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| My travels took me to India, when I got
there the monsoon had just started. I stayed in Darmsala, a Tibetan refugee
town to study Tibetan Buddhism. In the middle of the summer, a Burmese teacher
came to teach meditation. The meditation took place in a resort town up in the
mountains overlooking a river, it was quite charming in spite of the real
difficulty of sitting cross legged, 10 hours a day. However, it was not
difficult for one Japanese man who sat oblivious of anyone.
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The bus ride back was fun and relaxing, and when the driver stopped half way to
help us stretch our legs, I summoned the courage to talk to this man, asking
him where he was heading to, he responded that he had already done a few
courses and had now been invited to the next one. He mentioned that he was a
student but was not too eager to share too much about his private life. He
laughed when I asked him if he was Japanese, and we parted as soon as the bus
took off.
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Our next encounter was after lunch one day. We crossed paths and I greeted him
knowingly, asking him if he had a chance to eat. He shook his head no, and I
immediately handed him the apple that I was holding. That is the story of how
we met. I asked him for his address at the end of the course, hoping to visit
the town he lived in. Another ten-day course took me there, it was the town
known as Varanasi and I did look him up. He had already lived there for 4 years
studying Sanskrit at the local university. His apartment was a tiny room on a
terrace of a house where you could see the sunset over the Ganges River and
have crows and monkeys as visitors. It was truly a magical place.
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— Written by Celine Asano
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