Vipassana Meditation Course 07

I guess that today is the last day that I will talk about the mediation retreat. Tomorrow I will return to the pictures I took on a walk home from Sendai Station. It is getting cooler - today is only about 30, so I should be able to start walking again soon. I plan to walk around Sendai, visiting 33 temples containing statues of Kannon. I hope to do a series of pictures, one for each temple, and will take lots of photos to work from. I will post the photos and comments here.

Well, back to the retreat. After the 8 to 9 a.m. mediation, we were told that we could talk again but not in the main building. We were also told that we had to go to the group sittings and the dhamma talk, but that the other meditations were optional.

At 9, most of us went outside and discovered that they had set up some exhibits of the worldwide activities of the Vipassana organization that ran the course. We were given back our wallets and allowed to make donations if we wanted. I was surprised at how little (read no) pressure there was to give them money. Also we were able to talk to the women for the first time. I spend a long time talking to one of the men who slept in the room with me. It turned out that he was from Fukuoka and knew the area where Masayo was pretty well. I also spent time with a couple of the other people from my room and the guys who watched the dhamma talks with me.

I went to the required activities but blew off the rest of the meditations. The atmosphere was different and I could not really focus. I spend a lot of time in the dining hall where they had exhibits of various publications. One of the books has transcripts of all the songs and chanting that we had heard, along with English translations. I discovered that most of the stuff was poetry written by Goenka himself and the rest was quotes from the Buddhist literature, almost entirely Theravada, by the way.

The next morning we got up and had a special session from 4:30 to 6:30. During this we meditated briefly and then listened to a tape by Goenkaji. He explained how we should continue after we returned home. Briefly we were told to do an hour of mediation in the morning and another hour in the evening. Also we should do five minutes just before going to sleep and again on awakening in the morning. The Vipassana exercises that we had learned were to be primary, but if we were having trouble concentrating, we should return to watching the nostrils and the space between them and the upper lip. We should determine on our own how much of each hour we should spend on each if we even did the anapana.

While Kyoko and Tsubasa were here, I meditated for one hour in the evening after Tsu-chan had gone to sleep, but since they have left I am doing an hour in the morning and another in the evening. I plan to keep it up for a number of months at least. If there is the positive change that I expect, I will make it part of my regular permanent schedule.

After the talk was over we went to breakfast and then after breakfast we cleaned the facility. I volunteer to work on the dining hall. There was a laminated sheet with the instructions on it but they were in Japanese. Since I ended up as sort of the boss, because Iwas the only one in the room who could read them, except for one of the older Japanese guys who just worked hard doing things, but did not try to organize anything. It took us about 40 minutes to give the place a complete cleaning, so that it would be nice for the next group, who were arriving in a few days.

Once we finished I was able to get my cell phone and book back and then went to talk to the man who was driving the van to the bus depot. I said that I was not in a hurry and would go on whatever trip had space. It turned out that the very first trip had space. Lots of people had signed up, but they were not ready. Actually the van made a couple of trips before the first bus left, so there were about 10 of us on the bus when it left. I spent much of the trip talking to the man from Nepal and a young man from Eastern Europe. When we got on the train a group of us sat together and I chatted with an Australian who had done his second retreat. Once we got to Kyoto we all said goodbye and separated.

I went to the Shinkansen ticket office and changed my ticket, which was for a 6 o'clock train to one that left at 11:30ish. I used to my cell phone to tell Masayo and she called me on the train to say that she, Kyoko and Tsubasa would meet me at the station. I was home by 6 p.m. and my experience was over - or maybe it was just beginning.