In Thailand, British monk brings Buddhism to Westerners
BY MICHAEL Mathes
THEY begin the morning at dawn clothed in white, but by mid-day the
25 Western men gathered at Thailand's largest temple wear the saffron
robes of the Buddhist monk.
A group of Americans and Europeans bow down during an ordination
ceremony at Dhammakaya temple in the outskirts of Bangkok.(AFP)
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With their heads shaved and concentration on their faces, they kneel
in front of the abbot and other senior monks of Wat Dhammakaya to recite
in ancient Pali some of the 227 precepts that will guide them through
the next several weeks.
The ceremony in a traditional Thai temple is closely watched here;
elderly Thai women in white robes sit on the matted floor with their
backs to the temple walls, palms together in prayer, offering support to
the novices about to embark on a religious journey to seek, in part, the
meaning of mindfulness.
Most are undergoing a temporary, one-month ordination, but for some,
the ritualistic donning of the orange robes represents a spiritual
renewal that could last a lifetime.
"It is impossible to make progress without faith," an English voice
tells them, translating the abbot's words moments before their
ordination. "The first thing is to be able to overcome our bad habits,
the character traits which we may have from the past."
The voice belongs to 40-year-old Nicholas Thanissaro, one of
Thailand's best known "farang" (Western) monks and the temple's primary
interlocutor for American and European Buddhist novices.
The only visible traces of his English identity are his light skin
and the soft fullness of his facial features. With his head shaved and
bearing the temperament of a senior religious figure, there is little to
identify him as a foreigner.
An unidentified Westerner watches chanting while preparing for an
ordination ceremony at Dhammakaya temple in the outskirts of
Bangkok, Most monks are undergoing a temporary, one-month
ordination, but for some, the ritualistic donning of the orange
robes represents a spiritual renewal that could last a lifetime. (AFP)
|
Yet Phra (monk) Nicholas is among a growing number of Westerners
putting on the robes in Thailand, keen on exploring the wisdom of
Buddhist doctrine but also on embracing a deeper Eastern spirituality
and meditation that they see is lacking back home.
"The general image of religion is getting worse in Western eyes,"
Phra Nicholas tells AFP, as he expounds on the hits organized faith has
taken in recent years, particularly with the emotional touchstone that
the US-led war in Iraq has become. Religion, he argues, frames a clash
of civilizations.
"Religion is seen as a source of conflict, a source of wars, a source
of people who don't have reasons for doing things. They follow blind
faith.
"But Buddhism is seen as different," he continues. "It is a religion
of wisdom, which encourages people to think, encourages people to
believe in cause and effect."
'Religion turned me off'
Here in the serene 325-hectare (800-acre) temple complex outside
Bangkok which is home to some 1,000 monks and a rapidly expanding and
controversial Buddhist movement, Westerners have been encouraged to
explore the dharma, re-evaluate priorities, question their role in life.
The ceremony is the third annual ordination of foreign monks at Wat
Dhammakaya. In addition to the 25 Westerners, there are another 25
mainland Chinese and Taiwanese participating.
"In Thailand we have the tradition of temporary ordination. So people
ordain, and they can draw on their purity of practice when they go back
to their everyday life and use what they've learned."
Today's newest monks are the latest foreign men to be ordained in a
kingdom that already has an estimated 300,000 local monks, about one for
every 215 Thai citizens.
Like their Thai counterparts, most of the new recruits will join the
monkhood for a month, then return to their lives as lawyers, stock
analysts or engineers. Others, like Phra Nicholas, opt to stay for good.
"My aim was to ordain for life," Phra Nicholas says. "But for that
you have to be fairly sure in your mind what you are doing."
Phra Nicholas was born Nicholas Woods and raised in Manchester,
England, where he attended church schools as a boy. He read the bible
"cover to cover" yet it failed to make an impression.
"The whole subject of religion turned me off, even as I had a whole
lot of questions about spiritual issues," he says. "I had a fairly
negative view of organized religion."
As a university student he began exploring religious and
psychological issues more deeply, and he was routinely drawn to an
overlapping element of both: meditation.
Woods studied and practiced meditation at a Buddhist society in
Manchester in the 1980s, learning of Sri Lankan, Japanese, Vietnamese
and Myanmar strains of Buddhism.
The Theravada school most common in Southeast Asia and Sri Lanka
originated with the monastic community that first followed the Buddha.
It tends towards conservative and cautious interpretation of its canon
of scripture, which is considered Bhuddism's oldest surviving texts.
Phra Nicholas says: "What I liked about the Thai approach was that
the teachings were very much based in daily life - they were speaking in
practice and not just in theory," he explains. But many of his
instructors were Westerners. He was seeking the source itself.
Completely different from my own culture
"I needed to get the feel of something completely different from my
own culture."
Eventually Woods made his way to Thailand in 1988 to learn more. He
taught English at a local school, but after visiting Wat Dhammakaya with
some friends he experienced an ephiphany.
What he discovered at Wat Dhammakaya was a very active spiritual
community that wasn't afraid to press its founder's guiding philosophy
on outsiders, including foreigners.
