Buddha Soup

How to begin our day, by Tai Situ Rinpoche

Teachings of Ajahn Chah

Dhamma of Walt Whitman

"Re-examine all you have been told at school or church, or in any books, and dismiss whatever insults your soul."

Day Care near Daylight School, Fang, Thailand

Thailand's Blood Foundation

Prof. Robert Thurman and the Bodhisattva Path

Joshua Glenn |

ROBERT THURMAN, who was ordained a Buddhist monk in 1964 by Tenzin Gyatso, the current Dalai Lama (an avatar of Lowbrow, in the most praiseworthy sense of that term), is one of the world’s most respected scholars and translators of Tibetan and Sanskrit for a Western audience — i.e., he is a Highbrow. Even more confusing: during the Nineties Thurman was best known as a mentor of middlebrow “celebrity Buddhists,” and as the father of a middlebrow celebrity. So what to make of him? I interviewed Thurman for the magazine Utne Reader in 1996.

GLENN: In the 1960s, it was the dream of many young Americans to trek off to the East and renounce the world of selfishness and acquisition. You did exactly that when you became the first American to be ordained a Tibetan Buddhist monk — by the exiled Dalai Lama, no less. Yet only four years later, you returned to the United States, put aside your sandals and Afghani pants for a coat and tie, and never looked back. Why?

THURMAN: After being a novice and then a monk for four years, I decided to follow the bodhisattva path (although I do not consider myself a bodhisattva), which is to seek enlightenment for the sake of others, to serve others. But being a Buddhist monk was not a suitable position, at that time, from which to command people’s respect, to engage them intellectually, or teach them, because everyone thought that an American Buddhist monk was somehow defective. There wasn’t then, and still isn’t, a real social understanding of the place of a monk in Western society. The academy is the monastery, if you will, of modern secular society, so my quitting being a monk and returning to become a professor was just a natural adaptation to America’s social reality.

I was also influenced shortly after I returned to the United States by The Vimalakirti Sutra, an ancient Buddhist scripture that I was hired to translate from Tibetan. Vimalakirti was not a monk, but an enlightened layperson who emphasized the notion of “nonduality,” which means that one doesn’t create artificial distinctions between the everyday world and some exalted state. In other words, you try to live out your nirvana in the world, not in the monastery.

8th-century Chinese image of Vimalakirti

GLENN: Your translation of Vimalakirti’s teachings is complex. We learn that you should strive to be neither affected by passion, desire, or hatred, nor to be free of them; you should live neither in control of your mind nor indulging it; you should be an ordinary person, yet be somehow extraordinary. But how does one function like that in the day-to-day world?

THURMAN: It is very complicated. I remember when I proudly gave a published copy of my translation to my original teacher, Geshe Wangyal, and he said, “Oh, the Vimalakirti Sutra. Are you beginning to study that?” And here I had just spent forever translating it!

What he was saying, of course, was that I would be finding new insights in that work for years to come, and he was right. As I understand Vimalakirti, he says that yes, there are all these amazing, miraculous, beautiful esoteric realities, but that they are all right here, right now, in the most ordinary things and events. It’s really a very Zenlike idea that we should strive to be aware of the immediate situation and not be dualistic, not seek nirvana somewhere out there. Nirvana is not a place, necessarily, but rather a selfless, open way of being in the world.

GLENN: The way of the bodhisattva boils down to two things, in my understanding: an awareness of “nonduality,” or what’s called sunyata, the “voidness” or emptiness of the self and all other things, on the one hand, and compassion for all creatures on the other. I’d like to return to the idea of compassion, but first I’d like to ask whether you think that it’s dangerous to teach people that the self and the whole universe are somehow void.

THURMAN: That is a very important question. The Buddha himself was, according to the great scholar Nagarjuna, very worried about teaching people about sunyata, about emptiness, since people might misinterpret it as nihilism, become confused, lose all their morals and ethics, and go around doing very negative things. But the Buddha lived in another time. In those days, people were very spiritual and lived in relatively simple societies, where everything had a traditional meaning attached to it. In this environment, the idea of sunyata was potentially very damaging. Today, however, everyone is a nihilist already. Everyone starts off with very materialistic ideas that they have no soul, no mind, just a brain floating there, with random chemical mutations determining everything. They start out in that place the Buddha worried sunyata would take people.

But voidness or emptiness is not the same thing as nihilism, by any means. The teaching of sunyata simply says that nothing exists independently, that everything and everyone depend on everything and everyone else for their existence. This teaching, rather than being a danger, is the one hope for a safeguard and a cure for today’s nihilism.

GLENN: But the Dalai Lama refers to these sorts of teachings as the “secret” teachings, because the idea that you can be enlightened without having to retreat from all the passions and activities of everyday life is a very dangerous one, especially for people who haven’t first trained, as you did. Vimalakirti, for instance, was a real man of the world, a successful businessman, a swinger, not a monk, and his example might lead others astray, right?

THURMAN: Absolutely.

GLENN: I can’t help but wonder if someone like Richard Gere, one of the founders of Tibet House New York, who recently told US magazine that he considers himself to be a sort of monk living in the world, might not be in danger of going astray as a result of being in such close contact with a person who champions such a complex form of Buddhism. Not to mention the other “celebrity Buddhists” who have become associated with Tibetan Buddhism, people like Philip Glass, Harrison Ford, Lou Reed, Paul Simon, Laurie Anderson, Edie Brickell, Oliver Stone…

THURMAN: First of all, I didn’t make that much progress as a monk. I learned a lot more after coming back and having to deal with the nitty-gritty. It’s comparatively easy to be a monk in a quiet monastery, but the bodhisattva tries to engage with all the noise of the world. As far as “celebrity Buddhists” go, I can’t judge them individually, but I think celebrities are in a very interesting position. They’ve already achieved great fame, success, and wealth, and they’ve realized that those things alone don’t bring happiness; that, in fact, they can be a real pain in the neck. They have fewer illusions than the rest of us, who still imagine that worldly success is going to solve all our problems. And many of them have looked to Buddhism, which — whether it is Tibetan, Japanese, or whatever — urges you and helps you to look inside yourself for treasures and pleasures, rather than depending on some sort of external success for ratification.

