learn · 2026-09-20
I did not quite believe I was going until I was there. The trip was supposed to happen from Bali and then, in the way of these things, it happened from somewhere else, and I came out of the airport into a kind of peaceful vacuum — the feeling you get when you land in a country and are wholly inside it, with nothing familiar to hold on to. The air was clean, even near the city. The cars were old. It felt like arriving in the nineteen-eighties, and the last time I had felt that particular interest in how people live was in India. I had come for fifteen days at the forest monastery, with a question I could not answer, and I went to the pagoda first.
Shwedagon is said to be two and a half thousand years old, which would make it the oldest structure in Myanmar and one of the oldest Buddhist shrines anywhere; the tradition puts its founding in the reign of Ashoka. It is ninety-nine metres of gold, covered in it, with diamonds and stones that pilgrims have given for centuries, and it is blinding in sun and lit at night. Inside, they say, are hairs of the Buddha and a footprint. None of that is what I brought back.
What I brought back was a man. He lived at a monastery near the reclining Buddha and came to the pagoda every day, and had done so, he told me, for about fifteen years. Six hours a day: an hour sitting, an hour walking, an hour sitting. I asked him what he practised and he said the breath; sometimes he counted. I asked whether it was Vipassana and he named his teacher instead, because the label did not interest him. He was not a monk. He was a man at the pagoda, and there was nothing about him that said fifteen years; he was as ordinary as the people selling flowers. That is what I had been looking for in the silence of retreats, and here it was in a public place with tour groups walking through it — practice as a plain fact of a life, not an event.
I felt there what I feel on retreat: a tranquillity, and with it a sense of knowledge in the air, as if everything around were understood. I went closer to the people praying to see what they were doing and found that they were reading. Sacred texts, in the open, at the shrine, in the middle of the day. They kept that purity through knowledge — not through the building, not through the gold — and it changed how I thought about my own practice, which had been almost entirely sitting. The Burmese read. The Dhamma there is a thing you know, and then sit with.
Not all of it was tidy. At one altar the offerings were bananas, coconuts and cigarettes — ordinary cigarettes, for a deity who looks after business and health — and I was told the statue nearby, of an arahant, had been given the eyes of a cow and a goat so that he could see more clearly when he came to the market. Around the base of the pagoda are eight corners, one for each day of the week, Wednesday counting twice, and you find the corner of the day you were born, pour water over the Buddha and the animal that stands for the day, three times, and make your wish. Astrology and Theravāda side by side, and nobody troubled by it. I had come from traditions that strip everything down to the technique, and I found I did not mind the cigarettes. Devotion in a living country is not clean. It is alive.
I recorded the talk for the second day of my home course there, and it opens by saying so: this message comes to you from Burma, which they call the golden land. The talk is about being alone — about the moment when there is no one left to hand responsibility to, and the real work begins. It was the right place to record it. Nobody at Shwedagon was watching anybody else practise.
The question I had brought was about food — why the monks, who ate whatever was put in their bowls, were so much calmer than I was on the cleanest diet in the world — and the monastery answered it, as I have written elsewhere. But the pagoda answered something I had not asked. I had thought of practice as a thing you went away to do: a gate, ten days, silence, then home. The man with his fifteen years, the readers at the shrine, the woman pouring water on her birthday corner between errands — they did not go away to do it. It was where they lived.
Sit, and say nothing, and let it be where you live. That is what I brought back from the golden land, and it fits in a sentence, and it has taken me years.
The Vipassana Path · Retreat and home, honestly · The monastery kitchen that ended my diets