Five thirty am. It’s pitch black outside. Only frogs croak in the dark undergrowth. Suddenly, a bell tinkles in the distance. A two-step chime. It’s getting nearer, slowly. I squint my eyes. A lanky, blond and bearded man walks through the corridor, his right arm swinging a bronze bell up and down. I sit up in my room, take a minute, shuffle to the loo, put on something warm and make my way upstairs. The others are there too. We take off our shoes and pass the woman standing by the door. As each one of us enters the room, we bow to the cross and the idol in the centre.
A candle is lit; we bow again and take our seats. We remain seated, breathing. Dawn slowly leaks in through the windows as birds chirp. I inhale through my nostrils and notice my belly expand. Then I watch it deflate slowly like a balloon as I part my lips, letting the air out.
For a minute, it feels like I’m a monk in a fourteenth-century monastery, consigned to a life of silence, service and devotion. Except: I am not bound by religious strictures. I am a visitor from the big city. As I made my way up from Bangalore, I felt excited to leave the clamour, distractions and overstimulation of the city behind and spend some time being with myself—and, most importantly, not look at my phone.
I am at Bodhi Zendo, the Zen meditation centre located in the middle of a six-acre campus tucked behind a coffee estate in the village of Perumalmalai, hidden from view by a ring of silver oaks—away from the prying eyes of tourists and locals alike. The idol in the meditation hall is the Buddha, sitting in the lotus position in front of a large cross.
Bodhi Zendo was founded in 1996 by Father Ama Samy, an eighty-something-year-old Jesuit priest and Zen master. ‘I stand in the in between of Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Zen and Advaita—it is a creative fidelity, a deeper fidelity both to Zen and Christianity, without mixing them up or confusing one with the other,’ Samy writes in Zen: Awakening to Your Original Face (2005). Samy’s ‘long and arduous journey’ to Bodhi Zendo is as much about creativity as it is about community. Born to poor Tamil migrants in Burma (now Myanmar), he survived starvation and massacres during World War II, returned after the war to his family’s village in the East Ramnad district, only to face caste apartheid, poverty and famine for years, before joining the Jesuits.
After a few years in the Jesuit hostel, Samy grew restless and was drawn to the sanyasi life of the ‘flying-haired, fiery-eyed’ Swami Abhishiktananda, who in turn introduced him to the teachings of Sri Ramana Maharshi. ‘My longing and seeking was to experience God face to face, so to say, to die to the self and be re-born in Christ Jesus…,’ he writes in Zen. ‘I did the Jesuit Spiritual Exercises year after year faithfully, but my heart was still feeling empty. My studies in philosophy and theology only led me to deeper questioning and doubting, to losing my certainties and grounds…’ Thus began Samy’s travels to ashrams across the country—though his superiors soon persuaded him to come back to the parish and work to restore his faith. But after a year of unfulfillment in the novitiate, Samy managed to get permission to travel as a beggar-sanyasi. ‘I wandered along the Cauvery banks for a short while. It was a painful but rewarding experience,’ he writes.
After this, Samy returned for a year to teach the Jesuit juniors, and then, with permission, he left again to live as a hermit at the shrine of St. Anthony the Hermit near Dindigul. ‘I used to sit the whole day in a little hut looking towards the small hills south of Dindigul stretching towards Madurai… I was a rare sight in those days, a Catholic priest living the life of a beggar-sanyasi’ (Zen).
Sometime later, he arranged a trip to Japan to study with the renowned Zen master Yamada Kōun at the Sanbo Kyodan, a well-known Zen school for laypeople in Kamakura. This school incorporates both shikantaza meditation (‘just sitting’) and koans (existential riddles). After many trips and years of further study, Samy was ordained as a Zen master and authorised to teach. He soon began travelling to Europe to give Zen courses. Eventually, he set up his Bodhi Zendo in Perumalmalai in 1996, followed by nearby Little Flower Zendo in 2022, where he currently lives and teaches.
