Episode #237: Sketching the Journey
“I really dreamed of going someday to see how Buddhism and meditation teachings are in their home,” says Dragos Badita, describing the rationale for his 2019 trip to Myanmar. Growing up in Romania, Dragos had learned meditation from local teachers, in addition to attending some retreats in England. But he yearned to spend extended time in a monastic setting in order to go deeper in the practice, and for that, he knew he needed to go to the Golden Land.
However, Dragos’ focus while traveling was not just meditation. He is also an accomplished artist. “I tend to take my time on my sketches, because I think it's a very good way of sitting and soaking into the experience and the people, and paying attention to what's happening,” he explains. “If you have to draw something, you have to be attentive, and this is a kind of meditative practice.”
Indeed, Dragos tries to take in everything that falls in front of his eyes: from daily, mundane scenes, to the details of monastery architecture, to the morning’s breakfast. His sketches capture a wide range of the life he experiences while traveling. “You can snap a photo and just forget about it,” he says, noting that drawing an object forces him to look more closely at it. “And that sticks with you, it sticks in your memory. It’s a way of looking more objectively.” When Dragos is immersed in his drawing, he becomes acutely attuned to its details and intricacies, which often escape casual observation, revealing a depth and complexity previously unnoticed at first glance. And like meditation, drawing takes a kind of patience and commitment that is often missing in “point-and-shoot photography.” This allows him to integrate into a scene, as pen and paper is often less obtrusive than a camera, which is particularly important in monastic settings.
Dragos spent several weeks at Pa Auk Monastery, and his sketches reflect his time there, from drawing his room (which he notes was made entirely of wood), to the path where he walked every day, to such mundane details as door frames and monks’ bowls. “Some little details stand out to me,” he recalls. “In the meditation hall, each meditator has a cushion and a reserved place with a mosquito net, that was really like a cocoon! You have some privacy, even though it was a really big meditation hall, and sometimes quite noisy on Sundays. But you have this personal space, and you felt secluded, just because you had this net around you. There's also many dogs that were living at the monastery, and you could hear them at night howling far away, around the forest.”
Dragos highlighted one mundane scene as illustrating the depth of meaning an object of everyday life can have: the footwear left at the entrance of a building. “I think there's a lot of meaning,” he explains. “With the sandals, it's this kind of respect that in Myanmar, everyone takes off their sandals when they go inside a meditation hall. So you can see a sense of community that happens where everyone is together. It’s a bit symbolized, like with the sandals going together, and I don't know how they recognize [their own] because all of them look the same! How they knew which one is which…”
While these are common scenes for any Burmese, they stood out for Dragos as a foreigner. Yet he notes that within the mind of an artist— or a meditator, for that matter— there is a beauty in not overlooking the everyday. “I live here in Romania, and I can look with a fresh eye at things that are common and familiar but they become interesting, if you pay attention. That's almost a meditative practice to try and pay a lot of attention to something! Whatever we do will become interesting, just through this continuous attention.”
But the main motivation for his travel to Myanmar, as Dragos started off the discussion saying, was not his art, but going to the source of the meditation practices he’d learned at retreats in his home country and elsewhere in Europe. However, he’d never lived at a monastery before his time at Pa Auk. Rather than following a strict timetable and reporting to a teacher daily, he found he now had more freedom in navigating his practice schedule. Of course, being at a Burmese monastery introduced him to the cultural side of things, too. He has a plethora of warm memories, such as an older, obviously poor woman who would regularly offer the monks condiments for their curries, or the young children who offered flowers to the Buddha shrines, or the large wooden gong that announced meal times and alms rounds.
Although Myanmar was “exotic” for him in some sense, Dragos also noted similarities with his own country. “I was born just before communism fell, and Ceaușescu fell. Actually, when I traveled to Myanmar [before the coup], the country reminded me a bit of my country after the dictatorship, when it tried to do this transition to democracy. It’s very hard to pinpoint exactly what, but it had this kind of same energy, like it was changing very fast, and there was some hope!” Dragos notes that Romania has since had decades to develop its democratic institutions, which has been no easy feat, but eventually they have enjoyed greater civil rights and personal freedoms— something he hopes can come to Myanmar in the not-so-distant future.
Expanding on his thoughts about the importance of freedom, Dragos muses about the first time he ever went abroad. He was just 14, but the stark differences between the closed and repressive society he grew up in and life in a free society were so evident to him back then. “It was really striking for me, because you don't realize when you live in a country that there is some collective trauma, after such a long period of dictatorship.” He noticed how the lack of trust— both in one another, as well as civic institutions— permeated Romanian society in contrast to what he found in the West, as well as the decreased opportunities for employment and education that existed. For Dragos, Romania’s opening also had a spiritual component, as he began listening to Dhamma talks on YouTube by the Canadian monk, Venerable Yuttadhammo, who taught in the Mahasi lineage. This was what had led initially to his interest in Buddhist meditation, and was the impetus for his trip East.
However, Dragos points out that the Buddhist understanding he gained in Myanmar derived from lessons learned off the cushion as well. “You see monks in the morning, and it reminds you that this exists, that it's happening it has some weight to it. A lot of time has passed from when the Buddha gave the teachings, but this is still happening! The monks with the alms bowls in the morning, it is still happening after all this time.”