A Weed Wacking Roshi goes to Mass

 Blue Cliff Record 22.1

My friend James Ford recently wrote a heartfelt piece about attending a service in Boston's Kings Chapel. I’ve been looking for a response. I had several questions about his almost lyrical reflection on the juxtaposition of hearing mass using a truncated version of the English Catholic Reformation's arcane liturgy in a handsomely endowed Unitarian church.

I emailed him to say as long as it has some singing and dancing, I suppose I could hum along, but I confess, I was initially put off by a koan master’s flirtation with 15th century ritual. The practice of Zen, at least in my experience, has tended to strip away some of the mystery surrounding these observances.

But further examination exposed a new level of entanglement and possibility.

Seekers and Quakers, Ranters, Diggers and Collegiants

James is a well trained, thoroughly modern koan master. He is also an ordained Unitarian Minister, so he has set aside some Church orthodoxy and its insistence on creedal formulations of the mysterious. All well and good. He, I and the Boston Unitarians are on the same page.

I also know from our conversations that he is trying to look at the tumultuous spiritual landscape of right now from a Zen perspective. His interests include traditional Christian denominations, evangelical churches, fringe spiritual movements, and the relatively small but growing number of western Buddhist practitioners from various Asian schools. After some digging, I discovered that King Henry’s abrogating the authority of Rome unleashed a tidal wave of non-conforming religious expression that was similar and even more stormy than our own, but most of the ramifications lay hidden beneath the doctrinal garb of our inherited religions.

I stumbled upon a YouTube series of lectures by Alec Ryrie, Professor of Divinity at Gresham College, London. He’s a committed Christian, and he’s also brilliant. Of course I had studied the history of what we call the early Reformation, at least enough to satisfy my Jesuit examiners, but my training was focused through the narrow lens of the Counter Reformation which my order spearheaded.

I had carefully examined Lutherans, Calvinists, Methodists and, I suppose by extension I can include Jansenists to get ecumenical, but there were also many many smaller splinter sects; historians call them the radical reformation. Who were they? They included the first radical Quakers, but also Seekers, Ranters, Diggers, and Collegiants. They questioned the very foundations of the Christian enterprise.

The events of these few decades were momentous. So much transpired that continues to shape our spiritual lives; the language of prayer; the separation of religious belief from philosophical discourse (I didn’t know for example that Baruch Spinoza had been a member of the Dutch version of the Quakers); the far reaching economic impact of King Henry VIII’s confiscation of Church assets led to secularization and the end of the total domination of the church-state.

Alec Ryrie says that battles are rarely determined by the pacifists. Who can dispute that? However I am loath to give up my cherished position as a Skeptic.

John Earle. (c. 1601 – 17 November 1665) whom I regard as an English Pascal (19 June 1623 – 19 August 1662) and his contemporary, also felt that one has to take sides. But he is far less rarefied than Blaise. Earle presents the famous philosophical wager as a conundrum with a nihilist resolution: “Whilst he fears to believe a miss, he believes nothing.”

Can I believe anything and do I really have to?

An Age of Atrocity

If I were an actual actor in the real drama of the early Reformation, I might have been forced to take a stance about my beliefs. I remember a conversation I had with my friend Avery Dulles (not sure if this was before or after he was elevated to the rank of Cardinal) but he was serving on some high level ecumenical commission. He told me that he'd worked long hours on some presentation papers. Then came the meeting. It began with a prayer petitioning the God of the doctrinal points they knew they could agree upon. Then Avery stated and explained the Roman Catholic position. He was thanked and applauded. Then the other side’s theologians presented a similar paper outlining their position. They sat down and were politely applauded. Then together they worked out the closing statement: we can agree on X for Y reason and we continue to disagree on the following points for Z reason. We were happy to have this exchange, and pray for our continued growth in the Spirit.

During the Reformation, one of those parties might have been burned at the stake. In those bloody times, the untimely deaths of the heretics or martyrs, depending on your side, could be made into myths, to warn succeeding generations, to train them in some self sacrificial virtue or remind them that some truths could never be compromised. The Inquisitions made decisions about who needed to be celebrated, who needed to be blamed and what lessons the survivors needed to draw.

