Lessons from a Monk

I was headed to the internet café but made it only as far as the second house when west met east: a monk in orange robe and light gold sash surprised me from around a corner. “Sabbai dee,” I said, pressing my hands together in the Lao greeting. He looked slightly displeased and accosted me in English, “You don’t sabbai dee a monk, you don’t know this?”


“No,” I said, “kau todt,” grasping for that other word that was already holstered and ready for slinging: “excuse me.”

He waved me off as a bothersome gnat and I turned, ready to take up my agenda. But my contrition and language had piqued his interest. “Where you from?” he asked.

“Ameeliga.” I tried to say the word as the Lao say it and was pleased with my success.

“America.” He spoke real English and didn’t need or want my pidgin. “And they don’t teach you that there, I suppose.”

“Respect is not high on American lists,” I say, again pleased with my own contrition.

“Respect, yes,” he concurs. “When I first started speaking English, no one said ‘Hi.’ Hi? What is, ‘hi’? It was always ‘How are you doing?’ or ‘How do you do?’” I’m not prepared for this bit of Zen and smile and nod; I’m a hi-er myself; “Hi” is very American.

“So what brings you here, to Laos?” he asks, genuinely interested now. I recount the story in brief, emphasizing that this trip is high on our to-do list, perhaps the number one spot. I’m sure the conversation is winding down now, that he’ll continue his meditative stroll around the house, that I can resume pilgrimage to the internet café. But now he’s found me interesting. “Come, let’s sit,” he says.

My agenda shot, I settle in. I’ve got an audience with an in-the-robe Buddhist monk; I may as well see this for what it is and glean a bit of wisdom for a blog--this, my new agenda. This monk is short, bald and wears an orange robe. So much is obvious. This monk has the hint of light gray stubble appearing around the rim of his shaved head, and his eyes, too, have grayed, but are intent in their gazing if wrinkled in what can only appear to be a wizened way. Then, too, his ears are large on his head, the lobes especially heavy and almost squarish.

It turns out this monk is a capitalist: he was a businessman for most of his life in Chiang Mai, Thailand, where he has one daughter and seems pro-business in his political outlook. Now, however, at 70, he’s returned to his home country to slow down his life, to walk the path of Buddha, to dedicate himself to truer things before the end. As he tells me this, it doesn’t sound as if he’s bragging about an individual choice so much as following a prescribed order for life. He might be saying, “So the wife and I bought this place here in this community in Florida.” Not that they’re the same; it’s just much more understood as a life stage. He lives at a wat seventy kilometers away from this house, his sister’s.

“Now, I eat one meal a day, read, pray—that’s it,” he says, and even he seems to be feeling that he’s forgetting something, that there must be something else.

“In Catholicism, you have 10 common mans,” he says, and by my perplexed look, he knows he must try again. “You know this? In Catholicism, you have 10 common mans, and nuns—you know nuns?—they have eight common mans.” He’s plowed through, but it’s only beyond the immediacy of the conversation that I’ll realize he means “commands.”

“But do you know how many I have to follow?” That’s rhetorical set up, of course. “Two-hundred-thirty-two commands.” And east and west collide. I’ve had to make up the number he quoted; it was somewhere between two hundred and eight hundred. One never remembers a braggart’s stats, and at that point I couldn’t help but feel a little bullied by his holiness.

However, this man is certainly a well of knowledge and I dig in my heels: as a boy he learned French because everyone in Laos did then, he insists, and that was a good thing. Then he had the opportunity to go to Thailand and learn English, and he did. The revolution swept in behind him, and he found himself locked out of his country, so he made his life on the Thai side of the border, a good one, it seems, if he’s voluntarily renounced his wealth.

“So how do you like it here in Laos?” he questions, and now I’m on the spot. I like it, of course, and try to illustrate the difference between Laos and Thailand in what I saw in the countryside: the part I saw of the Lao countryside seemed more organized, tidy, disciplined. “I will tell you,” he says, not getting my drift, “the Lao people are lazy. They think only about today. And that’s Lao speaking about Lao.” Well, it may be everyone else speaking about the Lao: in the Lao history I read, the French said this of the Lao and then the Americans said this about the Lao; but the Lao are still here and the French and the Americans—and the Thai, which seems to be more of the perspective of Lao critique, here—are not. Perhaps the Lao remain an anomaly, even to this Buddhist-capitalist-Thai monk.

Language is a favorite topic for him. It turns out both Lao and Thai stem from a Sanskrit language via Bali; Vietnamese, however, comes originally from China and then was westernized by the French. Ethnically, too, Lao and Thai are closely related even though Vietnam has been the major political influencer of Laos for forty years. This influence is economic as well: the family where we’re staying saves their bottles for a Vietnamese recycler even though Vietnam is an hours-long trip over poor roads to the east; Thailand, meanwhile, economically light-years ahead of both, I can only assume, is ten minutes to the west.

Language is also the key to the future of Laos for the linguist-Buddhist-capitalist-Thai monk. Laos has the opportunity to play a greater role in ASEAN, an association of Asian nations that would help to bring Laos out of its isolation, and in order to take on that greater role, the monk insists the Lao should study English.

“Isn’t that the language of the imperialists?” I ask. It depends on how it’s used, he suggests. Americans, he argues, use it very imperialistically, creating a “Secretary of State” rather than “Office of Foreign Affairs,” making “Congress” instead of “Parliament,” hoarding the language for themselves and their own constructions, as it were, rather than using it in a more metropolitan way.

“But weren’t the British the original imperialists—and isn’t it their language?” We can trace it farther back is all I’m saying, though I don’t have evidence readily at hand. We’re at an impasse; suffice it to say that this is one progressive monk, a man living a simple life who would encourage Laos to follow Thailand in joining the world community.

“When do you return?” I ask.

“This afternoon,” he says. “There’s a lot of nature there, snakes, scorpions, frogs.” It seems to be one of the conditions he was missing earlier: eat, read, pray, be one with nature. “We eat just one meal a day,” he says again.