The Middle Way

22.Aug.2013

There once was a King that wished so desperately to follow the ways of the Buddha that he was exceedingly generous. He was willing to give away everything that he had for the happiness of others. If a passing peasant saw his diamond crown and wanted it, the King would freely remove the crown and give it to the peasant as a gift. One day, a demon, wishing to bring bad will to the King, demanded that the King kill his own children. The King thought that to follow the Buddha, he must be willing to give up all his own happiness for others, so he listened to the demon and killed his offspring. This is one of the many stories I’ve heard over the last two days that demonstrate the importance of the Buddhist tenet of finding the middle way. It’s strangely apropos that everything I’ve seen recently has something to do with finding the middle way because an acquaintance on facebook recently posted a status lauding her ability to do nothing because of her generous parents, which sparked a series of both harsh and supportive comments from friends. For me, the combination of this facebook controversy and the series of local legends I’ve heard here in Myanmar pushes me into an evaluative state of introspection. Am I anywhere close to finding the middle way?

Wandering around the Ananda temple in old Bagan, I could here the soothing sound of birds chirping outside while the peaceful yet somehow watchful eyes of the Buddha stared down at me. I’m enjoying life. I take advantage of my many blessings in life to experience new places, new people, and new potential. Travel is my biggest weakness and my greatest strength. I spend more time and money on travel than I probably should, but it has been such a crucial part of my education and who I am that I can’t imagine what my life would be like without it. So far in life, many would say I have not worked much. Firstly, I believe it is far more accurate to say that I have earned very few pay checks in my life because I have worked hard at studying, volunteering, interning, building lasting relationships, and improving myself step by step. Secondly, when I work, I am dedicated to it, and I always strive for excellence and success. I have not, however, accepted the common American viewpoint that the only way to be successful is to work yourself to death. I cannot begin to count the number of teachers over my life that have told me, “quality, not quantity.” This maxim does not apply solely to academics, rather to life in general. Working too much leads to lower overall productivity and reduced work product quality. The same is true for one’s downtime; doing nothing will eventually reduce one’s quality of life in one form or another.

This journey has been a reward to myself for finishing my LL.M. thesis, but in a matter of days, I have managed to learn and experience so much. It is my hope that by putting these moments, these senses, these lessons into words, I might be able to share my experiential wealth with others in some sort of effort to find this elusive middle way.

Yesterday started with a walk through old Yangon. This was the moment that I was first confronted with the decaying tropical grandeur of British Rangoon. I kept waiting to see old English gentlemen turn the corner in linen suits and white caps. We popped in to the old post office to find that time had stood still in this Victorian masterpiece of handwritten bureaucracy. Locals queued up at counter after counter making payments, getting papers stamped, and getting things inspected and weighed before they were finally able to slap a stamp on and drop it in one of the two red boxes at the main entrance for outgoing mail. The old ceiling fans rocked back and forth, ready to tumble from their weary fixtures at any moment. The stamped metal flooring had withstood the test of time, that is, except for the crumbled rusted portions covered with simple sheets of plywood through which I anticipated tumbling to my death, or at least the death of whatever poor local I landed on top of, in the blink of an eye.

From the post office, we continued on to the Strand Hotel, where foreigners have come to waste away their days in Yangon since the 1940s. The bar was a classic wood and marble affair with a beautiful pool table in the corner. We paused for a drink and to soak up the atmosphere. I ordered a $7 USD bottle of San Pellegrino that was large enough to share, and my guide was excited to try both sparkling and Italian water for the first time.

We also walked along the riverfront, and visited a market boat. These large vessels cruise up and down the river picking up people and their goods to sell from township to township. The rusty old boat was packed full of everything from vegetables to t-shirts and families living their lives the only way they know how. A young baby was napping in a makeshift hammock of fishing net hung from the ceiling, kittens roamed about hoping for some food scraps, and women ground their Thanaka to protect their faces from the sun. We visited a local temple before making our way to the National Museum.

Upon arrival at the National Museum, I was warmly welcomed by the new Museum Director. He had been informed about my visit and was eager to hear my feedback. The man knows the Myanmar history better than most, and he has grand ambitions for a museum stuck with the burdens of poor funding and government bureaucracy. He has only been with the Museum for a matter of months, but it was clear he was already doing whatever he could to protect the museum and its treasures from gradual decay and irrelevance. He left me to explore the museum, but the assistant director soon came looking for me to explain some of the exhibits I was looking at. The museum was quite large, and the displays seemed to go on and on forever. One of the most important exhibits is the Lion throne of Mandalay. The throne had been taken to India and later England during the colonial period, something that Myanmar was still clearly bitter about even after the throne was returned. The assistant director explained to me that all of the other thrones were destroyed in fires, so I told him that maybe the greed of the colonial powers had its benefits after all. One hall of the museum shows the geographic origins and traditional clothing of each of Myanmar’s 135 distinct ethnic groups. I was struck by the story of one group’s tribal symbol; it was a bird that can grow very large, and when the female mate dies, the male flies as high into the sky as he can before freefalling to his death. I guess love is a complicated thing even in the animal world.

