1) A round black cushion, a saffron robe and an imposing Buddha icon - in the main garden of the BRC; 2) Fare for the vegetarian table comes from the well-tended vegetable and herb gardens; 3) Making waves in the BRC Zen garden; 4) Buddhist teacher Mervyn Croft moved from the BRC in 2000 to create the Emoyeni Retreat Center near Johannesburg; 5) The BRC stupa, built by visiting Thai monks, stands beacon-like above the hut-dotted KwaZulu-Natal landscape; 6) Louis van Loon, a civil engineer and Buddhist scholar, founded the BRC some 30 years ago; 7) The thatched library, the meditation hall and the lecture room cluster amidst the foliage; 8) In 1996 Kittisaro and Thanissara, a husband and wife team, became the resident BRC teachers; 9) Buddhist teachers Stephen and Martine Batchelor regularly include the BRC in their international schedule; 10) Teacher Godwin Samararatne from Sri Lanka has taught frequently at the BRC.

Article: What Is This?

A Zen poem says: If you do not get it from yourself, where will you go for it?

Story and Photos by Wanda Hennig

First published: Sunday Life Magazine, Sunday Tribune, South Africa

"My Thai teacher, Ajahn Chah, used to say 'Read the book of your heart.' That is the most important book because until we learn to follow it, we are continually following someone else's opinion. The source of joy is within ..." -- Thanissara.

"I ENVY you. That's just the sort of holiday I need. Somewhere to relax, space out and unwind." The comment comes from a colleague. He has just asked where I'm going for my eight-day break and I've told him the Buddhists Retreat Center near Ixopo in KwaZulu-Natal. He tells me he has had contact with Buddhists. He once sailed to Sri Lanka on a yacht. He spent a month there and met lots of Buddhists. He was impressed by their philosophical attitude to what, from the outside, looked like great suffering.

The Hindus he met in Sri Lanka, on the other hand - they caused him great suffering. Okay, so it was unintentional as he wasn't forced into hotfooting it across a bed of burning coals at a fire-walking ceremony. Nobody held a gun to his head and the only thing spiritual about the experience was what he poured down his throat beforehand. Anyway, he ended up with blistered feet that took weeks to heal and he doesn't want to try that one again.

"But Buddhists don't do hot coals," he muses. "They just park off and do nothing." He phones the Buddhist Retreat Center and makes a booking for himself.

The Buddhist Retreat Center, founded more than 20 years ago by Durban-based civil engineer and University of Durban-Westville Buddhist studies lecturer Louis van Loon, is the headquarters of Buddhism in South Africa. It invites teachers and attracts students from various Buddhist schools - from Tibetan, with its elaborate and colorful rituals and visualization, to the stark simplicity and rigors of Zen and the more gentle and contemplative practice of Theravada or insight meditation. It also attracts many non-Buddhists to courses that range from bird watching to sketching to t'ai chi ch'uan.

"We have to 'sit' for six hours a day," my colleague says, with panic rising, when we get there and he sees the schedule. 'Sitting' being Buddhist-speak for meditation. Which, from the outside, looks as if it is a good way to relax and space out. Until you try it for an hour, six hours, 12 hours - not moving even as you feel the sweat form on your hairline and trickle down your forehead towards your eyeballs on a hot day; not moving as a fly settles to investigate the sweat; not moving as your legs begin to ache for movement from where they are knotted like a koeksister beneath your backside. Not moving - and not thinking.

Fishing for the mind

Stilling the mind and learning about it by engaging in the simple practice of watching the breath as it inhales and exhales. Playing the 'mind to breath' game, which is something like fishing with light tackle for a prize game catch - the breath being the hook and the untrained mind, the fish. You hook it and hold it. Then it runs. You see it's going, take the gap and firmly but gently reel it back. After much running and reeling, it seems to be tiring and, for a moment, you think you've got it tamed. At this moment, the fish strikes and is gone.

Three days into the retreat, early evening, just out of the meditation room, I whisper to the colleague who has come with me to Ixopo. "So, what is this?" I ask, because for the eight days of the retreat we're supposed to stay mute. 'Noble silence' is what they call it at Ixopo.

I ask him "What is this?" because the subject of the Korean-style Zen retreat we're doing is "What is this?" The idea is that we keep asking ourselves the question "What is this?" during the eight daily 45-minute sessions of 'sitting' in the zendo, the oblong meditation room with slatted windows that let in the sounds of birds and bees and lawn mowers and, sometimes, African drums from the surrounding valleys and the noise of chain saws being used to fell trees, as the Buddhist Retreat is a working timber farm.

We must also ask "What is this?" while doing walking meditation, which takes place between sitting meditation, while eating our meals and, ideally, while we are asleep. And while we're asking, we must make sure we're not looking for an answer.

"Don't confuse a comfortable state of ease for good meditation," warns Martine Batchelor, a Buddhist teacher from France who spent 10 years training in Korea as a Zen nun. "Meditation is about being focused and bright and questioning. You can't rest anywhere. You can't try to resolve the question intellectually. You only know what snow is when you jump into it. That's like this practice. Just keep asking," she says.