Also, Richard Gere has some Tantric initiations, and he does some meditations and prostrations and so forth, but I don’t think he considers himself a great Tantric yogi or anything, or pretends to be one. I’m sure if you asked any of these celebrities point-blank, “Do you do any esoteric thing?” they’d laugh and say, “No, no…” What someone does in Tibetan Buddhism is not levitate or whatever, but try to be more humble, try to be generous, try to be tolerant of things that are irritating, a little bit, day by day. That’s where they measure their real progress.

Finally, I don’t teach people high Tantric teaching. The reason I write a bit about them is that I like everyone to know that such amazingly sophisticated things are there in the Tibetan inner sciences. But if someone wants to really study Tantra, if they’ve done some serious preliminary practice, I would refer them to His Holiness the Dalai Lama or to some other real guru.

GLENN: Then you don’t consider yourself a guru?

THURMAN: I’m not a real guru, I’m an academic professor. I may be what they call a kalyanamitra, a spiritual friend of some of these people, offering advice now and then if I’m asked. But I don’t try to take up the role of serious guru. In fact, part of choosing the professor’s or the academic’s life pattern has to do precisely with avoiding getting into the guru game with people. If I had stayed a monk, I would have had to have disciples, which gets you involved in the complications of being a guru, having people develop various kinds of transference toward you and dependencies on you, and I didn’t think that was healthy for them or for me. I was helped in the decision, of course, by my wife Nena, who always insisted on maintaining that I not get deluded about there being anything exceptional about me! She’s been a great spiritual friend of mine, and had the foresight to encourage me to pursue more mainstream academic pursuits. We’re on a pilgrimage together as much as possible.

GLENN: I’d like to get back to compassion. In the Mahayana tradition compassion is seen simply as the logical outcome of the deep understanding that all things and people and events are “void,” or interdependent. Because, logically, if you harm others when your existence is inextricably bound up with the rest of the world, then you’re also harming yourself. Your book The Politics of Enlightenment: A Handbook for Cool Revolution builds a whole politics of “engaged Buddhism” out of this idea of compassion. But it’s a very paradoxical idea: How can someone be simultaneously indifferent to the world and altruistic?

THURMAN: The concept of “engaged Buddhism” isn’t my term. I believe we first heard it from Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese Zen master. But bodhicitta, the way of the bodhisattva, is exactly as you put it, the joyous and compassionate commitment to living beings born from an unwavering confrontation with the inconceivable profundity of sunyata, or emptiness. It’s an idea that goes all the way back to Sakyamuni Buddha, the historical Buddha, himself. The Buddha never taught escape from responsibility or society; he taught escape from ignorance and evil thoughts and actions. After he was enlightened under the Bo tree, as the legend goes, he didn’t stay there: He got up and tirelessly taught others for the rest of his life.

Thich Nhat Hanh (center) leading a peace march

GLENN: But teaching Buddhism isn’t the same thing as a “revolution,” necessarily. Buddhism tends to be regarded, in the United States, anyway, as a nice therapy, not a force for social change.

THURMAN: Well, you know, the Buddha was one of the few great religious leaders who was never persecuted or executed, because he knew the art of the possible, he was a very effective administrator and strategist. He was a prince, and in those days princes weren’t trained to be comparative literature professors, or poets; if he hadn’t gone over the wall, so to speak, he would have been a general. So he realized that he couldn’t just say, “We’re going to rule India according to the Buddhist ethic, and let’s give up our armies,” and so forth. He would have been crushed. Instead he founded the monastery, this very countercultural institution that exerted a slow and steady influence on many societies over the following centuries. And the sangha, the community, he founded was a sort of nation-within-a-nation in which the principles of individualism, nonviolence, personal evolutionism, simplicity, equal access to enlightenment, altruism, and pragmatism held sway. And if lots of people really started trying to live by these principles, we’d have a revolution on our hands.

Also, I want to point out that these ideals fit in very nicely with what we think of as “American” ideals of freedom, civility, pluralism, altruism, generosity, faith in human development, and individualism. We don’t need to call it a “Buddhist” movement, if that alienates people. The point of my book, which I’m writing all over again, by the way, is to say, look, given the fact that we live in an extremely free society, the idea that we can just sit on the sidelines and criticize everything “they” do is irresponsible, it’s unenlightened, and it’s un-Buddhist. There comes a time when you have to step in and take responsibility. We need to get up off our Zen pillows and mobilize active Buddhist participation in American politics. We need to speak out, we need to engage our opponents in dialogue, and we need to vote for the closest thing we can find to our principles. The Tibetan Buddhist movement in this country is only 15 or 20 years old, but I think it can become a very effective movement, and I think it’s very necessary right now.

GLENN: The “engaged Buddhism” of groups like the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, for instance, is very much an oppositional movement, one that practices protest and resistance, not one that seeks to actually step in and take over American society. And I hardly need to point out that Buddhism has historically tended to support the inequalities and tyrannies of whatever political system it has found itself under.

