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Venerable
Ajahn Viradhammo -
Dhamma Refugee
Shortly after his 50th birthday last year, Ajahn Viradhammo set out with
Nick Scott on a pilgrimage through the Baltic States. This is hardly the
Buddhist heartland, but of heartful significance to the Ajahn: his
parents fled Latvia when Stalin took over. He was born in Germany, but
left there when he was seven to grow up in Canada. Last year then was
the first time that he had seen his ethnic homeland.
Q. What are some of the words you would use to describe this trip?
A. Interesting, exciting, and sorrowful. It was a mixture. I had a deep
interest in my people’s country, which I’d so much heard about in my
childhood, and in speaking my mother’s tongue and finding out people’s
personal histories. Then there was the sadness of seeing the
mistreatment of people and the attempted destruction of a culture over
the past fifty years.
What was surprising was how well it went and how everything came
together so perfectly -- whether it was through bus rides, or people
helping us out, or finding places to sleep in the forests, or in a whole
variety of things. So that sense of being taken care of by forces of
goodness was very magical. However, in terms of what I saw politically,
socially and economically there were no real surprises; I had expected
something like it from my readings and from what I’d talked about with
my mother and other Latvians. Seeing it in real life, however, is much
different.
It was also interesting when we weren’t with people. Some of the bird
watching we did was fabulous: eagles and cranes and black storks and
white storks and all kinds of water birds. But the overall feeling was
that I was very grateful that my parents had escaped from Latvia!
Q. Was it a kind of tudong (pilgrimage)?
A. Well I didn’t go with that intention. I just was going more as a
person whose heritage was Latvian. I didn’t go pindapata or seek alms.
Nick was there, he had money and took care of us, but it ended up that
people were very interested in what I was doing. Seeing something so
exotic as a Buddhist monk in the backwoods of Latvia was very
fascinating for them. So it did end up being like a tudong in the sense
that we made lots of contacts and people seemed to be very grateful for
us being there. There was the magic of tudong, of spontaneous happenings
through just being open and trusting and having faith.
Q. How do you think you can bring back a little bit of that magic to
our monastery?
A. Well I think one of the big lessons of tudong, for me, always is, and
this time especially was, trust and faith. Life in a monastery is more
regulated by meetings, there isn’t the spontaneity of just taking off
and walking which is a very free, liberating feeling. Because of the
complexities of monastic life and because we live on alms, there can
easily be a tendency to worry. The magic is in just doing your best and
trusting that things will somehow work out OK; that the forces of
goodness will provide. That quality of faith is something that brings a
lot of joy and sparkle to the monastic life.
Q. Did you have any Buddhist contacts before you went?
A. Strangely enough most of our contacts were outside of Latvia. We had
a good contact in Poland; a good contact in Vilnius, Lithuania; a kind
of vague contact in Estonia and a good contact in St Petersburg: but our
Latvian contacts were a bit vague. In some of the places we walked
through we had no contacts, and we just went without knowing anyone. In
many ways that was the most interesting because then one has to live in
complete faith. The contacts that we did have were the ones which
created the most populous situations for sharing Buddhist teachings with
groups. We were invited to teach in Riga (Latvia); in Poland we did some
teaching, just to small groups who were interested, we did a one-day
meditation in Bialystok in N.E. Poland; and then in Riga I came together
with a group several times. There was a sort of vague invitation, a
possibility of doing a retreat next year in Latvia. Then in Estonia we
had a name from a Buddhist Directory which we made contact with, and
that turned out to be a Kagyu group. We met them every evening and had
Dhamma discussion on several nights. St. Petersburg was the most
organised venue: people had rented a school room and about thirty people
were there every night. One night we had a meeting in the Buriyat
Temple, which is the Buddhist Temple in St. Petersburg.
Q. What differences do you see between what you teach in those places
and the things that would come up, say, in Canada or here in England or
New Zealand?
A. I taught so briefly to people there that it’s hard to say, but I
should think the sense of freshness, of people not having had much
contact with Dhamma and being very fresh and grateful. That was very,
very strong. I think what was different in their lives was the physical
and social difficulties they’re facing in order to just pay the rent and
have a place to sleep. So to hear someone talking Dhamma when most of
the time the discussion is about how to survive -- I think just that was
very refreshing.
Q. So you found they were open to you.
A. Yes, very open: even the ordinary farming people that we ended up
talking to. There was one incident when Nick and I were backpacking,
walking along a river bank and we ended up spending the night in a
deserted barn. In the evening I sought out the local farmer to get some
drinking water, and it turned out that he was a policeman. He gave us
the water and then came by later with a whole basket full of cottage
cheese and milk and rhubarb and all kinds of lovely things. He had
studied philosophy at the University of Leningrad for five years and
then taught Marxist philosophy in University of Riga for twenty years;
then with the collapse of the Soviet empire and Marxist philosophy being
no longer in favour, he had no job and so he ended up having to do
subsistence farming with his wife and her brother. His salary as a
policeman is barely enough to pay for petrol so they have to do
subsistence farming. So he is a policeman and farmer -- and he loves it.
We sat for many hours and talked.
Q. But do you think that the people in these countries need to hear
something different then say people in England and New Zealand?
A. Yes, I think so, I think somehow one has to address the predicament
of their conditioning which has been for the last fifty years through
the Soviet system. So basically I had to get to know that first through
their questions. I can speculate that part of their conditioning has
been of a very suppressed mentality which has no chance of
self-expression, so there’s the fear of self expression and of
initiative. But also there’s been the security of a system which gives
you enough to survive on. So that’s created an apathetic kind of
mentality based both on fear and on being minimally taken care of. This
is something that people talked about and would have to be addressed.
