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 reflects on monastic life at a Tibetan Buddhist monastery in India and its practical lessons for Western practitioners. He opens with his personal experience of cultural disorientation as a Western monk—how encountering radically unfamiliar practices, rituals, and ways of living forced him to confront the constructed, impermanent nature of reality itself, a core Buddhist insight often taught abstractly. Kaldan explores several implications for spiritual practice in the West: that one’s entire life should become practice rather than splitting spirituality from everyday activity; the irreplaceable role of a committed community in supporting genuine transformation; the importance of rigorous study alongside meditation; the necessity of sustained effort over years rather than seeking instant enlightenment; and deliberately creating spaces free from distraction in a culture that prizes constant busyness. He concludes with unresolved questions about the future of monastic ordination in the West—whether short-term ordination, lay-centred practice, or accelerated study programs can preserve Buddhism’s benefits without requiring traditional monastic commitment. Aimed at Western Buddhist practitioners seeking to understand how monastic models inform practice outside the monastery.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 2009 02 11 06 Monastic Life 11-2-09.mp3
UUID: 607f706e-ce54-4b8a-aa65-af1b42067ac5
Teacher: Jampa Kaldan
Collection: Monastic Life (Jampa Kaldan)
Date: 2009-02-11
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~6,431
About our life and our lived experience. What’s it all mean? And fourthly, I think it’s an opportunity to be exposed to the everyday unset un what would you say? Upsettingness or sense of having a rug pulled from out under your feet of of of a practical exposure to this central theme in Buddhist philosophy, the idea of emptiness. In other words, the idea that the reality that we live in is very much the reality that we construct and lay out onto the world and ourselves and everything.
And it’s our propensity instinctively to do that all the time that leads us to all our habitual problems. That’s one of the fundamental thing issues that Buddhism is on about. Now when a westerner steps into this context, it’s like practical meditation on emptiness because you emptiness because you in in in both let me for example, with my experience, with coming to terms with this radically different culture. For the first year or two, was there. I was so anxious and afraid of this strange new world, so fearful, constantly overwhelmed with the sense of how can it all work because it doesn’t have there’s no rules here that I can see.
And I guess any of you who’ve traveled to strange new places can probably relate to this. And I think this sense of there was everything seemed to have a lack of solidity. It all looked artificially constructed as if, know, how can it all work? Is it really gonna be there when I go out of my room and go down to the little stall where the Indian guy so kindly brings fruit and veg to sell at the monastery every day so I can have access to is how does he get his fruit and veg? Is it gonna work?
Maybe he won’t they won’t it won’t be there tomorrow. Yeah. And this constant sense of anxiety and how things not going together how they should. And I had the feeling that that that was that sense was despite it feeling really bad was exactly what the dharma is telling us to familiarize ourselves with. Because we get so stuck in our our habitual world that we construct individually, but more more at a deeper level socially as a linguistic cultural entity.
We just take the whole thing for granted as absolute reality. And suddenly, I was in a context where there were not eighteen million people taking things as absolute reality, but one billion people taking a completely different reality as an absolute reality, and they all seem to be happy and getting on with it. What was wrong with me? And so I get as we do, we’re really flexible, aren’t we? I got used to it after a couple of years and began to see, oh, it’s okay.
You know? This is good. I I quite enjoy it here, I’m getting used to it now. It was very interesting because I there’s another dimension of the same thing that I and I suspect other of my colleagues from the west have experienced. And that and some of us, I suspect, experience it who come to Tibetan Buddhism and begin to investigate it and wanna study it a bit, and we find this this really bizarre different culture that we can’t make head or tail of.
And they’ve got all these strange ways of doing things and all these different jargon and and just rituals. So much ritual and iconography that we don’t understand. And sometimes at the monastery, would find myself just becoming quite angry and just sick of all this. You know, this is not me. What have I got to do with all this system?
