Fallen Leaf
Yesterday I was ordained here at Abhayagiri as an Anagarika, or postulant. The word Anagarika is from the Pali language and means “homeless” and is the first formal step towards becoming a monk. I ordained alongside my fellow postulant, Kevin, and we’ve now brought the ranks of Anagarikas here up to three persons, joining Nate who has been in the role since September.
As an anagarika I can offer unique services to the monastic community that might otherwise be hard to come by, and not easy to do without, and I’m quite happy about that. I can still use money, but I have little personal use for it anymore; usually I handle money only for Monastery business. I can still drive, but the same condition applies; personally, there’s nowhere for me to go other than here.
In going into this homeless state I am turning further away from the lay life I had been living and facing towards the full-on monastic life. The conventions of the community here are becoming my conventions, the rules I adopt for myself under the direction of the abbot. One of these is to restrict the use of the internet so that one spends very little time on-line, a mere 2 hours per week for email purposes. Furthermore, as a monastic in training it seems proper to step away from blogging as the term “blogger” has a slightly seamy quality to it nowadays. Perhaps later I’ll take it up again, but for at least the next few years I shall set it aside. Given that, this shall be my last blog entry in “Withered Leaf”. I thank all visitors and commentators for your support during the brief life of my little blog.
However this is not my last email message! By all means if you want to stay in contact with me please write to me at my email address.You can also write to me at my post mail address: Brian Johnson
c/o Abhayagiri Monastery
16201 Tomki Rd.,
Redwood Valley, CA 95470
With deep bows and kind regards,
-Brian
This message also posted at http://witheredleaf.wordpress.com
The Gifts of Retreat
Dear Family & Friends,
The 3-month retreat here at Abhayagiri monastery is winding to a close. Today is the weekly lunar observance day and also my 51st birthday. The kitchen manager arranged for a chocolate cake at the meal and I’ve been receiving gifts all week. I am very happy and want to send my warmest birthday greetings to you all!
The retreat has been a wonderful experience. Along with several other volunteers I have been supporting the monastic community of 19 monks, novices and postulants by cooking, cleaning and doing maintenance and errands. This has allowed the monastics to go into a deep silence and develop their meditation practice. Since I only had 4-5 hours of daily work or less, most of my time was also available for practice. Along with meditation there have been Dhamma talks (Dhamma = teaching ), sutta readings (sutta = discourses of the Buddha) and plenty of time for personal reading and reflection. My understanding of the teaching and my devotion to the path has deepened further.
The retreat has also yielded one extraordinarily good birthday present: I have been accepted to join the community here at Abhayagiri. I am now officially a resident and will go through a formal acceptance ceremony to become a postulant sometime later this Spring.
Partial retreat crew posing by the bell
Abhaygiri is simply one of the best Theravadan Buddhist monasteries in the world. It is located in a ravishingly beautiful Northern California valley on about 200 acres of steep, forested hill land. The abbot, Ajahn Pasanno, is world famous as a trainer of monks. In Thailand he has the status of a rock star, drawing crowds of admirers wherever he goes. That he is still little known in the U.S. is just an additional benefit since along with fame comes crowds. The monastery has very good support from an active and devoted group of lay people. Because of all these great factors a stream of top-tier visiting teachers and luminaries come to Abhayagiri every year.
To have the chance to join this community and eventually ordain here as a monk is the opportunity of several lifetimes; it’s a rare and wonderful thing indeed. I can hardly believe my good fortune; I am filled with gratitude. Now I have to make my practice truly worthy of these circumstances, to take maximum advantage of this privilege I have been afforded.
At this point I am done wandering the earth in search of a place to land and ordain. Part 1 on my scheme is complete, now on to part 2: Developing Renunciation. I suspect this part will be less colorful than the part about traveling around Thailand.
Time flies by quickly, and this is even more apparent in a place like this, where it often seems you’re having the same day, over and over again. Pretty soon you lose track of time and suddenly 3 months have gone by… But I shall try to write for the blog at least a few times per year. Please feel free to write to me directly if you like, or visit the monastery and we’ll have a chat.
May peace and happiness be your constant companions,
Love,
-Brian
Western Travel, Winter Retreat
After a long flight and a short rest in Los Angeles, I set off to visit my loved ones over the holiday season. I traveled to Payson, Phoenix, and New River in Arizona, then on to San Jose and San Rafael in California. I had a wonderful Christmas with family and many great meals, phone calls and meetings with beloved friends and family. There were also many that I missed – I had not the time to visit everyone dear to me, alas.
A couple days before the end of the year I arrived here at Wat Abhayagiri for the three month long Winter Retreat. I am part of a 5-person staff crew. There are 13 monks here as well. The monks will focus on meditation and do light chores. The staff will handle most of the cooking, maintenance and administration of the monastery, and also try to uphold a solid meditation practice. For the next three months we will all be doing our best to maintain noble silence and let the practice take us deeper and deeper.
Please excuse me then, dear friends, as I shall be dropping off the internet now and be mostly unavailable for the next few months. I’ll check e-mail occasionally, but will not respond to any but the most urgent requirements. I hope you have a wonderful winter and a prosperous 2010!