Like its founder, Bodhi Zendo has an eclectic history. It stands as one of the few Zen meditation centres in the subcontinent. The centre sits on a low ridge at the back end of St. Joseph’s Farm in Perumalmalai, which is run by the Madurai Jesuit Province. ‘It was formerly cow-grazing land in order [sic] to provide milk to the Jesuit students in Sacred Heart College in Shembaganur,’ Samy writes in his autobiography, The Journey of an Indian Zen Master (2021), a copy of which I found in the centre’s well-stocked library.
Bodhi Zendo is housed in a simple white two-storey building with a courtyard, where all the rooms overlook a garden featuring rocks, a koi pond, a small hillock and a majestic kumul tree, a native shola species with white blossoms. Coffee plants, banana, avocado and passionfruit trees grow throughout the campus. My room is spartan (and quite affordable): plain white walls, a cot on one side and a study table by the window, overlooking the back garden.
‘I like the silence and solitude at Bodhi Zendo, and I’m fortunate to be here for a longer period,’ says Sister Severina, who, after several shorter visits to the centre, has taken up the role of head administrator.
It feels like the perfect setting for meditation and to reconnect with oneself. There are no hotels or homestays nearby, the only occasional noise coming from the church on top of the next hill. And as Samy and visitors to the centre tell me, it took years of work and an unflinching vision to make this the space it is today. When he first visited the property, he recounts in The Journey of An Indian Zen Master, there was ‘no road facility to the site, no electricity, no water’. But when the friendly Provincial, Father D Jeyaraj, offered this small parcel of farmland, Samy accepted, pouring all his savings and donations from followers into building the centre. Many delays and setbacks followed, but volunteers and former collaborators stepped up to support the running of the centre.
Revathi, an educator from Nagapattinam who has been visiting Bodhi Zendo for the last 16 years, says, ‘It wasn’t this perfect at that time [when she first visited], but the constant labour that was put in here to create some beauty…it was very moving. Father Ama used to do the gardening himself, and always spoke to the workers. Everybody else is always pitching in in their own way, too.’ Even the massive kumul tree in the central garden, so reminiscent of the Japanese cherry blossom, ‘was very small, and it used to have a lot of diseases. I saw a lot of effort going into nurturing this tree,’ she adds.
Behind the main building lies a Zen rock garden, along with vegetable patches and a couple of gazebos. A Swedish artist and disciple of Samy, Ylva Lindqvist, built the rock garden before Father Cyril, the current director of Bodhi Zendo, came here in 2000, he tells me. As you walk out of the building, to the right there is a kidney-shaped patch of crushed pebbles—a mini desert in a sea of lush green, with a smattering of moss-covered rocks. ‘If you see it from a different perspective, you can imagine that tall rock as a mountain and the sand as a desert. People make nice patterns with the pebbles and crushed stones,’ says Father Cyril. ‘We usually don’t step into the rock garden. We sit around and just look at it and feel the harmony. It’s also a nice way to get into meditation, calming for the heart and mind.’
Stephen, the gardener, tells me that he had long discussions with Samy on how to incorporate all elements of nature—sand, grass, rocks and trees—to invite contemplation and self-reflection. ‘This is not like other gardens, where the spectacle [of bright flowers and exotic plants] is supposed to impact you,’ he says.
Each visitor to the centre is encouraged to put their phones away, adhere to the designated hours of silence outside of meditations and meals, and follow the daily routine, which involves participating not only in zazen (sitting meditation) at scheduled times during the day but also in samu (seva or selfless service), assigned to each person. After breakfast, seven to eight visitors gather around a table outside the dining hall to chop vegetables for lunch. The rest, about ten others, help clean up the space, clearing idli and sambar containers and wiping down the tables. I was tasked with sweeping the first floor and the stairs leading to the terrace. Samu, integral to Zen philosophy, not only accords dignity and importance to physical labour but also sustains community life and encourages mindful engagement.
‘What I’ve learnt here,’ Seshadri, a retired law professor from Bangalore, tells me, ‘is that we can take our experience of zazen into our day-to-day activities. With other forms of meditation, like Vipassana, meditation and [daily] life are separate: you sit for some time, meditate, and then go and do your work. Meditation has nothing to do with our day-to-day life. Whereas in Zen, meditation need not only happen while sitting. You can meditate while standing, walking, lying down. Any act can be an act of meditation. And Bodhi Zendo has created an environment for this practice.’