THURMAN: You’re right. The engaged Buddhists who come from Japan, Vietnam, or China, for instance, have a background in their respective Buddhist traditions, where Buddhism was never anything more than a countercultural institution. So these “engaged Buddhists” are operating, ironically, under a dualistic presupposition that Buddhism can only be a restraining force on a fundamentally corrupt social order they can never really transform. They’re like the human rights activists who limit what they ask governments to do. They say, “Well, we’re just going to restrict ourselves to stopping torture. We’re not going to ask these governments to really allow self-determination, because it’s hopeless, they’ll never do it.” There is this very defeatist attitude that basically says it’s impossible to stop… well, Caesar. It fits in well with the Christian “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto the Lord what is the Lord’s,” you know, because you can never stop Caesar. Caesar is going to crucify you.

GLENN: I take it, then, that you get your inspiration for a “politics of enlightenment” from the history of Tibet. You have often described the preinvasion culture of Tibet glowingly as having been unique in all the world. How so?

THURMAN: As an institution Tibetan Buddhism has had the experience of administering a society along Buddhist lines, not just protesting or whatever. Tibet is the only Buddhist country in history where Buddhism ever became the mainstream culture. In Japan, China, India, or in Southeast Asia, for instance, Buddhism always coexisted with something like Confucianism, Brahmanism, or Shintoism — some sort of native culture that considered Buddhism impractical as far as fighting wars or running a bureaucracy are concerned. The rulers of those countries might very well have honored the monastery at times, but the final control, socially, rested with the king, with his military establishment and his aristocracy. Whereas in Tibet, after a thousand years of that same type of dualistic social structure, where Buddhism was a kind of countercultural restraining influence on the mainstream political entity, in 1642 the citizens of Tibet asked one of their leading monks, the fifth Dalai Lama, in fact, to be the king. Most of the national budget was then invested in the monasteries, which became the training ground for the government bureaucracy. Then, once the majority of single Tibetan males were in monasteries instead of in the military, the country demilitarized. And they developed an educational system connected with a massive monastic tradition that has no replica anywhere in the world. Their gross national product of enlightened persons must have been proportionally higher than any other country ever.

More than that, the Tibetans succeeded in transplanting that same cultural pattern into the Mongolian nations, which then became what I call “fully monasticized” and very demilitarized. This was kind of a miracle because the Tibetans and the Mongolians were two of the most ferocious, imperialistic, military nations in the world, and then, just as the rest of the world was gearing up to become imperialists, they turned into very peaceful monks. Both nations ended up being chewed up by the Russians and the Chinese precisely because they were demilitarized, but for three and a half centuries — right up until the Chinese conquest of Tibet in 1950 — the Tibetans were unique, and they continue to be potentially unique. If we can restore the Tibetan culture, they will show us a very meaningful society.

GLENN: Tibet was the inspiration for the mystical, utopian land of Shangri-La in James Hilton’s novel Lost Horizon. Are you “Shangri-La-izing” Tibet? Is Tibet really such a worthwhile culture to emulate? It wasn’t a democracy, it was ruled for centuries by feudalistic noble families and then by theocratic monks, it had a low standard of living…

THURMAN: Tibet was never a “theocracy”; Buddhist monasteries are run on the rules established by the Buddha, and disobedience and critical thinking are encouraged in them. But to answer my critics who accuse me of trying to pretend that every Tibetan was an enlightened yogi, and they never even wiped their butts, and they didn’t have robbers and bandits and ignorant people, and they weren’t cruel ever — like it’s all just some sort of fantasy of mine, well, that isn’t at all the case. My thesis is a sociological one that has to do with mainstream social trends. The fact that a great majority of a country’s single males are monks rather than soldiers is a major social difference. Now, many of those monks might be nasty, they might punch people, some of them might pick your pockets, some of them might be ignorant. They might eat yak meat; they’re not out there petting the yaks. So I am in no way Shangri-La-izing Tibet when I try to develop a non-Orientalist way of appraising and appreciating certain social achievements of Tibet, which really tried to create a fully Buddhist society.

But my opponents, who want to adopt the old British attitude that Tibet was dirty, grubby, and backward; or the modernist attitude that it’s a “premodern” undeveloped society; or the attitude of many other Buddhist countries that think Tibet was somehow degenerate because it was very Tantric, and Tantric Buddhism grows out of the degenerate period in India, well… I think these attitudes are mired in the idea that we modern Americans are the most advanced civilization the world has ever seen. I don’t think that’s the case. I consider us pretty barbaric. We’re like the Mongolians before the Tibetans civilized them.

GLENN: You, Richard Gere and several others founded Tibet House New York — which is a cultural embassy of sorts, combining the functions of an educational institution, a museum, a conservation foundation, and a membership community — at the Dalai Lama’s request in 1987. You’ve said that one of the goals of Tibet House is “to make Tibetan culture familiar in every American household by the year 2000.” Is that one way of “civilizing” America?

THURMAN: I think so, but there are various levels on which it operates. We don’t have to convince everybody that Tibet is the unique, ultimate society of the world to try to save it. There are a lot of good-hearted people who’d like to save various Native American cultures and indigenous people all over the world, and if that’s how they have to consider Tibet to want to save it, that’s fine with me. It is my belief that Tibet can become a great school for mind training for people who would come there from all over the world to get “higher” education. Tibet could be a kind of Switzerland, where people would go not only for spas, but also for yogic training of a certain special kind. It would be a very effective institution, if they could develop it.

GLENN: The current situation in Tibet would seem to preclude any such development, don’t you think?

THURMAN: Ever since Mao’s armies invaded Tibet in 1950, the Chinese have engaged in what has been described as a wholesale campaign of genocide and “culturecide” against Tibet. As many as one-fifth of the preinvasion population of 6 million people were killed by famine, warfare, and execution. 130,000 Tibetans have fled into exile, and hundreds of thousands more have been interred in gulags and work camps. Tibetan cultural heritage has been carefully and systematically destroyed: Historic and religious sites and monuments have been razed; the Tibetan language was basically outlawed; much of Tibet’s voluminous philosophical, historical, and biographical literature was burned; and only 13 of over 6,000 Tibetan Buddhist monasteries remain standing. Worse, China’s program of sinicization, an ongoing population transfer into Tibet, has resulted in seemingly irreparable damage to Tibetan culture.