Thousands were tortured and executed. The authorities of the newly reformed English Church did it as well as the Catholics. In the Spanish Inquisition it was a  matter of life and death for the Jews, conversos, and dissenters who were murdered. 

A lot has changed in the course of a few centuries, but I don’t think that I can erase that part of history that is an affront to the sensibilities that are the product of my own time and religious culture. The Jesuit Saint Robert Bellarmine may have saved Galileo from the stake but I am deeply troubled by his role in the execution of Giordano Bruno and Friar Fulgenzio Manfredi. The temptation for revisionists is to write out the parts of your history that don’t conform with your myth.

Koan Practice for Tudor England

We are already living in the 21st century. Before I introduce some koan practice, I would like to introduce perhaps a consideration, or a caution. Following Foucault, “. . . you cannot find the solution of a problem in the solution of another problem raised at another moment by other people.” (Michel Foucault, quoted in Dreyfus and Rabinow,“ On the Genealogy of Ethics,” 229. In this context the other people were the ancient Greeks.)

By chance, I started working with this elliptical koan that I unfolded from Yuanwu’s Commentary for Case 22 of the Blue Cliff Record.* I tried to apply Foucault's question about understanding bridging history. I began using a Buddhist technique to cut away the weeds. It dates from medieval China about contemporaneous with William the Conqueror. Can the record of an ancient Zen master help me decipher the experience of an arcane ritual dating 5 centuries after 1066, during the reign of King Edward VI?

Theology and science fiction love time travel. Let’s see if religious studies linked up with Zen practice can be equally anachronistic. Paraphrasing Yuanwu, can a 21st century Westerner have an authentic Zen experience? At least this might be fun.

A koan: The Family Jewels

When [Hsueh] Feng got to Te Shan he asked. “Do I have a part in the affair of the most ancient sect, or not?” Shan struck me a blow of his staff and said, “What are you saying?” At that time it was like the bottom of the bucket dropping out for me.”

(Allow me to decode some of the language: in 9th Century China "enlightenment" in Zen practice--according to the ancient sect is possible. Feng reports that he experienced it, but apparently that doesn’t settle the matter. Can I might include a modern Zen Roshi using the ancient prayer of the Church of England?)

Yen T’ou shouted and said, “Haven’t you heard it said that what comes in through the gate is not the family jewels?” Feng said, “Then what should I do?” T’ou said, “In the future, if you want to propagate the great teaching, let each point flow out from your own breast, to come out and cover heaven and earth for me.”

(The part of propagating the great teaching is not coded. We get the part about flowing from your own heart. Skipping ahead through several bouts of drinking tea and getting whacked, we move onto what Hsueh Tou’s disciple has to say about tracing the matter back to their root teacher Yun Men and mastering the art of snake handling. What is he talking about?)

“How many lose their bodies and their lives?” This praises Ch’ang Ch’ing’s saying, “In the hall today there certainly are people who lose their bodies and lives.” To get here, first you must be thoroughly versed in snake handling. 

Hsueh Tou is descended from Yun Men, so he brushes the others away at once and just keeps one, Yun Men: Hsueh Tou says “Shao Yang knows, again he searches the weeds.” Since Yun Men knew the meaning of Hsueh Feng’s saying, “On South Mountain there’s a turtle-nosed snake,” therefore “Again he searches through the weeds.”

After Hsueh Tou has taken his verse this far, he still has more marvels. He says, “South, north, east, west, no place to search.” You tell me where the snake is. “Suddenly he trusts his staff.” From the beginning the snake has been right here. But you must not then go to the staff for sustenance.

Yun Men took his staff and threw it down in front of Hsueh Feng, making a gesture of fright.

Thus Yun Men used his staff as the turtle-nosed snake. Once, though, he said, “The staff changed into a dragon and has swallowed the universe; where are the mountains, rivers and the great earth to be found?” Just this one staff--sometimes it’s a dragon, sometimes it’s a snake.

(Then after some detailed snake handling instructions, Yuanwu tries to encourage us by asking one of those pesky Zen Master questions.) Since ancient times, how many people have picked up the snake and played with it?

