Pa Auk Tawya’s Arhat

The rainy season in Myanmar was impressive. The first drops gave every bedbug throughout the monastery a new lease on life, but luckily also the flowering plants and creatures great and small. Within a week the trickle transformed into a curtain of water, its rushing sound enclosing the silence of my hut. There were days that I could barely see more than a few meters beyond my window. The mold exploded on my walls as it did on my feet. The season was for that reason popularly called the ‘toe rotting season’. The humidity turned everything into a challenge, especially as nothing would dry anymore. Luckily the season was indiscriminate in making all of us monks smell equally bad. As my hut was located on a slope, it turned into a river island, rendering my flipflops useless.

Going on pindapata, or alms-round, thus became a slow journey of feeling my way down with my toes, with a begging bowl in one hand and an umbrella in the other. Every day though, I would patiently wait for a specific voice to emerge from the forest above me. First softly but then slowly growing in clarity, it would announce the descent of what was renowned to be the Arhat (saint) living above me. On the top of the mountain, he resided in what was little more than a covering made from old robes stretched over a few branches. Despite his barren circumstances he always looked immaculately dressed, almost floating down with elegance and calm, while chanting prayers and Pali suttas with his melodious voice, drawing from each hut that he passed the mesmerized monks, like he was the Pied Piper of Hamelin. He was the general that we all followed into battle, the bee that we followed to the honey, the muse with whom we had all fallen in love.