Ghost Train to the Eastern Star

"How long will you be here?"

"Meditation for six months, then I will go to Laos and Cambodia—same, to meditate in a monastery."

"You just show up and say, 'Here I am'?"

"Yes. I show some papers to prove who I am. They are Theravada Buddhist. I am Mahayana. We believe that we can obtain full enlightenment."

"Like the Buddha?"

"We can become Buddha, totally and completely."

"Your English is very good," I said.

"I have traveled in fifteen Buddhist countries. You know something about Buddhism—you mentioned the Diamond Sutra."

"I read it recently. I like the part of it that describes what life on earth is:

A falling star, a bubble in a stream.

A flame in the wind. Frost in the sun.

A flash of lightning in a summer cloud."

"A phantom in a dream," Tapa Snim said, the line I'd forgotten. "That's the poem at the end. Have you read the Sixth Patriarch's Sutra?"

I said no, and he wrote the name in my notebook.

"All Zen Buddhists know this," he said, tapping the name.

We traveled for a while in silence. Seeing me scribbling in my notebook, the Frenchman said, "You must be a writer."

He had a box of food, mainly potato chips, pumpkin seeds, and peanuts. He shared a bag of pumpkin seeds with us.

Up the great flat plain of Pegu Province, dusty white in the sun, the wide river valley, baking in the dry season. Small simple huts and villages, temples in the distance, cows reclining in the scrappy shade of slender trees. Tall solitary stupas, some like enormous whitewashed pawns on a distant chessboard, others like oversized lamp finials, under a blue and cloudless sky.

The bamboo here had the shape of giant antlers, and here and there pigs trotted through brambles to drink at ponds filled with lotuses. It was a vision of the past, undeveloped, serene at a distance, and up close harsh and unforgiving.

Miles and miles of drained and harvested paddy fields, the rice stalks cut and rolled into bundles and propped up to await collection. No sign of a tractor or any mechanization, only a woman with a big bundle on her head, a pair of yoked oxen—remarkable sights for being so old-fashioned. And then an ox cart loaded with bales of cotton, and across a mile of paddy fields a gold stupa.

I walked to the vestibule of the train, for the exercise, and talked awhile with an old toothless man going to Taungoo. When I asked him about the past, he seemed a little vague.

"I'm fifty-two," he said, and I was reminded how poverty aged people prematurely.

When I went back to the compartment, Tapa Snim was rummaging in his bag. I watched him take out an envelope, and then he began knotting the two strands that made this simple square of cotton cloth into a sack.

"Do you have another bag?" I asked, because this one seemed improbably small for a long-distance traveler.

"No. These are all my possessions."

Everything not just for a year of travel, but everything he owned in the world, in a bag he easily slung under one arm. True, this was a warm climate, but the sack was smaller than a supermarket bag.

"May I ask you what's inside?"

Tapa Snim, tugging the knot loose, gladly showed me the entire contents.

"My bowl, very important," he said, taking out the first item. It was a small black plastic soup bowl with a close-fitting lid. He used it for begging alms, but he also used it for rice.

In a small bag: a piece of soap in a container, sunglasses, a flashlight, a tube of mosquito repellent, a tin of aspirin.

In a small plastic box: a spool of gray thread, a pair of scissors, nail clippers, Q-Tips, a thimble, needles, rubber bands, a two-inch mirror, a tube of cream to treat foot fungus, a stick of lip balm, nasal spray, and razor blades.

"Also very important," he said, showing me the razor blades. "I shave my head every fifteen days."

Neatly folded, one thin wool sweater, a shawl he called a kasaya,

a change of clothes. In a document pouch he had a notebook and some papers, a photograph showing him posed with a dozen other monks ("to introduce myself"), and a large document in Chinese characters he called his bhikkhu certificate, the official proof he was a monk, with signatures and seals and brushwork. He also had a Sharp electronic dictionary, which allowed him to translate from many languages, and a string of beads—108 beads, the spiritual number.

As I was writing down the list, he said, "And this"—his straw hat— "and this"—his fan.

"Nothing else?"

"Nothing."

"What about money?"

"That's my secret."

And then carefully he placed the objects on the opened cloth and drew the cloth together into a sack, everything he owned on earth.

"Tell me how you meditate."

"You know the Japanese word koan" he said. It wasn't a question. "For example, in ancient China, a student asked an important Zen monk, 'What is Buddha?' The monk answered, 'One pinecone tree in front of a garden.'"