And I could say I could think to myself, well, I if I I can see that if I grew up with this, then I would just fit in with it and I’d flow, and I was jealous that my call my Tibetan colleagues, they can just join in and and it’s helping them move along and get on with their spiritual work. All I’m seeing doing is stumbling along and getting angry about not being able to do it all probably because I don’t understand half of it, three quarters of it, nine tenths of it. And so when Khensur Rinpoche, my teacher, who’s our teacher here, came to visit the monastery a couple of years ago, I put this to him and said, well, you know, I get really uptight and angry about all this stuff. I said to him basically what I said to you. And I was very I was so knocked out by what Rinpoche’s reply was.
It was very short, and it was just so incisive. Rinpoche said, oh, maybe you’re seeing the maybe you’re seeing the emptiness of it. And then he I I mentioned a couple of specific things that were bothering me, and he didn’t try and give any explanations about, you know, this is such a spiritual thing and you should try and he just said, oh, well, these things came about because that has that meaning and they thought about things that way and therefore they decided to do this like that. Yeah. Well, he was just pointing out, well, these things arise because of causes and conditions.
That’s why the tongue is drawing that because a whole lot of causes and conditions came up together and some Indian master decided that that’s what Mañjuśrī looked like. The embodiment of wisdom looks like that and the Indian iconography uses lotuses and other assorted hundreds and thousands of objects. And that’s it all just comes together. So anyway, I I was getting used to half and and just after I had that conversation, it was it was like a that was like a primer for the next experience of practical emptiness, which was when after three years there of trying to get a little bit of Tibetan going, I decided to join the debating class two years ago. And and once again, I was catapulted into this completely when I went to the debating class, because my Tibetan was was still quite was only just barely adequate, not being a very fast learner of languages.
And it was like going it was like stepping into a Dali painting. I remember this. There’s surreal bizarre paintings when everything’s just weird, if any of you have seen any of those surrealist paintings. And going on to the debating courtyard was like being in a Dali painting because I would sit in my room and memorize strings of strange sounds. And then I’d go out into this courtyard where there were one and a half thousand other monks, and I’d stand in front of someone, and I’d make strange movements and make strange sounds, and they’d make strange noises back at me.
And everyone was doing the same thing with such energy. And what was most amazing, with such obvious sense that it all had meaning. And to me, it was just a few of the words here and here that had meaning. And I had and and there was this struggle with with having this global seamless meaning where you just relax deeply into the meaning and go with it, which we get so used to doing. That went on for several months.
And and unfortunately, it went away. And by by about a year, I was finding that if I was doing my preparation well enough, I was really starting to be able to enjoy it, and and it didn’t seem so empty. It didn’t seem empty anymore. I’d I’d unlearned the emptiness and familiarized myself with it enough that that it was beginning to seem real and normal and and as if this is real reality now. And and that that wonderful, fresh perception of the beginning, I can’t I don’t seem to be able to access that any more.
So my feeling is that perhaps that of all the reasons for a Westerner to be there, my feeling is that for certain people that could be one of the most important. Because that grappling with that issue is is one of the key things that we have to deal with in Buddhist in Buddhist practice. So now a few comments about going on with the Westerners, a few comments about what’s been happening amongst the Westerners there. As I said, there’s been Westerners there for ever since the early years, but in recent years, there’s been more. And in recent years, there’s been a growing tendency.
We’ve been putting a lot more effort into being together and working together as a group of Westerners. We Westerners tend, I think, pretty much to like to be individualists. And when we go to the wild west, we wanna go alone on our horse. And do it alone. And I think there’s a little bit of that when when someone becomes a monk and goes to a bizarre new context like that.
There’s a bit of this sense of, well, I have to sort of do it on my own. And one of the one of the really interesting nice things that’s been happening amongst the group of Westerners there is that in the last couple of years we’ve been being developed we’ve been turning that around and putting a lot of effort and energy into developing a community together as a group doing things together. And I think that’s going to be extremely valuable for us. I think it will make our time there much more useful. I think it will help us to avoid pitfalls like thinking what we’re going to the the true way and that what we left behind was somehow the big mistake because this is where we came from.