Over the space of nine years he prepared for the monkhood by learning
Thai and studying the precepts. He changed his last name when he became
a monk eight years ago, and has worn the robes ever since.
'They need this in New York'
Today Phra Nicholas splits his time between Bangkok and Manchester,
where he has set up educational courses and teaches meditation. He also
arranged to teach a meditation class to Thais and foreigners at a
fitness center in downtown Bangkok.
Hope Weiner, a 37-year-old American who works in Bangkok for the Red
Cross, emerges from the class elated.
"It reminded me of Russian dolls, with all these little yous inside!"
she tells the monk. "Damn, they need this in New York."
They have it in New York, or at least in the neighbouring state of
New Jersey. Phra Nicholas has gradually become involved in the temple's
international movement, and it now has more than two dozen chapters
around the world, including in the United States, Britain, Belgium, and
Japan.
Buddhism has thrived in the United States, where there are now over
one million known Buddhists. It is particularly embraced today among
white, upper-class Americans keen on exploring their own internal
spirituality in a fast-paced world.
Many remain faithful to their Christian or Jewish faiths but adapt
several elements of Buddhism, which is itself less a religion as a
doctrine of principles by which to live one's life. Millions have taken
up meditation and yoga.
"But I find it a little bit vain in the West," Weiner says. "I think
they are looking for forgiveness in a way, from themselves.
"People take a pounding - 'you're not pretty enough, you're not good
enough at work.' But when you come to (studies such as meditation and
yoga), there is a beautiful sense of forgiveness, that you're all right
the way you are."
Several farang monks being ordained at Wat Dhammakaya express similar
ideas.
"I think some people have got to a point where they are saying,
'Well, we have a lot of the creature comforts here but something is
missing'," says Aaron Stern, a Jewish American studying for a doctorate
in political science but who is ordaining for a month at Wat Dhammakaya.
Like many of his fellow farang monks, Stern says Phra Nicholas has
been the link between their Western mindset and the Buddhist principles.
"I think he's been fantastic. He puts things into terms much more
familiar to those of us not raised in Thailand," Stern adds. "In that
sense he's a great bridge."
'By giving to others, it comes back to them'
Wat Dhammakaya, considered by some to be a breakaway Buddhist order,
has aroused suspicion ever since its following began to swell some 30
years ago.
The temple's founder, Luang Pu Wat Paknam, proclaimed he had
re-discovered a lost path to enlightenment through intense meditation.
The prospect of reaching nirvana proved a huge draw for thousands.
"All the knowledge that Buddha has, even that which is written in
books, it comes from a very tiny spot within oneself, right about here,"
says one devout Thai follower, pushing an elegant finger into her torso
just above her belly button.
Contributing to Dhammakaya's otherworldly aura, its logo - and indeed
the temples themselves - are unnervingly similar in shape to a UFO. At
lunchtime, hundreds of monks appear to be eating under a giant flying
saucer some 100 metres (yards) in diameter.
Several temples dot the massive complex, including the Dhammakaya
Hall, covering 16 hectares (40 acres) and which can hold services for
nearly a quarter million people. Temple staff describe it as the largest
public building in the world. Often it is nearly full, they say.
Critics say Dhammakaya is a huge money-spinner, with followers
strongly encouraged to donate vast sums, including their homes or land,
to the temple in order to accrue merit.
Six years ago the temple's abbot, Dhamachatyo, was accused of
amassing a billion-dollar fortune and was charged with embezzlement.
An Englishman who now teaches at Dhammakaya says much of the temple's
work has been misunderstood, with several other temples around the
country expressing "jealousy" at its runaway success.
"They do a lot of good but never tell anyone," he says.
Phra Nicholas admits the earlier scandal's reverberations are still
felt.
"As organizations grow, it's as if you come across a ceiling where,
if you hit it, you're seen as a threat on a political level. In Thailand
and perhaps in other countries, once you exceed that threshold you're
put under a lot of scrutiny."
With most of the charges against the abbot now dropped, Dhammakaya
can go about promoting its brand of Buddhism here and abroad, embracing
modern technology to push its message through the Internet, its own
satellite television station and multi-media.
"Dhammakaya is on the leading edge of Theravada Buddhism in that we
aren't afraid of using modern technology. It's necessary if Buddhism is
to remain relevant in the modern world."
He insists the temple is not proselytizing, but merely spreading its
message of peace through meditation.
When asked directly if the temple solicits excessive donations from
the faithful who may be eager to cast off their material excesses to
gain merit, the farang monk turns philosophical.
"There are those who have become wealthy since" becoming Dhammakaya
followers, Phra Nicholas says. "What goes around comes around. By giving
to others, it comes back to them. This is a lot of the driving force for
people to be generous."
The Buddha's antidote for moral decay of His time
BY ARYADASA Ratnasinghe
AT the time of the Buddha (BC 588-543), there were six sophists or
religious teachers, Purana Kassapa, Makkahali Gosala, Ajitha Kesakambali,
Pakuda Kaccayana, Sanjaya Bellattiputta and Vardhamana Mahavira alias
Niganta Nataputta.
