Train Journey,Train Mindfulness

Train Journey ~~ Train Mindfulness

One morning last November I was told by a friend that she would be attending a Yoga retreat in Bangkok in early December last year. I was curious then and hoped to join in as well as it would be a new experience for me. I asked her to check if there was any vacancy available. Much to my disappointment,the enrolment was filled up and I had to wait for the next session the following year.

A few days later I received a text message from the friend asking me to submit a set of photostated travel documents together with the fee as I would be replacing a person who withdrew at the eleventh hour.

Not long after that,I was informed that the trip was not a Yoga retreat but a Buddhist one instead. However, that did not deter me from joining as I was also a lay Buddhist interested to learn,though superficially,all the traditions of Buddhist practice. But then I was still not sure about the location and the nature of the retreat as I missed the trip briefing on November 25,2012.

Three days just before the trip it suddenly occurred to me to send out a text message to the organiser to find out where the monastery I  supposed to reside in Thailand. From the reply, I searched on the Google to find, among others, the following links for Daen Mahamongkol International Meditation Centre:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nalt9CEnXXA

http://tomstravelogue.travellerspoint.com/13/

This information gave me peace of mind as I could roughly anticipate the environment where I would be staying and the activities in which I was expected to participate in.

    This trip could best be described and summarised with the keyword- “TRAIN” which if further amplified, could be designated as ‘Train Journey ~ Train Mindfulness’,the title of this post.

    The remarkable part of this trip is the journey by train; the second leg of the journey from Hat Yai to Nakhon Pathom.
http://www.seat61.com/Map-southeast-asia?-train-routes.htm

    We arrived at the Hat Yai Railway Station by bus at around 3.00 pm local time, on December 8,2012. There we had to wait for another three hours to board a northbound train.

    The train arrived promptly at around 6.30 pm local time.

    As I climbed up the train to look for my seat,it was as if I was going through the time machine back to the years of the Sixties of the last century. At that time travelling by train was the cheapest and the most common form of transportation for distant travel. I remember I had made several trips travelling by train to Kuala Lumpur to visit my late sister and my late uncle at Rantau,near Seremban.

    I can still recall,in those years,any bright student at my home town who had scored a good grade at the Higher School Certificate[HSC] examination and got admission to the prestigious University of Malaya,would usually take a southbound night train at ten o’clock in the evening from Nibong Tebal to Kuala Lumpur. At that time,it was not an unusual practice for the town folk,friends and relatives,to throng the platform of the Nibong Tebal Railway Station to give the student a grand send off. I supposed that that student would feel very proud and honoured to receive such a VIP treatment.

    Like others,I was a daydream chaser. I yearned to be in the shoes of one of those bright guys boarding the southbound train. Unfortunately,that dream was like a bubble bursting in the humid tropical air;but it still remains as an occasional sweet dream in my slumberland.

For as long as forty years I did not travel on a train as it was acknowledged by most people to be a slow and time-consuming means of public transport. Moreover,the seats were not as comfortable as compared to that of a luxurious twenty-four seater bus.

    This time around we travelled in a second-class air-conditioned sleeper train.

It was the first time in my life that I was travelling in a sleeper train. It was really a wonderful and fascinating experience.

As I am ‘not-so-young a man’ now,the organiser was very kind and considerate to arrange a younger man, Mr.Cheah, to be my travelling companion to look after me in case anything untoward would happen to me. I was allocated a lower berth while my partner had to climb a few steps of stairs to sleep on the upper berth.
 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=kkKxEJxef6A

Travelling on a train has more fun and much freedom for a commuter as one is free to move around to chat and joke with the other passengers. Otherwise he can also choose to remain in seclusion,reading,meditating or sleeping. If he needed any refreshments,he can always adjourn to the restaurant car or he can order from the steward who would appear at the compartment at regular intervals to take orders.Travelling by night in a sleeper compartment has an added advantage as it would also cut down one’s travelling expenses by the difference of one night’s hotel room charges.

