MACON — Buddhist monk Bhante Dam Phommasan arrived in a wheelchair. Just as he was entering a vast, carpeted meeting hall for a speaking engagement at Mercer University, those escorting him stopped and reversed course.
They wheeled him 15 or so feet back to the hall’s main doors.
There would, for Phommasan, soon be a grander entrance.
Four months earlier, in mid-November on the outskirts of Houston, his left leg was mangled when he was struck by an automobile during the widely publicized, 2,300-mile Texas-to-Washington, D.C. “Walk for Peace.”
Phommasan had joined his fellow monks on their easterly trek south of Dallas. His wounded leg was later amputated below the knee.
In Macon on Wednesday, 120 days after the accident, Phommasan, a native of Laos and abbot at Wat Lao Buddha Khanti, a Buddhist temple in Snellville, was being fitted with a prosthetic leg. The university’s “Mercer On Mission” program is renowned for annual trips to Vietnam, where, since 2009, some 24,000 amputees have received ingenious and low-cost, lightweight prosthetic limbs.
In the hours after his fitting, Phommasan, 33, made his way to a campus meeting hall in a wheelchair. As he sat in the doorway, more than 250 people waited.
Credit: THE MELODY
Credit: THE MELODY
One of them, Jane Donahue, 84, of Warner Robins, who had followed news of the cross-country walk, said, “I love the monks, their humanness, if you will. Their empathy and compassion for all living things.”
Donahue, a former systems analyst for IBM and avowed peacenik who once lived in Thailand, said, “They offer hope. … We’re kind of lost right now. It’s so chaotic. We don’t know what is going to happen day to day.”
At the doorway, Phommasan, robed in his deep-orange kasaya, rose from the wheelchair and stood with the aid of a walker. He then took a tiny step, then another, his first in public since November. The room applauded. Phommasan nodded and, with not much of a limp, more or less glided across the room.
That he was here at all was by chance encounter. Oddly enough, when he came to the U.S. in 2016, he was online exploring where he might go to college. He happened upon Mercer. Though he never enrolled, he considered it his dream school.
Credit: Leah Yetter
Credit: Leah Yetter
After the accident, he traveled to Washington in February to be with the monks at the end of their 15-week trek. Around 20 monks walked on foot through several states, including Georgia, where they were met by large, enthusiastic crowds drawn to their message of peace.
In Washington, Phommasan briefly met a 2017 Mercer graduate named Brandon Tran, a chiropractor who has, for more than a decade, been involved in Mercer On Mission. Tran was there treating some of the monks for soreness and injuries they’d sustained on their journey to the nation’s capital.
Tran arranged a follow-up meeting with Phommasan at the Snellville temple. Tran offered him a Mercer-made prosthetic. After learning of Mercer’s mission in Vietnam, he told Tran, “Let’s do it.”
Tran was speechless seeing Phommasan, privately earlier in the day, take his first steps with his new limb. “It’s incredible,” Tran said, “how much people are willing to work and not give up on life after losing a leg.”
While Phommasan was being fitted and becoming more comfortable with the prosthetic, he joked about his speaking engagement later in the day. “Maybe,” he said, “they won’t even know which leg is which.”
During his talk, he said the other monks at one point asked after he was injured whether they should complete the walk. He told them to keep going, that perhaps continuing would make the journey more meaningful, that he would be with them in spirit for every step.
Credit: Leah Yetter
Credit: Leah Yetter
He was asked by someone in the audience how “in the accident you lost your leg. Is there anything you gained?”
Phommasan answered optimistically: “I lost only one leg.”
Phommasan had been walking with the monks for nine days when the accident happened northeast of Houston. A passing automobile collided with one of the monks’ escort cars, which then hit him.
He described himself as “lucky” that he didn’t pass out.
“I remember everything,” he said. “I refused to die.”
He said his mindfulness proved helpful, living on in the moment and focusing on the pain, which he likened to meditation. He told of lying in the hospital, hurting from his wound and excruciating treatments.
“I focused on my breathing,” he said. “Breathing in and breathing out.”
Ten centimeters of a bone in his lower leg were missing. “Gone,” he said, “on the road.”
In early December, doctors gave him two options: amputation at a spot about halfway up his shin or a much more involved and arduous two-year process of lengthy hospitalization to rebuild his leg using muscle and bone from other parts of his body.
He said, “I don’t have time to be in the hospital.”
Later, he was asked about thankfulness, appreciation. “When you feel gratitude in yourself,” he said, “you can spread your kindness to everybody.”
Toward the end of his talk, he led the room in mindful meditation, in eight minutes of calm.
Six minutes in, he spoke softly of thinking deeply about someone you love.
Seconds later, a few rows to his left, a jingly robotic thrum pierced the silence: someone’s cellphone.
Eyes shut, Phommasan’s face didn’t react, but he did seem to grin.
Credit: THE MELODY
Credit: THE MELODY
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