From Nudism to Buddhism
Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh addresses the community at Plum Village in France, 1997.
**NOTE: This is a slightly expanded version of a story I wrote in 1998. It first appeared on Salon.com in September of that year.**
When I broke up with my boyfriend last summer, I did what I always do under such circumstances: fled the country. Not everyone considers this the healthiest way to deal with personal crises, but I figure it's my life, and if I want to run from it, I can. Fortunately, I’d recently gotten some moderately lucrative on-camera acting work, so I had enough cash to take off.
l to r: my stepmom Betty, my dad (aka Vati), me, our dear friends Anja and Jan outside the train station in Agde, the nearest town to the clothing optional community of Cap d’Agde.
Since both morale and funds were low (the on-camera work notwithstanding), I decided to begin my trip where people knew and loved me and would be likely to buy me meals. My father and his wife spend every summer at a nudist colony in the South of France and had begged me to visit for years. Though the thought of being naked with my father made me slightly uneasy, I decided now was the time. Perhaps the stripping away of clothing would help me to cope with the unadorned truth of my break-up.
I'd intentionally left the next few months free of commitments, since the now ex-boyfriend and I had been planning a trip to Mexico, so I bought an open-ended ticket to Paris. I figured I'd stay at the nudist colony for a while to recuperate in the bosom of my family, and then travel in France and Spain till my money ran out.
Cap d'Agde is an enormous resort community divided into two sections: the "naturist" section and the "textile" section. In the summer the naturist section swells to a whopping 40,000 people. It's an international clothing-optional city, with its own produce shops, bakeries, restaurants and nightclubs, where people in every possible state of dress and undress roam freely. Waiting to pay for your grocery purchase, you might easily find yourself standing behind a French woman with a full shopping cart, naked except for her high-heeled sandals and pale blue nail polish, while behind you a portly German man wearing only a tight-fitting American T-shirt and broad straw sun hat waits impatiently to buy a bottle of ketchup. Only on the white sand beach do you find signs reading Nudité Obligatoire -- ostensibly to discourage voyeurism. In the evenings, however, when it cools off, people dress for dinner -- this is still France, after all!
l to r: Vati, Betty, Jan, and Anja outside my dad and Betty’s Cap d’Agde rental
My Dad, whom I call Vati (pronounced Fah-tee, German for Daddy), is 78 years old, a Vienna-born Jew who fled Austria with his parents shortly after the Nazi occupation. Five-foot-five and deeply suntanned, with flying, Einstein-like white hair, he beams with an exuberant, infectious joie de vivre. Betty, at 65, is a wonderful example of a sexy and confident older woman, at peace in her body, with or without its elegant draping of clothes. A diagonal scar between her breasts marks the place where she had heart surgery last year. They are into the philosophy of naturism, how it breaks down notions of the body beautiful. They see nudity as a kind of equalizer, like school uniforms for kids.
Vati and Betty love the freedom of the wind and sun on their bodies. I appreciate that on the beach, but walking around town I feel self-conscious, perhaps because I am a young woman and used to being looked at and appraised. The discomfort is particularly acute when my father proudly introduces me to the fully clothed young men working in the shops ("This is my daughter"). Somehow it's hard to discuss Asian travels with the handsome French butcher's assistant, he in his blood-stained apron, me in my birthday suit.
I notice, as well, that the women here are smooth as mannequins. Gone are the days when European women were symbols of vital, hairy femininity. Even their pubes are shaved into neat little triangles. I'm a shock of wild dark grass in a world of pruned hedges. I take to wearing an extra-large T-shirt that reaches to my knees, providing Vati and Betty with much hilarity about the prudishness of the younger generation.
In the end, the whole effect is profoundly desexualizing, and the presence of so much flesh begins to repulse me. Even before I am propositioned by a pasty Pillsbury Doughboy of an Englishman who tells me his wife won't mind as long as she can watch, I decide it's time to move on. Besides, I'm not crying enough. I decide this means that I'm not actually dealing with the loss of my relationship, and I need to spend time alone and "work through things."
I set off for Spain. On the train I run into a group of six young Americans. They're all about 18 years old, wearing loose cotton clothes and dangly earrings. Back in San Francisco I have friends in comparable positions, but here I feel like an impostor: a 30-year-old who looks like a 20-year-old; someone out of college almost 10 years who can afford to take two months off and travel but not to stay in hotels. The young travelers assume I'm their age, and I play along, talking about my major, where I go to school.
Over the next month I travel madly through Spain, keeping off the beaten track, staying with Servas hosts in suburbs and villages. (Servas is an international friendship organization that hooks up hosts and travelers who have a mutual interest in peace and social justice.) I do, however, spend a night each in the more touristed spots of Granada and Cordoba, where I meet a very young Portuguese painter and make out with him on the floor of the Alhambra's elaborately carved chambers and amid the columns of the famous Cordoban mosque. Parting from him, I decide I'm definitely not dealing with my break-up in a healthy way, and I need solitude.