This is where we have to live. It’s probably where we’re gonna go back to. We have to come to terms with it. We can’t you know, the whole west can’t go and practice Buddhism at their monastery in India. We have to do it in our day to day lives here in the west somehow.
So to facilitate this process amongst us, you know, we’ve, over the last year or two, put together plans to build a house. And for those westerners who wish to live together up until now, each person has lived in different parts of the monastery often, you know, twenty minutes walk from each other or whatever, depending on whose teacher you had and which country you came from. There are people from probably six different countries. Are at the moment five or six. And we’ve we are currently raising money towards this project.
It was very interesting. We thought we needed twenty five thousand until recently because we wanted the twenty five thousand US dollars because we wanted to build a room a place with about five rooms plus some amenities. And the head of this particular spiritual organization around the world that Buddha House is a part of, the FPMT, the spiritual director of that organization is Lama Zopa. Lama Zopa recently in when he met the sort of the head person of our group of Western Monks at CERA recently met Lama Zopa in Bodh Gaya in December and said, I’ll give you guys fifteen thousand dollars which actually bought us up to the twenty five dollars we needed. But in true style for Lama Zopa from what I hear.
He then went on to say, but I think you should build fifteen rooms and not five. So we probably need more like sixty thousand US now than twenty five. So there’s actually a display out here. And if some or other of you amongst the many demands on your generosity feel like you’d like to make some contribution of that, there’s some brochures and information out there. And any contributions would be most welcome.
Welcome. People would be able to give cash to me. I’m here for another ten days. But after that, there would would just be by means of a couple of other methods that are set out in the brochure if you’re interested. And on this on this topic of generosity, I I just wanna digress for a minute because I came across this lovely tableau situation one day when I was visiting the local town of Kushalnagar near the monastery.
It was a couple of years ago when it was Christmas, and I had gone into Kushalnagar because it was our day off and I was buying a few groceries. Was Kushalnagar was very busy on that day. And I was standing just near the main road that goes through the town, and it was quite hot and dusty. And there were there were, you know, a few meters away on the road, there were sort of trucks and buses careening past, and it was a very busy atmosphere. And there was a little banana selling stall just a couple of meters back from the road with a boy in there selling bananas.
And I was watching this situation, and a monk who’d been obviously doing some shopping had a bag with him and he went and bought a banana from the store and just stood next to the store and peeled the banana and and actually took broke off a piece of the top of the banana and took it. And then one of the local beggars from the town and there’s probably twenty or maybe thirty regular people you sort of get to know who who make their living from Beggie and Kushalnagar. But one of them came up and just stood in front of this monk. Just stood there and put out his hand in front of this monk. And the monk off took the took the banana and and gave the beggar the the rest of the banana.
And I thought, oh, maybe he won’t accept it because, you know, he’s already taken a piece off it. But but to my surprise, he just took it and just stood there and started eating the banana. And when he’d finished, there was a was a cow standing sort of next to next to them, just sort of half on the road. So the buses and trucks had to be go around a bit, you know. And the beggar took this took the banana skin and just sort of automatically and very wonderfully just handed the banana skin towards the cow.
And the cow just sort of nodded its head and took it and happily got on with its work of cleaning the place up and making milk. And the little boy in the stall had been watching all this. Obviously, the little boy, he came out of the stall and he smiled at at this he smiled at the monk and and he picked up the bag picked up the monk’s bag and sort of smiled at him and handed it to him. Almost all. He didn’t there was no words exchanged.
It was almost like, I recognize what you did. Here, I’ll lift up your bag for you and give it so you can go your way. So that little tableau sticks very strongly in my mind seeing that happen. And the the interconnected series of generosity was very lovely. Don’t think it’s got anything to do with what we’re supposed to be talking about tonight.