Sadness was prevalent and pervasive, one sensed what had happened there.
It wasn’t the sadness that you might have if you walked into the killing
fields of Cambodia. There wasn’t that kind of horror around. It was more
the sadness of a culture which had been dominated by something very
grey, very humourless and totally lacking in love. Also there had been
economic mismanagement. So there was a pervading sense of how
unnecessary and stupid it had all been, and the sadness of what people
had to endure. But because there wasn’t a lot of killing it didn’t get
depressing in that way.
I'd be speaking to someone in Latvian and I'd hear their story. Say, as
of one man who had been sent to Siberia twice and now he's 75 and
retired, he started to cry and we talked for two hours. Just reflecting
on the sadness brought a lot of compassion and warmth and feeling for
those people. And all the time it was interesting because there was an
unveiling of history happening.
Q. Can you explain just some of the practicalities; how you slept,
what you carried, how you ate?
A. We had minimal sized packs, Nick had a bigger pack than me, so he
tended to carry more than me. We had middle-weight sleeping bags, bivvy
bags -- which are kind of waterproof sack that you sleep in, some rain
gear and a minimal amount of clothing. I used sandals.
Sometimes we’d stay in Bed and Breakfasts, sometimes we’d stay with
people who had arranged things. Some people in Riga gave us a flat,
people in Tallinn in Estonia gave us a flat, art students in Vilnius
gave us a studio, and someone let us use their flat in St. Petersburg.
So in the cities we tended to live in people’s flats, but then out in
the wilds we just lived in our bivvy bags, which was very difficult with
the mosquitoes which were horrendous from Latvia onwards.
Our journey started in Poland in mid-May and we were there almost a week
in two big national parks. From there we went to South-East Lithuania
where there is a big national park; then on to another large wetland
area in Lithuania. In Lithuania we travelled to the capital, Vilnius,
then from Vilnius we went to Riga. In Riga we took a bus over to the
coast and then we walked along the coast for three weeks, which was the
major walking portion. Then we went back to Riga again and did a canoe
trip east of Riga in the Gauja National Park which has a beautiful
river. Then we went very briefly up to Tallinn in Estonia, and finished
off with five days in St. Petersburg.
Q. Were you recognised as a religious person?
A. Oh definitely -- but in the cities we were often thought to be Hare
Krishna. Especially in Riga, because Riga has a big Hare Krishna
restaurant and a very compassionate soup kitchen. In the country the
people didn’t know really what we were but they knew I was some kind of
religious person.
I stuck to the Vinaya even though people would always want to feed us.
For instance, there’s a festival in Latvia on the longest day of the
year in June, and it’s big, bigger than Christmas, which they celebrate
and they do a lot of eating and drinking all night, and we were with a
family who were having a barbecue. They really wanted me to eat, you
know, "have something to eat" and so on, so I said to Nick "You eat for
me." So Nick nibbled on a few things. But I tried to show them how a
bhikkhu lives; but not in an oppressive way.
Q. Did they understand after a while?
A. The people that we stayed with for longer periods of time respected
it. Obviously people who we met for just an hour or two didn’t really
pick up on what the rules and the Vinaya structure were about. I think
they just appreciated seeing a different kind of person. A lot of people
seemed honoured that we would be there, because a lot of the places that
we went to are just so off the map, so forgotten and the people feel
like they’ve been cast aside. We were often treated like honoured
guests.
Q. How do you see that trip now?
A. One of the most powerful memories for me is of a time when Nick and I
were walking in Old Riga. In Old Riga you’ll find pensioners begging;
people who have been trapped between two political eras and who just
can’t make it. They are very poor and try to survive by selling little
bits and pieces. One of these women came up to me thinking that I was a
Hare Krishna person and she tried to sell Nick and I some postcards. I
had to get to another place so we couldn’t do anything right then but
she seemed so embarrassed and so humiliated by having to ask to sell
those little postcards. She looked quite intelligent, she probably had a
PhD or something, and she looked about 60 years old. It just kind of
broke my heart. So we went back about a quarter of an hour later and
found her sitting on a bench looking at her postcards and we bought them
at twice the price, and she was over the moon, she was so happy. It
wasn’t the kind of poverty you might see in Calcutta but there was
something about those people who had lost their culture and who had no
real stability and no possibility of income... it really broke my heart.
And this is still with me.
Visually what stands out is the beauty of the huge pine forests which
are mostly untouched. Because they haven’t had much economic development
they’ve remained quite pristine. So there are the beautiful nature
images and then the images of people who are struggling to survive and
being very generous with whatever they have. In the midst of that human
difficulty and tragedy there is this goodness shining through, people
not just dwelling in bitterness or in anger at the Soviet system but
struggling with what they can do.
Q. Thinking personally, you were in your fiftieth year, and you went
back into your roots, did you touch something deeper?
A. Yes, I think what it really touched was the feeling that my parents’
lives were tragic, but that I’ve found my roots in Dhamma. What I could
see was the conditionality of my personality. I could see what some of
that was; I felt really at home being able to hear Latvian which had
been a foreign language in Canada. And even though I can speak English
much, much better than I can speak Latvian, just being in a Latvian
culture and hearing Latvian made me feel very much at home. So there was
that feeling. But I could see that all that’s the conditioned mind; that
some of my personality has been conditioned through that language and
that culture. And obviously I was very grateful that my roots are in
Dhamma; like Luang Por Chah would say: "Our real home."
Forest Sangha Newsletter: April 1998, Number 44
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