Tibetan culture has survived the Chinese in two places. It has been reconstructed in exile, in the tiny seed community of about 6,000 Tibetans in Dharamsala, the Indian town where the Dalai Lama lives, which is the seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile. And it has survived in the hearts of most Tibetans, and in their language, in that even though all the buildings have been destroyed, and the monks, and the education of several generations, their own hearts are still untouched in their basic faith and orientation — they haven’t succumbed to Chinese materialism as a whole.

But I also fear we’re getting to a point now where we’re many generations away from the old education and the old culture, so the memory of that thriving world is endangered. Also, the Chinese are relocating so many people to Tibet and profoundly diluting the Tibetan population.

Tibetans in the US protest Beijing Olympics

GLENN: The Dalai Lama, as the exiled political leader of a very oppressed people, has taken a very peculiar position. He refuses to hate the Chinese. In fact, he has frequently said that we need to get rid of the notion of “enemy,” that we need to transform our enemy into someone toward whom we feel respect and gratitude.

THURMAN: It’s a very difficult notion, but the Dalai Lama is saying there that the only way to peace is peace, and that you cannot achieve peace through violence. He is following an age-old tradition that includes Gandhi and Martin Luther King, but he’s also staking out new territory by trying to do this in an international setting, whereas leaders like Gandhi and King were working within their own nations. Also, he is speaking for a tiny minority, 6 million Tibetans, against a vastly superior numerical opponent, which is the huge Chinese nation of 1.3 billion people. All he has on his side are the truth and his peacefulness.

The amazing and audacious and visionary thing that the Dalai Lama does, and how he got the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989, is his insistence that he is going to see a free Tibet in his lifetime by nonviolent means, and that everyone should solve problems by nonviolent means. The Kissingers of this world, and the Deng Xiaopings, laugh at him and despise him. But I have great faith in him, and I believe that what he is saying will come to pass. He was really ecstatic in 1989 when the Czechoslovakian revolution against the Russians was relatively peaceful. Hungary, the Baltic states, and all of that unraveling of the Russian empire proved that this sort of thing can happen relatively peacefully, and that it is more effective if it is peaceful than if it is a violent, bloody revolution.

The Dalai Lama always says, “Let’s not talk about Buddhism, let’s talk about the common human religion of kindness.” You cannot make peace with the neighbor by hating the neighbor. The Dalai Lama gets this fundamental teaching from Shantideva, the great Mahayana teacher, who wrote the Bodhicharyavatara, the guide to the bodhisattva way of life, which is the whole yoga of developing tolerance by learning not to hate the enemy — by, in fact, learning to identify the true enemy, which is hatred. Hatred is far worse than any ordinary enemy. Ordinary enemies harm us, but the harm they do is not just in order to make us unhappy; it is also meant to be of some help to themselves. But hatred itself has no other function but to destroy our positive actions and make us unhappy. So therefore hatred is the thing you mustn’t give in to, and hatred is the only thing that you can hate.

THURMAN on TRANSLATION and DEATH

GLENN: I’d like to ask you a question about your profession. Translation’s reputation as a form of literature is low, to say the least. It is too often perceived as merely a mechanical activity, in which one simply finds words from one language that correspond to words from another. But you have been known to say that the hermeneutic — or interpretive — enterprise is the very essence of the Buddhist path, and that the problems of hermeneutics are the problems of life itself. How so?

THURMAN: Well, everything is a matter of perspective and interpretation, right? And so how you interpret things has everything to do with the inner quality of your response to things. Within that, I think that translation is a wonderful exercise in seeing the multiple ways reality can be expressed and analyzed. Different languages carve up reality in different ways. There is an ancient Buddhist symbol of a translator that is a two-headed duck — not a duck, exactly, but more like a cuckoo or something. It has two heads, meaning that it looks into two different cultures and makes a bridge between them. Now, in modern times, translation is not respected. Modern cultures are fairly arrogant and ethnocentric, and think of themselves as higher than anything from the past, or any other existing “premodern” culture. So we naturally think that in translating something, we’re bringing something from some lower realm into our realm just out of curiosity. Since we’re the highest culture, anything we would translate into English would just be for our curiosity. But in the ancient period, and particularly in Tibet, where they had the idea that Buddhist knowledge, which they learned from India, was something of a higher nature, and that to learn about it could elevate a human being, translators were respected, because they had to look into the realm of that higher knowledge and bring it into the lower cultural realm of the target language. In our Dharma communities, though, a translator is a little more honored, because we have the idea that Western philosophy didn’t get it together quite as well as the Buddhist philosophers did.

GLENN: In the introductory chapter to your recent translation of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, you write that death is “a strong force close to life, a powerful impulse to the good, an intensifier of positive attitudes and actions.” What do you mean by that?

THURMAN: On a very human level, Tibetan culture shares our Western attitude towards death, that it is a frightening and tragic end of life. On a more spiritual level, however, Tibetans have learned that death forces everyone to let go of everything: You let go of your mind, your personality, and your sense of control over reality. And that is what Buddhism teaches, that nothing we think we are, do, feel, or have has any stability. This state of letting go can also happen in moments of great pleasure, like in orgasm, or sometimes when you make a great gift or a great self-overcoming. Heroic acts are done when people let go of their normal self-guarding attitudes; at the moment of death, then, everyone comes into some sort of heroic state. If you try to be aware that life is fundamentally let-go-able, even when you’re not actually facing death, then you can begin to live in a more ‘letting-go’ way. You can become more sensitive in your interactions, more free, and more open. Being aware of death, even rehearsing death in meditation can make your life more rich. The art of dying is as important as the art of living.