Sometime during the bus journey out of Cordoba, I casually tell the woman sitting beside me that I'm I’d like to spend time in a remote village.
"Get out right here! Right here!" she exclaims, and hails the driver to stop.
"Here?" I look doubtfully at the olive trees and looming gray rocks. We're on a winding road through the mountains in Andalucia, about an hour from Ronda.
"Walk two kilometers down that road and you will come to Benalauria, where my grandmother comes from. Ask at the Meson la Molienda. They have rooms. Tell the proprietor I sent you!" she calls as the bus pulls away. Only then do I realize I never asked her name.
Sweating in the beating sun, coughing in the dust my feet stir up on the dirt road, I think, "Whose bright idea was this?" But when I see the tiny whitewashed houses nestled against the wooded hillside, my spirits lift.
The proprietor of Meson la Molienda looks surprised to see me, but giggles shyly and shows me to a tiny room, with rough plaster walls painted a dusky rose and a handmade quilt on the bed. A small window shows wooded mountains and the red tile roof and whitewashed walls of the next house. The price, about $30 a night, is a splurge for my budget, but at this point there's no turning back.
I venture forth into Benalauria, population 350, and doors close as I approach. Eyes peer from behind shutters. Children scurry around corners.
Panicked, I hurry back to my room. This is what you wanted, I tell myself miserably. I lie on the bed and cry, loudly and indulgently, as the sun dips in the sky. No one knocks at my door. Eventually, several shuddering hours later, I fall asleep.
The next morning a horde of children descends on me. "Cómo te llamas? De dónde vienes?" Apparently they had conferred and decided to approach the stranger en masse. I am carrying a notebook and a plastic bag filled with colored pens. They grab the notebook and fill it with doodles and messages in Spanish: "Please come and visit our town again, American friend. Con cariño, Paula."
Later that afternoon as I sit on the steps of La Molienda with my watercolors, Juan, the maintenance man at the inn, beckons to me.
"You are an artist," he says, indicating my notebook, in which I was feebly attempting to draw the view.
"Just for fun," I say. “Mainly, I write.”
"Come," he says. "I will show you my paintings."
I follow Juan to his little house, where he introduces me to Maria, his wife.
"Come," he says.
We go up a narrow ladder to a small attic, crammed with canvases. They are mostly domestic scenes: fruit on the table, a woman stirring soup, a man playing guitar. They are wonderfully vivid: many of the shapes evoke Picasso.
"Where did you study?" I ask.
"Here," he says, pointing to his forehead. "Only here."
Eating tortillas de patata with them that night, while a competition of child singers blares on the television set, I feel a deep contentment. They seem truly moved by the gift of a plastic San Francisco key chain with a drawing of the Golden Gate Bridge on it that I present to them when I leave.
"I'll keep it always," Juan says reverently, tucking it in a drawer.
Concerned that all this camaraderie is distracting me from my grief, I decide to move on. Flipping through my address book, I come across a phone number my roommate gave me of a place called Plum Village, a Buddhist community near Bordeaux, run by the venerated Vietnamese Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh. What better environment for seeking inner peace?
Breathing in, breathing out
Breathing in, breathing out
I am blooming like a flower
I am fresh as the dew
I am solid as a mountain
I am firm as the earth
I am free.
— Thich Nhat Hanh
I arrive at the Upper Hamlet tired and cranky from a long night on the train, looking forward to a shower. When I go in to register, I find there is no record of my coming, though I'd telephoned from Benalauria to set it up.
"We'll see if we have something," says the placid nun at the desk.
"See if you have something!" I am alarmed.
They place me in the New Hamlet, a 35-minute van ride through the placid French countryside. About 90 monks and nuns are full-time residents here, but I've arrived during the summer retreat, which 500 people attend. There are four hamlets, grouped by languages. New Hamlet has a sprinkling of Americans, and large groups of Dutch, French and Vietnamese.
I've missed the van to the New Hamlet, and I wait outside for four hours until the next one arrives. When I finally get there, I'm told there are no available beds.
"Now look," I say to Sister Ving-yip, the sweet-faced Vietnamese nun signing me in. "I'm very tired. I was on the train all night, I sat in the Bordeaux station for five hours, and now I've been waiting all day for the van. I need a place to shower and lie down."
Putting out aggression, I expect aggression back. But Sister Ving-yip smiles and takes my hand. "Yes, Sister," she says, holding my hand. "Yes."
Completely disarmed, I watch my irritation slip away, like dirt washing off in a cool stream.
Welcome to Plum Village.
Everyone here calls Thich Nhat Hanh “Thay,” meaning “teacher.” He is soft-spoken and slight, with golden skin, sculpted cheekbones and penetrating eyes. Though he speaks often of the benefits of smiling, telling us that the gentle upward curve of the mouth sends signals to the brain, he appears serious most of the time. His own smile, when it comes, is temperate—no wild rush of joy. He has seen great suffering in his life. In 1966 he was exiled from his home in South Vietnam because of his opposition to the war. Martin Luther King Jr. nominated him for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1967. Now, in 1997, he is 71 years old: a serious man, seriously going about the business of teaching people to be happy.
