Audio recorded at Buddha House Adelaide. Transcript auto-generated and AI-corrected; may contain errors.
About this talk. Jampa Kaldan reflects on seven years living in a 21st-century Tibetan Buddhist monastery in South India, exploring what monastic life might teach Western practitioners. In this 45-minute talk, he opens with practical guidance on adjusting motivation and breathing meditation, then traces the historical roots of monasticism from the Buddha’s time through the founding of Sera Monastery in 1970 by Tibetan refugees. He describes the monastery’s structure — organized into regional house groups and two colleges — and walks through the educational system that combines memorization of texts, lectures, and rigorous public debate as the core learning method. A typical day includes early chanting meditation, study, occasional lectures, and evening debates lasting hours. He emphasizes the monastery as a radically alternative culture offering strong communal support, intellectual rigor, and spiritual practice integrated into everyday life, then fields questions about language, the debate process, and the challenges of adaptation. Pitched at practitioners interested in Buddhist education and monastic life.
File metadata (for organising)
File: 01 Thoughts 2002 02 17.mp3
UUID: a07a0854-0c6e-4579-aa92-be8698b5cec7
Teacher: Jampa Kaldan
Collection: Thoughts from a 21st Century Monastery (Jampa Kaldan)
Date: 2002-02-17
Recorded at: Buddha House Adelaide
Words: ~6,232
First, develop a spend a few minutes developing a readjusting our motivation and bringing our thoughts to the here and now and to issues related to the spiritual path. And then spend a little bit of time doing some breathing meditation, and then I’ll talk on the topic for the afternoon. And perhaps at the end, there will be some time for a few questions if anyone has them. So first, to to look at our motivation. We have, an extraordinary opportunity and a capacity to grow and mature as human beings, but we’re often inhibited from extracting the full essence from our context because of our self limiting context.
And we say things to ourselves like the following, but I’m sick of some of my habits, but I seem to be stuck in them or what to do. I don’t like the situation I’m in, but I don’t have the courage to do anything about it, or it’s too hard for me. I’ll never be able to do the things that I dream about, or I just don’t have the inner resources to feel happy and contented without depending on someone else, or I can’t pause from the frantic busyness of my life because what would happen to me if I stopped? Besides, it’s not good to be lazy. And I’m sure you all come up with your own versions of fairly gross and perhaps more subtle ways of putting limiteachings on oneself.
And all such negative self talk is to significantly underestimate ourselves because we do have a great capacity to grow and to reconstruct our futures, to put into place more skillful ways of living, to heal the inner sense of incompleteness, to learn that going slowly and simply can be the opposite of laziness and eventually to awaken fully through our deepest potential as aware and conscious beings. Sadly, this capacity that we have has a very definite limiting point in the future. In other words, our death, which as for all of those who’ve gone before is inevitably a part of our lives as well. But we can’t be certain when this occasion is going to come about for us. And, of course, thinking about that makes us a little anxious and concerned because we I guess, we all really wanna live for a long time.
Yet to think in this way of our approaching death is most useful because it throws in a strong relief, the preciousness of our current opportunity to do some sort of spiritual practice, and we can begin to search for some more skillful ways to live and thereby to prepare for the dying dimension of our living. One of the key insights which we can have in our growing up as a person is that undertaking a work of self determination is the most profound way of being able to help others, and that working for others in turn is the best way of bringing happiness to ourselves. Closely linked to those to see that the fundamental problem which currently restricts our usefulness to others is the confused and messy mental operations of our minds at the moment, which every day tend to unfold themselves in a general state of confusion and bewilderment, where we misunderstand the nature of both ourselves and the world around us. And this generates a day to day lived experience, is always tainted with dissatisfaction. Perhaps the most important assumption of the practice of Buddhist spirituality is that our current ordinary mental mode is not the only one that is available to us.
