Greg Kleiman, Part 1
Coming Soon….
This is an interview like none other. First, it should be said that one of the great blessings of this podcast project is the opportunity to speak with the many special monastics, meditators, teachers, and scholars who have graced the Insight Myanmar Podcast studio. But every once in a while, we are particularly fortunate to have the opportunity to host someone with a nearly unmatched depth of lived experience in, and insight into, the Golden Land. Today we have one such guest. Greg Kleinman is one of the few foreigners to have witnessed first-hand key events in the country’s recent history, and has rubbed shoulders with many of the religious, political, and military elite, so there is a unique depth to the story he has to tell.
Now, trying to get Greg to talk about the formative events in his fascinating biography is not the easiest of tasks! Ask about his origins and he answers that he is from samsara, and ask about how his life followed the particular trajectory that it did, and he laughs that it’s all simply serendipity, that he “lucked himself into everything in life.” But his joking aside, Greg’s interview was important and engaging enough to warrant the nearly four hours and 3 episodes we’ve devoted to fleshing it out in detail! You’ll hear throughout this interview how Greg’s humility and deep sense of gratitude unexpectedly bubble up.
While Greg, like all of us, may indeed come from samsara, his more worldly origins (in this life, anyway) trace back to Melbourne. His father, a Jewish tailor from Warsaw, emigrated to Australia just prior to Hitler’s takeover of Germany. Once the Holocaust started, letters from family suddenly stopped arriving; they later learned that that entire branch of his family was executed. Like so many post-war Jews at the time, it left Greg’s father in a state of shock, and searching for meaning in a mad, cruel world. Eventually he decided that adherence to any particular political, religious, or economic system didn’t really make sense, and that the best way to get through life was to simply not hurt your fellow man.
Greg’s mother on the other hand, had as different a family background as could be: a Scottish-Irish family who bred sheep for an English lord, they were wealthy socialites. His grandmother would play the piano while his mother sang, and they gradually made a name for themselves touring Australia. It was on a trip to perform in Melbourne where she met Greg’s father.
From a young age, Greg had a keen interest in world religions, even though he wasn’t raised with any firm sense of faith. His first epiphany came when he was just eight years old, when he really registered the Mosaic edict, “Thou Shall Not Kill,” and yet he saw people and animals being killed all over the world by people who supposedly followed it. He was baffled by this apparent hypocrisy. A little later, when he was 13, he first learned about the law of karma and the Four Noble Truths, and he found them so profound that he proclaimed to all that he was now a Buddhist, and a vegetarian to boot.
In his teenage years, he was moved by the thought of meditation, even though he had yet to encounter anyone who actually knew how to do it. After reading a book by DT Suzuki, the Zen master who brought Japanese Buddhism to the West, Greg decided to sit in a chair and contemplate the Four Noble Truths, which he describes as his first moment of meditation. He thought about the suffering caused by craving, contemplated the Eight Fold Noble Path, and decided that this spiritual path was now his aim in life.
In 1980, after failing several university courses because of heavy marijuana use, Greg made a sudden decision that would change the course of his life. He announced he was off to be a Buddhist monk, and gave away everything he owned. He didn’t know exactly what it even meant to become a monk or how it would happen, nor had he ever even traveled outside of Australia. He was just deeply moved by the image of a monk practicing in seclusion in a forest, and although he didn’t know what that even really entailed, he wanted to make it a reality for himself. And anyway, if it didn’t work out, he reasoned he could always come back to Australia, smoke dope and just hang out.
Bali was his first stop. It had the advantage of not only being a well-traveled destination for fellow Aussies, but also having its own thriving Buddhist culture. Greg traveled from one Buddhist site in the country to another, sort of feeling his way through, and after picking up a book on Buddhism by Edward Conze, taught himself how to meditate as best as could. He continued his journey north, and in southern Thailand got his first glimpse of a real Buddhist monk. Then on a bus in Bangkok, with the frequent serendipity that Greg notes continually wove its way throughout his Buddhist journey, he glimpsed a sign for the “World Fellowship of Buddhists” out the bus window. Though still a ways from his hotel, he got off at the next stop and went back to check it out. There he met a kind, Bangladeshi librarian who helped orient him to meditation and the possibilities of ordination. He gave Greg some books and told him about a British monk who gave meditation instructions there once a week. Greg decided to try it, and although at the time he felt he didn’t have a clue what he was doing, he did enjoy it.