Monk for a Month: Not Buddhist Tourism, but Dharma in Action

Taking Buddhist Tourism to a New Level: The Monk for a Month Program in Chiangmai

December 4, 2009 by wanderingdhamma

In Joe Cummings’ Meditation Temples in Thailand: A Guide he describes the situation regarding English-speakers in connection with meditation and ordination at the famous Bangkok royal temple, Wat Bowonniwet. He states that this temple used to have meditation instructions for English-speakers until the 1980s when backpackers began to behave inappropriately, even sleeping on the temple grounds. At this time also the wat made a rule that foreigners would be expected to make a long-term commitment to the monastic life and would prove this by living as a novice for at least a year. Thai men who want to ordain are a different situation because it is a socio-cultural duty for them—so they can still ordain without commitment and for a short period of time. This is the case at Wat Pah Nanachat also where foreign monks must show their commitment before being allowed to ordain as a full monk.

A new program called Monk for a Month has brought a solution to any foreigners wishing to ordain for a short period but not finding temples willing to do this. Foreigners to Thailand also might feel that it is difficult to ordain because they do not know the customs or the language—Monk for a Month solves this problem as well by explaining everything in English. But there is another difference between this program and ordaining at any Thai wat: participants are required to pay for these services. Because of this, the reactions to this program have not all been positive. Here is a summary of discussions on the internet:

On the website Dhamma Wheel the discussion surrounding this program is mostly positive. Most respondents find this a great opportunity, way to spread Buddhism and also cheap. They say that they would spend the fee for the program anyway as donation, so being required to offer that amount is not a problem. But there are also those who comment that Buddhist teachings should be freely given.

There is also an article from the Global Post explaining about the program, the founder and his motivations. The author discusses the criticisms and provides a balanced perspective on the mixing of religion and capitalism.

On the Thai Visa site there is another discussion debating the merits or demerits of such a program. The teacher of the program, is on hand to give his perspective. He feels that foreigners want to understand what is going on within the Buddhist culture of Thailand and Thai monks are too busy or don’t have the capacity to explain. The founder of the program, Bowler, thus advertizes that he can offer English-language guidance in a world most tourists would never get to experience.

The Facebook page of Monk for a Month has been very popular with close to 10,000 fans. This page displays many positive comments from past participants and questions answered by both founder, Ben Bowler, and Dhamma Instructor, Fred Blandford.

The Monk for a Month website emphasizes that one does not have to become a Buddhist in order to participate in the program. The value of the product they are offering is stressed, making the operation sound very business-like. Participants can choose between different ‘packages’ for their stay dependent on their ordination status and length of stay. The reader is told that participants don’t have to worry about any detail as everything will be taken care —sounding similar to a luxury hotel website. It is stressed that you will have an experience like that of a Thai monk. This makes it seem like one would participate in the program for the novelty of it, rather than sincerity of wishing to learn about Buddhism.

The temple where the program takes place is called Wat Sri Boen Ruang in Fang, Chiangmai, and I went for a visit Tuesday morning, December 1^st. When I arrived a few novice monks greeted me in English, asking where I came from. Obviously the interaction with foreigners through this program has given these novices confidence in their speaking ability. Wat Sri Boen Ruang has about 50 novice reside monks and about 100 students that attend the school on the monastery grounds, with only 3 or 4 fully ordained monks. Thus the main interaction of the foreign participants is with novices—they go on almsround together, eat together, and can often be seen sitting and chatting in English together.

Despite the Monk for a Month hype on the internet and the popular Facebook fan page, there is nothing to indicate this temple hosts the program. There are no signs, and not that many foreigners around. There are usually between 1-4 participants in the program with only a few rooms available for the guests.

Tuesdays are when Fred, the Dhamma Instructor, usually begins his introductory teaching. Students arrive on a Monday and are given a day to settle in before receiving the two hour teaching sessions over seven days. Fred begins with the basic teachings on Thai culture, basics of Buddhism, and how to behave in a wat. Over the next few days students learn about the Buddha’s life story, the basics of concentration and vipassana meditation, major Buddhist concepts, and points of Buddhist morality. The seven days of teaching are rounded out with a discussion of the four stages of Enlightenment and Buddhist cosmology.

Fred met founder of Monk for a Month, Ben Bowler, by chance while eating lunch in Fang one day. After discussing his meditation retreat experiences at Wat Rampoeng, Chiangmai, and how he wished he could have helped out the other foreign meditators, Ben decided to give him a chance to teach. Fred’s qualifications are that he has been a Buddhist for over 30 years, he has been to many retreats at Wat Rampoeng, read many books on Buddhism, and has learned from Thai teachers including Luangpau Charoen of Wat Amphawan outside of Bangkok and most recently, Suphawan Green, a Thai laywoman and former student of Buddhadasa Bhikkhu.

Fred teaches vipassana meditation as he learned it in Wat Rampoeng. He tells the students the basics and then they can practice on their own if they wish. Participants also learn what Fred considers to be the ‘core’ teachings in order to give them enough background to do the practice of meditation. Much of these teachings, such as karma, rebirth, cosmology, are hard for international visitors to accept, however. When I mentioned this to Fred, he answered that the foreigners don’t have to accept it, they are not trying to convert anyone, just give them the context. Fred asserts that this is a good jumping-off point to go deeper into Buddhism. Many participants have gone on to meditation retreats or have thought about ordaining more permanently.

After learning about my main research interest, the pedagogical strategies of teaching Buddhism and mediation to foreigners, I met Graham, the guest coordinator of the program. Graham doesn’t like his title because he agrees it sounds like he is working for a hotel. His role is to arrange and help with transportation, arrange laundry, cleans rooms, fix any problems in living situation, and arrange the ordination. There is also a Thai layman, Charin, working for the program. He facilitates activities such as taking the participants on trips to the nearby waterfalls. When I was there he also helped translate the lunch order of the participants to the cafeteria workers.