I personally prefer opera

James Ford attended a truncated Book of Common Prayer service in a revered Unitarian Church. I hope that at least part of the motivation was aesthetic. And that’s perfect. He’s a Unitarian. I am what’s politely called a lapsed Catholic and an ex-Jesuit to boot. I find that after years of meditation, my love for the ritual of the mass has waned, but I won't rule out the power of the experience. Actually I prefer opera, but then I am also gay so it might be genetic.

But after doing some introspection, I am left seeing the similarity with my own situation as well as wondering about the huge waves that lie just beneath any attempt to deal with the numinous ocean that supports our lives. I am a skeptic as much as I am a Buddhist. There is a war inside about what to believe, what is worthy of belief and what beliefs are pointers and which ones might simply be a smoke screen. I would like to remain neutral, but also realize that I don't want to set myself up, in the words of John Earle, as “a hapless peacemaker trying to intervene in a duel getting shot by both sides.”

The contribution of the Zen practice here might be to clear the weeds from the battlefield and perhaps reveal the turtle nosed snake. I can carry a staff, at least in my imagination. “The staff changed into a dragon and has swallowed the universe; where are the mountains, rivers and the great earth to be found?”

For my verse, I’ll echo James with the two stanzas from from Leonard Cohen’s “Treaty” that he uses to close his meditation:

I've seen you change the water into wine
I've seen you change it back to water, too
I sit at your table every night
I try but I just don't get high with you

I heard the snake was baffled by his sin
He shed his scales to find the snake within
But born again is born without a skin
The poison enters into everything


* Here is Case 22 and the portion of the commentary that I used.

Split up California--Six Senators

I hate getting such poor representation. Not in the quality of the people that California sends to DC but in the diluted impact that my participation has in our highly fractured democracy. By my calculation one third of me is represented by a US Senator, Is it my head, my belly or my kneecaps?

The population of California is 39.24 million. The population of the other 49 states is 292.66 (total US population is 331.9). California is about 11.5 % of the entire US population. We have 2 senators. The other 292.66 has 48. 

Not even considering the very small states that have two senators (let’s leave that out of the calculation--we can haggle later) using gross averages 48 senators represent about 6 million people each. In California, each senator represents almost 20 million. 

There are 435 voting members of the House of Representatives. California has 53 members, almost 12%. There are 42 Democrats and 11 Republicans. 

Ok so we don’t have proportional representation because the Founding Fathers had something else in mind, but with anything closer to proportional representation, we should have at least 6 senators. 

Given the highly partisan politics in the country and the obscene amount of gerrymandering, let’s get four more senators. Make California into 3 states. Two would be easy and has been often talked about. Given the huge urban vs rural/agricultural population split, there is a high chance of at least a few of the new senators from the Three-State-Split-Up California being Republicans. 

In 1787 three-fifths of each state's slave population was counted toward that state's total population for the purpose of apportioning the House of Representatives. Today every Californian is counted as about 33% worthy of senatorial representation.

It's time to revisit the 2018 Cal 3 Proposal. Get us more senators.

Going back to a year that might have changed my life

 Yes and . . . 

Dear James, 

Your “Best Read on Jesus and His Message” was more than quick summation of the Jesus sayings, miracle stories, resurrection narratives, including possible source materials, how they were collected, and the way the early church used them, including the split between the Jerusalem vs the Greek/gentile communities. It is, from my understanding, pretty accurate. It might be a good jumping off point if we are just looking to examine the impact of what comes down to us, for both good and ill, of the “the Jesus Teaching.” I have to admit that it took me in another direction.

Can I tell you that your Unitarian training is showing? Let me chime in from the more liturgical Catholic point of view, even though I am definitely a former Catholic with little affinity left for ritual observance of any kind, even the spare zen kind.

I’ll call this “Going back to a year that might have changed my life.”

