Last week we watched a short documentary on Clear Mountain Monastery’s three day walk from the church in Seattle which has been their temporary home as they grew from 2 monks with a dream to a vibrant sangha now making the transition to the beginnings of a monastery 40 minutes from Seattle.
This week we’ll backtrack a little and listen to a video recorded before the land was purchased. Ajahn Nisabho talks about their vision for the monastery and its place in their lives as monastics and the lives of the wider sangha.
Among other things, Ajahn Nisabho talks about the need for monastics to have a home where they dedicate their lives to their solitary practice in the deep forest. He also talks about their vision that the monastery become a place where lay practitioners can come daily, to make the monastic silence and support a regular part of their lives. He calls it the “missing piece of the puzzle” in lay life - the opportunity to spend time in the profound space where practice and life merge.
When the Buddha set up the monastic life, he made sure it was intricately bound with the lay people the monastics would serve. And generosity - or dana in the Pali language - is the binding agent. The monks do not carry or handle money, they do not ask for donations of money, they also don’t buy food, cook or forage. Every morning they leave the monastery with their alms bowls and go to the villages. There they go from house to house and villagers come and put whatever food they can spare, that they were cooking for themselves, into the bowls of the monks. It might be only a scoop of rice if the villager is poor, it might be more sumptuous. Whatever they have, they share with the monastics. In their turn, the monastics open the monasteries to the villagers for teachings, for holy days, for ceremonies and rites around birth, death, marriage. They are the spiritual resource for the villagers.
The monks return to their monasteries with whatever food the villagers give them and eat their one meal of the day. If the donations are slim, the monks accept that. If they are generous, the monks accept that. If the monks became distant or unresponsive to the spiritual needs of the villagers, the flow of food might suffer.
So the monks are intimately bound to the villagers and the villagers with the monks.
The two ajahns at Clear Mountain Monastery have already been living on alms in Seattle, visiting Pike’s Market daily. Their sangha organizes these visits and ensures adequate support. They intend to continue the practice in North Bend which means they have to introduce the concept to a small town unfamiliar with monks in robes walking around with alms bowls. The sangha of practitioners will also take on this responsibility and many of them plan to live near the monastery. They will be introducing and growing a practice in North Bend, Washington, that has been in place for thousands of years in Thailand and other Buddhist countries.
Theravadan Buddhism or Insight Meditation as it is commonly referred to here is the most down-to-earth practice-oriented of the various Buddhist traditions. It has been possible for Westerners eschewing the excesses of patriarchal religion in this country to separate from the religious to engage in Buddhist practice. And Jon Kabat-Zinn took this to another level in his development of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction. All the Buddhist references, iconography, spiritual beings and devas, figures of compassion or peace were eliminated in favor of learning the techniques and psychology of meditation and mindfulness. This made MBSR acceptable to the medical community. And living in the present, being in the present moment has taken on a deeper significance in our lives as the profundity of life opens out through this deceptively mundane-seeming focus.
Nevertheless, from the beginning the Western lay teachers have worked to create centers where solitude and seclusion was possible, where Buddhist practices - bowing and chanting - were exampled and where Buddhist statuary and hanging tapestries spoke to the connection with a spiritual practice as well. And the retreat centers have welcomed and housed sincere meditators and monks and nuns alike for 50 years or more.
But increasing numbers of people have begun finding actual physical monasteries to add to their retreat-centered practice - visiting on holy days, spending several days or a week staying either on the grounds or near the monasteries to attend meditation and practice periods with the monks, and ask questions or blessings from the monks.
Why might this be? What call is being answered here?
We are all aware that the majority of peoples around the world practice some form of religion. In Eastern countries, Buddhism is a religion even though the Buddha never claimed to be anything other than human and asserted over and over again that if he could become enlightened, so could we.
Nevertheless, life can not only be stressful, it can be extremely difficult. It can challenge us to the core of our being. It can annihilate us without warning at any time. And a central tenet of Buddhism is impermanence embodied in the five Remembrances:
I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape growing old.
I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape having ill health.
I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape death.
All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them.
My actions are my only true belongings. I cannot escape the consequences of my actions. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.https://www.lionsroar.com/buddhisms-five-remembrances-are-wake-up-calls-for-us-all/
So the monasteries and the rituals and rites are physical manifestations of our need to go beyond the mundane, to confound our thinking, rational minds, to surrender to the ineffable, to open our hearts to the yearnings within us, to the confusion, to the pain, to the incomprehensibility of it all, to surrender to the profound “what is.”
This experience is not limited to Buddhist practitioners. Philosophers have pondered this phenomenon for generations as outlined in this article in Psyche https://psyche.co/ideas/the-most-profound-wonder-is-stirred-by-what-is-most-ordinary:
Typically, wonder is directed towards the novel and the unusual: the new Guinness World Record, an emotion we had never experienced before, an impressive artwork, the latest gadget. The list of the remarkable, the curious and the astonishing is endless. But Coleridge’s, Wittgenstein’s and Patočka’s wonder is different: what is most ordinary suddenly looks like a profound mystery. We are taken by the quiet realisation that ‘we are at all and that the world is’, that ‘everything is’. Martin Heidegger calls this a wonder at the most usual unusual: ‘In wonder, what is most usual of all and in all, ie, everything, becomes the most unusual … in this one respect: that it is what it is.’
And increasingly our practice confronts us with this astounding truth - things just are. It is what it is. This is because that is. This ceases to be because that ceases to be.
And while we can sometimes hold these truths privately and surrender to them, sometimes we might reach out to a place where such profound revelations are held in special reverence, where the laws of impermanence might find balance in human compassion as deep as the oceans, where bowing, chanting, prostrations, living, practicing and seeking with monks and nuns can offer support to bear what is sometimes unbearable, see what is sometimes unseeable, touch the joy inherent in the center of the flowering moment of being.
Some may call this “the sacred.” It is also the very ordinary currency of our lives seen when the scales drop from our eyes.