Fred felt that compared with meditation centers in the area, one receives the teachings here—the participants understand what is going on around them. Students also do not have to meditate but can choose their own activities. Some participants would rather do nothing with their vacation time or read some of the Buddhist books in the library, or participate in any of the organized outings. Thus compared with the international monastery, Wat Pa Nanachat (it is still a stretch to compare the two) Monk for a Month is much more light-hearted with its purpose being to live in the Thai temple and receive the cultural translations international visitors need.

Fred emphasized that the local community accepts and enjoys having the program at this wat. On wan phra the locals try to help the foreigners make merit by showing them how to offer. The local Thai Buddhists are happy to give alms alongside foreign visitors to foreign novice monks. Locals also enjoy attending the monk for a month ordinations.

Thus participants receive Buddhist teachings in the form of Fred’s Buddhism, translation services, activities, and a hassle-free journey. Is it worth paying for? I am not going to weigh in on that question. This program has been running for a year now and it is definitely interesting for those thinking about the mixing of religion and commerce. My main focus, however, is on strategies of reinterpretation for foreign meditators. The teaching here is unique in that not only meditation is being taught but also a kind of short Buddhism 101 class. And this is taught by a layman who is not part of a lineage of teachers, nor a scholar of Buddhism. Thus the presentation of Buddhism here is particular to this particular teacher.

But the presentation is also similar to meditation centers in that meditation is still the main focus and in both it is emphasized that conversion is not the goal. In terms of integration into Thai Buddhism, however, the point of the program is to become a part of temple life, as opposed to meditation centers where integration is at a minimum. Thus this is a new model of offerings for foreigners interested in Buddhism in Thailand. The ordination part is related to the model of Wat Pah Nanachat, the focus on meditation teaching is related to meditation centers across Thailand, and the light-heartedness and service-orientation is related to tourist organizations.

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Martijn van Osch, editor of Fresh Creation's 10 Things Learned from Meditation

From FreshCreation.com

In December 2007 I started meditating. A friend of mine had lent me some books about Buddhism. After reading them I was very eager to learn more. What attracted me most to Buddhism: 1) it is not a religion, it’s ‘merely’ a set of guidelines that help you in your search for happiness, 2) you learn by experience, it’s a way of living. Here are 10 things that I learned through 5 months of meditation.

1. Thoughts are not reality

I put this as the number 1 item on the list cause it had such a big impact on me. By doing meditation on a daily basis I learned to recognize thoughts for what they are: thoughts. Nothing more.

Looking back now, I spent an awful lot of time thinking about stuff that had happened in the past or about stuff that still had to happen. In the meantime I forgot to see the things that were happening now. Constantly I would be judging people, worrying about money, thinking about what others might be thinking… As a test: close your eyes and start counting your breaths from 1 to 10. Do this over and over and experience how many times you get ‘distracted’ by thoughts. That’s exactly what I mean.

Now, I’m not saying thoughts are a bad thing. I’m just saying that it’s a good thing to recognize which thoughts you need to be thinking about and which thoughts you don’t need to be thinking about. That alone makes your life a lot more pleasant.

2. Focus is important

Focus was generally not high on my agenda. If a great chance would come up I would want to grab it. No matter if I was already doing other stuff at that moment. I felt like I would be missing out on something if I didn’t grab all the chances that were thrown at me. But by wanting to experience everything I ended up being constantly focused on opportunities that I had missed out on. My life was not about what I was experiencing, it was about what I was not experiencing. Very tiring. By meditating I learned that doing one thing at a time is a good thing. Fully concentrating on whatever I’m doing is like a small meditation every time. Also being aware of why I’m doing what I’m doing helps a lot.

3. Media influence your view on the world

As I was examining which thoughts were going through my mind and what they were based on, I realized that many times I would fear or judge situations or groups of people that I had never experienced or met in real life. So where did I get these ideas about how they would be? Through the media. In all shapes and sizes. Newspapers, tv, radio, magazines, the web… I’m not saying that media are a bad thing. They can provide you with all sorts of useful information. But what kind of information do news programs usually provide? Bad things that are happening around the world. In Holland an edition of the biggest news program lasts for 20 minutes. Just imagine the impact if you would watch this show every day of your life, starting when you were a kid. A lot of people do. That must have an impact on your view of ‘how things are’.

Also advertising is a big influencer. The more ‘perfect’ the girls on the billboards look, the more dissatisfied young teens will be about their own looks. Nowadays I hardly watch any tv. Usually if something really interesting was on, friends will tell me about it and I’ll have a look at it on the web.

4. People are good

Instead of creating an image in my head of what a person is like by judging the looks and the movements, I now try to just see that other person as someone who has 3 basic things in common with me: 1) he or she is also human, we are the same species, 2) everyone is in search of happiness, 3) everyone is trying to avoid pain. Since I have that in common with all people around me, there’s a connection with everyone around me. By being aware of that connection it’s easier for me to start conversations with people that I don’t know.

By trying to be open I had the chance to meet some amazing people that I could help or just get to know briefly, like during a ride on the train. I used to have my doubts if all people were good. But if you stand on the street and you see someone crossing the road and nearly being hit by a bus, what is your first reaction? You scream: “Look out!” Or not? That would be your first response. You do this without thinking. Without thinking you want to prevent the pain of others. You want to help people. It’s just that thinking sometimes gets in the way.