This morning I find myself thinking about the year and half I spent at Dartmouth in the Religious Studies department. After I came back from France in 64, I decided that I would enter the Jesuits. I wanted to go to the novitiate right away, but my parents objected. I talked with the Newman Chaplin, and decided to switch my major to Religious Studies. I’d written on the religious drama of Paul Claudel in France, and there were no majors in the department, so I worked out a split major. I spent my last full year taking every course given by a stellar faculty, the kind of top level scholarship rarely assembled anywhere. Every day Jacob Neuser, H Hans Penner, Jonathan Z Smith, Robin Scroggs and a Belgian Augustinian who'd been a peritus at Vatican II, a visiting scholar, directed my study. There were few other students so my classes were basically seminars. I wrote my senior thesis on the Prophetic Voice in the Christian church under Neusner. I was closest to Neusner. He liked me and encouraged me. His Judaism also came closest to the way in which I held my Catholicism, faithful, open-minded and inquisitive. I wrote to him several times over many years, and he always took the time to respond thoughtfully and generously.  

If it had not been 1965-66, the end of the Vatican Council, and if my deep personal bias is what most would label extremely liberal, I might have fallen in with some right wing group like Opus Dei though some might argue that the Jesuits could be classified as a left-wing cult. Regardless, I was cult material. Thank god I was more interested in what John Courtney Murray, Gus Weigel and Hans Bea were up to. Throw in some Urs Von Balthasar, Hans Kung, Thomas Merton mixed in a bit of Mircea Eliade and you got me theologically. Add hard drinking, avoidance of dealing, or even acknowledging my homosexuality, and you got me personally. Looking back I was extremely conservative, even defensive, sure that the Roman Catholic Church had all the answers, or at least kernels of “The” truth were there if you looked carefully, thoughtfully, prayerfully, and critically enough. 

My concerns, at least from a theological point of view, were reconciling the apparent discrepancies in the resurrection narratives. Jesus had to have been bodily resurrected into heaven. It all hinged on that. When Scroggs, I think, asked me how I handled the outlier report of the risen Jesus telling his disciples to go before him to Galilee where he would ascend to heaven, I felt that there was either some misreporting or reporting a miscommunication. Further textual analysis would solve the mystery. Perhaps I really just had to learn Greek and/or Aramaic. 

Neusner had just published the first of the more than 900 hundred books and articles he wrote during his stunning career: A Life of Yohanan ben Zakkai. Leiden, 1962. Ben Zakkai was a contemporary of Jesus, and central to the creation of Rabbinic Judaism that took root in the diaspora after the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 CE. Ah ha, so Jesus was not a stand alone figure in the religious turmoil of his era. Neusner was an amazing scholar. He’d studied the religious history of Palestine during the first century of the common era exhaustively. He said there was evidence of hundreds of wandering teachers like John the Baptist, Jesus of Nazarath, and Yohanan ben Zakkai populating the parched landscape. This estimate might be very conservative. 

Toying with the idea of converting to Judaism, I talked with Neusner. He was always the scholar, but he was an extremely approachable and friendly man. He cautioned me, ”the conservative Jewish position is quite cultural. Conversion does not work the way it does in Christianity. It normally happens when Jew marries a Gentile, and the couple has to handle the day to day observance of the Law.” I was not going to get married, period, Jew or Gentile. My sense was that he had the confidence of a religious man that his particular faith tradition, let’s call it religious proclivity, provided some clues. He said that he could not deny that Christians had helped spread the teaching of the Prophets throughout the world. How’s that for endorsement of a religious belief system? I’m looking for the Messiah and he says that Christianity would do as a promotion, including a byline, on the back cover of a particular understanding of the Law of Moses. Oddly at the time that was enough. He encouraged me to enter the Jesuits. He perhaps felt, or hoped that with the discipline of the Jesuits I might be able to become a scholar. He might have felt that truly mastering scholarship would unlock some of the questions that I wrestled with. 

Your quote from Robin R. Meyers about early Christianity is certainly provocative. “Consider this remarkable fact: In the Sermon on the Mount, there is not a single word about what to believe, only words about what to do and how to be. By the time the Nicene creed is written, only three centuries later, there is not a single word in it about what to do and how to be – only words about what to believe.” This not entirely true, or at least it's certainly misleading. First, the presupposition is wrong; very few of the parables in the narratives contain any doctrinal statements. Meyers has framed his "remarkable fact" for the spirituality vs religion crowd.  He says “only three centuries,” but neglects to say that those three centuries were as eventful as the last 75 years in terms of the rise and fall of religions and empires. But most importantly he completely neglects the importance of the confession of faith amongst the early believers.