It is hard to describe what it feels like to truly be present and attentive to physical work and your body, especially in our era of smartphone addiction and the attention economy.1
Personally, it was both a huge relief and a strange thrill to be encouraged by an external structure to remain present in my body and not constantly ‘plugged in’ to the internet, the news and so on. For the six days I stayed at Bodhi Zendo, I planned my sweeping route for those ninety minutes after breakfast, starting from the northern corner, where the zendo, or meditation hall, is located, and making my way through the rest of the quadrangle. I had a constant view of the garden below: the bright orange, red and black fish chewing the grass at the edge of the pond, the violet-blue morning glories clustered on the railing, the bonhomie of the vegetable-chopping crew. Gripping the broom with my right hand below the left, my mind and body became one with the task of sweeping dust, stray litter and fallen flowers from the cement floor.
Solar power keeps Bodhi Zendo going, seen here on its roof (1). Staff like Sesumari, seen here making the centre’s popular wheat bread (2), serve up wholesome meals in its dining hall (3). In between it all, there is time in nature, in spaces such as this gazebo (4). Photos: Kartikeya Jain.
The entire campus is self-sustained. Most vegetables and fruits consumed by visitors are grown here, and there are solar panels for electricity, a solar water heater, as well as a rainwater harvesting system. Even the excellent wholewheat bread is made in-house by Sesumari, who has been working here for twenty years. Sesumari first met Ama Samy when she was eight years old, during Samy’s priestly tenure in Dindigul. In fact, most of the staff were familiar with Samy before he started Bodhi Zendo, having met him either through his parish work or during his travels as a sanyasi or Zen teacher.
Sasikumar, the office administrator, tells me that he came here as a young boy, in 1997, following his parents, who had joined a year before as gardeners. While working in the kitchen, he finished his tenth-standard education via correspondence, getting help in maths from a couple of guests from Periyakulam and English lessons from an Australian visitor. Moving from the garden to the kitchen to housekeeping, Sasikumar eventually took over office administration in 2012, managing bookings and corresponding with incoming guests. Greg, a long-time visitor from Australia who was around when I visited, taught him how to use email and the rest he taught himself, Sasi tells me.
A strong sense of community pervades life at Bodhi Zendo, one that has come together to build, sustain and nurture both the centre and its people. And this commitment extends beyond the meditators. ‘One has to deal with the world, particularly with the poor and marginalised. Without such engagement, meditation would be one-sided,’ Samy writes in his autobiography. The Bodhi Zendo Trust also runs the Little Flower School in Perumalmalai town, a couple of kilometres away (located by the Little Flower Zendo), which provides education to children from the neighbouring villages, along with free tuition and healthcare to the poorest.
Throughout my stay, I was struck by my privilege, which allowed me to stay in a place of such beauty, silence and solitude, which gave me the space to slow down and reconnect with myself. Adding to this, Bodhi Zendo seems to have been frequented by more privileged foreigners, though it sees a fair number of Indians, and has seen a rise in Indian visitors since the pandemic. Shouldn’t everyone have access to this, I wondered; am I just part of an advantaged minority that is able to escape the world out there?
The short answer is yes. But as I worked through my initial cynicism, I kept going back to the Ten Ox Herding Pictures of the Zen tradition, which speak of the endless search of the ox herder. Through tall grasses, along riverbanks and across remote mountains, the herder searches for his ox. Eventually, he happens upon his friend’s footprints. He is close. A little farther on, the herder catches a glimpse of the ox and gives chase. With great difficulty, he manages to catch it. Soon he is able to tame it and bring it home. He feels peace, at one with the world around him and its beauty. Finally, we come to the most important stage: the herder is now older and is back in the marketplace—the world, so to speak. He is wiser, compassionate, and there to help whoever needs it.
1Documentaries like The Social Dilemma (2020) show how social media platforms have tracked user activity for years and used this data to enhance users’ addiction to these platforms. The more time people spend on these apps, away from their real lives and communities, the more advertising revenue these companies earn—with catastrophic consequences for democracy and mental health.