5. Positive thinking is very powerful

If negative thoughts can influence the way you perceive the world in a negative way, then the opposite is also true. So the way to change ‘reality’ is just to start thinking positive thoughts about you and the world around you. It sounds too simple to be true. But it works. By repeating the sentences ‘I am love, I am perfect, I am you’ during my mediation, I created an image in my mind that everyone is perfect and everyone is love. I must admit that I had some difficulties starting with this exercise. It felt like a ‘girly’ thing. Me sitting down with my eyes closed while thinking ‘I am love’ was something that I thought was not me. Still, I decided to give it a shot and see what it would do for me. The results were amazing. After a while I noticed that the world around me looked more friendly and I noticed that I started to approach people in a very friendly and open way. By going through these experiences I could add visualizations of my experiences to the words ‘I am love, I am perfect, I am you’. Now I had ‘visual proof’ in my mind that showed me that I was indeed what I was thinking.

The thing is that the mind doesn’t make a difference between what you see ‘in the real world’ and what you see ‘in your head’. For instance: close your eyes and visualize a great dish that you would just love to have for diner tonight. If you really put yourself to it, you will start to notice that the amount of saliva in your mouth increases. Your body thinks the dish is actually there so it starts to produce the saliva. This means that your mind doesn’t make a difference between reality and visualized images. Do you see the power of this?

6. Mistakes are good

For me life was, and sometimes still is, about having success. About competing and winning. As a child I would get very upset if I wouldn’t win a simple family game. Instead of enjoying the game itself I would be focused on the winning. Not winning meant no joy to me. Meditation is all about experiencing ‘now’. Experiencing the moment. You can’t do anything about the past and you can’t control tomorrow. The only thing you can do is try to make the best of now. That also means that you’re enjoying a game as you play it. Doing your best while playing it, but not focusing on the outcome. It’s an experience. As is every moment. This means that losing or making mistakes are also experiences. They teach you something.

For instance, as I look back on the relationships that I’ve had till now then I am glad that everything went as it did. Each relationship taught me something. But back then I had great pain for a long time when a relationship ended. It felt like I had failed. Now I realize that the main reason I felt that way was that I had an image in mind of what a perfect relationship was like. Not living up to that image meant ‘failure’ to me and failure meant that I had made mistakes and mistakes are bad. But what if you turn mistakes into something good? Something that you can learn from. Then it’s much easier to accept the things as they are.

7. There’s too much stuff

Living in the moment means that you try to make the best out of each moment. As I started to realize this, I also realized how much time I was spending on buying stuff, looking for stuff, talking about stuff, maintaining stuff, replacing stuff, worrying about stuff. For instance: I spent 6 months on finding a good used car. Then when I bought it, I had to arrange an insurance, pay taxes, arrange a parking garage, have it looked after by a mechanic. I also started worrying if it would get stolen or damaged. After 8 months I sold the car again. It was a relief. This experience led me to getting rid of all the stuff that I didn’t need. Each time I sold or gave away something that didn’t really matter it felt so good. Space. There’s space in my room now. There used to be piles of stuff. Space makes me much happier than piles. Each time I buy something now, I first ask myself if I really need it. Most of the time the answer is no.

8. Listen to your body

Meditation learned me that it is important to listen to your body. In the beginning, while sitting on the ground with crossed legs, I noticed that I started to feel all sorts of small pains in my body during meditation. Perhaps these pains had always been there. I don’t know. But while sitting down and concentrating on my breath, they became very clear. It might sound strange, but I think pain is a good thing. It’s the way your body tells you: “There’s something wrong here. Take a look at it.” By constantly making minor changes in my meditation position I started to notice what my body wanted. The pain ‘told’ me how to sit down. I’m meditating for 5 months now and I still haven’t found the perfect position but I feel that my posture has improved a lot. That feeling is great. It tells me that I’m slowly getting rid of all the bad habits that I got used to. Besides the right posture your body also tells you when to eat, when to go to sleep, when to take it easy… All kinds of signals that I would just ignore 5 months ago. But that I am very aware of now.

9. Helping others is what counts

Meditation helps you to reach happiness. Other people are also striving to find that. Not all know how. So that’s also one of the main reasons for me to write articles like these. To make people aware of the great things that meditation can do for you. To inspire people to help themselves and others.

Fresh Creation is about helping people with creative minds. Showing them what’s possible. What people are capable of. If you make a habit out of helping people you’ll find out that it becomes your second nature. Besides that you’ll find out that putting a smile on someone’s face is the ultimate reward. ;-)

A while back I helped out a man that was standing in front of the train station in Amsterdam. Everyone ignored him while it was clear that he was asking something. So I stopped and listened to his question: “Could you help me carry the bags to the station? I’m just too tired to carry them on my own.” I picked up one of the bags and started walking to the station with him. It turned out he had just bought loads of books and had to catch the same train as me. He was so happy that I helped him. He’d been standing there for 15 minutes with nobody stopping. He bought me something to drink. I helped him put the bags in the train and, as I arrived at my destination, he offered me one of his books.

10. Being honest

With a clear mind you start to think clearly. You feel in control of your life again. Each moment it is you who decides what to do or say. Sometimes though, there are still situations from the past that haunt you. With me that was the case too. Certain people and situations were still in my head and I kept thinking about how I responded in those situations. Sometimes I was angry, sometimes hurt, sometimes sad. To put an end to this I decided to talk to those people. Tell them what had been bothering me. This gave me a lot of rest. Making the appointments was hard. But I’m glad I did it. Sometimes people simply denied situations that had been bothering me, sometimes they said they were sorry and sometimes I realized that I was the one who had to say sorry or just had to accept situations as they were. As hard as it was to have these conversations, I’m glad I had them. My mind is at ease now. A lot less unnecessary thinking going on. Mostly thoughts that I want to think.

Final remark: I hope you understand that the list above is not a complete list. But these were the main things that popped into my head as I started writing this article. Don’t think of me as an expert. I still have a long way to go in the meditation process. The list above is just an overview of some of the things I learned. I hope this article will give you enough motivation to try it for yourself so you can experience what it can do for you.

