The Vietnamese practice the version of Buddhism often called Mahayana; literally “The Great Vehicle” (from the Sanskrit). That is, they worshiped – in addition to their Vietnamese ancestors – not just the Buddha as a God but many buddhas or bodhisattvas as deities, and did not simply or strictly follow the Buddha’s ways and words. Mahayana is Buddhism for the masses, and it imagines a vast spiritual world in touch with this one.
One in the pantheon of deities was the Amida Buddha, a queen of heaven and princess of peace. The most popular was the Fat Buddha who could be petitioned for wealth.
This religion did not speak to me, but when I was a young man living and working as a teacher and tutor, translator and editor in Vietnam, I had a dream of becoming a monk and retiring to a temple, or a pagoda, to live in quietude and peace and semi-seclusion and brotherhood. There were temples everywhere, in Saigon and the suburbs of greater Ho Chi Minh City and the rice-patty hamlets of the Mekong Delta and the infamous
Parrot’s Beak adjacent to Cambodia.
Living in the crowded, dirty and noisy Districts 10 and Tan Binh and Binh Thanh, my mind escaped the suffering sickness and often went to gardening and reading and good works.
I thought that in a temple I could live alone with the monks and advise the community and learn to cook rice, and grow roses and star fruit and bananas and coconut, and raise pigs and carp under the monkey-bridge privy and chickens in the yard and cats everywhere. And always read Krishnamurti and Thich Nhat Hanh and think clearly, and write like a transcendentalist. To stay so far from the old pain and suffering and aloneness of the suburbs of Saint Paul in which I grew up that I would forget them finally.
That dream never came true.
After many years working in Vietnam as I have described and then as a cog in the wheels of multi-nationals in Ho Chi Minh City, for which you carried a badge which allowed you to electronically enter the building or office, and the cubicles where your support was IT and your boss was human resources; having good meals in the Western restaurants of District 1 and a lifetime’s worth of alcohol and women, I came back to the woods of Minnesota to become a part-time amateur trapper.
It always seems to rain on me on the first day of fox trapping season. That is the universe trying to tell me something.
I step off into the late fall woods with my woven pack basket on. It is heavy with steel traps and 18-inch re-bar stakes. And jars of bait and lure and tools. There is a clanking in the basket of stakes and traps with each step. In the morning it is overcast and cold and dry, so the dead leaves make a loud noise as I pass through the sugar maple bush, the brakes of hazelnuts, stands of fir, occasional paper birch, and basins of alders.
This is the great and vast National Forest. Very secret spots of my own. Grateful public lands. But I am not here doing good works. I dig a hole for a trap and a hole for the bait and pound the re-bar stake – a steel-on-steel sound that I can feel echoing through the woods.
It is spiritual for me, but there is not spirituality to it. There is no quiet. There is aloneness and seclusion and I am a man alone in the woods. With my skill and some luck, tomorrow I might have a fox. And, luckily, no one will see me dispatch it, with a .22 cartridge or blunt weapon, then carry it out of the woods on my shoulders.
I cannot explain or justify or defend, that this is my temple, and has always been.
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