Meeting today accomplished a few things. First, I managed to confuse the board members as to why I wouldn’t want to wear day-glow robes. Crazy Farang, I know. But they are supportive, and confident that they can figure out a solution to our dilemma. On the plus side, it sounds like by May there [...]
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Buddhism is certainly the hardest pill to swallow. Everything about us screams out against the middle way, trying always to find some way to make things permanent, satisfying or controllable. We push and pull, trying to make things go our way, never realizing that we are but dust in the wind, tossed about by storms of our own making. The middle way forces you to give up everything about who and what you are. This is the hardest pill to swallow. It is hard not because it is wrong, but because you are wrong. Everything you cling to is painful, everything you stand for falls over, everything that has meaning to you is meaningless. It is the ultimate test of selflessness. All of that is very dramatic, I suppose, when relating to the events of today… we did manage to compromise on the issue of opening a new center in North Hollywood under Wat Thai. I think the solution is really the best… it didn’t seem right anyway to make such a young monk the head of the meditation department at such a big monastery with such big and powerful monks, and a couple of times at the meeting I suggested that the best thing for me would be to just leave and find a place more suited to my way of practice. So, we swung back and forth, me trying to explain how difficult it is to run a meditation center when you are nothing more than a resident teacher under the authority of people who know very little about meditation centers in general, and they trying to tell me that everything would be just fine doing exactly that. For most of the Wat Pa Phong theras, the intellectual argument over the validity of bhikkhuni ordination is not the point. Their lack of knowledge of the latest studies on the subject is, in their eyes, irrelevant. To them the issue is that Ajahn Brahmavamso reneged on commitments implicit in his ownership of a [...] An interesting topic, and indeed history in the making; new Bhikkhunis in Australia and a schism in the Thai forest sangha… I’m not sure which is of more significance: History in the Making « Go beyond words: Wisdom Publications’ Buddhist Blog. This is the closest I get to commenting on politics… Mr. President, if I were an American, you’d have just lost my vote… |
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