So what about relevance to practice in the West of the things I’ve been talking about? What’s this life and world there? Has it got anything? Has it have any implications for our undertaking of a spiritual practice? And there are are several things that that I’d like to comment on.
Firstly, the idea that one’s life is practice. I think we can often get a little bit sidetracked with thinking that there sort of spiritual things you do, and then there’s the rest of your life. And I’ll sort of, you know, I’ll sit and meditate now, and and that’s my spiritual activity. And then I’ll go out and do the other things I have to do, you know, in my life. And we create this sort of divide.
And what what the the monastic life illustrates to me is this this principle of of your life is your practice. In a sense, there’s sort of nothing special at the monastery. It’s all everything is just everything is just what you do when you’re a spiritual practitioner, When you’re trying to wake up as a human being, everything you do is a part of that. I think it can be actually really hard for us here in our busy western lives to develop this sense of one’s life being a seamless web. But that’s really the way it is in that context.
And I think maybe a message is, yes, it is harder here to undertake a spiritual practice and to make one’s life a seamless web. So we don’t have these separate compartments of, you know, work, home, bought a house and spiritually things and recreation, and they’re sort of in these watertight compartments or can be for some of us. And how do you break how do you open up the compartments and allow the whole thing just to be one seamless web of this is what I’m doing with my life for the purpose of my goal of of spiritual practice. A second thing that strikes me is this the the central role of what what one might call the enlightenment community. See, I don’t think that spiritual growth and success never happens in a spiritual vacuum.
And that’s one of the powerful messages of this monastic environment. There’s a there’s a this powerful culture and community whose reason for being is to maximize the opportunities that an individual can have to do the work of inner transformation. That’s that’s its reason for being that community. And those individuals wouldn’t have a hope of doing it without that community. They wouldn’t have a hope of doing it without it.
The vast majority of them. And in a bigger sense, none of them could do it because, you know, we just we are so deeply socially embedded as as thinking creatures. We don’t exist without a culture. So here, in this in that environment, that Sarah, the practitioners are immersed in this powerful context over many years and it prepares them to be able to take on the subsequent difficult work of individual practice when you do solitary retreat and fancy things like that. But for all the early, long formative years of their practice, they’re surrounded and supported by this rich, complex community that’s heading in the same direction.
Think with our Western individualism, we find it quite hard to accept the importance of that community. We think, oh, yes. I’ve come to Buddhism. I’m a spiritual practitioner. And now, you know, it’s been a year.
I guess I should start doing solitary retreat soon. And and, you know, they this in this culture that I’m living in there thinks that’s absurd. You know? Maybe there are one in a million people who can do it that way, but the vast majority of us can’t and it’s completely unrealistic to think that we can. And I think this has got a very powerful message for our centers in the West and the importance of them as communities where people can work together and support each other in their spiritual practices.
And even in perhaps much more important than it ever was in the past because we are are within a culture where absolutely everything in the culture is going in the opposite direction of what one wants to undertake. There is no cultural ethos about or model for spirituality at all. So the community becomes even more profoundly important if there’s to be any serious progress, I think, for practitioners. Third one is the importance of study. This tradition of Tibetan Buddhism, the Gelugpas, has often been quite strongly criticized for being so intellectual and studying so much.
But I I find the fact that this tradition that grew out of the Tibetan spiritual master called Je Tsongkhapa some five hundred years ago, that this is both a mystical tradition in a sense of that word and an extremely rigorous intellectual and academic approach at the same time, I think is extraordinarily rich and interesting. Because nearly many other mystical and inverted commas traditions say that we have to abandon and and give up the intellectual pursuit because that’s an interference in spiritual growth. This one says we should harness it and and try and get out of it every bit of movement that we can possibly get to help in the process of transforming oneself. And then maybe at some very advanced stage, you do get to the point where you can step beyond it. But for most practitioners in the majority of their practice, will rely very heavily on a discipline of study.