From the time of the very first churches, there was always emphasis on what you believed in, and who you believed in. That was in fact the path to salvation. I was just reading an interview with Neusner. He was asked, "Why is dogma essential to orthodox Christianity and not to Judaism?" His response: “The main reason is that Christianity begins with the demand to believe in something or someone. There is a proposition attached to the beginning of the faith. You are saved through what you believe. This is certainly the message of Paul and the early church. Christianity stresses theology, not merely dogma in the sense of what one must believe, but theology in the sense of a systematic study of the faith and of the propositions of faith. The result of this is that the Christian, particularly the Protestant Christian, will think of religion in terms of faith.” 

I think that this is just a given. What was emphasized and what was neglected or changed is a parochial argument, but once you enter into a polemical conversation, it is part and parcel. If you take the position that the only course of understanding in Christianity is through discourse, however evenhanded, clear and logical, some residue of this trails along. It is the nature of the beast, intensified by the internecine bickering that was rampant in the early churches. 

It is also the key, not just backstory for the Christian polemic that the life, death and resurrection of Jesus was a singular, history changing event. My own take on this has evolved over the years. It is a life changing event in your history if it changes your life. That depends on you and you alone. I’ll let you call it grace if you include some qualifying statements. Personally I’ve moved from Paul to Kiekegaard but that’s another story.

This argument still doesn’t account for how the cult of Jesus along with the corresponding cults of Mary, and the saints and martyrs came to capture the religious imagination of the West. Listening to the early writers of the gospels, it was proven by the reports of miracles and the resurrection of Jesus. I would venture that this is still the case in the vast majority of Christian religious communities today or at least it’s in the general guidelines for membership. Listening to the church of religious science, in any of its forms, the reason is that it coincides with the nature of the human spirit, and according to most liberal theological thought, it is where our discourse lands us.

But for me this does not come close to answering the question of how among hundreds of itinerant preachers wandering in what we now call the Holy Land, did Jesus come to dominate the Western religious imagination? The believer says it's a statement of faith--that he was the son of god and it had to happen, but that’s a belief. I want to exert my personal prerogative to examine other possibilities.

I mentioned Jonathan Z Smith. The position at Dartmouth was his first as I recall, but even then he was working out the complex interactions of culture, ritual and belief. He scared me. After one seminar, because I was pretty resistant to his thesis, he looked at me and said, “If I lived in a culture that fostered a vibrant cult of Socrates, I’d be a follower.” Another time he said, “Christianity was the mystery cult that won.” Talk about provocative statements. But I remembered them. 

Let’s look at one of those propositions and see where it goes. In zen, as things fall away, beliefs get challenged inside where they reside. Let’s look at the belief in Jesus dying and being resurrected as a kind of myth that may or may not have a lot of import on many levels. It’s hard to be objective, but I have to acknowledge that several key elements of the pagan mystery cult are present. The god dies, initiates share some of the elements of the god in a ritualistic way, and the believer emerges with some aspect of the divinity. The sharing of bread and wine as a memorial of the sacrifice of Jesus in the communal rites of Christians, though probably very unlike what we know today as Mass, was practiced. You even have the separate entity of the primary god who presides over the unfolding of the mythic ritual, accepting the sacrifice of his son.

Information about mystery cults remains mysterious because they were secret. But they were rather widespread so some of the details have become known. I find it interesting that a lot of our information comes from early church fathers denouncing them. They were not blind to the similarities. Membership was also sought after. It was also used as a way of social advancement. Early Christianity among the Gentiles was regarded as a religion of slaves.

I’m not citing any of this to either prove or disprove any of the tenets of Christianity. But if I were looking for a reason why the teaching of Jesus was the one that found a fertile ground in Greco-Roman pagan culture, I would look here. There were hundreds of preachers with probably as many followers as Jesus, and who knows what they had to say about how to conduct your life. But the myth of Jesus’ sacrificial death and resurrection was planted in a culture that had a predisposition carved out by centuries of mystery cult initiations that went all the way back to early Egypt. It might have been the mystery cult that won. 

