Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. In this 45-minute talk, Jampa Kaldan traces the history and daily reality of monastic life at Sara Monastery in South India, where Tibetan monks have built a thriving scholarly community since 1970. He walks through a typical monk’s day from pre-dawn meditation and two-hour chanting sessions through structured debating classes held twice daily, interspersed with lectures and independent study. The educational backbone is a fifteen-year curriculum built on memorization, classroom instruction, solo preparation, and rigorous peer debate—a slow, socially intense learning process designed to cultivate both intellectual mastery and personal transformation. Kaldan reflects on the monastery’s character as an alternative counterculture, notes the striking absence of ego among the monks, and explores what draws Western practitioners to ordain in such a radically different world. He concludes with the monastery’s incongruities: a center of philosophical rigor isolated in rural India, and considers what this institution might teach Western practitioners about spiritual practice and alternative ways of living.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2009 01 11 05 Monastic Life 11-2-09.mp3
UUID: c977705d-5a00-4b40-aeaf-db5f742ff468
Teacher: Jampa Kaldan
Collection: Monastic Life (Jampa Kaldan)
Date: 2009-01-11
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~5,984
The spiritual path as it’s taught by Buddhism is that our current ordinary mode of mental being—we no longer have discontent and where there can be a spontaneous and compassionate openness to the flow of our lived experience. So let’s spend five minutes in silent meditation. You may wish to use it as an opportunity to develop a positive motivation for yourself, thinking about one of the points that I mentioned, or you may simply like to use it as an opportunity to calm your mind by focusing on your breath, watching the natural in and out flow of your breathing, not trying to control it, and simply trying to come back when your mind wanders as it will—bring your mind back to the breath. Let’s spend five minutes either analyzing something that I said and thinking about it and meditating on that, or just meditating on your breath. So let’s sit with a, if we’re able, a fairly straight posture and a relaxed but firm sense of purpose and spend some time quietly meditating.
And I’ll finish that little session by ringing the bell. So what I will do during this talk is I’ll talk firstly a little bit about the history. I’ve been studying at a particular monastery in South India called Sera Monastery which is in the state of Karnataka and it’s about one hundred kilometers west of the tourist destination of Mysore. But where we are definitely isn’t a tourist destination. It’s out in a rural area.
So I’ll talk a little bit about the historical context for that place for you and then I’ll talk a little bit about the typical monastic life. Then I’ll make a little bit of comments about where it’s embedded, which is in India. And then I’ll talk a little bit about the westerners who are studying there and a few comments about what it sort of means for them. And then I’ll talk about what relevance this whole institution and way of life might have, what things it might be saying for us in the West in terms of spiritual practice. Are there any messages from looking at it?
So it was in nineteen seventy that several hundred Tibetan monks arrived at a little place in the Karnataka state called Bylakuppe, which is west of Mysore. And they had a handful of ex-Indian army tents with them and they had been guaranteed a basic, very simple food allowance. And they had been offered a patch of uncleared jungle by the Indian government with the promise that the government would help them to clear it and to set up some initial houses. One of the people in that first band of monks was Geshe Rinpoche, who has been our teacher at Buddha House for over ten years. His attendant, Tenzin-la, also arrived at this area when they were first setting up the tents, although he didn’t come from Tibet. Geshe Rinpoche did.
So Geshe Rinpoche had in fact come out of Tibet in nineteen fifty-nine to escape what was to become the attempted systematic destruction of Buddhism in Tibet during the Cultural Revolution. So it’s interesting that monks, this group of monks who arrived into India and then down to the south at Bylakuppe, that they were coming back to India with the Buddhadharma, something that their predecessors had in fact taken from out of India around a thousand years earlier. And fortunately, they took it very with great dedication because within a couple of hundred years it died out in the thirteenth century in India. There is a strange returning home for Buddhism with the Tibetans in the last forty years.
Now the roots of the institution that they were living in, this group of monks, their monastic lifestyle very clearly goes back to the teachings of Śākyamūni Buddha in around five hundred BC. He started a community of full-time ordained practitioners and shepherded it for forty years in teaching, and set up its guidelines, including its systems for dispute resolution and democratic decision making. That institution continued right down to this group of monks who were setting up their tents there in Bylakuppe in nineteen seventy. So for, in fact, two thousand five hundred years, the Buddhist Sangha was, if you like, you could say it was Asia’s counterculture. Counterculture was a popular term in the hippie era. Some of you may remember.
