The Monastic Lifestyle
Q: You practiced for several years as a layman before becoming a monk. What do you find to be the biggest difference between the two, or the major benefit of ordination?
A: Comparing the spiritual environment in a monastic community with the spiritual environment in lay life, the most prominent difference is the degree of commitment and consistency. The sangha, the monastic environment, is designed to provide a spiritual edge so that those who have the courage to practice diligently can do so. The lay life requires time and energy to be spent in meeting the responsibilities of family life and the demands of a full-time job. This is the way it is for most people.
There are a few rare individuals capable of practicing diligently in the world itself. They can create their own spiritual environment. For them, the marketplace and the high-walled monastery are on an even playing field.
Q: You have been living the life of a monk for quite a while. What lead you to take the robes? Or perhaps I want to ask, what do you consider the biggest advantage of living as a monastic?
A: Before I became a monk, I found that the world would sabotage my good intentions and considerable efforts at every turn. Contemporary society is ever so willing to bend to accommodate our most frivolous desires. So whenever I made a slip, lost myself, or lost my commitment to living simply and quietly—baam! everything would collapse and I would find myself back at square one.
Monastic life is much more contained, much more supportive of my commitment to simplicity, quietude, and contemplation.
Q: When I visited your monastery, I spoke with one monk there for about half an hour. After a few minutes, I got the distinct impression that the monk’s mind was in worse shape than mine. It is possible that meditation practice could take someone farther out of a meditative frame of mind?
A: You should have met that monk before! In the monasteries where I have lived, I have always seen people improving. Some arrive in dreadful shape but somehow have both the wisdom and the merit to enter into a commitment to meditate.
Monasteries are like hospitals. Some of us are still in the intensive care unit. Some are relatively healed and are helping others. Some will leave and practice in the world. It is not easy to live this life fully. The few who can do it will remain, maintain their commitment, and carry the tradition forward. The great legacy they will leave is the continuation of the tradition.
Don’t bother to judge others. Those you see practicing in monasteries are doing the best they can. Some are walking up a very steep incline. If you appear to be healthier than someone else, just see that as appearance and drop it. Watch the mind continuously, and use your experiences to awaken to the-way-things-are. Practice is the determination to observe and investigate the mind always.
Q: I have long thought about staying in a Buddhist monastery for the six months of vacation time that I have accumulated. But I know that people in the monasteries of your tradition eat only food begged as alms and eat only once a day, in the morning. The wake-up bell is rung at 3:00 A.M., and every day there are chores that everybody shares. All this sounds too extreme for me. Can you suggest a monastic community that isn’t so tough?
A: In Asia there are all kinds of monastic communities that provide the kind of opportunity you are looking for. But you will find some aspects in each of them that will not suit you. I don’t know much about monasteries other than the ones I have lived in except by hearsay, so I can’t help you much there.
Keep in mind as you are considering these places that things are relative. If you had never seen a redwood tree, you would think that a twenty-foot fir is very tall and beautiful. If all you know is three meals a day, eight hours of sleep, one hour of news, thirty minutes of balancing your checkbook, doing laundry every second day, one and a half hours of daily commuting, and fifteen minutes working the daily crossword puzzle, then naturally the monastic schedule is going to appear overwhelming. And after the initial feeling of awe disappears, you may feel aversion, or you may feel indignant that it isn’t more to your liking. We all have gone through that one.
Once you get into the rhythm of a monastic lifestyle, the order of things just becomes ordinary. Not eating three times a day, not following the news, not balancing checkbooks, not scouring the daily paper for clever cartoons, not clipping discount coupons, not adding up air miles, and not fiddling with leaky faucets becomes just another way of life, one that frees up a lot of time and space. Then you will have the chance to understand a great deal more about yourself than you do now.
The community activities such as doing chores together, chanting together in the early morning, and walking for alms help to keep everyone going in the same direction. They promote harmony in the community and help the individual to develop and sustain a valuable meditation practice.
Q: Do you find the diet and way of eating in your monastery—with the various foods gathered from begging all mixed together—to be helpful spiritually, or is it just a convenient way to deal with getting food into the body?