And I think that this is again especially relevant for we Westerners because we in fact we have no cultural context to fall back on about, well, if you want to do a spiritual practice, what does it mean? How does it work? We don’t have any idea. We come we come to it with some sense of longing or interest or wish to explore and discover maybe, but we really there are no models. So I think it makes it very important for us to put in some effort in terms of investigating and studying.
What what’s this all about? How does it work? Is it really right? Is it to be acknowledged? Or is it just is it just another opiate of the masses like all the other religions in inverted commas?
Is it just another big system of deception? Or is there are there are there some essential and amazing and magnificent things in here? And how do they work? How do they relate to me? How does it all fit together?
I think this is a topical issue here at the Buddha House at the moment because it’s just been started a more formal approach to doing some study amongst some of the students. Seeing themselves doing a bit of more organized study on a longer term basis over a number of years to try and grapple with what this whole spiritual philosophical system of Buddhism is about and how well do I really understand it. Perhaps another another couple of things two more perhaps before I’ll finish. A couple more things. I think another point is that to get results, we need to put in consistent and quite hard effort.
That just stands out so clearly from the life there at the monastery. We take it for granted that if I want to become the senior manager of a department or a chief executive officer of a business, I’ll get a gold medal at the Olympics or any other achievement. We’re going have to put in systematic and hard effort over a long period of time to make those get those results. And it’s exactly the same in spiritual practice. But often we come to it and often it may take several years or more struggling with this idea that I should be able to do it all instantly.
You know, well, you know, this is sudden enlightenment. Surely, it’ll only take me a year. And we have completely naive and unrealistic. So one of the things that stands out so clearly is the very relaxed, in in one sense, the very laid back way that my Tibetan colleagues go about this long term process of transformation. There’s no sense of personal rush about what they’re doing, which I see constantly in myself.
And I’ve already mentioned before, it’s a I think it the business of distractions. I think it’s really important for us to be able to generate spaces for ourselves from the distractions. I think that’s the essence of the monastic life to create a big working space from all the distractions so you can step away and get on with the inner work so that in the long run you might be able to prepare yourself to reenter in a more productive way later on. And we absolutely love to be distracted. We really love being distracted.
It’s the essence. If if lack of distraction is the essence of Sarah, then then being constantly distracted has to be the essence of our mass Western culture. So within when we’re living in it, can we construct places of space within that from that maelstrom of busyness? You know? Time for some reading and study on our own about the some of these issues.
Is there any time to pause and formally sit and meditate? Can we make any deliberate choices towards deliberately unbusying ourselves? Ourselves? Or are we just going to hand our lives totally over to that and, well, what to do? Can we find space for the occasional little weekend retreat to give ourselves a bit of breathing space?
Perhaps best of all, can we somehow work at developing a sense of contentment in the midst of this feeding frenzy of our culture? It’s frantic consumption. I guess I it’s almost nine. I haven’t left time for questions, but I must make one or two comments about what’s the role of ordination in the future in the West. It’s ordination has always and the the Sangha, the ordained Sangha, monks and nuns has always been at the center of Buddhist practice in life.
It’s been basically a monastic culture with the sort of the outer lay culture sort of hanging on and running along behind. And so it’s naturally said within that context, it’s naturally always said by our teachers that when you can’t have a flourishing practice of Buddhism without a flourishing ordained Sangha. That was just almost like a tautology because that’s the way it always was. So is so is what’s gonna happen in the future? I mean, is is Buddhism is a spiritual practice within within in a in a sense of in a sense of it as it’s related to the Buddhist tradition?
Is it going to endure in that mode? Is it going to develop as it seems to be some sort of alternative lay practitioner centered thing where people who become ordained are a minority. Is that gonna work or not? Should there be things like short term ordination so that young people can have the rich experience of for a short period of time like they do in Thailand? Make a choice.