The counterculture—well, mainly Buddhism, Buddhist monastic life was like a counterculture to Asian culture, a radical alternative mode of living in community, besides living out in the normal world. So in nineteen seventy, here was Geshe Rinpoche and all the others. At that time, Rinpoche would have only been in his forties. And his colleagues, they were starting again, starting to try and make a working version of this institution in what for them was an extremely unbearably hot, chaotic, and wildly bizarre new environment.
So they spent three years clearing the jungle and having very little time for anything else but that, having to be very careful of the wild elephants that lived there. And even though their traditions saw them normally devoting the majority of their time to study, most of them had very little time to study in those early years. And the tents were really great for the first year, but by the second monsoon they were pretty leaky and the third one they were even worse. So it must have been pretty hard at the beginning there.
But gradually, they worked away and they rebuilt a total way of life, centered around a very sophisticated educational process. So that today you see when you look at a picture of, for example, the one that’s out there in the corridor—if you haven’t seen it, have a look after—the long picture on the wall here of Sera Monastery. You’ll see what looks like quite a large thriving town. And they have created this virtually out of nothing in the last thirty years.
The first intrepid western pioneers to go there arrived in the late seventies in their ones and twos, a time when the nearby—the main nearby town, which is eight kilometers away, was still very very small and poor. And pretty much the only way you could get there and back was by bullock cart. And as far as I know, I don’t think there were any telephones even at the monastery in those days. And one of those very early people was an Australian monk who is not a monk any longer, but he studied there for many years. And he’s now teaching and translating up at the center in Queensland called Chenrezig Institute. And his name is Jampa Yeshe.
So by the late nineties, the monastery continued to develop and grow. And there, in fact, were about ten Western monks living at Sera in recent years. So what’s the monastic life like? Let me first run through what a typical day might look like for one of the Tibetan monks.
So normally they would rise at just before five, and then, the typical morning, they would go to one of the main meditation halls, and they would spend two hours doing pujas or chanting meditation. And during that, there will be served Tibetan tea, which is tea made with salt and butter rather than sugar and milk. They use milk and butter and salt. So Tibetan tea is a bit of an acquired taste. We’re not used to putting salt in our tea.
And then at nine o’clock—so that goes from five to seven—at nine o’clock in the morning, there is a debating class will start, and debating class goes till about eleven. I’ll say a bit more about what debating class is a little bit in a minute. It’s held outdoors in a debating courtyard, but I’ll explain a bit more about that in a minute.
Then at eleven o’clock, there’s lunch. The monastery has its lunch together, all seated together in an area underneath the meditation hall. From eleven thirty to about five, it’s sort of a mixture of free time, but also people during that time will go to their lecture classes. And I’ll talk a little bit more about that in a minute.
Then at five o’clock will be the dinner with all the monks together again. And at six o’clock, once again debating class will start for the evening debate. And that goes usually through till nine with in the middle of that, there’s about an hour to an hour and a half of once again chanting and meditation and prayers.
And at nine o’clock, the debating class officially ends, but many people will start debating later than that. And also, it’s very normal practice that when monks finish the debating class, they’ll go back to their rooms and then maybe stay up quite late reciting and memorizing the text that they’re having to memorize at that time. So they maintain this sort of schedule for six days a week. They have Tuesdays off as the holiday at the monastery. And Tuesday was chosen because it’s the market day at the nearby town of Kushalnagar, one of those lovely Asian type markets. It’s really fun. Very nice. All the probably little farmers sit out their wares.
So Tuesday is a holiday. And this daily routine superimposed on that is actually a very complex program of weekly, fortnightly, monthly, and annual events and festivals and activities. So it’s actually a very busy life, and it’s very socially—it’s a very full and varied. There’s always something different and new happening, there’s always some interruption to the normal program. I think it’ll be a bit frustrating for Westerners to get a timetable for the term and expect it always to be the same time at the same day. Perhaps that’s deliberate.