Bangkok Farewell
Christmas has become more of a hit in Thailand than I would have imagined. Of course the big department stores miss no marketing opportunity, but at least here in Bangkok there are sweating Santa Clauses and twinkly flocked artificial Christmas trees spilling out onto the streets, jostling amongst the noodle vendors, DVD hawkers, prostitutes and throngs of shoppers. On my way to the market yesterday I took the underground Metro and several of Santa’s helpers were there in full red North Pole costume, belting out a jazzy Thai version of Jingle Bells across from the ticket machines. Fortunately for them it’s heavily air-conditioned in the subway tunnels.
I’ve been in Bangkok for a little over a week and at this moment the Wat in the forest seems very far away. My earlier plans to visit additional monasteries in the countryside fell apart. I became fascinated and enervated by Bangkok and couldn’t work up the drive to leave for further jaunts. There are many stunningly beautiful Wats here of course, but the visitor load and noise of the city makes them less than peaceful. I’m mainly visiting them as a tourist.
Today is my last full day in Thailand and I’m resting and girding myself for the 20 hour trip back to the US. I’ll spend the days through Christmas in Arizona, then drive to California to visit more family and friends through the 28th. On the 29th I’ll go to Wat Abhayagiri to settle in for the Winter Retreat.
May your holidays be full of cheer and love!
-Brian
Back to Tourist Mode
I’m in Bangkok and after many years I’m finally getting a sense of the scale, depth, and density of this city. I’m staying a couple of nights in a guesthouse at the SE corner of the Chinatown neighborhood called “Cozy Guest House”. It’s popular with backpackers and budget travellers with low rates and shared bath/toilet facilites, but it’s very pretty and comfortable.
A fellow monk-candidate, Julian Albanese from Canada, and I have travelled together from Ubon, and spent yesterday here eating at street vendors, taking buses, taxis, skytrains, and subway trains to handle Buddha Image export paperwork and do some gift shopping.
Bangkok is at the opposite end of the spectrum from Wat Pah Nanachat – it’s busy, loud, crowded, and jammed with commerce at every conceivable level. Although I am generally not a fan of cities, I’ve grown fond of Bangkok, mostly because the Thai people that I meet are so friendly, helpful, and down to earth.
I have a couple more Wats to visit and will do that starting today, then back to Bangkok at the end of the week for the flight back to the U.S.
Buddha Image Export
I bought a small, beautiful Buddha image while in Laos, and recently I discovered that Thailand has rules about taking Buddha images out of the country, regardless of their origin.
New images, such as mine, can be taken out, or “exported”, but this requires a permit. Small images below 5″ in length are exempt from this.
It took a 1/2 day of trial and error to get the process done. The permit is issued by the Fine Arts section of the Archeology department. Their building is in the NorthWest part of town on Ayutthaya road, near the river. The office is on the 2nd floor of a sizable office building. As with most such institutions there’s a gate guard who can point you in the right direction, and a lobby guard you can point you further, but no English signage.
Once in the Art section, the very helpful staff explained that I needed two 4×6″ photographs of the statue against a white background. I had prepared two such photos, but used a neutral background. This was not acceptable for the application, but I still had the camera with me and they sent me to a print shop nearby that used Photoshop to replace the original background with white.
Off we went to work this out with the shopowner. After a fractured negotiation with my half-baked Thai and a lot of help from Julian they understood the task, sent us off to have a meal while the shopowner’s daughter did the Photoshop work.
They did a fine job. I received 3 copies and the whole task cost 150 Baht – about $5. Back I went to finish the application.
The application form itself is concerned with your personal identification and what you’re planning to do with the Buddha image.
While in the office the staff made a photocopy of my passport for the application, and an expert was called in to examine the image in question to ascertain whether it might be an antiquity rather than a new work.
They put a sealed tag on the image to show that the inspection had taken place and instructed me to return in 2 days to receive the permit itself.
There was no fee, but this was a bit of trouble to go to for a single 7″ Buddha statue. Undoubtedly most people just stuff their statues in their luggage and leave the country with no trouble, but once I knew the rules I couldn’t ignore them. During my research I came across many tales of woe, treasured Buddha images being confiscated by customs at the airport.
Languishing in Laos
Laos is like a cut-rate version of Thailand, missing the baroque panache, the style, and the devotion to Buddhism, substituting for those items an even-more-laid-back quality, lots of drinking, and the dreary grey dilapidation I associate with communist countries everywhere.
I’m stuck in the town of Savanakhet, a provincial capital on the Mekong river. I came for a 2-day visa run, which has become a 7-day slog. The big delay came due to the Thai King’s birthday. They don’t observe it in Laos, but they do observe it at the Thai embassy here.
At least my money won’t run out any time soon. The guesthouses are costing around 70,000 Kip per night – Kip is the Lao unit of currency – which works out to about $8.30. This is a very poor 3rd world country by most standards, and relatively speaking with $300 in my pocket I’m a wealthy fellow…
With any luck I’ll be back in Thailand on the 8th and will proceed with a truncated version of my Wat visit plan. I can feel the pressure of the end of the trip on me now. My flight back to the U.S. is in less than 3 weeks and I can hardly keep my mind in the current time and place.
I’m sure if I got out of Savanakhet I would see some of the beautiful Lao countryside and village life, but honestly I can’t rouse myself to do such a thing. Maybe it’s the local work ethic infiltrating my mind. It’s just easier to stay here, wander around this sad and dusty town, eat drawn-out meals, and read and meditate in the guesthouse room.