A: At the very least, I regard monastic life as a key to opening doors and windows that are ordinarily shut. With my ordination I resolved to eat a single meal a day in the morning, as dictated by our tradition. I soon began to notice many unusual things about eating that had otherwise escaped my attention.
One very interesting quirk was that I would feel more hunger after eating than before. That was strange. Obviously, there was a hunger within me that was not satiated by food. I investigated that for a long time. As I worked with it around my meal, I was able to sort out all kinds of stuff and to disentangle a lifetime of distorted and conflicting messages regarding food for the body and food for the heart. I could then use that understanding to see deeply into my mind where the core ignorance lives and binds me to the wheel of becoming. This is the secret hideout from where foolishness, greed, and clinging contaminate our life. This process and many other experiences and insights have lightened my life and widened my range of choices.
With food, I now find that I can take it or leave it and am just as happy with one kind of food as I am with another. I have the freedom to eat what is available and be content with it. This is the priority before any other consideration—even whether the food is vegetarian or not. So, for me, eating rather quickly what is offered once a day, in silence and with appreciation, is spiritually productive as well as efficient.
Q: Why are monks not allowed to watch TV?
A: To avoid distraction. The commitment to take ordination is a determined effort to turn away from petty diversions such as hobbies, reading pulp fiction, and indulging in sports and games. These only serve to take the mind away from what is really worthwhile. Taking ordination is a commitment to die to the superfluous.
Television, video games, shopping, and the like hardly give the mind a chance to become grounded. When we’re watching TV, we think we are keeping up with important events of the world. But once we understand that the world operates without moral values and mostly through power and exploitation, the actual events become inconsequential—the countries change, the leaders with their distorted and selfish desires make a few plays in the world and then disappear. If we hang on to any of it, we end up fretting over it, for most new events stir up a lot of anxiety. We become embroiled in the news at our own peril. For people who can see through this, there are other, more important things to occupy the mind with.
Q: There is a movement in the United States to liberalize the rules for monks so they can adjust to the times and fit into the culture more smoothly. What do you think about this?
A: I think that if the distinction between monks and laypersons becomes blurred, everyone will be the worse for it. The monk will have compromised his integrity in order to meet other people’s concerns, and the laity will lose much more than they realize. The monastic community carries the lineage of the dharma vinaya, the Buddhist teachings as encompassed in the monastic vows, in its entirety. The only way this tradition can be handed down through time in its pure state is by people actually living it.
The lifestyle of the bhikkhu has been designed to help individuals turn away from the world and look into the truth of things. They are able to know and pass on aspects of the teaching that can only be realized through the deep understanding that comes from full-time inquiry. This wisdom is invaluable, the most precious thing in the world.
Q: There is a general belief that most monks and nuns take ordination because they are heartbroken. Was this true for you?
A: If people believe that, then nothing or no one can change their minds. However, in the monasteries, I have rarely met anyone romantically brokenhearted. To take on this level of commitment to spiritual life requires more motivation than that.
In a sense, though, I could say that I took ordination because I was heartbroken—heartbroken because the world is as it is. Suffering, conflict, poverty, exploitation, and injustice are rampant, and little is done to address these urgent problems. Unlike some other Western monks whom I know, I wasn’t depressed, suppressed, or incapable of living an ordinary life. I simply opted for a better way to live. I was keenly aware of all the pain in the world as you and I know it. I became thoroughly disenchanted and bored with what the world had to offer. The reality of our human situation broke my heart. I am striving toward the way beyond.
Q: What do the monks do about the hoards of mosquitoes that live in the forests and caves where the monks reside?
A: We don’t do anything.
Many years ago, I caught a mosquito in a large-mouthed bottle. It had been buzzing around my cave for hours. When I finally trapped it in the bottle, I tried to reprogram it through telepathic suggestion into believing that it was a butterfly and should behave like one. Two days later I released it inside my mosquito net. It circled around me a few times and helped itself to another bite of my arm.
This confirmed for me that mosquitoes know just one way of behavior—and also confirmed my lack of telepathic prowess! The mosquitoes are acting the way they should. It is we humans who see a problem where there is none. It is we who must change. This is part of the Buddhist practice of letting go. Learning to coexist with everything is part of becoming a mature person.