That there is another way of being within our lived experience where there is no discontent and where there can be a spontaneous and compassionate openness to the rich flow of everyday life, the state which in Buddhist thought is called full enlightenment, the potential for which is an innate part of what we are here and now, our Buddha nature as it’s called in Buddhist tradition, the ultimate nature of our mind, or sometimes referred to as our subtle clear light mind. So this perspective on us of our potential is not foreign to our western heritage. I’d like to read a little quote from the twentieth century Trappist monk Thomas Merton in his biography, the seven story mountain, where he says the following, expressing perhaps something similar, but within a completely different conceptual model of reality, a Christian one. And he says, the soul of man left to its own natural level is a potentially lucid crystal left in the darkness. It is perfect in its own nature, but it lacks something that it can only receive from outside and above itself.
But when the light shines on it, it becomes in a manner transformed into light and seems to lose its nature in the splendor of a higher nature, the nature of the light that is in it. So the natural goodness of man, his capacity for love, which must always be in some sense selfish if it remains in the natural order, becomes transfigured and transformed when the love of God shines in it. What happens when a man loses himself completely in the divine life within him? This perfection is only for those who are called the saints, for those who are the saints, and who live in the light of God alone. Of course, from our Western heritage, the words and the concept or structure is quite different from the one used by Buddhism, but his idea of there being this natural, potentially lucid crystal that we are is quite similar to the Buddhist idea.
Only in this tradition, it’s seen as primarily our own work to let our own light shine. So if such a potential were the case, perhaps one could imagine that they might spring up communities of people who had devoted themselves to making this a reality in their lives. Such and such a community would be called an enlightenment community. In that, it’s it’s raison d’etre, it’s it’s purpose for existence would be to facilitate the coming true of this state of being in the world. So for the last seven years, I’ve lived in just such a community, an ancient way of life suddenly finding itself thrust into a modern world.
And in the talk today, I want to share with you something of that community, my experiences there, and from that, to see what messages there might be for us at the beginning of the twenty first century. But before we do that, let’s let’s just pause and and do some breathing meditation for a few minutes. And perhaps be aware of your your sitting posture. Your back’s straight. If you’re sitting on a chair, it’s good to be sitting forward rather than leaning back against the chair.
And back straight. Imagine your top of your crown of your head being pulled up gently. String going down through your spinal cord. Shoulders relaxed. Hands at ease.
Head slightly down. Head slightly tilted forward and eyes downcast. And be aware of any tension that there might be in your neck or shoulders. And let this relax and move away. Let it let it drain away.
And whatever way seems appropriate for you, establish a a positive feeling about why you wanna do this meditation. And then bring your awareness to follow the natural flow of the breathing. Not trying to adjust the breathing, but just watching it as it flows in and as it flows out. Being aware of this constant movement that’s with us all the time, perhaps around the nostrils or in the chest or diaphragm, wherever it’s easiest for you. And when your mind wanders from following the breath as it will because our minds are distracted so easily, then gently bring your attention back to the breath again without being concerned.
So some thoughts from a twenty first century monastery, spiritual practice across the debate great divide, the great divide between the modern west and the ancient east. I’m gonna look I’ll look at four thing five things in this talk. Firstly, some historical background. Then secondly, looking at the life at the monastery. Thirdly, some thoughts about the nature of this divide between these two worlds.
And fourthly, the relevance of that other side of the divide to us here and now. And finally, some comments about the future future of Buddhism in the west, if such thing is possible. Firstly, then the historical background. In in nineteen seventy, several hundred Tibetan monks who had come out of Tibet in nineteen fifty nine around the time that the Dalai Lama had left Tibet so as to escape what was to become the attempted systematic destruction of Tibetan Buddhism by the communist Chinese. They arrived this group of monks arrived in nineteen seventy at a little town called Bylakuppe near Mysore in Karnataka State in South India along with some ex Indian army tents given to them by the Indian government and a basic food allowance from the Indian government.