The train journey took us fourteen hours to reach Nakhon Pathom. We arrived at 10.30 local time on the following morning. Five buses were already waiting near the railway station to ferry us.

It took us another two-and-a-half hours to reach our destination. Before we alighted from the bus,our mobile phones and cameras were surrendered for the safekeeping of the organiser. Hence we would be cut off from the rest of the world for the next few days.

After crossing the bridge,we were brought to our dormitory,an open hall on the first floor of a three-storey building.

I chose to put my baggage on one of the sleeping mats at the side of the hall overlooking a serene and scenic river. I was unaware then but later I was terrified to be told that it was in fact the infamous River Kwai(血溅桂河)into which countless number of corpses of the Allied Prisoners of War (POW) and the Asian labourers, who were the forced labourers of the Death Railway(死亡铁路),were dumped by the Imperial Japanese Army during the Second World War.

After keeping our baggage,we were instructed to walk up a distance of about one hundred metres to the washrooms in another building to put on white attire which we had acquired from the monastery. We had to wear white clothes throughout our stay at the monastery all day long just like a school child who has to wear his uniform in school.

As all of us were observing the Eight Precepts,we were not allowed to take any solid food after twelve noon. Hence,we took two meals a day,breakfast at seven o’clock and lunch just before noon.

All meals provided by the monastery were vegetarian food which were served in buffet style in a wide variety of dishes with a different menu each day. You may wonder how much we had enjoyed the food as most of us would look forward to the next meal even before our present one was over.

We were trained to be mindful while eating or drinking. Each one of us was expected to kneel in front of the food or beverage before us to show our appreciation and thanking to the Lord Buddha,one’s parents and the donors before consuming the food. Like any other practitioner of Zen Buddhism,one had to be aware and mindful of one’s every action like eating,walking,sitting or sleeping as mindfulness is a way of cultivation of the heart and mind of a person.

One of the house rules in which we were expected to follow whenever we wanted to enter a building,even the washrooms,was to wash our feet and arrange our sandals properly outside the building. This is also a good practice for us to train our mind on tidiness and cleanliness.

    To live alone in harmony with oneself is not easy;to live in harmony with others is even harder. Just imagine that we had four hundred and eighty participants staying together in the same hall,sleeping on mats arranged in rows like ‘salted fish to be dried under the hot sun’.

Imagine the frustration I would have had if there were one big,fat guy sleeping and snoring at ‘high frequency & high amplitude’ similar to 'a train whistling through the dark moonless night chugging along the coast of the Gulf of Thailand’ while I am waiting earnestly to get into my sweet dreams 'to board the train to enrol in the University of Malaya'. Nevertheless,I had to keep my composure by being mindful in practising endurance and tolerance,and to contemplate that ‘snoring’,being a passing phenomenon,is impermanent in nature. I would either sit up to meditate or I would lie down to observe the rising and falling of the snoring sound until I would fall asleep. This is how mindfulness could be practised in the act of 'sleeping'.

Saying prayers forms an integral part of many a religion. It is an important spiritual practice. It was not an exception in this Buddhist retreat. We had two sessions of chanting every day,one in the morning and the other in the evening. Each session lasted more than an hour followed by a Dharma talk which was conducted by a resident nun,an Upasika,in the Thai language and translated into Mandarin by a member of the organising committee. We had to bear the pain in our backs for sitting through the long session on the floor,with patience and endurance. It was also a good practice for our spiritual upliftment.

Other highlights of the retreat were short sessions of meditation under the hot morning sun,watching video clips in the evening,the walk up the hill to visit the breathtaking five-storey castlelike temple and its beautiful surroundings,and an early morning session of confession and repentance among the members of families.

I would say almost all the participants enjoyed the retreat,especially the vegetarian food served during the meals. Many of them had come to the monastery for more than once and they vowed to come back again bringing other family members who have never been here before. Hope I would do that too.