At the monastery 😯
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As I wrote last week, the fear of going back home is indeed the fear of being stuck in old patterns. Understanding that makes me feel rather excited to be “home” this time, as I keep discovering how novel everything and everyone feels, that perhaps I never really know it.
This week, let me bring you to the monastery, both the physical one in Loei, Thailand where I’m residing and the monastic life of the mind. I came to the monastery with two intentions. First, to make my mom happy that I got to see what her current life is like. Second, to experience it as a kind of fieldwork as a potential anthropologist.
Morning tranquility
6.30am
A long soothing bell wakes you up when everything is still mostly dark. You walk around the beautiful piece of land around the lake, taste the morning breeze, greet other monks and nuns, sit in silence together with everyone. You discover fresh leafy smell in the air, one that you don’t even know but still piques your smell bud.
Then the sun rises in its full glory, and you witness its glow with appreciation. In that kind of moment, one experiences an expansion of the inner world, a rediscovery of the innate spaciousness. Sometimes I wish the city could be this way, that people take the time to experience stillness and witness life’s glorious beauty. A culture of appreciation rather than accumulation.
Sunrise — a silent appreciation
Monastic life is known for its tranquility for a reason. The regularity of life, embedded within the vast open land, brings out a nourishing stillness that the overactive mind quietly needs. In the past, I would have gone crazy due to the lack of stimuli rather than enjoy such tranquility. Now, I’m learning that true excitement doesn’t come only from potential future possibilities but also from the appreciation of the Great Knowing that animates everything in this mysterious moment. The vitality of life comes from the bridge across past, present and future, as David Whyte once wrote.
In my short stay here, I am also deepening a few awareness of my natural surrounding. One, every step is a greeting to the earth, or to be even more romantic, a kiss. The non-flat earth in turns responds with haptic glee, holding my feet, turning, turning slightly. Two, every tree has a life, an unique existence and even personality. Some trees, as my wandering around has revealed, have many delicate ants joyously exchanging invisible messages through their head antennae.
Eventually, the whole world should feel vividly alive, but I’m in no rush to get to that ecstatic state. It’s a blessing to stay here for a while.
People and practices
People here, from monks, nuns to laypeople, are friendly and relaxed. They live close to one another in their own small ward like a village, drop by each other’s house for communal meal, cook, talk, walk, drive around, chitchat with Internet wifi, watch silly videos. As in many other monasteries, doing these simple actions is a form of practice in itself as it helps still the mind.
The central practices in this community is Ahosi (forgive) and Soh (let go and bless). Practitioners say Ahosi whenever we make a mistake, from spilling water to leaving slippers on carpet to eating before monks. The idea is that as living beings and humans, we inevitably are caught in the karmic cycles with one another, and we can be set free in every moment by saying Ahosi. I may help you clean your house, and with Ahosi I won’t get dirty.
Soh is a practice of emptying out our being, opening up andg giving no meaning to anything. No stories, assumptions, worldviews. Emptiness is as important to Buddhism as grace is to Christianity. Most people say Soh while opening their hands to the side as they walk, sit or talk. In front of every ward is a water vessel, and anyone who enters or leaves the house will take a ladle to pour some water out as they say “Soh”.
Perhaps it will work if I practice enough, for now I just enjoy doing those rituals. The words are onomatopoeic and very soothing. It all seems utopian, for now.
Spiritual teaching
Lest me romanticize monastic life, mae Sasi, (mae means “nun sister” in Thai), our friendly translator nun, kept reminding me of the teaching by the monastery master Luongpho “No meaning. The trees don’t have meaning, the birds don’t have meaning, any meaning is human made. See through, don’t get caught up in concepts”. Behind every pleasant chirping, there is an Emptiness that one must become aware of.
It’s fascinating that I hear this teaching now as I’ve gone through my own existential crises, which mostly is about the overactive mind searching for something to occupy itself. Comparing this teaching with one of the most popular book in this existential self-help category, Man’s Search for Meaning, and I can’t help but marvel if the Buddha is really one level away from Viktor Frankl. Nature abhors a meaning vacuum indeed.
Many people here seem to know the essential teaching at a personal level so well that everyone from the master to the regular monks explain to me in similar words. Whatever we put out, we will get back. Put out thoughts, get back thoughts. Put out feelings, get back feelings. We give nothing, we get back nothing. But this Nothingness, the Void, Śūnyatā in Sanskrit, Mai in Thai, Kho^ng in Vietnamese, the Big Bang in Western science, is very rich.
