(This entry compresses days five, six and seven into one post, for brevity.)

Last night the Venerable Tamir, our meditation leader, took us for a bit of out to a Festival of Light being held at the nearby Mahabodhi Mahavihara Buddhist Temple which was built right next to the Bodh tree — where the founder of the Buddhist movement achieved enlightenment. The temple is an awesome sight, brought alive by the chanting, drumming and meditating of the hundreds of monks brought together from their various orders to this one special place. I feel honoured to have witnessed this celebration.

I observed a delicious moment over the top of my milk tea this afternoon: A plain-clothes Westerner tried her hand at the turning the prayer wheel in the wrong direction. She managed to successfully rotate the huge drum two revolutions, backwards, before a nearby Tibetan monk could hastily saunter over (monks rarely run) and slow the wheel until stationary. Of course, in his silence he could hardly shout over to the ignorant tourist (ignorant, in the Buddhist sense of the word). I pondered whether, in those two short revolutions of the drum, two hundred million prayers had come undone*. No matter, two corrective revolutions later we were back to where we had started. The embarrased Westerner clasped prayer-hands and made a sheepish retreat. Don’t worry chick, your motivation was at least virtuous so no harm done I’m sure.

I had a useful one-to-one with Tamir about how to improve my meditation technique. At the start of the course, I falsely believed that I was a natural at it. Turns out that sleeping on-the-job is not the same as meditating and won’t bring me any closer to enlightenment. We also shared with each other our [very] differing views on Buddhism — don’t worry, he asked; not me! Tamir is truly, genuinely a stunning bloke whose careful wit relaxes and reopens everyone’s minds after our sometimes hard-to-accept afternoon teachings. Particularly memorable was tonight’s gem, just prior to our evening’s meditation, after the class was left grappling with the Buddhist concept that nobody/nothing exists in independence of everyone/everything else in existence, he said “So now you’ve discovered our plans to steal your identity and force you to shave your heads and become Buddhist monks… We had better do only a light meditation, in case the police are outside… ‘A monk told me I don’t exist’…” and then after several minutes of silence, expecting some life-changing, earth-shattering insight he continued, “…I can’t think of anything to say…”. The formerly straight-backed lotus-positioned room curled-up into heaps of giggles.

Next day, Tamir played a blinder with his cigarette lighter. “I think you’ll be quite shocked when you see what it can do”, he giggle-grinned. In the darkened gompa, a button-push on his lighter and a projection of Osama bin Laden was thrown onto the wall. (The subject of meditation was equanimity.) Claire couldn’t stop wondering where one buys a lighter that projects an image of Osama. Tamir is a living legend.

* The giant prayer wheel at the Root Institute has one hundred million “om mani padme hum” mantras embedded within it using microfiche technology. Thus one revolution is equivalent to saying one hundred millions prayers. Sounds like cheating to me!

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