And they had spent the previous ten years at a refugee detention center at Buxar in North India on the Ganges Plains. So in coming to India, these Tibetan refugees were returning in a sense to their cultural and spiritual motherland, bringing back with them the Buddhist teach teachings which they had received from India during the eighth to the twelfth centuries and which had subsequently died out in India by the fourteenth century. And the roots of the monastic lifestyle that they brought with them them clearly goes back to the teachings of a Buddha on those Ganges plains in the sixth century BCE. I’d like to read to you a little description from a book called songs of the sons and daughters of Buddha about what that life was like for them. Twenty five hundred years ago, extensive tracks of forest covered parts of northern India, particularly the wide fertile fertile watershed drained by the river Ganges.
In contrast to the open plains and farmlands where the sun could be blistering, the forests were cool, breezy, pleasant. Socially, it was a time of massive dissatisfaction, A burgeoning merchant class drawing on the region’s natural resources and trading widely throughout Southeast Asian subcontinent had helped build the thronging cities of the Gangetic Plain, while cosmopolitan life offered unprecedented opportunity to people relocating to the cities, particularly the freedom found in breaking with the constraints of traditional village life. A recognizable urban malaise had set in. It was the old problem of an expanding economy and the confusion of values that comes with it. The traditional system of Brahminism founded on caste hierarchies and rigid expectations regarding an individual’s duties throughout life had a stink of antiquity and irrelevance to it.
And religion dominated by imperious priests who demanded cattle for presiding over births, weddings, initiations, and funerals was in many sectors seen as just a dry rattling, empty formulaic, and devoid of spiritual substance. Where could one go for nourishment? And so there occurred one of those considerable deliberate migrations out and away from the cities. Not just the elderly were freeing themselves from encrusted social demands as India’s law books had always sanctioned a spiritual departure into the forests for those who had seen, quote, the eyes of their children’s children. But the young and intellectually hungry were heading out also, heading towards woodland and grove to live as wandering seekers.
This is the period from around eight hundred to four hundred BCE of the venerable teachers of the Upanishads, contemplatives and thinkers who practiced yoga and sagely discussed metaphysics with students who clustered around them. Quotes, fuel bearers, so the documents described them, meaning students brought traditional offerings, not currency or cattle, but simply food and a bit of firewood. By the hundreds, such students sat sharpening their wits in debate or undertaking austerities in forest groves. Several figures who crop up in the accounts of Śākyamūni Buddha’s life are renowned teachers and sages of times, familiar to the annals of Vedanta or Jainism. Young Siddhartha Gautama, which was the name of the Buddha before he became the Buddha, was a prince who had fled his ancestral home to solve the mysteries of old age, sickness, and death and learned a thing or two from some of these philosophers.
The future Buddha was by no means a solitary seeker. He lived in one of those consequential periods in history when yogis, wanderers, teachers, humry eyed students, cult founders, and peripatetics met under the trees swapping philosophies. When prince Siddhartha called Buddha or awakened one by his admirers after he had opened his wisdom eye, began to attract students, he drew to his side a number of scholars who had already attained reputations. He also drew unsophisticated illiterate low caste folk. These disciples lived on the road ranging from town to town governed by a fierce set of rules and sleeping in forest or city parks.
Only temporarily did they settle in knocking the dust off their feet in little out of the way retreats, caves or woodland huts during the rainy season when travel was difficult. Monasteries as permanent residents did not exist until hundreds of years later, so it is accurate to think of these folk as itinerant monks and nuns of highway and forest, not of the cloister. Elsewhere, these disciples have been referred to as the sons and daughters of the Buddha. It is a tender expression suggesting the relationships that bound them. They pursued very austere lives indeed, carrying articles, no articles, but a robe and a needle to patch it, a begging bowl, a razor to shave the head.
