The landscape of saṃsāra

from my transcription of "Freedom to Choose",
a talk given by venerable Ajahn Sucitto
at Cittaviveka monastery, 2004,
which includes these recollections on his pilgrimage to Tibet.

...One of the most marvelous pieces is the third day when you have to go over the high pass, Dromala pass, which is 5800 meters, I think. So you have to climb 700 meters, which is an over 2000 foot climb, and you're already at 4800 meters, so you're already at a gasping zone and now you have to climb 2000 feet up a pass. And it's one of those things where you just don't know if you're going to make it or not.

You just don't know if your body's going to make it or not. Real kind of: moment at a time. And then... lifting... choosing... yeah you can do one more step, yeah you can do one more step, yeah you can do one more step. Yeah, just doing that for 5 or 6 hours. And then stopping, it's time to stop now. You can do another step, another step, another step. And it's very cleaning for the mind because there's not time to wonder if and what and anything like that.

When you come up to the top there's a kind of tremendous celebration. The top of the Dromala pass is like a, I like to think it's a special place on the planet, because it's so remote and desolate and takes so much endeavor to get there. And this place, the site itself, surrounded by these crags and glaciers and rocks, but the pass itself is like a garden of prayer flags. Fluttering. Just huge poles and ropes and banners, which is just about prayer. Nothing else, they don't do anything: they're just prayers. Maybe hundreds of thousands of these.


So you come to the top and you feel like you've actually arrived at a place that's completely dedicated to blessing and prayer, and has come about through everyone that has been there and made this special effort, commitment to devotion, to the spirit of it. To taking a step at a time, to moving against an edge, deliberately lifting and carrying one's self onwards. There's a tremendous exhilaration when you get to the top. What comes after is, after you've come to the top, is you start to recognize you've got another 5-1/2 hours walk to get to the place where the yaks have gone with the tent -- the yaks go on [ahead] -- and then it's, "This is a very, very, very long walk."

When I came down that pass, the first was a sense of exhilaration and accomplishment. And after about 2 or 3 hours of walking, the energy was so low the feeling was like now you can plod or you can really give it everything you've got. We actually finished the day's walk very briskly, 2 or 3 hours of walking very briskly. It was like complete, just giving one's self away to the walk. It was a, again, a very exhilarating experience.

More than just patience as endurance but patience as a complete willingness to be with whatever, until the willingness itself becomes the thing that you feel. You don't really take in so much the discomforts or even the fatigue, you're just taking in the willingness. And that is when the blessing comes back. Because that is when the pilgrimage starts to bless your own heart. You feel tremendous resource and joy and willingness, and heartfulness.

And I sense that is what has really made that country [Tibet], given it the strength it has. Because life is so hard. In a way it almost asks that you either give up and die or just be miserable, or you're going to lift up and enter it with willingness. And the results are rather educational, something that we can really look at ourselves. Sometimes when in a western situation where there's a lot more... things are not really pushing you physically to the edge, we can create tremendous trials and torments for ourselves just over... the mind is not being fully held. It's being left to ramble and dither and speculate and project. And you're not really holding it and giving it something, fully giving it something to be with. So it, we experience the distress of mental habits of leaving the mind unguarded, unprotected and unchanneled. And see how miserable people can be.

Quite an eye-opener. I never saw anybody in Lhasa that was as miserable as people in London. You know, in the kind of shut-down, frantic, agitated states. People always had some cheerfulness, some openness to the present moment. When we take it into meditation it's that training to pick up the theme, the body theme, the theme of the heart, whatever one's theme of practice is, and recognize it's going to take you through some tough territory, some painful territory. But that's the landscape of saṃsāra. This is the territory we live in. It can be a place of blessing if we train ourselves, we feel the willingness and the joyfulness and the one-pointedness. Then the most desolate territory can be a place with beauty and prayer in it.

These beautiful photos "borrowed" from
Ray Kreisel's "A Journey to Lhasa and Mt. Kailash, Tibet, 2006" web journal.