1 January 2023

Another walk into the teeth of the wind towards and around the pagoda helped blow away the doubts and frustrations from yesterday’s final session and began this, my last full day.  It set me up for a relatively successful and immobile hour of meditation.  Even the morality tale of the discourse, plus of course a couple more lists for good measure, did not take the shine off the morning.  And then, after listening to a recorded speech by the centre’s founder in lieu of a meditation session, we were allowed to talk.

Lunch felt strange; what was really a normal level of background noise seemed unusual as people chatted, swapped experiences and got to know each other.  Afterwards we were given the opportunity to see inside the golden pagoda.  Eight small meditation rooms were arranged around a small central room for the teacher, all gold leaf and brightly lit, with one room holding an effigy of the Buddha surrounded with plenty of flowers as ‘offerings’ to brighten things further.  Rooms in pagodas are apparently a rarity; they are normally solid monuments but the female founder of this centre was determined to have something different.

The relaxed state of the day continued into the afternoon with a 1950s documentary from America that followed a woman traveling through Burma during which she spent some time at the ‘parent’ centre of the site here in Heddington. Black and white and dated in its style, presentation and attitudes (I think the staff had edited it to try and address some of the latter issue) it was nevertheless informative and interesting to see the world through eyes from some eight decades earlier. Another documentary on a group visiting Buddhist pilgrimage sites and a third on the history of the Buddha rounded off the morning.