Many thanks to the people that told me about meditation.

From Shambhala Sun | July 2009 | The Violence Outside of Us

From Shambhala Sun | July 2009

In Times of Trouble

by Zoketsu Norman Fischer

In the Surangama Sutra we hear of Kuan Yin, the bodhisattva who through the power of her practice of listening is able to hear deeply the cries of the world. She hears these cries with a still and perfect serenity, and she understands that they are all manifestations of the perfect light of enlightenment. Because of this she remains peaceful and is able to offer exactly the right kind of help to beings, according to the situation.

I suppose we all are and aspire to be Kuan Yin. But also we aren’t Kuan Yin. We are human beings and so when we confront the stark realities of the delusion of human violence, we cringe. We aren’t serene. We get jittery and angry. We feel grief and anguish, terror and disorientation.

I don’t think we want not to feel these things. If we are human we do feel them and we want to feel them. Maybe we have to be both—both Kuan Yin, who accepts what is with perfect and effective equanimity, and also poor human beings, who find what happens sometimes unbearable and unacceptable. And yet we have to bear it and accept it, because there isn’t any alternative.

The day before the terrible attack I was helping to facilitate a meeting about racism and diversity in the Buddhist community. In the meeting we heard many expressions by people of color about their frustration and their suffering. This suffering often is hidden to people of the dominant culture, who have no idea what their brothers and sisters go through in the course of any ordinary day in America. One African-American woman said to the group, “Racism isn’t just eye-holes cut into white sheets. In its most insidious form it is simply privilege itself. When you live in a world structured so that some races dominate over others, some races enjoy peace and prosperity while others suffer terribly, then simply enjoying your privilege unthinkingly is itself a form of racism.”

I do not doubt that something needs to be done in response to these terrorist events. Exactly what needs to be done I do not know—as a religious person it is not my job to figure this out. I do not know what I would do if I had the responsibility. But if the actions taken come out of a wrong understanding of the situation, out of a blindness to the social and spiritual forces that have given rise to it, then those actions will be twisted and ineffective. I have seen this so many times in my lifetime: violence inspiring violence that gives rise to more violence. Wars that end temporarily, only to produce new wars.

The people who hijacked those airplanes and murdered so many people were themselves people. They did what they did because of their damaged hearts and twisted minds. But their hearts became damaged and their minds twisted for a reason. There isn’t any separate evil out there that I can find, blame for all this, and root out of the human family. There’s just one world, one human race. The evil that happens happens for a reason.

I heard a Catholic priest speaking about all this on television. Someone asked him to explain how God could allow such things to happen. He said, it’s a mystery, we don’t know. But I think we do know. Terrible things happen because humans beings act with violence and aggression and delusion. And they do that because they have been hurt, because others have acted with violence and aggression and delusion against them and their families. People do what they do because they are terrified of confronting the pain and anguish in their own hearts. The violence outside of us is an outer projection of the violence and pain we feel inside.

If we externalize such events and their perpetrators, scapegoating them on to some outside force or person, some evil in which we have no part, and then, to alleviate the grief and the impotence we feel, try to stamp out that evil once and for all, this will never work. It is so perfectly clear. The result of this kind of understanding will be more and more violence. Soon after the crisis began His Holiness the Dalai Lama wrote a letter of condolence to President Bush. “It may be presumptuous of me to say this,” he said, “but I hope that the American government will not try to correct the situation with further violence.”

But this is what we have been seeing for so long it seems like forever. This disaster in New York and Washington was terrible. But there have been so many terrible things. Almost every nation in the world has felt terrible things like this. The dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bombings of London, of Dresden, of countless other cities. Vietnam, a country decimated. The Holocaust. The genocide of the native peoples of the Americas, of Africans, of Armenians. All the lives lost in those places—we cannot forget about any of them. And now, so close to home, we are feeling the pain of such useless deaths.

There are some people who wonder how there could be such evil in this world. How human beings could generation after generation perpetrate such acts. But I do not wonder about that. To me it seems so very much ingrained in who and what we are. To speak in theological terms, it’s not that evil is out of God’s control and that we, on God’s side, have to overcome it. Good and evil exist on the same plane and operate by the same calculus. Evil is good covered over. Wherever we ourselves, in our confusion and in our unwillingness to look at life as it actually is, with all its pain and difficulty, commit acts of evil, we add to the covering. And whenever we have the courage and the calmness to be with life as it is, and therefore, inevitably, to do good, then we remove the cover. We transform evil into good. This is the human capacity. Evil is not a part of reality that can be excised, cast out and overcome. Evil is a constant part of our world because there is only one world, there is only one life, and all of us share in it.

There are times when life becomes so stark, so absolutely real in and of itself, that there is no thought of meditation practice—just bearing witness to what is is enough, and more than enough. But here I do not mean meditation practice itself. I mean the preciousness of it, all the interesting refinements and developments of the practice that can get so artistic sometimes. It’s all of that which reality often blows out of the water.

But meditation practice itself—the simple practice of being quiet, the practice of listening to ourselves, to the cries of the world, listening deeply with an accurate ear, allowing, opening to what we hear—that practice is more relevant in times like these than ever. There are, in a crisis, a million ways to help and we all should help in whatever way we can. But beyond help, and in addition to it, we need to bear witness to what is happening. To take it in, imagine it, feel it, grieve over it, accept it, not accept it, understand it, fail to understand it, and comfort each other in that. To do that we need to sit, we need the expansiveness of our sitting, as well as of our chanting and our prayers. It seems absolutely essential.

This is the complete version of the author's piece as excerpted in the July 2009 issue of the Shambhala Sun.

Metta

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