I have been watching 18 Buddhist monks walk across the US for 108 days. They have walked (some barefoot) through sleet, snow, and, by my antipodean standards, insane cold for more than 3,200km from Texas to Washington, arriving on Tuesday in Trumpistan with temple bells and funny little monk trumpets, like a time-travelling procession of quixotic supplicants.
They want peace and love, and Gautama Buddha’s birthday declared a national holiday in the US, and they walked 30km per day to make their point.
It has not been a pilgrimage without incident. Some mindless driver crashed into their support vehicle, and one of the monks suffered an amputation as a result. They also had a rescue dog from India with them who walked some of the way and developed his own substantial social media following, but found the endless kilometres a strain and took time off to visit the vet and the support vehicle.
They want peace and love, and Gautama Buddha’s birthday declared a national holiday in the US, and they walked 30km per day to make their point.
The monks are from the Theravada tradition — the oldest Buddhist school — and wore their traditional orange robes and beatific smiles the entire way. The number of days they walked, 108, has deep spiritual significance in many cultures (even the Christian ones). Look it up. I personally delight in the fact that 108 is approximately the ratio of the distance between the Earth and the Sun, and the Sun’s diameter. A similar ratio exists for the Moon, and because the ratio of distance to diameter is so similar for both, they appear nearly the same size in the sky. This is what makes total solar eclipses possible. It is a number that tells you people were paying attention back in the day.
Along the endless road through American towns, the monks were greeted by a respectable number of people who lined the streets with gifts of flowers, fruit and ChapStick, most of which the monks simply passed along further down the receiving line in a sweet game of pass-the-bloom.
Every now and then they would pause and chant blessings over someone sitting in a wheelchair and tie a piece of charmed string around their wrist. Sign-bearers welcomed them and their message of love, peace and a very visual reminder that in the Buddhist tradition the overwhelming human condition is suffering.
The feet on some of those monks looked positively ragged.
Some had committed to not lying down at any point on the journey, so they sat in meditation all night after their daily trek through the American hinterland. People broke into spontaneous tears as they saw them approach. Some travelled for days just to catch a glimpse.
We live in a wonderfully crazy world where a pilgrimage like this can exist alongside so many other spectacles unfolding at once: the Beckham family crisis, the Windsor family crisis, Helen Zille’s visit to the Alexandra Women’s Hostel, Bad Bunny at the Super Bowl making a case for love and Puerto Rican independence, and a woman called Ms Rachel who has millions of followers on YouTube, all toddlers, while also offering commentary on international news.
People broke into spontaneous tears as they saw them approach.
The multiverse is real, my friends. A small hop in time and space, a rejigging of your algorithm, and boom — you find yourself in a parallel universe. You may never see the monks at all, or they may be the only thing that recurs in your feed. I almost missed them myself, and I really like this sort of thing.
It’s that fragmented. My world is as distant from yours as 108 suns and 108 moons are distant from the Earth. One hundred and eight swipes away and what we experience as objective reality is undone.
For a brief moment we received information via a few television channels and print media that purported to present a cross-referenced global worldview where we could agree on what was happening in our shared world. Now even those few things we felt sure about — namely that the last century was a bloodbath of extreme proportions and that curbing our enthusiasm for exterminating one another might be a good starting point — are up for grabs. Do we still aspire to peace and love?
I know I am meant to clutch my pearls at the death of institutions like The Washington Post. Once a bastion of so-called objective reality, it was practically eliminated in one fell newsroom cleanout. The increasingly buff billionaire who bought it as a bauble to go with his superyacht — Jeff Bezos — pulled the plug. But I can’t fathom how the death throes of yet another newspaper will change the current state of the multiverse.
Make your meaning where you may. Nothing is as it seems, but everything is as you experience it in your own tiny corner of feeling, sensation and sensationalism. I seek mine in the random qualities of Harshad numbers — joy-giving numbers in Sanskrit. A Harshad number is an integer divisible by the sum of its digits. Like 108.
Sunday Times
