This month, I’d like to talk about some old songs in relation to my trip back to Shan State last month.

So I was back in Lashio, a place I used to call my hometown until I left it in 1962, 51 years ago. I was 14 then.

As I was driven from the airport across the town to the hotel, I looked left and I looked right. Of course, I knew it would be nothing like what Tom Jones said in his song Green, green grass of home:

“The old hometown looks the same
as I step down from the train.”

However, I was a bit disappointed that nothing I saw rang a bell in me.
Even the place where our house used to stand with a garden in front of it and a brook on its flank looked strange. There was instead a modern building, already looking old. Only my old school looked somewhat familiar.

Manhsu, the pagoda that used to stand majestically alone in a field outside the city, was now surrounded by hundreds of buildings and houses and no longer the city’s landmark. Not to me anyway.

It was more like what Rick Nelson used to sing:

“No, you can’t retrieve it,
cause once you leave it
Oh, down home’s just a memory”

So after completing my job and meeting friends and relatives, I returned to the familiar world of Thailand with mixed feelings, which were exactly as Neil Diamond said in his song I am, I said:

“L.A.’s fine but it ain’t home
New York’s home but it ain’t mine no more”
Just say “Thailand” instead of “L.A,” and “Shan State” instead of “New York”, and you’ll know how I felt.

Then the words of my long gone teacher returned:

“What do you think, is form permanent or impermanent?”
“Impermanent, sir”
“Is what is impermanent suffering or happiness?”
“Suffering, sir”
“Is what is impermanent, suffering and subject to change fit to be regarded thus: This is mine, this I am, this is myself?”
“No, sir”

“Therefore, any kind of form, whether past, future or present, should be seen correctly as thus: This is not mine, this I am not, this is not myself. Seeing thus, one experiences revulsion. Experiencing revulsion, one becomes dispassionate. Through dispassion, one’s mind is liberated.”

I became calmer. But being human, the new feeling, however comforting it was, did not remain long, leaving me with a resolve that the next time, it should stay longer, then, longest and later forever.

Note:     This appeared as Message to the Reader in Shan Diary for March, 5 April 2013.