Monkchat

It had been a while since I'd had a decent conversation about Buddhism so I decided to attend "monkchat" at Wat Chedi Luang, a stunning temple in the centre of the Old City in Chiang Mai, Northern Thailand.

The monkchat set-up is a collection of tables and chairs shaded by trees in the temple grounds where young monks and novices (monks not yet qualified), take it in turns to attend for a few hours each day to talk with visitors, one on one or in groups. These conversations allow visitors to ask questions about Buddhism and the life of monks, and encourage the young monks to improve their language skills and learn about the lives of foreigners. Great idea; everyone's a winner!

As well as myself, my monk chat group consisted of a small collection of visitors from the US and France and our monk was Tung, a friendly 20 year old newly qualified monk with good English skills, from Wat Suan Dok, a nearby Buddhist monk university. As I didn't have a voice recorder it would be unfair to quote everything Tung told us as I'm only going from memory and a few scribbled notes which are, of course, open to interpretation but, here's what I got out of it:

If you were to give a Westerner just one piece of tangible advice to take away, what would it be?

"Practise meditation," Tung replied with a laugh. He went on to explain that monks in Thailand generally learn two types: 'insight meditation' and 'tranquility meditation' but that in Theravada Buddhism (the type of Buddhism they practise in Thailand) they only practise insight as it makes them more knowledgeable.

Insight mediation or "Vipassana", also known as "mindfulness" meditation, is the meditation of nirvana - the end of suffering. This type of meditation is about observing physical feelings in the body, and observing one's emotions, but without focusing on them and without attachment; just noticing them.

Tranquility meditation or "Samatha" is the meditation of enlightenment - the wisdom of emptiness. There are several types of tranquility meditation but one often used is a focus on the breath in order to calm the mind.

The Buddha practised both types but Tung stipulated that it's very important to have a meditation teacher and that you study it before you practise otherwise if you practise before you study you are likely to go the "wrong way". (I'm not sure what happens if you go the "wrong way", we didn't ask.)
  
Why do Theravada Buddhist monks not practise Samatha?
Because it doesn't give knowledge but Samatha meditation is like magic - "monks can fly!" (I couldn't get a solid explanation for this but, believe me, I'm looking for one!)

What happens to a Buddhist's soul when he dies?

Tung explained that we never see the soul, we can just feel a love. We go to one of four places when we die, depending on our lifestyle / state of mind:

1) If we are an angry person, we will go to an evil place
2) If we are a desirous person, we will become a "hungry ghost"
3) If we keep the five precepts, we will be reborn into the human world
4) If we have high merits we will go to heaven. 

What are the five precepts?

No killing
No stealing
No sexual misconduct*
No lies
No alcohol.**

*I've looked into this and as long as nobody gets hurt it's fine. Phew!
**Yeah, it is what it says; bad luck.

How do you know if a Buddhist is enlightened?

Apparently you don't. You continue to go to your Buddhist meetings and they will go to their enlightened meetings to talk about things but you will never get to find out.

Do monks pray?

"We don't pray, we chant and meditate."

Fascinated, and eager to learn more, I returned a week later and, this time, spoke alone with a monk named Supot, aged 23.

Supot, who travels to attend monk chat almost every day from a monastery outside of the city in the countryside, explained how difficult it can be to speak to visitors who have strong religious beliefs. "They're not open to new ideas," he told me. Because they're so focused on a "God" figure, he went on to clarify, they can't get their heads around a religion without one, and constantly try to push Buddha into that role which, of course, won't fit because Buddha was a regular guy (albeit a prince - but he was still human like the rest of us, and that's the point).

Supot quoted a Buddha proverb, "Everything is dependent on your actions."

His point is that Buddhism is all about taking responsibility for yourself, rather than relying on being judged, rewarded or punished by an external God. "When I put something on my Facebook," Supot told me, "not everything is about Buddhism. You must not only pray for things, but you must also take action. Things happen, not because of their wishing or praying but because of their action."

I told him I'm still amused to find that monks use Facebook but he didn't respond directly, although he did express disappointment that the world seems to be reducing face to face communication, which he deems important for happiness, in favour of spending more time making and maintaining relationships online. He advised me to live in reality because virtual friendships are not real. And oddly that echoes exactly what my good friend Karen told me the day previous. (I guess I need to listen!)

There's a fair bit of information here and everyone will make their own interpretations but, for me, there's a big question jumping right out that cannot be answered by a Theravada Buddhist monk:

What'll happen if we practise tranquility/Samatha meditation, the meditation of enlightenment? Will we find that "prayer" (or a form of prayer) can manifest our wishes without action?

The Holy Bible and other horror stories

What I’m going to do is shed some proper light on all the religious guff we’ve been fed since children and show that, if we strip away all the obscurity, the deity (e.g. the bearded man in the sky) and the metaphors, what we’re actually presented with is the truth, and a way of living our lives that will GENUINELY make us happy.

Stick with me, keep reading. I’m going to make sense of something for you – this could make a big difference to your life.

I think, for some reason, we’re given the bearded-man-in-the-sky stories to “help” us to understand something, to keep us on the right track and to make us scared of going against the common good. But unfortunately, it simply doesn’t work for most of us because it’s so exaggerated and shrouded in so much bullshit that it doesn’t make any sense and so we disregard it as nonsense. Well, I know I always have.

So, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, and here’s what I’m realising:

We all came from the same stuff.

We didn’t just land on the planet ready-made, did we? We came from something, probably after the big bang, there was this bacterium that then multiplied and then all these different bacteria mutated into all the living beings on the planet, changing bit by bit, over the years, to fit into their different environments. It makes perfect sense if you think about it, doesn’t it? So, going WAY WAY back, you and me, we’re related! Oh, and we’re related to next door’s dog and your mum’s cat and those goldfish in the tank in the dentist’s waiting room. Yes we are; we’re family, innit! So let’s treat each other as such! And no, I don’t mean arguing about the washing up; you know what I mean.

We’re all just big children trying to be happy.

In order to be happy, we need to look outwards. This means being good to others and not just to our friends and family but EVERYONE and all living beings (see above about us being family): colleagues, neighbours, strangers in the street, people on the bus, next door’s dog, your mum’s cat, the dentist’s goldfish and all those gazillions of beings living all over the world. Being good only to ourselves makes us selfish – think about a world where it’s every man for himself: we push to the front of the bus queue, we barge our way through doorways first, someone loses their wallet and we find it, thinking how lucky we are – is this really the way to live happily and in harmony? Course not. Now imagine a world where everyone is kind to each other… take a moment to think about it. The last time someone in front of you in the check-out queue let you go first because you’ve only got one item and they’ve got a massive trolley-full – how did you feel? Aww, that’s a nice feeling, isn’t it? Did you say to yourself that it’s restored your faith in human nature? I bet you did. That time you saw someone in the street crying and stopped to check that they’re OK – how did you feel? Better? Warmer? Kinder? More connected? Happier? It touched your soul, didn’t it?

What are our excuses for when we’re being selfish?

I’m in a hurry. To go where?

Strangers are not kind to me, why should I be kind to them? Be the change we want to see in the world – be a good example, it’s contagious.

If someone found MY lost wallet I bet I wouldn’t get it back. So we’ll be selfish, so other people will be selfish, and so the cycle continues. Let’s break the cycle.

Material possessions mean nothing.

Imagine the world blew up and, after the explosion, you’re left roaming around for days, alone in the rubble of houses and buildings, mucky hands and face, tatty clothes. What would you hope to find… An iPad? A pair of Kurt Geigers? A plasma TV? A Rolex? A Bentley? “Don’t be daft, Lisa!” I hear you cry, “After food and shelter needed for basic survival, I’d hope to find a fellow human being for companionship, to share my experiences of the explosion, to help me make sense of what’s happened!” Damn right! Would you fight this person and see them as competition, or would you be glad of the friendship of this stranger and share your food and shelter and hope they’d do the same for you? So, what’s the difference in our world of plenty? Why are we fighting and grabbing for more for ourselves instead of caring and sharing? Does the grabbing (working all hours to earn more money) make us feel satisfied and content or do we just run faster on the hamster wheel, filling our homes with more and more crap..?

Attachment is the root of our problems.

What’s attachment? It’s the unhealthy way we fasten ourselves to thinking that we “need” something and, it’s so unhealthy that, if things don’t go our way, if we don’t get what we want, it makes us truly miserable! But it’s not not getting what we want that makes us miserable, it’s our minds telling us that we’ll be unhappy if we don’t get it. For example, you want a bigger house. You see this beautiful house, in the street of your dreams, you put in an offer and it’s turned down. Oh, the misery! Boohoo, poor me! But really, it’s just a house. Becoming detached does NOT mean you don’t care about anything, what it means is that you’re flexible to the outcome, that’s all; that you don’t rest your worth or happiness on external factors.

So, who is God and how will following him make me happy?

Well, this is what gave me my Eureka moment this morning while I took breakfast on the balcony. God is simply love. There’s no bearded man (like you imagined for a minute that there actually was – I credit you with WAY more sense than that). Let me explain. If we let it, love can be the guiding factor in our lives. When we struggle to know what is the right thing to do, if we turn our focus outwards (instead of worrying about our own selfish needs – or attachment), if we show love to everyone around us, if we treat others with kindness and compassion, then THIS is what will help us to see the right way, and will make us happy because it makes us ALL happy. Do you get it? Read it again ‘til you do because it’s important.

And what about this eternal damnation; burning in hell??

Oh crikey, it’s no wonder we don’t like religion if we worry that if we put a foot wrong, we’ll burn in hell! What I believe this refers to is the loneliness, emptiness and mental torture we’ll endure if we behave as though we’re independent, cut ourselves off from the outside world, are greedy and selfish, and treat others with contempt. There may be more to it, something to do with karma, but this is as far as I’ve got. It’s enough for now.

And redemption?

Well, we’re none of us perfect, are we? But if we realise where we’ve been going wrong and we stop being led by greed (attachment) and look outwards and treat all other sentient beings with love, kindness and compassion, our loneliness, emptiness and mental torture will cease.

It’s quite straightforward, really, isn’t it? We don’t need a big fat book of convoluted horror stories. If we stop being greedy and grabbing and starting from now begin treating absolutely everyone with love, kindness and compassion, we’ll receive the one thing we all strive for each and every day of our lives – happiness. :o)