So a few comments now about the actual educational process. The Tibetan tradition has a standard program of study that goes for fifteen years. And the monks will start when they’re about eighteen years old and go through till their mid-thirties. And the better ones will enter following that, will enter into a subsequent six-year advanced class. So at the end of it, you graduate with what is called a Geshe degree. And the ones who successfully complete the extra six years, that’s called the Lharampa Geshe degree.
And it seems like an extraordinarily long time to do one study, but I’ll make some comments about that as I go. The educational program really has four components. They are memorization, going to lectures, preparation on your own alone, and at the center is the debating process. So a comment or two about each of these.
There’s a lot of emphasis in this tradition put on memorization. The classes that one attends will use a textbook. The textbooks are somewhat—textbook to be. They are not a full and complete explanation. They’re more like a selection of definitions and categories and hints and summaries, but often with bits missing or things that seem contradictory. So it’s almost like a selection of pieces out of a jigsaw puzzle.
Then you’ll have certain key sections that you’ll have to memorize because the debating will be based on that memorization. Then once you’ve memorized it—I’m talking about this is the ideal way—once you’ve memorized it, you would then go to the lecture class. And that’s quite minimal, that lecture input. We think of one of the key components of a university course as being the lecture material. In fact, here it’s quite—even in the early years, you would never have more than an hour a day of lectures. And in higher classes, you might only have an hour every second day or less.
And those lectures will often be not a systematic and full presentation of the material like you might expect to get from a Western lecturer. They will be once again more highlighting certain things, drawing out some of the key issues, making some of the connections that haven’t been made in the textbook, but once again not complete. And so that brings you then—you will have to, working on those two lots of material, the textbook that you memorized and what you’ve got from the lecture class—and you will then have to prepare something to be able to take to the debating class.
So the real learning in this process is together with your classmates in the debate, in the debating courtyard. It’s there that you have to thrash out your understanding or your lack of it with your classmates. And in the lower classes, the emphasis is mainly on one-to-one debating. One sits and one stands. And in later years, it moves more to group debates with one or two standing and debating and the others sitting around listening.
Of course, the way the debating process works is that there’s one person stands and one sits. The standing person is the challenger, and the sitting person is the defender. The person who’s sitting—their job is to maintain a consistent and logically correct position all the time in the way they give their answers. So they have to really know what do I think about this topic, and what do I understand the relationships to be to the various things that are in this topic.
Now the person who’s standing has to throw—and this is a very standardized format for how to go about it—but the standing challenger has to throw things at the person and get answers. The person can simply say “why” or agree or say something to the effect of “what you’re saying doesn’t logically imply this other thing that you’re saying.” There’s only three replies a person can give. So it’s quite a very structured process. It’s not just having arguments without any direction. It’s a very structured process.
And in the debating, it’s an extremely student-centered learning process. The students, the monks in their debating have to thrash out for themselves their understanding together with their classmates. There’s very—there’s really—I was very surprised how little spoon-feeding there is. There’s just people left to be confused often and to thrash it out for themselves out of their confusion. And to go back to the debating class day after day and have to live with it, have to put up with the fact that I can’t understand this topic at the moment.
And so what it does is develop a great intellectual rigor and capacity in the monks. And it also allows them to develop a very thorough understanding of a topic. I think often a lot of our education in comparison, we sort of skim through things. We listen to a few lectures, read a book, write a quick essay, and we think, well, I’ve done that. And we didn’t spend very much time actually trying to thrash out how well do I really understand what this is all about? What are the implications of it? What are the logical relations within what it’s saying? We don’t spend a lot of time on that. Perhaps when you get very further, when you do things like a PhD, then on a very particular topic, you will have to be much more rigorous like that and thoroughly work it out.
So the process is a very slow one. This is another big difference from our style of education. It allows a lot of time for working it out and for integrating the material, both within itself intellectually, but also to let it sink in and have some impact on you as a person. So it’s quite a slow process.
