Freistadt, Wisconsin was settled in 1839 by immigrants from Prussia, a chunk of land in what is now Germany and Poland, next to the Baltic Sea. A history compiled for the village church’s 150th anniversary says their hard journey to a new home was a search for religious freedom.

 They apparently kept looking for it after they arrived. A few steps down the hill from the only crossroad in the village, on the north side of the road, lies the Buffalo Synod cemetery. It has a wrought iron fence, freshly painted glossy black, sheltering the remains of a few dozen souls who opted for their own spot, rather than the original Missouri Synod church cemetery right across the road. Their particular search led to a different conclusion, part of an internal Lutheran immigrant doctrinal dispute that began shortly after their arrival and continued until after the close of the United States Civil War.

Herman looks after the little manicured plot, right next to his own front yard. He tends it out of tradition, he says. Not his tradition, actually, as he goes to the church across the road and expects to end up in its overflow cemetery hundreds of yards south.

But the Buffalo Synod’s grass is in his neighborhood, which he takes to include the box elders and shaded turf overlying his alienated underground neighbors. There is always the highly unlikely possibility that an ancestor of his might be buried there, which makes it easier, though no one comes by to decorate the graves and Herman considers short grass plenty of recognition.

Neighborliness, that’s what it is. I hope if I end up in a neighborhood going on that long, someone cares about me the way Herman does. I’d be planted in a little plot with blackened gray stones reaching toward the sky, left by fellow ancestors adherent to beliefs lost on those living in the mere present. And Herman would drop by to cut the grass.

I’d enjoy hearing the weed whacker whizzing overhead. Herman might even care about me more than the guy on the riding mower in the original church cemetery across the road trying to make his way between the stones, the ones with names everybody recognizes as surnames on local mailboxes. I’d love the chance to give Herman the separateness he constructs for himself every so often, escaping from his world into our present, a quiet place, fenced and green, a little space of solitude shared by fellow searchers.

Heads freshly shaven, they kneel in rows, palms together, sitting on their heels. Some wobble, some shift their weight. None quit. A hundred fifty robes, monks in front, novices behind, no one over twenty-five except the elderly abbot leading the chant.

It is Makha Puja, the festival of the full moon of the third lunar month, commemorating the Buddha’s articulation of his basic teachings to twelve hundred followers. They chant in Pali, the language of early Buddhism. Nobody in the small group of worshipers at the rear of the temple can understand it. It’s a language of insiders, like Latin in the Christian church.

Carolyn and I are in the temple of Wat Sirikanchanaram this evening at the invitation of Niran and Sunee, our hosts for a month of volunteering in Kanchanaburi, Thailand as conversational English teachers. The Wat is a monastery on Khao Phurang, a mountain just outside of town. I scan the crowd of monks at the front looking for Chaloempon, a Pali teacher at the monastery school I have met while teaching here. I can’t find him.

One morning in the school office, Chaloempon had allowed that he would like “to talk.” He had no specific subject in mind, it turned out. He simply wanted to engage in the act of conversing. Well, that’s conversational English teaching, I realized. Novices hung around, watching their teacher have instruction. We played our way through a stack of English flash cards. The students drifted in and out of the office, watching another monk surf the web, listening to Britney Spears playing through the computer.

“How old is the temple?” I asked.

“About twenty-five years.” The abbot wanted a mountain retreat community and this is it, he explained.

“I checked the temple’s orientation with my compass the other day,” I said.

Chaloempon’s brow furrowed briefly. I produced my compass from a shirt pocket and opened it so we could watch the needle swing its way north.

“The temple is aligned east to west. The Buddha image is in the western end,” I said. “Christian churches traditionally have the altar in the eastern end.”

His face relaxed. “It is because Buddhism came to Thailand from the west.” West, in this case, meaning India.

Did I want to walk around the grounds of the Wat while we talked?

“Yes, that would be fine.” We paused at the door for me to put my shoes back on.

“It is a beautiful place,” I said.

“Yes, peaceful, away from the city. How you like Kanchanaburi?”

“I like it. Our host family is very gracious. The size of the city is like where I live in the United States.”

“Where you live in United States?”

“In Wisconsin, in the north, near Canada. Now we have much snow.”

“Ah, snow. I have seen snow in pictures. Very beautiful.”

“We have two seasons in Thailand,” he volunteered. “Hot and hotter. It will be hotter later.” He smiled.

It’s ninety-five Fahrenheit today in the grove of pho trees and it’s only Spring. Wonder what happens later.

“You like to see the temple?”

“OK.”

We entered below upturned eaves, brass bells tinkling along the roof in the breeze. Chaloempon opened a shutter made of coarse dark wood carved in patterns of leaves and flowers. Light spread across the floor, reflecting off polished stone. Birds called outside in unfamiliar voices.

Chaloempon smiled as if he were at home. I guess he was. He stood quietly, waiting for questions.

The men in the pictures beneath the Buddha image?

“The head abbot of Thailand, king of the monks. The other is the abbot of this monastery.” (Thailand has an actual king, so it seemed apt).

The Buddha image was seated on a white stone platform level with our faces. Its gold was fresh and lively. I had no more questions.

“We should respect the Buddha,” he asserted. I nodded.

Chaloempon knelt, motioning me to do the same, stretching his arms toward the image. His professorial glasses were rimmed in black plastic. I stretched my arms west, kneeling next to him.

“This does not interfere with your religion?” He was solicitous, checking in before going ahead. Even in the cool of the temple, it was hot. The notebook in my shirt pocket stuck to my chest.

