...To the Pure Land

One thing I have learned in years of wandering around world is that it is a good idea to be open to invitations from local people. There are three young Vietnamese who live in my building, cleaning, guarding, driving a car for the owner. They are from the countryside, in the north, where there are mountains and traditional ways of life. One of them, Nhung, is returning Satruday to her home for TET (lunar new year) and wanted to visit her pagoda for good luck and to say goodbye for the month. Nhung wants to become a Buddhist nun, but her family will not let her, and asked her to work to support them. She wakes up at 5 AM and goes running, works quite hard around the place.
I returned from work at around 6 pm, having had quite enough of traffic for the day, mind-crammed with stats on GDP, sector weightings and other things when Nhung and the others leap from their room and ask if I wanted to visit their temple. They have seen the Buddhist paraphenalia in my room.
I had little inclination to go, honestly, but some little voice perked up and said "sure" and off we went, heading north of the city to a very poor area called Hoc Mon. It is hard to describe what an urban landscape marred by 150 years of colonial occupation, foreign wars, and communist rule looks like. Suffice it to say: lighting is poor, dust is plentiful, buildings tilt, people wander the side of the road, and trucks scream down the street. It is, without any exaggeration, a landscape of human suffering.
Forty five minutes later, we arrive at a high, wide, dented metal gate, and Nhung darts out of the car and through a small opening, and the gate opens, and we drive into, well, a pure land. Even in the evening dark, the temple grounds offer up immediate solace. Nhung is running along side the car, so excited to be at the temple with her friends, and leads us through a maze of buildings and paths for the grand tour: the buddha hall, where five novices are taking vows; the meditation hall, where about 40 monks and 80 lay people are sitting zen in tight lines, and where a young monk walks up and down the rows with his zen stick; to the study hall, where 50 monks in brown sit on benches studying sutras; to the library, where a young boy, who does not see us, recites sutras; and perhaps most amazingly to the kitchen, where it feels like we are stepping back 200 years in time.
An elderly woman in brown robes tending a fire turns to greet us as we enter the outer area of the complex, and she ask about the strange tall one. We exchange the local greeting "na mo a di da phat," which brings a smile to her face, and she leads us through one dark kitchen chamber, which opens onto another, and another, as we walk past towering vats of water boiling over wood fires sunken into berm platforms, high shelves of white and red rice soaking before cooking, an array of many large pots sunken into another fire-filled berm, waiting for the rice; and finally, in the heart of the giant ktichen complex, to a large table where about 15 people - monastics, elderly, young, women, men - sit in silence pounding rice into cakes, filling them with bits of food, cutting and tying string around them, and laying them on a high pile. The air is filled with the scent of smoke from the wood fire, incense, rice and mostly, to be figurative, the passage of time.
The elderly woman has wandered off, and she reappears holding out two beautiful mala and asks which one I would like. As often happens, one is overcome with gratitude at the simple kindness, such a contrast with the struggle of getting through the day in the city, trying to make rich people richer, and such a reminder of what is important.
As we are leaving, and peaking in at the novices preparing for ordination in the main Buddha hall, we are approached by a middle aged monk, with the eyes, smile, skin and ears of one who has done years of training. It is through his impeccable and shockingly clear English, his smile, and firm and warm grasp on my arm, here in the middle of an urban sprawl so suffocating and dark and remote and hopeless, that I come back to myself, to my own longing for peace glimpsed through practice, and still longed for. And to a feeling of: "Oh, this is why I came here."
He sits me down and quizzes me on the basics: "Why did Shakyamuni appear in this world?" Check, got that one. "What is your daily practice?" Oops. Wrong. Kwan se um bosal should come later, he says. First, focus on Amitabha Buddha. He tells me he does three hours of consecutive prostrations, five hours of chanting, and will go the distance pure land when he dies. (He does not sleep and lives on water, says his students later.) I ask him if there is a pure land any closer than that, and he laughs knowingly, as if to say, yes, OK, we understand each other. BUT, he says, just chant Amitaba (in Vietnamese, A Di Da Phat). Pure land fundamentalism! This explains also the fire in his eyes, the smile, and strength of his grip, the energy and excitement about his chosen vocation.
After ten minutes of fire and brimstone, which begins to make me a bit nervous, I use the excuse of the late hour, and my waiting friends, who sit with us entranced by the sight of this intense monk lecturing the nodding American on dharma, to excuse myself, and say I must be returning home. We exchange goodbyes, A Di Da Phats. Nhung, her friends and I jump back in the SUV and leave the pure land for the realm of desire, anger and ignorance, where I have always been more at home anyway.