I suspect that if we got a curriculum designer to put the program together for a university course, they’d probably come up with a four-year course instead of a fifteen. I’m not sure about that, but wouldn’t be at all surprised if that was the case, that we’d whip through it in four years. Maybe three. But not only is it—it all sounds very intellectual at the moment—but the courtyard, the debating courtyard is also a very powerful crucible for personal development. Because you are debating with one partner who obviously understands the topic a lot better than you. And you have to just accept that this person is completely cutting, is completely dismantling your position and what you thought you’d worked out. And you don’t understand that at all. And so you have to constantly accept that that’s what I have to go through here in this debating class—that I’m gonna feel like an idiot half the time because someone understands it better than me. Or there are parts of it I just haven’t even thought about.
And then the next person you’ll be debating with, it’ll be exactly the reverse. And you’ll understand it a lot better than him. And suddenly, you’ll have the teaching role where you have to try and skillfully lead the debate in such a way to help him find—see where he’s confused. So it’s a very intense social context because you’re doing this with these people almost every day. You can’t just say, I’m sick and I don’t want to debate with those guys anymore. I won’t go anymore. You just keep going back and doing it every day.
Of course, I didn’t mention—of course, every—all of this is not an issue for the Tibetans, but it’s a little bit more of an issue for the westerners—of course, this whole process is done in Tibetan.
So a few comments about the style of life at the monastery. So I’ve talked a little bit about—in terms of the monastic life, I mentioned I talked about the typical day, the educational process, and now a few comments about the style of life there to give you a feel of what it’s like to be there.
One way to think about this culture, this mini—this little culture of the monastery—is that it really is an alternative culture. When we think of it back in its original context in Tibet, so many people were ordained. They used to say that something like one third of all the men were monks. It wasn’t just a few oddballs escaping from everyday life into some quiet retreat. It was a huge chunk of the population. And so what they were maintaining was like a total package of alternate living where—this is for all of us here, this huge number of us, our role is to maintain this completely alternative way of living and to support each other from small childhood to death in the process. This is our life. This is our culture. This is where we—this is where we go as from six or seven years old in many cases. This is where we have our education, where we grow up, where we mature, where we undertake a spiritual path, where some of us become teachers, provide whatever services to the outside community were appropriate at that time, and die there.
The monastery life is a highly social life, and this is one of the shocks I had when I arrived. I think I had images of a Buddhist monastery being some sort of a quiet forest retreat where everyone just—there’s just just this general quiet and people keep to themselves. Tibetan Buddhist monasteries are nothing like that at all. They are incredibly—they are like—they’re like social hothouses. And there’s tremendous friendship and camaraderie amongst the monks. They live in house groups from the original areas in Tibet, so often they’re living with lots of people just from the same group of villages as them. They live—they’re like big groups of brothers when you see them living together. They have a tremendously intense, supportive social context.
And they put in a lot of work, just all the day-to-day maintenance of the monastery—the kids and keeping the place clean and cooking of food and running the kitchens. Fields—there are big cornfields around Sera Monastery, so they do a lot of the work in the planting and harvesting of those.
Another point is that it’s a very full-time. There’s little free time in one’s life there. There’s always something that you’re supposed to be doing. It’s very full-time. And there’s a real balance between the intellectual, which I’ve spoken of in some detail aspect, and the more emotional worship side of life. And some people have the impression that this particular tradition of Tibetan Buddhism has an overemphasis on the intellectual. And it certainly is unique amongst probably spiritual traditions and mystical ones for its enormous emphasis on study and intellect. However, that’s very evenly balanced in the monastic life there with the attendance at—large amounts of time doing chanting meditation, where you’re having opportunity to foster that other more emotional worship, imaginative side.
Another point about the place that really struck me is how little ego there is amongst them. The message of Buddhist practice has just seeped into this community so deeply. They just seem to be wonderfully free of these huge egos that we all carry around in the West, and that we spend so much time propping up and maintaining to all those around us, and then we invest so much energy in maintaining for each other. They just don’t do any of that. They just sort of relax—well, I’m just me and getting on with what I need to do. And there’s this wonderful lack of ego.