What has a Lutheran boy got to lose by showing respect for his host culture? I thought it over. In the back of my mind a warning rang out, something about bowing down to graven images. Then I remembered a statue of Christ looming over the front of the church where I grew up. Christian churches had plenty of religious statues, not just of Jesus but of other people.

“Respecting” seemed the way to go, immersing myself in the culture. I liked Buddhism’s philosophy, but had thought of the experience more theoretically.

I was here to learn. He was trying to teach. That Biblical prohibition against worshipping “graven images” in the King James translation of 1611 was really an Old Testament thing, I decided. We were in the New Testament now. It was 2002. Go for it.

“No,” I replied.

Chaloempon taught me the three bows.

One. “I respect the Buddha.” He said it first in Thai (or was it Pali?), then in English.

Second bow. “I respect the Dhamma.” (His language, repeated in mine). “I respect the teachings,” he explained as we came upright, still kneeling.

Third bow. “I respect the Sangha.  I respect the community of monks and the people.”

Chaloempon rose and walked over to close the window. It was dim and quiet again. The gold of the Buddha reflected light coming through the open doorway. We walked out into the sun.

Let’s have a walk around the monastery grounds.

Sure, why not.

The path up Khao Phurang is not that long, but in the sun it seemed longer. I noticed a sign at the edge of the path, hand-painted blue letters on a white board nailed to a pho tree.

“Do not trouble the trouble,” it said. “If you trouble the trouble, the trouble will trouble you.”

There was no translation into Thai, nor for that matter into any other language.  Interesting choice of word, though, “trouble.” One word, almost half the words on the sign. For a Lutheran of German descent like me, “trouble,” the noun, is an invitation to add the appropriate form of the verb “to fix.” And as a verb, “trouble” inevitably raises associations of “guilt.”

I regretted not asking Chaloempon the meaning then and there. What is the “trouble?” Why is the sign at that place? Who put it there? Is it a Thai saying? A Buddhist saying?

“Let sleeping dogs lie” might be a parallel, but there was no way to place this into the monastic context. Maybe it was more along the lines of “Sufficient to the day is the evil thereof,” or some other Biblical saying, translated into Theravada. Given our language barrier, I was happier to let the proverb settle into my mind as an idiomatic Thai/English reflection of something I already knew.

I guessed when we attended Makha Puja that we might be expected to do the three bows. Carolyn figured on skipping the bows. We aren’t Buddhist, she pointed out.

True, but I was bothered by “respect.” It would seem respectful of our hosts’ religion and culture to fully participate, but she was right. I was completely ambivalent.

There are at least twenty-five bows in Makha Puja, through which I sit upright. I become less and less comfortable, to say nothing of my legs. After an hour, the chanting ends. Monks and novices line up to exit the south door of the temple. I glance at Niran next to me. He smiles and makes a horizontal clockwise circle with his finger pointing downward.

“We walk around temple three times. Not talk. No shoes.”

The novices follow the monks processing around the building, trailed by a dozen or so of us lay people. We conclude our third roundabout but nobody’s leaving. I check it out with Niran. He says we’re half done.

Another hour of sitting and the chant ends. Novices follow the monks past us in a double line of saffron robes out the east door. Chaloempon is not in the group. Tomorrow we leave Kanchanaburi.

I recognize a fifteen-year-old novice from the M2’s, my first class. He smiles acknowledgement. I bow slightly, palms together below my chin. I’m a lay person greeting a monk, forty-five years his senior.

Standing on cool marble facing west, the only sound that of shuffling bare feet, I begin to understand, not think.

Regrets can be let go. It is possible to learn not to trouble the trouble.

The rest is simply religion.

Our Naxi driver from Lijiang to Dali was assigned this leg of our China trip because he has to see a specialist about a headache. En route he picks up a friend who gets off at the airport road south of town. Attempting to explain the detour, our driver settles for steering motions and mouth noises like a whistling engine. We can’t tell whether his friend with the small briefcase is traveling to Kunming on business or is supposed to pilot the plane.

Carolyn and I nod as if we understand. He goes back to driving.

In Dali, we meet our local guide Peter at the side of the road, called on his cell phone by our driver. As we look out from the ancient bell tower halfway through the city tour, Peter points out our next stop, a brand-new temple to Guan Yin, the Buddhist goddess of mercy, a favorite of the local Bai people. Yet another temple, in the long line of temples we have visited on our month’s tour.

Carolyn’s focus is off to the right, on a knot of people clustered around cooking fires next to a squat, ornate building. 

“Who uses the new temple?” she asks Peter.

“The government built it for tourists.”

“What’s that?” she continues, gesturing toward the picnic scene.

“Let’s go, then,” says Peter. He is into customer service. There are plenty of other government stops to keep the tour supervisors satisfied. We descend the steps of the bell tower and clamber over a stone wall into an open space fronting a ben zhu (local god) temple.

Twenty or so women from a neighboring village are cooking chicken and fried dough sweets in woks perched on stones over wood fires. Peter talks to them, then to us. They are here for the day, he says, to pray for the health of the children in their village.

Three colorfully-painted gods swathed in vermilion cloth fill most of the back wall of the tiny temple. One by one the women enter, standing to dictate their message to an elderly man sitting by the door. He brushes ink characters onto a yellow square of paper and hands it to an attendant. As each woman kneels before the central image, the attendant burns their prayer in a candle, sending it off with wood clackers, beneath temple walls and ceiling blackened with smoke.

They are older women, grandmothers of the village, perhaps great-grandmothers. One of them smiles at us over her sizzling wok of frying chicken, offering a plateful of fried dough and rock candy. She’s pushing the frybread but we pass, opting for the rock candy. Peter downs our portion of frybread.

She looks happy. So are we.

We have been welcomed by a community, simply because we left the tour.