Fairy Tales # 27: The Steam Room

A man was very fond of the banya. He went there with his friends, and his friends were fond of the banya too, and also of beer, and also of crayfish, which they brought in buckets and which lay in the buckets red and astonished.

At first the man steamed himself with birch switches. Then he drank beer. Then he ate crayfish. Then he steamed again and drank again. Then he talked. What he talked about nobody remembered, and he remembered even less. In the morning his head ached, and he went for beer so that his head would stop aching. So a week went by, and so the years went by.

Then the man went to India. What he did there is unknown. All that is known is that he came back the same as he left, only a little bit not the same.

On the very first Saturday his friends invited him to the banya. He came. The crayfish were brought. Beer was poured into chilled glasses, and the glasses sweated with joy.

– Just a minute, – said the man. – Wait for me. I’ll be back soon.

And he went nowhere. He sat down on the top bench and closed his eyes.

The friends exchanged glances. One of them said “He’ll be back” and broke a crayfish claw. The claw cracked.

And the man, meanwhile, sat in the heat. The heat was at first down below, by his feet. Then the heat went up, like a man who is tired of sitting on the first floor. Then the steam room got warmer, then warmer still, and the steam embraced everything, the way relatives are embraced at a railway station, long and without sorting out. Sweat ran down the man. His heart was beating in him not the way a heart beats, but the way a mother’s heart beats when you hear it from the inside. Or perhaps it was the rhythm of the whole universe, even, with no break for lunch, and the man in it was like one of the veins, rather small, but important in its own way. Blood went through the veins hot, and then came back and reported to the whole universe that everything was in order.

Behind the door the friends were guffawing. The crayfish crackled. The glasses clinked. All of it was somewhere very far away, on another planet, maybe on Mars.

And then the man understood that he had never once in his life been in a steam room. He had sat in one, true. Sat, lain, whipped himself with a switch. But he himself had been either in the past or in the future, and in the gaps between the past and the future he had been in the beer. In the steam room, it turned out, there had been nobody. An empty steam room had been steaming by itself, without the man, for years. That was why in the morning he could not remember whether there had been a banya at all. He remembered only his head.

A minute went by. Or an hour. Or maybe three days. The friends ate all the crayfish, then ate the buckets, then thought it over and ate one another. This was untrue, but that is how it seemed to them.

And the body gave the man more and more. It gave him heat, it gave him a heartbeat, it gave him drops on his nose, and each drop was the size of India and the same shape. On one side it had the Himalayas, on the other the ocean, and in the middle something trembled and smelled of spices. The man took all this and said thank you.

Then he got up and left.

He went out not where the beer was being poured. And not where the crayfish lay looking at the ceiling. He went out into nirvana. It was quiet there, and nobody asked whether he would have more beer.

In the morning nothing hurt. He woke up, looked at the ceiling and thought: “Well, how about that, a ceiling.” And after that everything went quite differently.

The friends waited a long time for him to come back. They waited until evening, then until morning, then until the next Saturday. The crayfish in the buckets were no longer astonished, they had got used to it.

And he did not come back. Not at all. Only sometimes he would open the steam room door a little, put his head in and say:

– Come here.

– Where, here? – the friends asked. – Into the steam room?

– No, – he said. – Further.

– And is there beer there?

– There is nobody there to ask whether there is beer.

The friends thought it over and said that this was, perhaps, too far. But one of them, the smallest, still wiped his hands on a crayfish claw and went in. Then the second went in. Then the third, but he finished his glass first, out of respect for the glass.

That’s all. Nothing more is known about them.

And on Saturday a new man came to the banya, saw the buckets, the empty glasses and the open steam room door. He stood, listened and said:

– Just a minute. Wait for me. I’ll be back soon.

But that is already a completely different story, and it did not come back either.

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The subtext. A tale of how mindfulness turns an ordinary action into practice. For many years the man went to the banya but was never really in it. His mind went off into the past and the future, and in the gaps it was occupied by beer, crayfish and conversations. In Pali this state is called muṭṭhassati: lost sati, lost mindfulness. The body is here, but attention is not. That is why in the morning he could not remember whether there had been a banya at all. An empty steam room was steaming, and the man was not in it.

Everything changes when he simply stops and pays attention to what is there: the heat, the sweat, the heartbeat. This is the basis of meditation, attention to the body and sensations in the present moment. Nothing special needs to be done, it is enough to be here. But once you truly stay in it, ordinary experience turns out to be deeper than it seemed: the boundaries of the body dissolve, the heart becomes the heart of the universe, a drop of sweat becomes a whole country.

Nirvana in the tale is not a reward for a feat, but what remains when you stop running away from the present. That is why it is quiet there and nobody asks about beer: the habitual voice that is forever wanting something has fallen silent.

The ending is the path of the bodhisattva. The man, having seen how everything is arranged, does not leave for good and does not stay to enjoy the peace alone. He opens the door a crack and calls: come here. In the Mahayana tradition a bodhisattva is one who vows not to rest until all beings are freed. But he drags nobody by force. The friends go in one at a time, each in his own time, and one even finishes his glass, because the path does not require renouncing the human. And the looped ending says the chain does not break: the next person to come to the banya will also say “just a minute”.