So after those simple beginnings, life increasingly became based in monasteries and the simple but powerful approach to spirituality that the Buddha had taught in those early days went through a series of dramatic new unfolding of both its direct breadth and the depth of its vision with the emergence of what’s called Mahāyāna Buddhism around the time of Christ and then the radical emergence of the Tentric Buddhism in the middle of that first millennium. And all of this spiritual tradition was taken by a series of great Indian masters into Tibet, the last country in Asia to which the Buddha’s teachings went. And so for two and a half thousand years, the Buddhist Sangha or the monks and nuns, the sons and daughters of the Buddha, was in fact in fact Asia’s counterculture displaying this radically alternative way of living to everyday life. And perhaps it’s the longest running single institution in human history. So in nineteen seventy, when the Tibetan monks arrived in Bylakuppe in South India, they were the most recent manifestation of this wave of spiritual activity created by the Buddha’s emergence so long before.
And they were having to start again from scratch in what for them was a an unbearably hot chaotic crowded and wildly bizarre new country, namely India. During the first three years, they cleared the jungle where they which had been so kindly given to them by the Indian government, and they had to contend with wild elephants that roamed the area at the time and too little food and the tents that they were given after the first monsoon started to rot away and began to leak. And there wasn’t any time in midst of that for much study. But gradually, with incredible persistence, they rebuilt the total way of life centered around a very sophisticated educational process so that today, you see the large and thriving university town of Sera Monastery, made up of around four thousand monks with half a dozen smaller monasteries in that same area, including the main monastery belonging to the Nyingma tradition headed by Penor Rinpoche, which has about a thousand monks, plus four or five other smaller monasteries. And also scattered throughout this same area, there are many settlements of lay Tibetans.
In fact, this settlement, this whole area is the biggest single settlement of Tibetans outside of Tibet. One of the groups of one of this group of refugee monk settlers who came to Bailukupa was a monk called venerable Loisang Tukden, who had been a brilliant student, graduating from his monastic studies with the highest awardable degree called the Lharampa degree, and he went on to become the discipline master at the monastery later on. And he as well completed a three year solitary retreat in his little room in the middle of the monastery and eventually became the abbot of Sera Monastery Sera Je Monastery in the in during the nineteen eighties. At the completion of that, he was then referred to as Khensur Loisang Tukden Rinpoche, a title of great respect, meaning precious former abbot. And for the last fifteen years or so, he spent most of his time living in Adelaide and teaching in Australasia and and Southeast Asia.
His picture’s here, and he’s one of the been one of the key teachers of Buddha House in the last fourteen or fifteen years. Yep. Yeah. His photo’s right behind me. So the Rinpoche Kens Rinpoche’s coming to be came about because he was requested by another teacher called Lama Zopa Rinpoche, who is the head of the organization around the world that Buddha House belongs to, requested to come and teach here in nineteen eighty six.
And this center came about as a result of Lama YESHI who had founded this organization, the FPMT, and had suggested that it would be good for a couple of his students to start a center here in Adelaide. And this year is the twenty first anniversary actually of the founding of Buddha House under Lama Yeshe’s suggestion. And that I think is a wonderful credit the the, that small devoted band of people who made this place come about and has continued to make it survive all the years in between. And of course at the same time as all this there was another fairly headstrong young man who was sort of living a normal western life and who eventually met this Khensurrr Rinpoche and decided at the age of forty to become ordained as result of coming to teachings here and meeting Khensur Rinpoche and having a wonderful opportunity to do that because he’d been kicked out of a job that had been his religion up to then and had a bit of free time to change his direction in life. And at the time of becoming a monk, I changed my name from my old name to Jampa as it is now.
And then six months later, I went to live at Sera Monastery in in India in nineteen ninety five that was, and I’ve been there for the seven years since almost at the time. So let’s have a look at life at Sera, second point, and under this we’ll look at I’ll I’ll talk briefly about four things. Some comments about the structure of the monastery, the program of a typical day, the way the educational process there works, and some comments about the style of life at the monastery. And so virtually about the structure of the monastery. The monastery, this big it’s like a big university town sitting on top of a hill in a beautiful setting, in rolling hill country.