We rounded out the day with a surprise visit to the local travel agency responsible for my tour and a walk around Chinatown. Since our stop at the travel agency was unannounced, my guide decided to have some fun with the manager and told him I was there to complain about how things had been so far. The manager had fear in his eyes and a knot in his throat when he turned to ask me how things have been since my arrival. There have been few occasions in life where I have seen someone look so relieved as when I told him everything was great. We talked about some of the changes happening in Myanmar, and he expressed his excitement and concern for the rapid growth in tourism. He could not have been happier about the steady increase in foreign visitors, but he also feared what his life would become like as he took on more and more work. As this young man with so much energy, excitement, and pride pushes himself to keep up with the speed of change in this country, will he be able to find the middle way?

Changes are clearly happening sector by sector here because we also visited the antiquated train station. Another grand structure frozen in time, I loved exploring the station and watching the smiling people prepare for their long journeys on rickety trains that had been in use since the 1940s. My guide was also eager to show me “the plastic shop.” It was a warehouse full of everything plastic; I’m pretty sure this is where the spirits of plastic lawn furniture end up after they die. Every hideous color of plastic furniture imaginable towers around you like a forest of Chinese dyes and resin. I felt ashamed for even thinking about the cheap tacky nature of the furniture when my guide proudly said, “we come here for interior decorating; it’s the best most people can afford.”

Before sunrise, we were back on the road to the airport to catch my flight to Nyuang U. We did a quick drive by of “the Lady’s” house, the affectionate term for Aung San Suu Kyi, the mention of whose name could have gotten you arrested a few years ago. At the domestic air terminal, I finally saw the Yangon airport I was expecting. It felt like visits to the Hickory airport during my childhood back in North Carolina. Security was more for show than prevention, at least when it came to foreigners. Passengers lined up with their handwritten tickets to check their luggage and receive their handwritten boarding pass complete with a sticker for the seat number, and a bright yellow airline sticker for the passengers to wear to identify themselves.  The little propeller plane hops from airport to airport in Myanmar like a bus with wings. We swerved from side to side as we powered down the runway, but I made it to Nyuang U, the gateway town to Bagan, in one piece.

Old Bagan is amazing. Temple after temple dot the horizon as far as the eye can see. The problem that I’ve had since I’ve been here is my inability to say no to the people. In my long list of travels, I’ve learned to quite efficiently give people the cold shoulder, but the people here are so nice that I find it difficult to ignore them. One young girl asked me if I’d like to by a small elephant family carved from stone. I smiled and told her, “no, thank you,” but she kept following me. She introduced me to the mother elephant, the father elephant, the brother, sister, and baby elephants. She told me, “it’s ok, think about it, maybe later.” She followed me up the stairs to the terrace, warning me to watch my head the

whole way. After snapping some photos and before heading back down, she asked me again, “you want to buy elephant family?” I asked her how much, to which she replied, “3,000 kyat,” which is roughly $3 USD. Now, I could have said no, or I could have bargained with her to save another dollar, but if my one dollar can help pay for her family’s dinner, how can I in good conscience keep it for myself. I gave her the money, and she ran down the stairs to get me a bag. On the way out of the temple, the mother gave me an almost apologetic thank you that only served to confirm the value of this small purchase to the family. If it had been a larger purchase where I could have potentially saved myself at least $5 USD by negotiating, I would have, but I couldn’t bring myself to quibble over cents that mean so little to me and so much to that young girl. Unfortunately, a dollar here and a dollar there add up eventually, and I might soon run out of room for elephant families in my suitcase.

We ended the day watching the sunset from atop one of the many temples (though one of the few tourists are allowed to climb), and my guide explained to me some of the suffering the local people have gone through over the decades. He was born in old Bagan, but his family was forcefully relocated like many thousands of other families to new Bagan. I could see how he still looked out over the plains of temples with a sense of longing and a connection to his past. Things are relatively good in his life now, but something will always be missing because his heart is at home somewhere that he can no longer be.

I have things very good in life, and I have never had to personally experience the kind of suffering that these people have powered through. My hope is that just by being here, spending my money, hearing their stories, and sharing them with others, I am somehow helping. My path may still be considerably closer to the path of comfort and self-interest, but I try to do my part, and I never take my blessings for granted. I haven’t yet found the middle way, but I am not as far off as some people I know, and Buddha never said that enlightenment came easy.