They had renounced the world in their quest of truth and to discover
a panacea for the evils of suffering. The air was full of a coming
spiritual struggle which extended far into the people at large.
The Samannaphala Sutta of the Digha Nikaya deals with these teachers,
who wandered from place to place, along with their disciples spreading
among the people their respective teachings and each upholding His
doctrine as the perfect approach for the cessation of suffering.
In the Brahmajala Sutta, the Buddha says that He is rightly praised
not for mere morality, but for the deep wisdom he was able to realise
and proclaim for the good of mankind.
The Sutta gives a list of 62 forms of heretical views about the world
and the self, as proclaimed by other teachers, which were denounced by
the Buddha as low and ignoble.
Into the arena of these religious combatants, entered the Buddha,
expounding His philosophy based on the Four Noble Truths and the
Eightfold Path, rejecting the extremes of sensuous gratification and
self-mortification, as the Middle Path leading to the attainment of
Nibbana (the most blissful and supermundane state) ceasing rebirth.
In the world of Dr. Hermann Oldenberg: "When dialectic skepticism
began to attack moral ideas and when a painful longing for deliverance,
from the burden of being, was met by the first signs of moral decay, the
Buddha appeared."
Of the six sophists, Mahavira (BC 659-587), who was elder to the
Buddha by 36 years, was the last (24th) in the long lineage of "Thirthakas"
(ford-finders), and was a Jain.
The first was Vrasabha and the one before Mahavira was Parsava, and
all of them practised extreme asceticism given to austerities and
penances of the most rigid kind.
They were not Brahmins but 'Ksathriyas' (similar to the Buddha's
father, the King Suddhodana), who were of an oligarchial disposition.
Mahavira, unlike the Buddha, was not the founder of Jainism because
it was in existence before Him.
According to the unanimous Buddhist tradition, the Buddha had, under
the Bodhi Tree discovered by intuition the fundamental truths of His
doctrine and attained Enlightenment in accomplishment of His endeavour
for the cessation of suffering.
But, Mahavira, after attainment of complete omniscience (kevala-jnana),
adhered to his ancestral faith 'ugra-thapascarya' (extreme asceticism)
and upholding 'ahimsa' (sparing all animal life and non-injury) as the
highest precept advocating sympathy and compassion towards man and
animal alike.
Jainism is a monastic religion which, like Buddhism, denies the
authority of the Vedas (the oldest Hindu scriptures) and is, therefore,
regarded by the Brahmins as a heretical doctrine.
On the other hand, the canonical texts of the Buddhists frequently
mention the Jains (Nighantas) as a rival sect because Mahavira has often
repudiated the Buddha for following the Middle Path and not conforming
to the norms of self-mortification,which the Buddha rejected as mere
fiasco.
According to the Encycylopaedia of Ethics, Mahavira was a native of
the village Kundagrama (modern Baniya), a suburb of Vesali (modern
Besarh) in India. He was the second son of the 'Kshatriya" Siddhartha
and Trisala, a highly connected lady.
Acaranga Sutra mentions that the soul of Mahavira first descended
into the womb of the brahmin Devananda, and was, by the order of God
Indra (Sakra of the Buddhist tradition) removed thence to the womb of
Trisala.
Mahavira's 11 disciples were Indrabhuti, Agnibhuti, Vayubhuti, Arya
Vyakta, Arya Sudharman, Manditaputra, Mayuraputra, Akampita, Acalabhratr,
Metrarya and Prabhasa. None of them nor Mahavira had ever confronted the
Buddha to clarify matters pertaining to their conflicting views and
ideologies.
Only the householder Upali had gone to meet the Buddha, as directed
by Mahavira, to argue on crucial matters on which the two disagreed.
What happened was that Upali became a convert to Buddhism and entered
the order.
Mahavira passed away one year after the Buddha's Enlightenment and,
therefore, it can reasonably be construed that there was no opportunity
for the two to meet directly.
The conversion of Uapli, the chief lay-disciple of Mahavira, was a
severe blow which he could not bear with patience. Finally, he passed
away undergoing the penance of stravation.
After the passing away of Mahavira, a group of Nigantas (Jains), came
to meet the Buddha seeking clarification over extreme penances. After
listening to them the Buddha said.
"If it is true that all living beings experience pleasure or pain as
destined by their actions in the past, or in the course of their earlier
births, then the Nigantas must have been all sinners in the past and,
hence, they now undergo such painful austerities."
In jainism, the monastic discipline as a rule go to the extreme
extent of religious suicide by starving to death by slow process.
Mahavira himself adopted such a method to end his life, and when the
Buddha heard of it, he declared that suicide is a useless and a futile
effort and a cowardly act, committed after much deliberation and
frustration.
"Be a lamp unto yourself and work out your salvation with diligence"
was the admonition of the Buddha. Mahavira said "Man, you are your own
friend. Why do you wish for a friend beyond yourself?" Both these
sayings have a common touch. |