I wanna see what it’s like for a few months or six months. What might I learn myself to step away from all that and just go in an environment which is much more contemplative and away. What about people go through these these traumatic phases of their life after loss and being made redundant or, breaking up in partnerships where they where you have these windows of opportunity to reconsider one’s life. But all the forces around us conspire to make us as quickly as we can, we strive to reconstruct our normality. Gotta get married as quickly as you can as you can.
Again, get another job as quick as you can. Don’t learn anything from this. Just get stuck back into it quick. You know, is is there an opportunity? Should should there be some way that people in that phase could say, I need a breather.
I’m gonna I’m gonna become ordained for twelve months. I’m gonna go and live in a community that will richly support me and see what I can learn. And I don’t think I can do that forever, but I wanna take that breathing. I don’t know. Is that something that might be feasible in the future?
Is it that only older people should become ordained? Maybe is it better for us westerners to get out there and and live and struggle and learn the hard way for a few years and then become ordained if you want their records right somehow? Or is that wasting your talent? And should and and should some people who really want to get stuck into it young? And not worry about being all that confusing stuff we have to go through and, you know, all the normal things we do.
I don’t know. I’ve only got lots of questions at this stage. And if there were monks and nuns, what they should all what should they all be doing anyway? Is is the Geshe studies program, like the one I’m doing at Sera, is that feasible in the future here in the West? And how could it be feasible?
Can that whole system be sort of transferred? And how do we take account the whole Western philosophical and scientific tradition? How’s that gonna be integrated into it? Who knows? So I’m very uncertain about all that sort of stuff, but I think that the answers will emerge from our practice and the practice of our students and our children over the generations to come.
And Buddhism has had this amazing flexibility of developing of unfolding in extraordinarily rich and interesting ways in different times and different cultures. And it could well be that something like that happens again here. That’s really in our hands what happens. Thanks very much for this opportunity. I’d like to wish you all well on your journeys, whatever the details may be in your lives and your spiritual practices.
And perhaps you’re growing up one day to waking up. So if anyone has a question or a comment, please please feel free. Yep. Did you did you not hear when I went through that at the beginning? Okay.
I’ll just quickly say again what the typical light day at Sarah consists of. They get up before five in the morning, they do a two hour session of chanting meditation during which a very simple breakfast is served and then there’s a bit of free time often they use it for memorizing from seven till nine then at nine they will do debate in class until eleven and there will usually be some chanting meditation during that then they’ll have lunch then from three thirty till five it’s a mix of free time for private study memorization or going to lecture classes which are quite minimal and then dinner at six and five then from six till nine at night is once again debating class with an hour to an hour and a half of Chenrezig meditation in the middle of that and then after that until late into the night in many cases people will either continue debate or do memorization. Now that what that picture is very, very highly specific to this particular tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. So it’s got, you know, it’s just worlds apart in many ways from what would happen in a Thai monastery or a Zen monastery.
But there would be yeah. Well, there is a bit of spare time during the afternoon, but it’s a very but life’s very simple. So, like, the kitchen duties, for example, all the monks are rostered on to do two days. So they just leave their They just don’t do their normal work and two days a month they go and just have this enormously long day just working in the kitchens. And if there’s other work like working in the fields then just everything else stops for the class, they just won’t go to their classes or lectures or whatever for those and I’ll just be maybe cleaning corn or whatever.
Yeah. Does that answer? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Pardon? For us westerners who have completely forgotten how to memorize, it’s unbelievably difficult at the beginning. But I think it’s like any other skill that you develop a mental facility of it, and they just they they they memorize enormous amounts of stuff because they’ve been doing it since they’re kids, and it’s they just they just do it, you know? Well, well, that’s perhaps that’s another positive comment. It’s something that our educational system has moved completely away from, in the face of learning how to manipulate data and discover it rather than to know it.
And I think that’s a wonderful new development that we’ve come up with. But I think we’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater because I think the the magnificent thing about the memorization is that it gives you this you’ve just got all the stuff you need to work with right there in front of you in your mind to work with it. And for a spiritual practitioner, it’s very useful because you if you’re doing a particular meditation, instead of having to always read it, it’s just there. You just know what you’re gonna work through. If you’ve got all these points that that that the practice sets out that you should be trying to remember all the time, if you’ve got a lot of that memorized, it’s just there and you can just access it all the time when you need it.