At the World Fellowship, Greg heard about a Thai monk named Ajahn Chah who was attracting an increasing number of foreign disciples, and so he decided to travel to Wat Ratchathani. Seeing the monks there living a simple forest life, in quiet meditation, immediately gave Greg the deep sense that he was “coming home.” Although he stayed only three weeks, the experience more than met his expectations. “It’s like searching for something, and then you find it’s better than what you thought,” he noted. Coming as he was from a materialistic Western culture, the generosity of Thai supporters moved him to tears. Most of all, he was supremely impressed with Ajahn Chah, using a host of adjectives to describe his impressions: calm, cool, serene, special, charismatic, and collected.
Back now again at the World Fellowship of Buddhists in Bangkok, another odd bit of serendipity occurred that connects Greg’s story with another episode of Insight Myanmar. Last year, we interviewed Alan Clements about his early days at the Mahasi Sāsana Yeiktha in Yangon, back at a time when foreign travel was largely prohibited. Asked about the presence of other foreign yogis, Alan recalled: “I remember writing an aerogramme to the Thai Buddhist Society [the Word Fellowship] in Bangkok and a few other places, alerting them that the country was open if you did this at the Mahasi Center, and a few lay people began to come.”
Well, Greg was one of those who Alan’s letter eventually found its way to, and he booked a Biman Airlines flight to Yangon in the fall of 1980. Arriving late at night, he planned to sleep at the airport and go directly to the monastery the next day. However, an airport police officer told him it would be open even at that hour and encouraged him to go right then. So Greg jumped in a broken-down cab (with a “designated pusher” since it had no first gear), which would take him to the monastery for just $5. They arrived at about 2:00 am. Greg was accepted in and given a room to nap in; two hours later, he was awakened, and brought to Mahasi Sayadaw, who was practicing walking meditation. The Sayadaw greeted him and gave him meditation instructions…and thus began Greg’s Burma journey!
Greg stayed at the Mahasi monastery, alternating sitting and walking twenty hours a day. He stayed just two weeks, but the experience threw him “into the deep end”, and as he said, “[It] completely changed me. My mind was never the same.” Despite such intense pain in his legs that he couldn’t sit longer than five minutes at a time—he would experience tremendous knee pain, including throughout his monkhood, and at one point even tore ligaments—his time at Mahasi was challenging and profound. He experienced dissolving impermanence, a state that stayed with him for years. In his words, “I couldn't enjoy anything anymore…For years, anything I touched, just dissolved.” He said he had followed the meditation instructions so rigorously that he didn’t realize until the end of his course that the immovable presence at the front of monastery was actually a statue of Mahasi Sayadaw standing in contemplation, and not the great master, himself!
As Greg’s visa was expiring, he made plans to depart on a flight to Bangladesh. His new itinerary was based on a list of places around the subcontinent that his Swiss roommate at Mahasi shared. But his journey did not get off to an auspicious start, as his plane ended up flying through a cyclone. Greg was oblivious to the danger, observing the six sense doors and the rising and falling of his abdomen the whole way…while the passengers around him panicked! After a stop in Bangladesh that he characterizes as somewhat depressing, he went on to Calcutta. There he was quite active: he met briefly with Anagakira Munindra, a vipassana master, at the Maha Bodhi Society, toured Darjeeling, and then studied Tibetan medicine at a 3-week course at a Tibetan monastery in Nepal. To his surprise, his Australian ex-girlfriend had come to enroll in the same class! After it ended, they attended a vipassana meditation course together in Bodhgaya with Christopher Titmuss. Funny enough, before leaving Australia, he had confided in her a desire to meet the Dalai Lama, to which she scoffed and informed him such a thing would never happen. Yet during that retreat, who should “rock up” but His Holiness himself, who gave a brief talk and meditated with the group for a short time.
After a 3-month sojourn in Sri Lanka, Greg flew back to southern India and meditated in some Hindu cave temples, where he followed eight precepts and ate one meal a day, taking daily walks on the beach. (Once, he accidentally ended up walking inside a nuclear power station!) His adventures carried him on to Bombay, where he spent hours at the main library devouring their vast collection of Buddhist books, and then headed north to Dharamsala. He had hoped to undertake a three-month self-course in a Tibetan monastery (constructed from old English horse stable), but there was no room. However, that opportunity was resurrected when a female yogi who had killed all the huntsmen spiders in her room was requested to leave. But right before the course started, he came down with hepatitis, becoming so weak that he turned yellow and unable to even stand, and he had to be fed and cared for by friends. During his severe illness, Greg devoured the monastery’s library, teaching himself the reflections on Triple Gem from that Conze book, which instilled him with faith, as well as working with kasinas (which he said didn’t work so well for him), ānāpāna, and reflection on the 32 parts of the body. But the book that most impacted him was Living Buddhist Masters by Jack Kornfield. He was particularly attracted to Taungpulu Sayadaw, who taught Four Elements meditation. And this connection would start a new chapter in Greg’s spiritual life, to be continued in Part 2 of our talk.