"When one asks 'What is this?' we can expect to find a mystery that gets more mysterious. And then one might ask 'What is this that asks what is this?' The suggestion comes from Stephen Batchelor, a Buddhist teacher from the U.K. who studied in Asia under Tibetan Buddhist lamas for eight years. He then turned to the Zen tradition of Buddhism and spent three years training in Korea. Stephen and Martine, who are married, are doing a teaching stint at the Buddhist Retreat Center in South Africa. Usually they live, write books and articles, and teach at The Sharpham College, a Buddhist community in Devon in England.

"Perhaps it is the reality that 'I can be a question for myself' that distinguishes human beings from other forms of life,' suggests Stephen. While asking "What is this?", he adds, we should rest in a state of not knowing, link this up with an air of expectation - and have no agenda.

"You must diligently investigate with a mind willing to endure even the crushing of your bones," Martine's Korean teacher, the late Master Kusan, advised students in a book my colleague points out to me in the Buddhist Retreat's small but well-stocked thatched library. (The Way of Korean Zen by Kusan Sunim, published by Weatherhill, 1985.) He believes only six of us signed up for the retreat because everyone else read the book beforehand.

When, on the evening of day three, I whisper to my colleague "What is this?" he hisses "Torture!"

Yearning for inner peace

Randolph Weinberg grew up in Tennessee in the United States, went to a military high school and became a wresting champion. He had a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford University more than 20-plus years ago and was writing his master's thesis on the link between mysticism, science and art in the context of Aldous Huxley, when a yearning for inner peace led him to a nearby Buddhist center. "I felt there was a deeper dimension to our being, a more peaceful dimension, and that the way to understanding this was not through thought of intellectual process but through meditation, or mind training."

To this end he went to Thailand and for two years lived as a Theravada forest monk, which entails living and meditating in a forest far from the distractions of city life. When a bout of typhoid nearly killed him and left him debilitated, his Thai teacher suggested he go to England and continue to practice with a forest order that was being set up in Sussex.

Mary Weinberg was studying at Southampton's College of Art when "I veered off to follow my interest in meditation." She first spent seven months at a Buddhist meditation center in India and then visited similar centers in Myanmar (Burma) and Sri Lanka before ending up in Thailand, where she lived for a year at a forest monastery. She returned to England and spent 12 years with the Sussex forest order. In October 1991 she and Randy moved out of the forest monastery and were married the next year.

Since then, they have kept busy responding to teaching invitations from Sweden, Spain, Germany, Britain and the United States, where they are regularly asked to give classes in awareness training to the growing number of teenagers classified as having attention deficit disorders. And recently they became the first resident teachers in more than a decade at the Buddhist Retreat near Ixopo, where they teach under their Buddhist names of Kittisaro (that's him) and Thanissara.

"Our initial letter inviting us to teach in South Africa arrived just before the 1994 elections. At the time the prognosis was bad and people said we were mad to even consider accepting." But they came and found kindred spirits in the hills outside Ixopo.

They have settled in South Africa and have a small patch of land in the foothills of the Drakensberg mountains. For six months each year they will teach at Ixopo and at Buddhist groups in Durban, Johannesburg and Cape Town. They will fulfill overseas teaching commitments for four months, during which time visiting teachers will be at the retreat center. Teachers such as Stephen and Martine Batchelor and Godwin Samararatne from Sri Lanka, who in 1997 did his sixth long-term teaching stint at Ixopo. Kittisaro and Thanissara will spend the remaining two months chilling out in the private retreat on their small plot. "When one teaches a lot, one can become automatic and divorced from the essence of practice and that's why we believe it is important that we spend two months of the year alone, meditating and studying the Buddhist scriptures and contemplative writers."

The retreat center accommodates up to 30 people. The setting is low-key and rustic. The food is vegetarian and home-grown. Celibacy is observed. Teachers are not paid for their teaching but rely on 'dana' - optional money offerings given by students. "Quite a few people who come here aren't interested in Buddhism but are aware there is an area of stress or fracturedness in their lives and they feel that some sort of calming and meditation will be useful," says Kittisaro.

"More and more, psychotherapy is working with awareness and there is an overlap between Western psychology and Buddhism. The two work together - therapy can help you to have an integrated self while Buddhism helps one transcend the limitations of the self," says Thanissara.

"My Thai teacher, Ajahn Chah, used to say 'Read the book of your heart.' That is the most important book because until we learn to follow it, we are continually following someone else's opinion. The source of joy is within and when the heart is steady, joy comes. What were desires, fears - and joy - are seen differently when the mind is collected and composed through the sustained attention of meditation."

My colleague and I stay on for an extra day after the retreat so that we can swim in the dam and hike to the waterfall in the next valley. On the drive home, I ask him how he felt at the end of his eight days. "Like when I finished the Comrades Marathon," he says. "Or like when I broke the two-minute barrier for 800 meters. A sense of achievement."

It was Proust who said the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes but in seeing with new eyes. My colleague surprises me and himself when he tells me his is now feeling relaxed, spaced out and unwound.

© Wanda Hennig - 2004