I’m talking about ego in that negative sense that I just said about, I’m so important and if you don’t do exactly the right thing by me all the time, I’m gonna get all offended and hurt, and then you’ll have to look after me and go and make it up and all that stuff that we invest so much energy in. They just don’t. They just don’t do it. And it’s not because they’re trying to keep themselves desperately in control. They just seem to have relaxed into being like that. And it’s very refreshing. It’s very—it’s quite upsetting at the beginning, actually. It was for me. Because you’re—it’s very hard to—it’s very hard to have all these expectations about, oh, well, you didn’t, you know, you didn’t do the right thing by me. So, you know, I’m feeling upset. What are you gonna do about it? Things we take for granted from each other in our lives here.
And related to this is also something very interesting about that—here we are. Here’s a community of three and a half thousand men with no women living there, and they just get on so well together. They just—they just—it’s almost as if I wonder if men don’t have women around and they’ve got a positive view to work with amongst themselves, there’s no one to put all their stuff onto to avoid being a—not a full human being. So they can just relax and be a complete human being and just do all the bits that need to be done instead of saying, I’m a man. I do this. You’re a woman. You do that. And spending years and years trying to negotiate the fine details of the relationship.
So that’s very interesting. I don’t know. I haven’t had any experience of what it’s like in nunneries, but I wonder if it gives them the same sense of space to be able to just unfold as a person instead of this half role that we expect each other to play in our sexual relations we are involved in normally in our culture, in any culture.
And another thing, there’s a—like a medieval simplicity about their worldview and their simple faith in the complete revelation of all that we need to know about the world and reality that they believe was handed down by the Buddha or and/or some of his key subsequent successors. And so there really is a—I imagine that the way they are in that regard is probably not dissimilar to what it might have been in Europe in the Middle Ages, where the picture of the way the world was and how everything was supposed to be was clear-cut and completely worked out. There weren’t any loose ends.
And what I think this gives them the freedom to do when I compare it with myself and my skepticism and questioning of so many things and struggle with doubts is that they can just accept the system as it stands. You don’t have to worry about it anymore. It’s obviously just all there and it’s right. And my job is just to master it and use it as a tool in spiritual growth and transformation. Not because I’m trying to prove is it the true view of reality like we would in science, but just taking it as that’s the way things are. And now I can just relax within that model and get on with the real job, which is transforming myself.
Another big difference that’s related closer to this is that there’s no sense at all of creativity. There’s no such thing as having to come up with an original thesis to get your PhD. In fact, you probably won’t get anything if you come up with an original thesis. That’s not to say that there’s not an incredibly rigorous and demanding intellectual exercise going on. I think much more demanding than much of our university education from my experience. But it has the focus of mastering a system superbly well rather than generating an extension to the system or a new version of it, which is the model that we have in our higher education as being the ideal.
And I’m not making a negative comment about that. And I wonder whether that will in fact be quite a difficult process for many of my colleagues now and in the future within the Tibetan tradition to come to terms with. Because for the first time, they’re going to have to grapple with an incredibly potent alternative intellectual and technical system that in many ways, leaves theirs for dead in terms of its understanding of the nature of reality and the details of it. So but it’s very interesting to understand the way it is and that is very logical in the sense of if you had cultures going on for hundreds and thousands of years without virtually any change in basic worldview, which is what the case was, you didn’t want to invest energy in coming up with new ideas. You wanted to invest the energy into the inner work. That was the important thing.
And I suppose spiritual practice—even now and in the future, that will ultimately always be the key focus. But maybe we won’t be able to do it in the future with such a naive assuming that everything’s worked out like we have in the past. I’m not sure about that. But I do wonder about it sometimes.
So overall, this environment is an amazingly high-intensity Geshe-producing factory. And I’m not saying that in a put-down sense. It’s like a production line for producing excellent quality people. Another way of thinking about it that I like is, you know, a lot of my classmates when I started the debating two years ago, they were these youngsters, real wild lads from the sticks of Western Tibet and all over the place with little or no education. They were nomads and peasant farmers with little or no—half of them couldn’t read and write. And they come to this big monastic university with its enormous tradition and with its incredible rigor, and they have to learn how to read and write. They have to start doing this intense intellectual study. And the whole environment is very high pressure, and it’s so social.