It’s about a thousand meters. It’s a great climate. Never gets really hot, and it never has a winter because it’s tropical. And this monastery is divided into two colleges called Sera Jeay College and Sarah May College. And these two colleges are physically in the same sort of monastery town, but but they have, following a tradition from Tibet, they tend to live quite separate lives.
They both have their own study program and so on. So within the college that I belong to, which is Sera Jeay College, which is the biggest of the two, there are thirteen regional college groups. And these are made up of monks that come from different areas of Tibet. So the monks from a particular area of Tibet would tend to come and live together at the monastery in in one regional college group. And they can rise they can range anywhere in size from just, you know, maybe twenty or thirty people, the tiny ones, up to the one that I belong to, which is the biggest called Thohor.
Thohor Khangtsen. These regional college groups are called Khangtsen, and that’s got about twelve hundred monks in it. So it’s huge. And then that again is divided into little house groups of anywhere from forty to a hundred monks who tend to to live together, and that’s like their immediate family group. And they usually tend to be from very small particular areas in Tibet where they come from often relatives and brothers and distant friends and all that sort of thing.
And so it was into the house group to which my teachers pictured behind me, Khensur Rinpoche belonged within Thohor Khangtsen in the Sera Jeay College of Sera Monastery that I went seven years ago to take up this new life. So a typical day at Sera Je goes something like this. It starts around for the for the Tibetan monks, they usually get up around five thirty AM and have a two hour chanting meditation session in the main meditation hall, and that includes a breakfast of Tibetan tea and some piece of sweet white bread that they make on the premises, flatbread. Followed then by a time free time for study or memorization or perhaps going to lectures. And then lunch at eleven thirty.
And after lunch, the afternoon is again free time for study memorization or going to the occasional lectures that are on. And then dinner around five, followed by the public debating class out in the debating courtyard, which goes in the evenings till about nine, and then that’s followed by study and memorization of texts often until quite late into the evening. So this background pattern of act of activity is is overlaid with with what to the newcomer such as I was, an absolutely bewildering set of complicated variations, to that program, in cycles of weekly, fortnightly, month and annual variations and events. So it’s a very complicated little society and what’s happened is always something happening that doesn’t fit the standard program. So that brings us to the educational process.
Sera Monastery is part of the the Gelug tradition of Tibetan Buddhism. There are four main traditions, and the Gelug is the biggest headed by his holiness, the Dalai Lama. And it was founded by the this great Tibetan master from the fifteenth century called Tsongkhapa. Tsongkhapa picture is up the top over there. And this particular tradition puts a great emphasis on on the importance of study as a part of one’s spiritual practice, especially in the earlier years of one’s practice.
So monks arrive from Tibet and and also from some of the northern parts of India like Ladakh and Himachal Pradesh where there are large they’re Indians, but they ethnically and ethnically and religiously very close to Tibet. And they come anywhere from seven years of age up to around early twenties. There’s a constant stream of newcomers arriving at the monastery, mainly from Tibet, of course. And when the younger ones arrive at the monastery, they go to what has now been a well set up school doing a curriculum of study similar to a a typical schooling, but, of course, they also studied Tibetan and memorized Buddhist texts as well as that. And they have a pretty long day compared to what we expect the cool school kids.
They go their school day goes from six AM till eight at night with a two hour break in the middle of the day. So when they’re when the monks are about eighteen or to their eighteen to twenty, then they enter into the the the formal study program at the monastery. And and that is a a basic program of study that goes for about fifteen years, and it culminates in what’s called the Geshe degree. And on top of that there is an extra optional six years of intensive study, which can lead to the highest Lharampa Geshe degree. So the educational program that they do all these years consists of the following steps.
They do a lot of memorization of particular texts, the texts or the textbooks that are being studied at that time. Although these textbooks we would find rather frustrating if we were using them as a basis for study because they tend to be more a collection of hints and partial presenteachings of the overall material that one has to come to terms with. And then there are some explanatory lectures given on that material, but it’s quite minimal, often only about an hour a day, and then you have to spend some time preparing the material for yourself so that you can go and debate it at the debating class. And the debating class is really the center of the educational process. And it’s here in the debating class that that one can spend several hours a day on a typical day.
