Tim Parks - The Server

If only we could swap places.

I closed my eyes and at once felt hands take mine. I’d known this would happen. They were soft, boys’ hands, but strong. Mine were resting palms up on my thighs, but they were also being pulled towards the sea, we were running across the beach towards the surf. It was cloudy, but there was the moon somewhere, behind a cloud, or gleaming in the surf. Then I was in. Their hands let go but I ran on and plunged. ‘Stop, Beth. Don’t.’ They let go. They saw the surf was huge and stopped. The red flag had been up all day. The breakers were monstrous.

‘Stop, Beth, stop!’

I flung myself into the wave. It crashed like a wall. I was slammed on the sand, tossed this way and that, tossed and turned and tumbled, then suddenly, violently, dragged outwards. Stronger hands took me and tossed me out to sea and another wave crashed and another and another and I wasn’t trying now, I wasn’t floundering, I wasn’t fighting, I was waiting, waiting for change. Let me change, I screamed, let me change, let me change.

‘THE NINTH DAY is over. You have only one more day left to work.’

The words surprised me. People had come and gone, gone and come. The vents under the roof turned on and off to bring us air. You felt a low humming in the belly, the faintest draught at the roots of the hair. Five minutes, then it stops. Dasgupta talked about multiplication. I sensed the flicker of the video. The hall was full again. The law of multiplication, he said. The seeds of the banyan tree are infinite. The tree is huge, the multitudinous seeds are tiny, but each contains another huge banyan tree, which again contains infinite seeds, infinite banyan trees. Likewise with sankhara s, the painful formations of the mind. Every unskilful action carries the seed of endless multiplication, endless mental misery. This is the law of nature. One betrayal spawns a thousand others. The karma grows and grows. Where will there be an end? When will we be free?

My body reassembled itself. It had come apart in the surf. My nose floated off from my face. My lips swimming away like eels. Let them go, let them go. My eyeballs shifting back and forth in the shingle. My skin flapping and tumbling with the seaweed in the long wash of the tide. How to stop this mad multiplication? Dasgupta asks. How to come out of our misery?

Hour after hour, even deep in meditation, the old stories came back. It had never happened before. Previously I had been safe in my trance. I could hide. But now Jonathan, now Carl filled my mind, this wild concert, that drunken night, Zoë, Dad, Mum. I thought the sea would purify, now each tide brings more wreckage.

‘How to stop the sankhara s multiplying?’ Dasgupta asks. I sit in my filth and his voice flows through me.

‘By not giving these seeds of misery a fertile soil to grow in, my friends. That is the answer. By denying them nourishment.’

And is the sea a fertile soil? I’ve been turning in this water for months. Shouldn’t it have washed me clean?

‘It is so easy,’ Dasgupta says. ‘This is what the Buddha understood. It is so clear, so easy. If we stop producing new sankhara s, the old ones float to the surface and evaporate. It may be painful, my friends, but it works. It’s automatic. It’s the law of nature. Or like an old-fashioned clock: as soon as you stop winding it up it winds down. Like a spring released after years of tension. Just stop producing new sankhara s, new attachments, new aversions, stop winding up the clock of your misery, stop throwing new filth into the wash.’

I threw myself into the sea. Why did they bother saving me?

‘Suddenly everything is so clear,’ Dasgupta says. ‘If only we will accept things as they are , not as we would wish them to be, if only we can stop producing new sankhara s of craving and aversion, then we can break out of this cycle of ignorance and misery. Then we can be liberated.’

Dasgupta believes what he’s saying. He’s not a fraud. But when I tried to stop I made things worse.

‘You must master the present moment,’ Dasgupta says. ‘The future is child of the present. Master the present and the old sankhara s will unwind. Master the present and the future will be happy, the future will be peaceful. You will be liberated.’

How? I have held my half-lotus for hours. The twilight is deepening. I feel it. The video is coming to a close. I know these videos. I know how Dasgupta’s voice changes when he is near the end. Now he’s talking about the angry old man who went to the Buddha to protest that his teaching distracted people from their prayers. ‘“Thank you, but I will not accept your gift of anger,” the Buddha told him. “Take it away, old man. It is your anger, not mine. I do not want it.”

‘Master the present moment, my friends,’ Dasgupta says. ‘The present moment. Do not accept gifts of anger. Do not react to pains and pleasures, provocations, promises. Do you see? It’s so easy, once you have understood. Do not react to pleasant thoughts or to negative thoughts. That is the way of ignorance and limitation. Observe your breathing. Observe sensation. Observe thought. Just observe, just observe, don’t react, never react. Work hard at the technique and you are bound to succeed, oh, bound to succeed.’

If the present moment is a crashing sea, how can I master it? If the surf around me is churning with filth, how can I not feel aversion? My baby is there. She is tossed up on the sand, swept away by the next wave. How can anyone master anything? The present is an angry sea. I have sat still and breathed and observed my breathing, observed my body, observed my thoughts and the present moment has overwhelmed me, the sea has overwhelmed me, my aching ankles have overwhelmed me. I am beaten, beaten, beaten.

The only thing to observe is my failure.

‘ Bavatu sava mangelam .

‘May all beings be liberated, liberated, liberated.

‘ Sadhu, sadhu, sadhu .’

It was over. The meditators left the hall. Those who had questions to ask lined up before Harper and Mi Nu. There is no need to open your eyes to understand these things. I can feel the people getting to their feet, shuffling this way and that all around me. Now there are low voices. Some questions are muttered, others I can hear easily enough.

‘Is anicca a name for a single energy force, or more in general for any kind of change that takes place in nature?’

‘I am sure I did something terrible in a previous life. How many lives does it take to work off the bad karma of something really awful?’

‘My husband cheats on me. Sometimes I think I’m using meditation to live in denial. What would the Buddha say?’

It goes on for twenty minutes, maybe half an hour. I never hear Mi Nu’s answers. Harper repeats his formulas. ‘Whatever you did in a previous life, the way of Dhamma is always the same. There is no need to torment yourself.’

Then the questioners are done and the metta can begin.

‘If I have offended anyone in today’s Dhamma Service, I seek pardon of him or her. I seek pardon of him or her.’

Dasgupta’s voice feels closer and quieter in the metta : the recording has a sort of throaty intimacy, as if he knew he were addressing his band of faithful servers and no one else; he doesn’t need to persuade.

‘If anyone has offended me in today’s Dhamma Service, I ppardon him or her, I ppardon him or her.’

May all beings, visible and invisible, visible and invisible visible and invisible …

The metta was over and the servers took their cushions to kneel before the leaders. I stayed put. I stayed separate, marooned on my cushion. Motionless. I have been motionless all day. I am turning in the surf, with all the filth the tide is bringing, and I am entirely present and motionless here, sitting still while the servers get together for their final meeting. Surely now, I thought, someone will intervene. Someone will remind Beth Marriot that eccentric behaviour isn’t permitted at the Dasgupta Institute.