And it’s like, you know, how one method of polishing gems is to take rough stones and just put a whole lot of them into a big tumbling machine with some grinding material, switch it on and walk away and come back a month later. Well, here they switch it on for twenty years and come back, take it out—you have these really, really, really rough and wild crazy stones at the beginning. And at the end, you take out some very wonderful, sophisticated, educated, skilled, and beautiful, loving people. And some of the teachers we know in this tradition are just perfect examples of that. Geshe Rinpoche, who as our teacher here, is exactly that. Polished masterpieces is what this place specializes in producing.
So all of this is embedded within the world of India. It’s not in its context anymore, and that sort of adds another whole totally different dimension to it for everyone, especially for a westerner who goes there. It’s embedded in this rich complexity of India. And one English administrator after a period of time working in India when he left was asked, well, what’s India like? And he said, well, India is functional chaos. And Lonely Planet, I think, described India with something like the terms a multidimensional sensual onslaught.
And it’s in my experience, it’s certainly both of those. And for a westerner, going and living there is—one is exposed to what appears like a sort of an unbridled flow of real life compared to the highly controlled and precision-managed life that we all hold or that we all hold ourselves in here in this in our culture here in Australia. Of course, that’s just an observation from an outsider who doesn’t really understand the full details of how that culture works. And probably if you look a bit deeper, one will realize that it’s in fact an unbelievably precision and highly controlled culture as well, but in a completely different way. Especially in terms of the incredibly powerful combination of the belief in karma, in a fairly passive sense of that understanding, and the practice of caste and the interaction of those two.
So certainly for the Tibetans going there, it is a radically different world to where they were living before. And for Westerners who are going to live there, it is also. It’s an environment which very powerfully forces one to reconsider all of the things that you took for granted about life and the way things should be. I’ll come back to that topic a little bit more in a minute.
So there are some—a couple of really interesting incongruences really struck me about this Buddhist monastery stuck there in the middle of this other world. It’s become since it was started up, you know, thirty years ago, really become, in some ways, quite a little center of world attention. It’s developed relationships with people, organizations, and teachers all around the world. And that’s in real contrast to the fact that there’s been very little interaction between that community and the surrounding Indian population. Its relationships seem to be more strongly developing with the outside world rather than with the Indian community.
And in some ways, Buddhism coming back into that community, it’s being accepted back as a—like, you know, perhaps the long-lost member of the greater Hindu clan with Buddha being as being one of the reincarnations. And I’m not sure of all the—I guess there are many complex reasons why there’s not a lot of—for example, there are not Indians—people very rarely coming to want to find out anything about Buddhism, whereas there’s a constant stream of westerners doing just that.
And one of the other interesting incongruences is that here’s this perhaps one of the most one of the most rigorous centers of study in the world, and it’s in the middle of a rural and largely illiterate community. It’s just—at the first year I was here, it just struck me as bizarre, this contrast between all my neighbors that I could see just across the valley, all the Indian farmers in their little houses around there, many of whom would be illiterate, and this center of intense philosophical enterprise.
So what’s all this got to do with us and the Western practice of spirituality? I’ll first make some comments about the relevance for Westerners who are living there. And one might ask the question, well, why ever would—should a Westerner become ordained and go to live in a context like that? Is this just some sort of escapism from coming to terms with one’s own world? Is it some sort of futile attempt to try and turn into something that you’re not, which is try to become a Tibetan? You know, trying to put on some strange and ill-fitting garment.
I reckon there’s four reasons that I think why it can be of value for a westerner to do just that. One is that being there provides a space free from our everyday hyper-busyness and the aggressive distractiveness of our culture. So it provides a space away from that to allow some time to focus on the inner process, to do the inner work. It’s a very low-distraction environment. It’s a very high-boredom environment, except that you’re always so busy.
And secondly, it’s a chance to familiarize with this extraordinary counterculture that goes against the rules of how normal cultures work. So it’s a chance to see a living reality of something that doesn’t follow the rules and become familiarized with that. It indicates that there’s other ways of living. How is that possible?
Thirdly, there’s an opportunity to dig very deeply into the vast and rich complexity of what I suspect must be one of—must be the most sophisticated spiritual philosophical tradition in the world, the Buddhist tradition. So it allows a person going there and studying there, allows a person to enter more deeply into what that whole tradition and all of its enormous diversity and different subsystems—what it’s all on about.