And the debating works where you have one a person who’s a challenger and a defender. The defender sits down on the ground like you are there and the defender stands in front and has to throw various statements at the person who’s sitting and that person has to reply in a standard set of what limited ways like, yes, I accept or or what’s the reason for that or that doesn’t follow from that. And that’s about all I can say. And and in those simple answers, they have to maintain a consistent position. So the challenger is trying to test out the person who’s sitting with their ability to hold and maintain a consistent understanding of the topic that’s being studied at the time.
And this is not an easy process, and it really requires a lot of time and effort being put into it. And so and it’s also a process that that is very incredibly student centered in in its as a learning process. It really throws the ball into the court of the each person to come to terms with the material in their own right by thrashing out their understanding of it with their mates on the debating courtyard day after day. And it’s it’s quite surprising for a westerner because the degree to which they are just left to work it out for themselves, which which the group does. But at the beginning it’s a complete confusion the group doesn’t even know how to what the rules for debating are properly and and they just sort of pick up bits and pieces from the older monks and here and there and gradually over the first year you see this group going from like a state of colonial confusion and all people from all different parts of Tibet with all different dialects and hardly been able to understand each other and gradually developing this incredibly strong group identity and a sense of all going in the same place, and all of them gradually coming to understand what the rules are for debating.
It’s quite an extraordinary process they go through. So in a class with around two hundred students, there’s usually about two hundred new starting in each class. And what they they only work through one topic at a time, which is quite different to the way we approach education. The class does one topic. When they finish that, they move on to the next.
So they give all their attention to one topic, quite different to our Western University education. We always have several topics running in parallel. And that’s great for allowing time for you coming to terms with the material well, but also integrating it into your everyday life. So all of this occurs in an environment in which study and in fact intellectual virtuosity on the debating courtyard is highly regarded. And beyond that the debating courtyard is a very powerful context for personal development.
Having to front up daily and perform in that way together with your friends whatever your mood is and however well you may or may not get on with them is actually a very powerful way of people having to confront who they are and having to become more mature as a person. So some comments about the style of life. So we looked at the structure of the monastery, a typical day in the educational process. Some comments about the style of life there. If you could just Yeah.
Take questions through If you like. If you want to. If anyone wants to ask a question now. Is all is all this discussion done in Tibetan? Yep.
Everything’s in Tibetan. Did you have a good understanding and of Tibetan before you were there? No. I hardly knew any only a few sentences when I arrived. So the first couple of years, I worked on learning my Tibetan, and it was only in the fourth year that I had a go at joining in the debating class.
So how did you go? Okay. It was it was quite difficult, but but looking at it objectively, it went quite well, actually. It went quite well. Well, that’s a really interesting point.
They never used to really have exams in Tibet, but now they’ve introduced a system of exams, and I’m not sure if that’s the best thing that they’ve done. Because there’s this really interesting thing that when you’re working with that group every day, everyone knows who are the ones who’ve mastered the material and who are the ones who read. It’s just obvious to everyone all the time. And you almost don’t need an exam because everyone knows that those three are the best ones in the class. Over the first year, you begin to see that.
Everyone knows that, well, he’s in the top half and he’s and everyone knows that that group over there are totally confused about it all and and sort of don’t really, you know, find it all very hard. It’s interesting. When you say that people have to come back together again endlessly, back together, so the ones who are confused, do they debate with the bright ones? Not very much. No.
They tend to what What I observe is they tend to work together. What happens is you tend to get groups working together in their comfort zones. So the better ones will tend usually to work together with each other, not exclusively, but more like that. And the ones who are having more difficulty will tend to work with them. But it’s not strictly in times you’ll get that mixing around and that mixing around is actually very useful because it requires different different things of you.
