Социолог и буддийский монах из Англии сравнивают опыт старения, смерти и отношений с отцами

What happens when two Englishmen who chose completely different lives meet to compare notes on sex, ageing, difficult fathers and death? Sociologist Dr Stephen Whitehead sits down with Buddhist monk Ajahn Jayasaro to find out There’s a particular kind of Englishman who leaves and doesn’t come back. There are two of them in this story, and both went looking for something England couldn’t give them. Ajahn Jayasaro  was born Shaun Chiverton on the Isle of Wight in 1958. Asthma kept him out of school for long stretches;  he filled the empty days with reading and found Buddhism on the page before he ever met a Buddhist. As a teenager he went to India, travelled for two years, hitchhiked home and still couldn’t settle. Then someone told him about an Englishman who’d gone to Thailand and become a forest monk. And that was that. By 1980, he’d taken full ordination in a monastery in north-east Thailand. Since then, he’s spent 46 years in ochre robes, living under a celibate monastic discipline that restricts physical contact with women and solid food after noon. In July, King Vajiralongkorn elevated him to Somdet Phra Ratchakhana, the second-highest rank in Thailand’s monastic hierarchy and the highest ever reached by a foreign-born monk. Most people know him as Ajahn Jayasaro. His mother knew him as Shaun. I’m the other kind of Englishman. I ran pubs and restaurants in Leeds through the 1970s and ’80s before I went into academia. I married several times and have five children. I came to Thailand almost by accident in 2001, joining my eldest son on one of his Asian business trips. At the last minute, he informed me we had to add Bangkok to the itinerary. After we arrived in Thailand, I never really left. Buddhism entered my life almost immediately,  though I admit that in the beginning it was the nightlife as much as the mindfulness that caught my attention. In April 2004, I ordained too, in a temple just outside Chiang Mai. Head shaved, eyebrows shaved, the same ochre robes, the same alms round at dawn, the same single meal before noon. I lasted two weeks. I don’t offer that as a joke at my own expense. I loved it — I’ve rarely been so completely present anywhere as I was in those 14 days, and I’ve never since been so uncluttered. But I also knew, with a clarity that has never left me, that I couldn’t do it for 40 years. Ajahn Jayasaro could, and he has. That’s the whole difference between us, and it’s not a difference of belief. What I took away instead was the practice. Now, 22 years later, I’m still meditating most days – which means that for all the distance between a fortnight and a lifetime, we’ve been doing the same thing every morning for over two decades. Last month, we finally sat down in the same room. We met at a private, understated residence in central Bangkok. From the street, it announces nothing – a wall, a gate, and then a garden that swallows the traffic whole. Just 10 metres in, one of the loudest cities on earth simply stops. There is no handshake. On arriving, and again on leaving, I go down on the floor and bow three times before him, as convention require s, my wife kneeling on the floor behind me, also as convention requires. Then he settles barefoot with a white mug at his elbow, and for an hour two old men talk about the things that actually matter. Our Fathers Were The Same Man Ajahn Jayasaro told me about leaving home. His father drove him to the station, and on the platform, at the beginning of a journey that would take his son to the other side of the world, said nothing meaningful at all. Then, finally, “Don’t forget to write to your mother.” I laughed before he finished the sentence. Any Englishman of our vintage will. We were raised by men who couldn’t say the thing they meant to say, and who said something adjacent to it instead, expecting you to understand. We both did — that’s the sad part. Years later, he says, people asked his family whether they’d seen it coming. “You always knew he was going to do something weird. We just didn’t quite know what kind of weird it would be.” On Love, and Doing Without It I’ve been voluntarily celibate for some years now, and I told Ajahn Jayasaro so. It came late for me, after a long and crowded life, and I find it an unexpected gift – as does my wife. The sex monkey is off our backs. My head is clearer than it’s been in decades and our marriage has never been in better shape. But it took me most of my life to arrive somewhere he walked into at 22. I asked him whether it had been hard. “I would say that Freud and his followers made too much out of sex,” he said, and then, cheerfully: “I blame Freud.” He’s serious underneath it. After 46 years of monastic life and hundreds of men observed, he’s convinced that desire is far less uniform than we pretend. Some monks are untroubled in their twenties and then find celibacy difficult at 40. Others begin with enormous appetite that simply ebbs. “It is not something that is entirely physical.” What struck me was the absence of struggle, and his refusal to take credit for it. Both Of Us Wake At 2am We compared bodies, as men our age do. He is stiffer than he was. Small ailments take longer to clear. He’s fallen asleep instantly his whole life — “just turn off the switch” — and now wakes repeatedly in the night. I asked what he does about it. “Meditate. Then go back to sleep.” I told him I had only just started doing exactly that, at 2am, and that it mostly works. Two Englishmen, one a monk and one not, awake in the dark in different provinces of the same country, doing the same thing. What He Told His Mother This is the part I’ve not been able to put down. When Ajahn Jayasaro’s father died, his mother was left alone in England and became depressed. He was in Thailand. He began phoning her every morning at 7am UK-time so that she would wake to a voice. She said what so many older people say, and what so many daughters and sons will recognise instantly: “I’m just a burden on the family. I’m not doing anything.” He gave her an instruction: “Can you do one good thing every day? Just one thing that you can feel proud of. It doesn’t have to be a big thing. The carer comes round and you just say a kind word to the carer.” That is all. One good thing, daily, small enough to be possible on the worst day. He’s describing something he uses with the dying, too – asking them to remember whatever they are proudest of and to rest their mind there because, as he puts it, “nobody can take that away from you.” You do not have to believe a word of Buddhism for that to work on a Tuesday afternoon in Leeds, London or Luton. The Word That Stopped Me We talked about who looks after ageing parents. Ajahn Jayasaro had watched it done on both sides of the planet. “I know that a lot of people do that in the West. But there’s always a sense of martyrdom. For people here, it’s more like a privilege to be able to look after your parents.” Martyrdom or privilege. The same work, the same exhaustion, the same lost years — and only the meaning is different. I don’t think that means Western carers should feel guilty about resenting it. Rather, I think it means we have built a culture that makes the resentment almost compulsory, and then blames the women who feel it. Day by Day At the end I asked him to think ahead – what he makes of his own ageing, now, at 68, having just been raised to the second-highest rank in Thai Buddhism. I was braced for something profound about impermanence. “Unlike laypeople, a senior monk — what I am now — you get more work as you get older, not less. And I’m thinking I have to exercise a bit more, because I’ve got a lot on.” And then, almost apologetically: “It sounds a cliché. Just take it day by day.” He invited me to a retreat he leads in March, in English, near the mountains where he lives. I said I’d probably be the oldest one there, and that I’d need a chair, because I can no longer sit on the floor and I get up in the night. He said the last retreat had people in their eighties, that chairs are not a problem, and that the ages run from 20 to 90. Then, he added: “You’ll enjoy it. Make some new friends.” Two Englishmen left home a long time ago and went looking for something. Neither of us found what we set out for. Both of us, I think, found something better, and it took the whole of our lives, and we’re still not finished. Dr Stephen Whitehead  is a gender sociologist and author recognised for his work on gender, leadership and organisational culture. Formerly at Keele University, he has lived in Asia since 2009 and has written 20 books translated into 17 languages. He is based in Thailand and is co-founder of Cerafyna Technologies. His forthcoming book, co-authored with Constanza Fernández Arce, is Where Have All the Good Men Gone? Tagged in Lifestyle