The Last Days in Bodh Gaya

During our last sitting at the Bodhi tree I sat in zazen. When you sit in zazen you are supposed to be like a pine tree in the wind or a frog on a lilly pad, but instead I was like a girl sitting on a cushion beneath a sacred tree feeling the pangs of impermanence. I broke my still contemplation to wipe the tears on my face with my scarf, and struggled to remind myself that Buddha's don't cry. After we sat, our strange little sangha lit hundreds of candles and laughed like there wasn't a universe collapsing.

When I came back from Sri Lanka, I had one week in Bodh Gaya to share tales of the independent study and bid India farewell. During those dust-filled days I had many long meals in Tibetan restaurants, hastened to finish my paper, and spent as much time as I could reveling in the presence of the people on the program--people who I have come to love. It's funny, but one profound thing I learned in India is that, at least for me, places are people. When I look back on the semester I spent in South Asia, I will of course remember the vivid beauty of that landscape, but those images are inextricably intertwined with the people with whom I absorbed them.

The man who leads the Buddhist Studies Program in Bodh Gaya is named Robert. He is spectacularly wise, and we would often speculate that he is the embodiment of Time. As the end of the program approached, we would refer to our farewell to India and the dispersion of a beloved community as "Robert's last lesson": everything is impermanent, everything is changing, and there is nothing to cling to. The universe collapses in every instant, and every tangible imagining is just that--a dream.

So now it is over. It was beautiful, and, because Nirvana eludes me, the undeniable preterite of the word "was" conjures a pang of sadness in my chest. However, this ending (like all endings) butts heads with a new beginning, and I am excited for the West and Christmas and school and the unbounded mystery of Things That Have Not Yet Come to Pass.

I will end with something I wrote during my last days in the monastery:

I sit on the veranda overlooking the garden
the gloaming plays blues saxophone and
the people in the village strike matches to
light candles in their windows.

Brown-skinned workers pour their last
load of cement into wooden frames and
quiet laughter echoes in the stairwell.

I smell the sweet exhalations of the earth
as it rolls over sleepily and
wonder about impermanence.

As the sun plunges the
clouds strike a beautiful, sad note
and I pack my bag.