By Rüdiger Falksohn
Although the rainy season is nearing an end, last night storms swept across the sky. It is 6 a.m. and Bangkok is awakening in the morning mist. Monks leave their temples to begin their daily begging rounds, some in groups and some alone.
Surachai is a lone monk, and Wat Pathumvan, one of at least 400 temple complexes in Thailand's metropolitan capital, has been his home for nine years. He used to work as a chef to support his family. A tattoo on his right shoulder blade is the sole reminder of his old life. Since then, he has served the Buddha only.
Surachai is 66 years old, a taciturn man who commands respect among the more than 100 monks of his community. Despite a hip ailment that hampers his gait, he moves steadily into the dawn light, across the square in front of the wat and to the gate where the first alms are already waiting.
A woman kneels, presents her plastic bags of food, and when Surachai has stowed the donation in a balloon-shaped drum - like his monk's robe the color of saffron - she bows once more and kisses her empty tray. For it is not the recipient who must be thankful: devout Buddhists consider it a privilege and blessing to help the barefoot ascetics with their shaved heads realize a worthy existence.
Surachai makes his customary rounds: along the commuter railroad on its massive concrete stilts, through quiet alleys where the acrid smell of frying pours forth from food stalls. Passersby greet him with reverence; Surachai nods back respectfully. He acknowledges every donation - individual portions of cooked food, juice, yoghurt, the occasional 20-baht note (half a dollar) - with a humble smile that always seems mildly surprised.
Into the sweet nothing
His container is quickly filled. Soon his fingers are clutching the knots of a dozen bags of steamed rice and he returns to the temple. Surachai enters the abbot's room and piles his takings on two big metal trays.
Abbot Luangta, a 75-year-old doctor of sociology, has lived at Wat Pathumvan for half a century. His spacious, dimly lit room resembles a rummage shop, in which holy objects and junk - the sacred and the profane - are jumbled together. Along the wall, rows of Buddha figurines and cheap vases glisten with colored glazes, and gilded frames hold photographs - one pictures the abbot with the young King Bhumibol. In front are cordless telephones, a microwave oven, desks ready for the salvage heap, file cabinets, and a grandfather clock, its pendulum long stilled.
Adhering to a belief system that is at least 2,500 years old, devotees of the Buddha care little about time. After all, if nirvana - the dissipation of existence into the sweet nothing - isn't achieved in this lifetime, there are always future lives in which to approach the condition beyond pain and beyond need.
"Take this," says Luangta, a roly-poly Buddha figure as he extends a strand of blue and red prayer beads. "Let the beads slip through your fingers; keep repeating: 'Bud-dha, Bud-dha.' Inhale deeply through your nose, all the way down to your belly, and then exhale. Concentrate on your breathing." He who circles the strand 50 times, the master promises amiably, will feel "really happy" and taste the delight of salvation. He will overcome all physical and material needs and be delivered from this earthly vale of tears.
Tolerance and forbearance
Is this then the ultimate purpose of existence? When the clock within stops ticking, when the contents of the file cabinets no longer command interest, when greed, ambition and the pursuit of pleasure are overcome - is the human being then really happy?
In Thailand, at least, nearly an entire nation lives by this creed: 95 percent practice Buddhism. Most are able to reconcile their rampant consumerism with the dharma - the teaching of the Buddha. Buddhism prevails elsewhere, as well: in Laos and Cambodia, in Vietnam and Burma (Myanmar), on Sri Lanka, in Mongolia and in Tibet, despite its suppression by the government in Beijing. Buddhism's practice of tolerance and forbearance seems to provoke suspicion among authoritarian regimes, notwithstanding the Buddha's recommendation that his followers pursue an apolitical existence.
Buddhism does not reject people of different beliefs. Unlike other major world religions, it does not preach conversion. Neither crusades nor jihads nor zealous missionary movements are part of its history. The current Buddhist resistance in Tibet against Chinese occupiers is modeled on the example of Mahatma Gandhi, India's Hindu leader who brought down a colonial empire without resorting to violence - a particularly subversive type of rebellion from the vantage point of totalitarian rulers. Consider the 14th Dalai Lama, today's best-known face of Buddhism: The charismatic holy man, who serves as a celebrity peace emissary and preaches the non-extremist "middle way" of the Buddha, was forced to flee from Lhasa in 1959.
In the civil war on Sri Lanka, however, Buddhist monks are showing that even this gentle religion can be reconciled with a suitable quantum of violent aggression.
Some 450 million adherents make Buddhism the fourth-largest religion in the world. In many respects, however, it is closer to a philosophy, based as it is on ancient concepts of natural science and psychology. Its image as a source of energy, a sort of spiritual aerobic exercise, makes it an easy fit for a very modern way of life in Asia - and in the West.
Buddhism is not a uniform identity
Half of history's foremost German philosophers - Leibniz, Kant, Hegel, Herder, Schelling and Schopenhauer - studied Buddhism. An estimated 250,000 Buddhists currently live in Germany. Every third German regards the Dalai Lama, the man with the scholarly glasses, as "the wisest man of our time."
The sections of society most often seeking equilibrium and mental fitness through the Eastern practice of meditation include people in the arts, the affluent and the educated middle classes. Because charitable work plays a subordinate role to "selfwork," this teaching fits well with the neoliberal zeitgeist, while offering the bonus of a relaxing balance, particularly for the prosperous and stress-plagued urbanites of the 21st century.
Buddhist centers are therefore booming in Germany as well. They bear exotic names - the Bodaisan Shoboji Rinzai Temple in the Bavarian hamlet of Dinkelscherben; the Yogacara Meditation Center in Neckarbischofsheim; Semkye Ling in Schneverdingen in the North German heath; the Chödzong Center in Fürth. And they teach a Far Eastern wisdom that differs from one school to the next: Buddhism is not a uniform entity.
Yet all these institutions embrace meditation as a principal tenet, as a high road to unfolding the self - be it in the older, traditionalist Theravada Buddhism, which holds sway in Thailand and on Sri Lanka, the reformist Mahayana variant that arose more than 2,000 years ago to more effectively engage laypersons, or the Vajrayana, which incorporates practices to accelerate the enlightenment process. These movements are sometimes known as "small vehicle," "greater vehicle" and "diamond vehicle," respectively.
German hobby Buddhists, who decorate their garden nooks and windowsills with statues of the Enlightened One, do not take such distinctions too seriously. When they twist their legs like pretzels, sit with straight backs and close their eyes in concentration, they are merely seeking better quality of life, striving to focus their diffused consciousness into a sharp laser of spiritual energy. And they needn't fear conflicting loyalties of faiths. They're not forsaking the God of Christianity for another - the Buddha never regarded himself as such. He enjoins others to follow his example, but he does not demand this unconditionally.
Buddhism offers a practice for coping with daily life, a guideline for a higher existence. Even those who meditate only occasionally may be rewarded by an increased sense of well-being. And on the horizon, the Buddha's great revelation draws nearer: the decomposition of the individual, the peaceful deliverance, the evaporation into nirvana - an attractive though abstract goal.
Siddharta Gautama, who devised this teaching, is said to have been born around the year 563 B.C.E., the son of the Hindu nobleman Suddhodana and his wife, Mahamaja, in what is today South Nepal. The mother delivered standing up. Legend has it that the earth shook, the sick became healthy, and ghosts, gods and serpentkings deluged the baby with heavenly blessings and flowers.
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