In this tradition, to take is to make sense of the world, to put on labels on things, which is only useful for communication purpose. We must give, always give, to let go of ideas, concepts, assumptions, to be with Nothing.
The Enzyme won't be complete without some sort of musings, and staying at the monastery certainly invites some that I wanted to share. This section I usually reserve for that kind of deeper thinking, beyond the usual storytelling.
Reflection: discomfort and monk-hood
Being at the monastery for me is the paradoxically enjoyable and uncomfortable at the same time. It is enjoyable for the beautiful surrounding, friendly people and amazing fresh Thai food.
A simple, freshly prepared with love tray of morning vegetable mania.
Nevertheless, the monastic life has its own rules, rhythms and quirks that isn’t the easiest to adapt. Imagine how big the shift must be for me as someone who enjoys the expressive, hippy, clothing optional, free love encouraged kind of community to this monastic abstinence. Hah. 😛
There are two reasons for the discomfort. First, the pace of life is too peaceful for me, right now. I can imagine being here for a while, doing my work online, etc.. but at this point in my life, the conventional messy and “impure” world is calling me to meddle with. Although I physically just moved half the globe away, I’m not ready to rest.
The second is a much more intentional, self-imposed discomfort: a practice in believing in everything everyone says.
I once heard about this practice from Charles Eisenstein at the end of an interview. In a world of people fighting left and right for ideologies, someone needs to be able to uphold these opposing viewpoints simultaneously. I know that it comes naturally for me, but it is still not easy. Doing so triggers so much frustration, and yet in order to genuinely meet at the field that Rumi calls “out beyond the idea of wrongdoing and rightdoing” I need to do this practice.
As an example, I overheard many fantastical stories about past lives, supernatural abilities and predictions about the looming apocalypse. The monastery master Luongpho just led a group to a trip to the mountain near Nanjing, China to bless the angry spirits residue of the Nanjing massacre.
Coming here this time, I became so sharply aware at how the past 4.5 years of Western critical thinking education has shaped me so much that hearing stories like this stirs up in me plenty of resistance. A part of me wants to scream “BULLSHIT!!!”, another part of me assures “You must genuinely believe what people say”. I thought that I was fairly open-minded. Not so fast. It is so hard because our deepest assumptions about the world are often invisible to us, and they are only brought to fore when we encounter those who are different from us. How deep our beliefs are can be felt by how painful it is to let them go.
Yet, at another level I too believe in karma. The irony is that I only started to believe in this worldview through the lens of Western system theory by work of people like Joanna Macy who bridges East-West, between the Buddhist teaching of co-dependent arising and general system theory and later cybernetics. Sometimes you need to leave home in order to know what home really has.
As I wrote in the last post, coming back to South East Asia this time is a chance for me to pay off my karmic debt to this land. In a sense, this visit to the monastery is the perfect opportunity to discern what that really means.
As of now, it definitely doesn’t mean becoming officially ordained as a monk. I asked Luongpho yesterday “Should I become a monk?” while already knowing the answer deep down. Unsurprisingly, he said “You are already a monk. You don’t have to be here”. Yes, I am.
I’m noticing a inner resistance from learning from the master here; I see it through my habitual “trolling” patterns of asking questions I already know the answer. Maybe my ego is enjoying being smart… Or maybe I’m resisting traditional Buddhism, at least in the religious sense that most Asian societies adopt, one that advocates for renunciation and creates a split between real life & monastic life, between outer success and inner serenity. I don’t dig it, and I know many people don’t either.
No, it’s not getting blinded by worldly pleasures while becoming dead rock inside, nor is it focusing on the inner spiritual growth while renouncing every material needs.
The teaching is clear: it’s Nothing. No goal, no striving, not even enlightenment (which is often the most dangerous temptation). It’s becoming non-attached to the idea of non-attachment itself. In a sense, that’s the pain that the philosophically adventurous like me must undergo. You must fall in love with an idea, a worldview, or in the case of an anthropologist, a community or a culture. You must become one with the people, and then you must step back and critique it.
Remember the saying “it’s those who are closest to you who can hurt you the most”? It also applies to other things. That process is so damn painful it makes me feel the weight of my own endless karmic debt: maybe in a past life I was such a dogmatic bigot that this life whenever I hold on to any idea so dearly I will soon have to let it go.
I do not wish that on anyone but the bravest. May your world never get shattered, but when it does, you’ll discover new truths in the ashes.
See the full post here on Medium.
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