Searching for the Enlightened One

I watched over on the National Geographic their presentation At the Edge of the Earth (pardon if I failed to remember the program’s title) the life of buddhists somewhere in Tibet. I was only able catch part of the program but the effect on me was tremendous. And for somebody who can boldly say that I am not a Christian and does not have a religion, converting to Tibetian Buddism for me is enticing.

Fortunately, my youngest sister too has an interest in this philosophy cum religion. So on this day, we planned to take a ‘pilgrim’, as she described it while we were on a pedicab on the way to a Buddist temple.

Armed with nothing but the knowledge that Buddist temples are located somewhere in Manila, somewhere near Chinatown, we headed to for the city smirking over our silly plan.

The question was how would we explain our unexpected visit to the temple? In what way would we talk to the Buddist monks if we were already before them? Are we going to pretend as students (I’ve graduated a more than a decade ago and only my sister is the student) researching over their religion? Or are we going to be straightforward that we have plan to convert or to dig deeper into their religion.

Honestly speaking we didn’t know what to do that made us laugh even more. All we want was to know, and we were dead serious about it, is what Buddism is all about and luckily follow the footpath towards enlightenment.

For good luck, I brought a copy of Don Miguel Ruiz’s Four Agreement. After having a quick lunch, we started our ‘pilgrim’.

We alighted at the Carriedo Station of LRT, and on the way down, passing stalls selling DVDs, a rare find of Bob Marley’s concerts made me buy it in an instant, but that is another story.

My rule in looking for a place I don’t know where is to ask people until I reach my goal. This is easy to do if you have enough dough in your pocket because it means using transportation and you need money for that. And this is exactly the style that we employed in our short ‘pilgrim’.

When we reached Sta. Cruz in Manila, the goal was to know where Chinatown is. When we entered Chinatown, it seemed we were transported into a different, alien place we could not describe. Ever corner was all stores of different wares.
A number of questions where we could find a temple or a congregation of buddist led us to enter alleys until we found somebody who directed us to take a pedicab, going past Tutuban, at Narra St. where he said buddist monks resides.

Now, this is the sad part of the story. When we reached the Buddist temple in Narra St. of Manila, we were ‘shooed away’ as student researchers by the administrator of the church. The Chinese man whom we talked to was surprised when I approached him. He seemed to have seen a ghost. I assumed that he was fearful of a pure-bred Filipino. He said he would be busy for the rest of the day making white-lies that he still had to attend to something.

So what happened in our short piligrim in searching for the Enlightened One: NOTHING.

I would also like to use this post as a call for people who know about Buddism to please inform me where to go and search the footpath of the Enlightened One.