If and this is it is part of the extraordinariness of what has an educational process that that in one part of the session you might be someone who’s clearly better than you and so you have to accept just being made a fool of by this person who can run rings around you And then in the next part of the session, you’re with someone who doesn’t understand it as well as you, and the challenge then is to try and show that person where they don’t understand and help them by simply the skill in which you throw things at them to develop a better understanding. So it it can it can be a very rich opportunity for all sorts of things as well as a lot of fun. The times when I the times when I would get beyond being paralyzed with fear about the whole things, which happened occasionally, then and and if I was well prepared and had the material well memorized, one can have an absolute ball. You just if you get with someone that you react with that you’re relating to very well, then the the debate goes really smoothly and you and an hour can just disappear just like that.
And suddenly, you know, the discipline master is yelling out that it’s time for the assembly time in the middle of the session, and you’d hardly even know what happened. So they always say the standard thing is that in in the monastery life, if if a month if the debating is going well for a person, then they’re happy. And if it’s not, then they’re not happy. And that’s exactly right. Yeah.
That depends on each person. I mean, as I saw of course, and I’ll make a bit more comment about this in a minute. Of course, I mean, you’re talking about young lads, and they’re putting all and it’s just amazing to see they’re throwing all this testosterone energy into the debating, and it’s it’s just like a circus sometimes. It’s extraordinary. Okay.
Some comments about the style of life. No other questions about that so far? Do the children learn to do basic stuff? Not much. They do a do a bit later on in school, but not much.
But in the last couple of years, when they get in their later forties, they start to do a little bit to prepare them for going over the dating class. Yeah. And when you were there, how many what was the ratio of the estimates? Oh, there’s hardly any. It’s half a dozen, obviously, and a fourth thousand.
I think no other question? So about the style of life. The monastery really is a radical a radically alternative culture. It’s a place, where a monk and increasingly now in India nuns as well can grow up, be educated, contribute to the life of the monastic community, perhaps teach and then grow old and die. It’s it’s a highly social community, and this aspect of it was a real shock to me when I first got there.
There’s an incredible ongoing supportive friendship and living in the house groups doing all the everyday chores needed for life. So there’s a context there that replaces the home that the young person has left with something that’s better than home. It’s more it’s stronger and it’s probably more healthy, which is an extraordinary situation. And there’s a context so So it’s also a very busy and full time place, another surprise to me when I arrived. There’s always something going on there, and all this intense intellectual activity that I was talking about is very nicely balanced by two other components of the life there.
One is this rich social context that constantly is demanding that you have to practice, you know, you have to learn to get on with people and and just like you have to do in any family situation and do all the stuff that’s needed for everyday life. It’s very intense that aspect of life there. And the other, the third component is this more worshipful dimension of practice. The meditative worshipful dimension. So and where they in fact spend many hours in this chanting meditation which satisfies that dimension of life.
So these three dimensions are all now integrated into a total package that really doesn’t leave them a lot of time free for getting sort of bored. And the monks the monks are very down to earth and lovely people with a quite a lack of ego, which another so there were so many surprises that I had going there. And this lack of ego was lovely. We we spend we have so much we put so much importance on constructing and well defining what we are as an ego, and we put a lot of energy into carrying it around and presenting it to everyone. Thanks.
And and and if and we don’t like it getting dented or scratched and all those other things. And the Tibetans, the monks virtually don’t have that, and they don’t have to put any into it. And they don’t have to put energy into maintaining each other’s egos, scratching each other’s back so they don’t get, you know, so they don’t get sulky and upset and all that stuff. But when you suddenly land after coming from our context and you land in that context where that doesn’t happen, it was quite unsettling and confronting. But but but once you get used to it, it’s really nice.
Really nice. And another thing that in this in this, large community of of just men, it’s just men living together, and it leaves they live in amazingly good harmony. And they have the spaciousness just to be human beings rather than have to be men. And I suspect my theory is that that’s due to the fact that they can have that space is because there are no women around who they can offload onto half of what it is to be a human. And what usually goes along with that unloading is that we then oppress them along with it in some way or other.
Well, they don’t do the