Burma monasteries offer boot camp for the spirit

Rangoon, July 29: Predawn wake- up calls, days of silence and hunger may not be everyone’s idea of a holiday, but for tourists seeking spiritual sustenance Burma’s monasteries offer help on the path to Buddhist nirvana. The search for inner peace is unlikely to appeal to those who take a more hedonistic approach to vacations — booze, beaches and bikinis are definitely out.

“When you first start it is a bit like running into a brick wall, you know, you are having extreme problems settling down and for your mind to settle,” said Rupert Arrowsmith, a British art historian.

He spent 45 days of total silence in the “famously austere” Chanmyay Yeiktha monastery, a peaceful compound of rooms for meditation and sleeping in the countryside near Rangoon.

“The new environment, different way of dressing, different way of eating. It’s like some sort of military boot camp. You’ve even got the same hairstyle,” he said. After their heads are shaved at an ordination ceremony, new monks retreat to the quiet but challenging routine of monastic life.

Rising at 3.30 am, they practise sitting and walking meditation for the majority of the day, spending long periods crosslegged in the complex, which is largely silent apart from the sound of birdsong. Food, though often sumptuous dishes such as local curries, is served before noon. The last meal of the day at Chanmyay Yeiktha is at 10.30 am and monks have nothing more to eat before they retire to bed in the evening to sleep in individual rooms on a bed with no mattress.

Mr Arrowsmith urged those entering a monastery to “be serious, this is not Disneyland,” but he said the experience — his second at the monastery — was worth it. “It’s more or less essential for anybody who wants to understand how their own mind functions. I mean this is probably the key point for people in the West,” he said.

“You know people who talk about self knowledge, they really need to come and do some Vipassana meditation in Burma,” he said. Burma is stepping firmly back onto the south- east Asia tourist trail under a new reformist regime that came to power in 2011.