It took me more than 60 years to even entertain the possibility that Smith suggested. A few more and I’ll rewrite the Nicene Creed.

Your loyal reader

Blue Cliff Record, Case 23: Baofu and Changqing Go on a Picnic

 When Baofu and Changqing went on a picnic in the hills, Baofu pointed to the top of a hill, saying, “That’s the top of Miao Peak.”1

“That’s true, you are right,” said Changqing. “But a pity,” he added.

(Xuedou: What are you doing, going on a picnic with him?

I can’t say there will be no one like these two a hundred years from now, but there will be very few.)

Later Baofu told Jingqing about this. Jingqing said, “If it were not for Master Changqing, skulls would appear in every field.”

1 Miao Peak is the Peak of Wonder, the center of Paradise, according to the Huayan or Avatamsaka Sutra.

It was one of those crazy things you do when you travel with a fairly open agenda. We'd been visiting Angkor Wat for almost a week, and didn’t have to be in Ho Chi Minh City for another two. While in Siem Reap we’d heard about an adventurous boat trip, billed as once in a lifetime: You crossed the southern end of the largest freshwater lake in southeast Asia, Tonle Sap, and then followed a long shallow river upstream to a former French provincial capital, Krong Battambang.

We booked, but so did about 200 other people, mostly European kids. After arguing with the tour organizers--we were not going to sit on the hot metal roof of a flat river boat in the blazing sun for the 8 hour trip, they relented and hired another smaller boat to take the overflow. Once on board we discovered that even in a smaller boat the trip would be arduous, the river was low but flowing swiftly against us. Three added hours under a metal roof were just as hot as sitting on one, but we were spared sunburn. In the smaller boat, we were less than 30. We met and chatted with a lovely young German couple who were on their way to work for several years in New Zealand. The journey was tough going, but company helped.

The next day was Mardi Gras, and we arranged to have dinner with them. Ashish found a highly rated restaurant called La Pomme d'Amour. I know the exact date, February 12th 2013. Sometimes larger events help mark the calendar accurately. The day before when we were cut off from the world on our river boat excursion, Benedict, the oldest person elected to the papacy since the 18th century, announced he would be the first pope in centuries to resign. 

Our new friends told us. They were actually shocked. They still considered themselves Catholic even though they were an unmarried couple, but they were definitely Bavarian. One of their own was doing something unimaginable. I was startled by the news of Benedict’s resignation, but I think that I was more amazed at how our young friends had packed for their trip. The man wore incredibly crafted lederhosen with a pressed white shirt and his very beautiful girlfriend had on an exquisitely embroidered traditional dress. Ashish and I only carried the basics. Our European friends dressed for the occasion.

One thing about the French colonies, they have retained a tradition of cuisine. Even in this small Cambodian town, even after the unspeakable barbarity of the Khmer Rouge, there was still wonderful food. We enjoyed our dinner and the conversation. We agreed to explore together the next day.

We arranged for a larger tuk-tuk, seats for four, and driver for the day. Cambodians are in general smaller than a big American and a big muscled Bavarian boy, but we all managed to squeeze in. We’d heard about a bamboo train in the nearby hills. There was also a small ruin similar to Angkor Wat about 11 km out of town. We met early, before the sun got too hot. Before noon, we'd taken the train and climbed up to the ruin. We asked the driver what else he would recommend. With limited communication he indicated that he knew a place. 

The small Buddhist temple at Phnom Sampeau was about another 7-10 km across the flat plain. It's nice enough but really just a fairly ordinary concrete temple variations of which dot southeast Asia. We thought that was the end of our trip. But once there, some young boys drove up on their two wheelers and offered to take us up the very steep hill to the caves. They were very friendly, and happy for the work. We were told that there was a pagoda and a very simple Buddhist shrine near the summit. We could just make out the pagoda from the valley floor. At a kind of intermediate temple on the side on the narrow path about halfway up a few monks were chanting and performing rituals, but more just seemed to be hanging out with some Cambodian families. The walls inside were decorated with rather naive scenes from the Lord Buddha’s teaching career. They seemed to be done in acrylics right out of the tube. I noticed that you could commission a wall painting for a hundred US dollars and have it dedicated to whomever you wanted to have remembered and continually prayed for. I made a mental note that I might have one done for my dad. Somehow I began to sense that the whole mountain was about remembering ancestors. 

