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attention.
    Focusing on sensations came naturally, in any case, since my daily sessions of meditation provided a laboratory setting for the meticulous, detached observation of my inner life and its workings. Back in Chicago—years before coming to India—I had taught myself to meditate following the instructions in Phillip Kapleau’s Three Pillars of Zen . I got Judith interested, and for a time the two of us attended early-morning sittings at a local zendo. The sparse, samurai world of Zen didn’t suit her style though, and before long she lost interest. After she left, I too quit sitting at the zendo, but I kept up my practice. No way was I going to stop. After years of searching, it felt like I was finally pointed in the right direction. I found I preferred sitting alone.
    What captivated me about meditation from the very start was something both entirely simple and utterly profound. Until I began sitting, it had never occurred to me that one could learn, with practice, to distinguish between attention, or awareness, and its objects. But just this is the central and most basic technique of meditation in all the yogic traditions of India, first described some 2,500 years ago in the Upanishads. In those ancient texts, the meditator is instructed to observe literally every element of experience from afar, to simply bear witness to anything and everything that arises and passes away before the mind’s eye. That’s it. Just sit there, without moving, and watch, allowing the focal point of identity to shift from the contents of awareness—thoughts, feelings, and sensations—to awareness itself, where all trace of agency dissolves and the burden of personality can be set aside.
    Although I worked to cultivate equanimity around my various infirmities and trials of these first few months, the effort to step back from the tumult of thoughts and emotions was like trying to paddle a canoe upriver against a swift current. My loss was too deep, the images of Judith too powerful to repress. And India itself was overwhelming.
    In the Pali scriptures the Buddha is reported to have asked his disciples,
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  What, monks, do you think is more—the water in the four great oceans or the tears that you have shed while roving, wandering,lamenting, and weeping on this long way because you received what you feared and were denied what you wanted so badly?
    There were plenty of reasons to shed tears in Agra. Every day as I bicycled to and from the institute, I encountered myriad forms of human and animal suffering. The sick and dying wandered aimlessly through the streets, or lay where they had fallen—wasted, half-naked human bodies twisted into an astonishing variety of deformities, noses rotted away, faces bubbling with raw pustules. But it wasn’t just the omnipresent disease and poverty that was so disturbing. There was a kind of violence here that was unlike anything I had ever encountered. Indian society incorporated forms of casual brutality that I found unimaginable.
    I remember one morning I passed a group of boys entertaining themselves by throwing rocks at a puppy. They had formed a wide circle around the little dog to prevent it from escaping. Every time one of the missiles found its target, the animal would let out a pitiful, anguished yelp, and the children would cheer and laugh. This was taking place in the middle of a crowded street, and no one—not the shop owners, the pedestrians, the cop on the corner, the men sitting in the nearby chai stall, or even the wandering holy men—seemed to care or, for that matter, to even notice. On another occasion I came across a similar scene, only this time it was a single boy dressed in his school uniform—navy blue shorts, white cotton shirt, and a clip-on tie, a little knapsack full of books. He was standing in a street not far from where I lived, flinging chunks of broken concrete at a sow