So, you know Well, it probably it probably has many uses. Yeah. Just in ordinary everyday life as well. But for for me, it it because I didn’t have those skills, you it’s just you’ve just got to start off and struggle and take hours and hours and hours to memorize the first short short section. And then gradually, gradually, I found and my colleagues, other Western colleagues also find that you gradually get better and better and you become more fluent with the language which also helps.
But you just you seem to learn how to meditate, how to how to memorize. And your mind gets the facility to be able to do that quicker and easier. Yep. Yep. Well, Tibetan Buddhism has a an esoteric component in the sense of tantric Buddhism.
But at the monastery, most most of the monks tend to be to receive empowerment into the Tantric practices and to receive teachings on it from quite early in their careers. There’s no sense of sort of divided communities and those are the in-crowd. No. It’s quite it’s really open and they just, you know, sort of treated almost as if, well, you know, you are a monk, so you need to start knowing about this stuff as early as possible almost. And and and you just and a lot of the chanting meditation will be based on various tantric practices, for example.
But but perhaps there is another dimension though where there is, like I mean, it it is really a completely different category, but it sort of relates to something you suggested. Are there individuals that are sort of in? They know. And and I think that’s one of the key really important things about this community that there are in fact an integral part of it are those practitioners such as our teacher here, Khensur Rinpoche, who have very profoundly come to terms with themselves and have finished the work of integrating the intellectual material. And they just stand out as being very special people and don’t fit don’t play the rules of life like the rest of us do.
And these and of course, those people are the focal points. They are the role models. You know, instead of the instead of, you know, filling your head with movie stars and models and all the other just garbage stuff that we models that we fill our minds with. In this community, they, from little, have their minds filled with models of these rich, complex, compassionate, wise people. It’s very wonderful.
Monastery meals is at lunch, they sort of have a flat fried bread with with dal and and a banana. And in the in the evening meal, it’s rice and like a vegetable stew. But it’s the same every day. Not a place for gourmets. Do you have butter?
Tibetans love butter. They absolutely love it. It’s part of their staple diet in Tibet. Yep. So yeah.
And you’re next. Yeah. Currently, how can I say, complete transformation of my life? I’ve been practicing play Buddhist for five years. In the past eight years of my life, it completely dissolved personally, financially, everything else.
I’m currently currently now trying to accomplish through program basic study group Mhmm. Transformation. And having a lot of time to self develop, I’ve entered a employment base which is very much in line with the subject we’re talking about. Is it possible as being a Western student to attain further, with the sangha’s blessings, teachings within the Dharma to without ordination? Without getting ordained?
Yes. What would be So you mean, is it possible to receive extensive teachings so that you can really make some significant process without becoming ordained. Yes, for the benefit of people that hold seven vows. Yeah. Well, think that’s exactly what places like Buddha House are doing.
They’re clearly trying to offer some degree of community and ongoing education and access, in our case here we’re so fortunate, access to a very highly realised meditation master in Kensarin Boucher. So there’s regular access to that quite extraordinary person. His regular teaching. So I think, yes, it is available. And this particular international organization is struggling to try and make even more sophisticated versions of available for lay people such as the course which started a couple of years ago in Italy where it’s about forty lay people something like forty lay people started which is in fact a seven year course of full time study like a a mini speeded up, scaled down version of the same program that I’ve been describing at CERA and they don’t do debating.
It’s more in the western style of lectures and stuff. So they’re experiments. There are ways of accessing it now They are increasing. So I think really the limiting factor is what we want to do and how much we want to put in. It’s not do you become a monk or not?
Yeah. You. Buddhism in Asia has been very much a part of Asia in its practice. Having said that, however, there’s always been to Buddhist nuns.