. 

I promised that when

    I got old, I would not complain

    about 'the kids today' - how things

    are worse than they used to be.

But that's a promise I can't keep.

The world has gone wrong. People

are worse than they were before.

We are about the destroy the earth.

Horrible things are happening now - 

caused by human greed -  that

I could have never dreamed of.

The  world is on 

the wrong path,"

    she said.

Tintern Abbey ruins - temple of nature

King Henry the Eighth closed down all the monasteries of England and banished or killed the monks. Tintern Abbey, a Cisterican monastery, stood abandoned for three hundered years, overgrown with creepers and forest, a haunt of wild animals, when the young boy William Wordsworth came upon the ruins in the early 18^th century. As the contemplated the ruins, Wordsworth was overcome with a feeling of enchantment and longing, that gave rise to the so-called “Romantic Movement.”

I regard the Romantic Movement as the first faint, pre-dawn glow of Buddhism in the West, in reaction to the scientific-rationalism of the 17^th century.

Wordsworth saw the ruins of Tintern and was fascinated, mesmerized by the atmosphere and the effect it had on him. This feeling became the “romantic” feeling of longing for something that had been lost or forgotten, longing for another kind of world, a better and more humane world than the modern world he saw emerging around him.

Wordsworth intended to write a long philosophical poem called The Recluse, as a meditation on nature. The poem was never completed.

The poem “Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey” outline his ideas on nature, as he contemplated the ruins of the Abbey overgrown in vines.

How do I trace Romanticism to the influence of Buddha?

As a young man, Wordsworth had come under the influence of the eccentric ideas of a wandering yogi, John “Walking” Stewart (Feb 19, 1747-Feb 20, 1822). Walking Stewart was an English eccentric, traveler, philosopher who had walked on foot form Madras, India (where he worked for the East India Company) back to Europe between 1765 and mid-1790’s. In his wandering life, he walked across Persia, Abyssinia, Arabia and Africa, before finally wandering through Europe and into Russia.

When he settled down in England, Walking Stewart wrote The Apocalypse of Nature (The Revelation of Nature) in 1794 and Opum Maximum in 1803, outlining his ideas that he had discovered of eastern spirituality. Walking Stewart had a philosophy which combined elements of Spinoza pantheism with yogic notions of the single unified consciousness, i.e. universal mind or Buddha nature. He began to publish his ideas in 179s with his book Travels over the most interesting parts of the globe.

Walking Stewart saw a conscious universe in which all parts interpenetrated and corresponded through vitalist energies, sympathies, and antipathies – which Buddhist call Interbeing. His books and speeches stimulated radical interest in Pythagorean and Brahminical ideas in Europe. We would think of him as  a “man ahead of his time.”  He was a feminist, animal rights activist, and also promoted ideas of vegetarianism.

Walking Stewart was appalled by violence, and insisted that “men must do no violence to any part of the animal nature.” He was opposed to slavery, and killing of animals, and capital punishment.

Walking Stewart said that men “have glutted on the Tree of Knowledge, on arts and sciences, and abandoned the Tree of Life, that is, the knowledge of the Self in the law of sensation, and the relations of men with all their surrounding nature.”

In his teaching in England, he aimed to “harmonize” men with the “great organism of their universe,” and he defined nature as the state “when appropriation of things and persons shall cease.”

When Wordsworth saw the ruins of Tintern Abbey, the vision seemed to trigger a recognition of something for which there were no words. He sensed "something", a message from another world, outside the modern world. He saw the Interbeing with nature that Walking Stewart had spoken of.

Tintern Abbey, suppressed by King Henry VII in 1536, had been deserted for nearly 250 years, when Wordsworth came across the runs overgrown with vines and abandoned in the remote forest wilderness.

The Anglican minister Reverenced William Gilpin was the first to discover the abandoned ruins, in modern times. He had published Observations on the River Wye in 1786, in which he had described the ruins; and he began a tourism industry, when English folks began visit the ruins in droves. Gilpin found the ruins “picturesque” – a word he coined and developed, meaning an “appreciation of nature that rolls through all things.”

The abbey ruins gave Wordsworth a pantheistic vision of the divine, nature. He is overcome with a “sense of the sublime of something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns.”

He is met with the divine as “a notion and a spirit, that impels all thinking things, all objects of thought, and rolls through all things.”

The Romantic movement laid the foundation for Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau and the American Transcendentalists, the “first Buddhists” in America. 

The Good Life

.The genius of the Buddha’s teaching is that inner peace is a transformative power in the world. We need inner peace to create social peace, and we must use Buddhist meditation to reach this inner peace. Personal transformation is the key for social transformation. Inner peace is the key to world peace.

            Buddha’s teachings are very easy. There is no need to make them complicated. You must do three things only: to refrain from evil; to do what is good; and to purify the mind. That is all.

            We must silence our minds, and listen inwardly until we can hear our own peaceful nature. When we hear our own inner peace, we will hear the peaceful nature of others as well. Wisdom comes from listening.

            The Dharma teaches us to know, shape, and free the mind. When the mind is mastered, all the dharma is mastered. What is the key for mastering the mind? It is mindfulness.

            All proceeds from mind, all we are arises from the mind. We are what we think. With the mind we create the world. Disorder and confusion in the world follows disorder and confusion in individual minds.

            Only with a change of within will there be a change without. Even if it is slow in following, it will never fail to arrive.

            Consciousness is the source of ethics. Our mind generates thoughts, speech, and actions. When we have a peaceful mind, we have peaceful words and deeds. We unfailingly start and return to one’s mental states. Some people see meditation as opposed to action, but the Buddha said meditation is the source of action.

            If you are mindful, you are a Buddha.

            Peace is like water flowing everywhere. Peacemaking is the proper response to violence. Non-violence brings peace. Peace is the highest happiness.

            Peace will triumph over war when people can walk down the streets with peace in their minds. That is the only step-by-step process that will bring an end to the great suffering of the people of the world.

            We must develop personal compassion as a gift to share, a gift of peace, a gift of healing.

            The act of walking itself must be made peaceful, then we will peacefully affect those we encounter.

            The Buddha called mindfulness ‘the only way.’ Always in the present. At this very moment. From moment to moment. In all activity. In this very step.

            Slowly, slowly, step by step. Each step is a meditation. Each step is a prayer. Each step builds a bridge to peace.

            It is the contemplative state of beings that we offer as a gift to the world. Our peace-offering can take the form of meditation, having tea with a refugee, being a peaceful person during business meetings, establishing an altruistic organization, or walking together in a peace vigil. The line between activism and other activities is erased with the correct mind-state.

            Responding to the present moment with loving-kindness, compassion, joy, and serenity is making peace.             We must live in the present moment. This. Here. Now. Every moment is a special moment. The present moment is the mother of the future. If we take care of the mother, the mother will take care of the child.

            So we must develop the right mind state, and respond to the present circumstances of our lives. We change the world primarily by our presence and our example.

            We are non-confrontational, non partisan. We simply tell the people to take care, be careful, be caring, be mindful and aware. It is difficult for people to see the harm they cause if they are not mindful. 

The most important action of a peacemaker is the be peaceful. We cannot be angry peacemakers.

We pray for peace all over the world.