We continued uphill with our young breakneck drivers, eventually arriving at the top of some wooden steps leading down into a large opening of what seemed to be very beautiful limestone caves. We noticed that a very simple Buddhist shrine and altar had been set up on a level just below us. We had arrived at the killing caves, a Khmer Rouge execution site where they shot, strangled or slit the necks of their victims at the rim of this daylight shaft or ceiling hole, and then threw the dead bodies into the cave. Sometimes we were told, towards the end of their atrocities, in order to save bullets they simply threw people, teachers, doctors, almost anyone with an education, into the caves. They’d even killed children. If their victims were lucky, they died when they hit the floor. Otherwise they died of starvation or were killed when other bodies landed on them. There was a glass box containing skulls and some bone fragments. I can’t remember if anyone mentioned an estimate of how many people were killed there, but between 17 April 1975 – 7 January 1979 nearly two million were executed in a small country, so the number of people killed here was perhaps tens of thousands if not more. 

We were shaken.

We climbed back up the steps and continued towards the summit on foot. We separated. Ashish and our friends headed towards the viewpoint. It seemed like just a few steps from the opening of the cave I saw an elevated path towards the pagoda and small shrine. Inside a monk was sitting on the floor. When he saw me approach the door, he gestured for me to come and sit with him. 

He was perhaps in his late 30’s, early 40’s, Cambodian. I calculated that he would have either been born during the period of the Khmer’s slaughter or just after it ended, after millions were killed. He didn’t say. He was alone. He was too young to be the abbot of the community, but he wasn’t the duty monk. A rather forlorn layman by the shrine in the killing cave collected donations. The monk spoke meticulous, fluent English. There’d been many Americans in Cambodia after the war, helping rebuild the country. Perhaps he'd been part of that effort.

He asked where I was from, and how I got there? He didn’t see many foreign tourists. I asked him where he’d learned such good English. He told me that he’d been to Catholic school. He’d been Catholic. I think I remember him saying that he’d even been a Catholic religious. Yes, of course he knew some Jesuits. They were mostly in Phnom Penh. 

I asked him what he did. He said that he mostly just sat and practiced in the small shrine room. Sometimes people came by. Sometimes they asked him to chant memorial prayers for their relatives who’d died in the caves, but not often. Senior monks did that. There would have been a donation involved. Some people just had to talk; he was there to listen; sometimes people just sat with him. I felt a real connection with my fellow former-Catholic Buddhist.

After about a half hour, Ashish called out that it was time to get back down hill. It was getting dark. The motorcycle boys were anxious about the narrow path. There was a long tuk-tuk drive back to Battambang. I bowed and left.

Grâce à Google I was able to find some pictures of Phnom Sampeau. It’s almost exactly as I remember it with perhaps a few additions over a decade. Grâce à the koan, I am able to picnic with Baofu and Changqing on a peak of wonder. Grâce à my friend, we were able to help some of the skulls in the Killing Caves lose their power over people’s lives, my own included. 

La Pomme d'Amour still gets good reviews for lovely food. I stayed in touch with the young German couple for a while on Facebook. When I lost track of them, they were no longer a couple, but apparently both happy. I hope they are still thriving. I have no idea what became of my wonderful solitary monk. I trust that he’s still making skulls, in one form or another, disappear from every field. The koan says there's some chance.

Even if you haven’t been to the Killing Cave, the pictures I retrieved from Google tell the story well.

I don’t recall the large statue of the Buddha’s parinirvana. My feeling is that it covers the actual lip that they used to throw the bodies into the cave.







© Bo Løvschall


The path to the pagoda and shrine, exactly as I remember it.

My skull clearing monk was sitting in the shrine room at the top of these steps, behind this door.

The intermediate temple, with the naive paintings.



Wat Phnom Sampeau on the valley floor,




Phnom Sampeau from across the fields. It is a high mountain for southern Cambodia.






This would have been the first stop of the day.