Thich Nhat Hanh walks among the community. Sister Chan Khong, center, in a black robe, was his first fully ordained monastic disciple. She has been the director of his humanitarian projects since the 1960s.
When Thay walks into the meditation hall, a hush falls on the room. Then suddenly there’s buzz and brilliance as cameras click and flashbulbs pop, his international fans behaving like paparazzi. I wonder how it feels to him, this celebrity treatment. He walks quietly through it, as though inhabiting another plane. He speaks first to the children, telling them to sit beautifully like lotus flowers. Then he turns to the rest of us, instructing us on the practice of meditation in clear, simple terms, as if we too were children. His gentle voice is like a hand placed over my heart, and at once I am calmed, soothed. Awakening is possible in every moment, he tells us. He quotes the Buddha: If it were not possible, I would not ask you to do it. It is possible, therefore I ask you to do it. For a moment, sitting in the meditation hall, bathed in the sound of his voice, I believe him.
Bells bells bells, morning till night. The bell is the voice of the Buddha, reminding you to be present, and every time it rings you stop whatever you're doing and watch your breath until the last echo dies away. This is no small challenge with a clock chiming every 15 minutes. This goes for the phone, too: You breathe through the first three rings before mindfully picking it up. Imagine my surprise when I was registering and the phone rang to see the nun freeze with her pen in mid-air. I thought she was having some kind of attack! This was all the more bizarre when it happened about four times in quick succession. Once I figured out what was going on, a comic sketch popped into my mind where Inspector Clousseau is desperately trying to get some information from a slow-talking nun, and whenever she gets close to the crucial piece, the phone rings and she freezes. Then I thought of a scenario in which someone goes home, dials Plum Village, and sets her phone on automatic redial, immobilizing the place.
Mealtimes are a system of torture designed especially for me. We stand silently in line to serve ourselves, then sit at the long wooden tables with our plates of food in front of us, breathing in their savory aromas while every single person in the hamlet serves him or herself. When everyone is served, a prayer is spoken: "This food is a gift of the whole universe—the sun, the rain and a lot of hard work ..." As the prayer nears its end, I begin to salivate, but no, it is repeated, first in Dutch, then in Vietnamese, sometimes in French or German for good measure. Then we have to wait for the bell to ring three times. Yesterday I swear they waited a solid minute and a half between the second and third ring.
Another thing about the food: there isn't enough. Whoever's at the end of the line misses out on the good stuff, and ends up with a plateful of lettuce and rice. So while we're supposed to be walking mindfully across the courtyard upon hearing the lunch or dinner bell, I find myself surreptitiously hurrying to get to the front of the line. You'd think with all us wannabe Buddhists cultivating compassion and generosity, we'd take moderate portions, but much to my surprise, all the people at the front of the line—including me—load up their plates. During the second week the line "let me not act with greed or gluttony" is added to the mealtime prayer.
On my fourth day in Plum Village, after continuously finding fault, brainstorming comic torture scenarios and bonding with others through eye-rolling and sighing when the clock chimes, I go for a walk and give myself a stern talking to.
"Look, Tanya," I say, "did you come here to learn about this stuff or to mock it? All the rest of your life you can go around in a big rush, never having to stop for bells, not chewing your food 30 times. You came here because something is missing in your life. The least you can do is commit while you're here."
After that I find, much to my surprise, that if, when the bell rings, I truly stop what I'm doing and focus on my breath, rather than waiting impatiently to continue whatever trajectory I'm on, the moment of stillness becomes a kind of refreshment and regrounding, a reminder of the silence beneath the words. Which I suppose is the point.
A week later, as I sit in the morning meditation, I begin to think of moving on.
"Where should I go?" I muse. "It's almost September. If I could make it to Italy, I could pick olives in Tuscany for a while and make some money. And after that maybe grapes ... Then I'd have a chance to really process my break-up. I could find a place by myself, away from all these people ..."
Just stop it, Tanya. You've done the naked city, the mad dash through Spain, the passionate affair, the remote village and now this. Just stop. Sit down. Right here. Stay.
So I do. I sit. I sit for many weeks. And when I can't sit anymore, I get up and go home to my newly single life.
Note: Zen Master Thich Nhat Hanh died in January, 2022, at his “root temple,” Tu Hieu Temple in Hue, Vietnam. He’d moved back there in 2018, following a stroke, and was greeted with reverence and joy by the community there. It was his wish to spend the last years of his life in the place he was first ordained.
If you enjoyed this piece, you might also enjoy Tell Me A Story (about my travels in Taiwan) and Of Sweethearts and Sperm Banks: A Twenty-First Century Love Story (about my circuitious path to motherhood).
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