Monastic Life
Today I’m going to talk a little about monastic life, and why a person might want to become a monk. We don’t often do this, for a number of reasons. One is that we don’t want to give the impression that in order to really practice the Dharma one has to become a monk; that is not the case at all. We have many lay trainees who do exemplary training, better than many monks! I’d like to make that quite clear. It’s more a matter of commitment to the practice. Being a monk helps us to keep to this commitment, but it’s not essential.
As we know, the Buddha created the Fourfold Sangha: male and female lay trainees and male and female monks. We need all of them, we all support each other. Traditionally, the monks depend on the lay trainees for food and the other necessities of life, and the lay trainees look to the monks for teaching and guidance.
This arrangement is beneficial in many ways: it means the monks need to live a good life, to keep the Precepts and be worthy of the support they receive. If they don’t, the lay people stop supporting them and things fall apart. It also frees up the monks to concentrate on their practice because they don’t go out to work; they work in the monastery, whether it’s physical work, talking to people, giving Dharma talks, or simply doing their practice.
It also means the monks are not cut off from the world; people wouldn’t support us if we were. The monastery is a place of refuge for people who want to spend time here, or if they are not able to visit in person, to connect with us in other ways. A lot of people tell us how much it means to them that we are here, even if they can’t visit. We try to make the Dharma as accessible as possible, in as many ways as we can.
However, the world is changing. It is becoming increasingly secular, more concerned with material things than with any religion or things of the spirit. Monks in many traditions are becoming an endangered species, especially here in the West. People interested in Buddhism sometimes say, “Who needs monks? We can do it for ourselves; we don’t need monks.”
There are probably thousands of books about Buddhism, some of them really good and some not so good. There are many Buddhist teachers, far more lay teachers than monastic ones. Many of these teachers do good work and help a lot of people. There is the mindfulness movement, which is a really good thing, but it can get divorced from its Buddhist roots, it’s a self-help thing. There are meditation apps, podcasts, Zoom events, online Dharma talks (including ours) ‒ endless ways of practicing the Dharma and never even seeing a Buddhist monk.
With all of this there is a feeling of trying to make samsara comfortable rather than looking to see what lies beyond it. Trying to have a happier, more comfortable self with all its trappings rather than being willing to relinquish selfishness, which is the basic cause of our suffering.
And with all of this, why would anyone want to become a monk? Because there is a call of the heart in some of us, the vocation, which means ‘calling.’ Some people have it, most people don’t. This does not mean that those who have this call of the heart are any better than anyone else; it’s just that some people want to be monks and nothing else will do. Some people want to be doctors or bankers or artists; it doesn’t mean they are better or worse than other people.
One reason I am talking about all this is because someone recently said they thought we didn’t want more monks, that there was some kind of barrier. We do want more monks. Some of our older monks are getting frail and elderly, a few have died in recent years, and though we have some younger monks we need more if we are to continue into the future. We want to continue; we want to be able to offer the Dharma, and the refuge of the Abbey, to future generations. I also feel that there will always be a few people who have that call of the heart, the call to the monastic life, and we want to keep the door open for them.
It is said that some people are pulled towards the monastic life, that call of the heart, and some are pushed, by suffering. I think that for most of those who become monks there is a bit of both. For some people there has been great trauma or suffering in their life, and they want to find something to help them deal with that suffering. They want to find a deeper refuge than this transient life. For others, it is just that life is not satisfactory, as the Buddha said; the things most people want: love, family life, enough money, a satisfying career ‒ for some people they are hollow, they don’t satisfy. “There must be more to life than this! What is the purpose of my life?”
For others again, they are pulled to the monastic life. Maybe something has happened: they may have had an experience of Truth, a glimpse of something a lot bigger and deeper than they usually see. And they are drawn to know it more deeply. You can’t recreate an experience of Truth, it doesn’t work; but you can accept it as a gift, something to draw you towards your life’s true purpose. The wish to let go of the things of the world and find the Truth becomes the most important thing.
For myself, I am more grateful than I can say that I have had the opportunity in this life to be a monk. I can’t imagine the sort of person I would be if I was not. I have never been under the delusion that being a monk made me any ‘better’ than anyone else; I was lucky. The first time I went to Throssel Hole Priory, as it was then, in England, I knew: This is it. After that I no longer had that middle-of-the-night feeling of “What is my life for? What is my purpose?” That kind of panic that I was missing my life. I had to muster up my courage to ask about being a monk; I thought they would laugh at me. They didn’t.
Feeling one is unworthy to be a monk: many of us, even many monks feel like that, and in a way it’s not a bad thing. It keeps us humble and willing to learn and change. But we don’t want to let it stop us from asking, from trying, if that is what our heart longs to do.
Not everyone is suited to monastic life, in fact few people are. To start with, most people have no desire whatsoever to be a monk; you have to really, really want to do it, because it’s not easy. We don’t accept everyone who asks; we try to discern what is best for the person. Maybe it’s good to let them try it, even if we think it may not work. And sometimes, clearly not. Some people want to be monks and they can’t, for reasons of health, or age, or family commitments or other difficulties. Some people have an unrealistic idea of what monastic life is ‒ a way to escape from the world, to get away from their suffering.
Monks are not trying to get away from suffering; we’re trying to face it head on and accept it and deal with it. All beings are prone to old age, sickness and death, and they’re all right in our face when we look. Monks look. When we look at these things directly they are a lot less frightening than if we keep trying to look away and pretend they are not there. This doesn’t mean we’re thinking miserably about sickness and death all the time; we’re not. We are often more joyful than most people, partly because we don’t take things for granted.
Monks are not perfect. We still have greed, anger, selfishness, fear and so on. But we are trying to see them as they arise, and not act on them. We are working on our selfishness, imperfect as we are. Monks don’t escape from the world; we’re right in it. We try to know what is going on, without getting obsessed with the news and the latest thing. We need to know what people are dealing with, what they are concerned about, what is happening in our world, so we can offer merit and maybe a little advice on how to deal with it. Not to cut ourselves off.
Being a monk is not easy. Being a lay person isn’t easy either. But to be a monk is to live in community, with other people, not all of whom may be easy to get along with. But we are all trying to do our best to work on our selfishness and our shortcomings.
Some years ago a little boy saw one of our monks, and asked him what he was. He replied, “I am a monk.” The boy asked, “What is a monk?” The monk said, “A monk is someone who tries to be the very best person they can be, and that isn’t easy for anybody.” A simple, perfect answer that a child can understand. And that is what we are trying to do: to be the very best person we can be. Of course this isn’t exclusive to monks: most of us are trying to be the best person we can be, within our own circumstances, which may be hard amid the pressures of life in the world. It’s hard to keep to that. For monks it is what we do.
This doesn’t mean trying to be perfect, to live up to some ideal. It means paying attention to what we are doing, and saying, and thinking, and seeing where we are being selfish or greedy or angry. Learning to let go. Working on the self. Community life is really good for this: Rev. Master Jiyu said it was like a rock tumbler: we are all tumbled around by our life together and our sharp edges get worn off. We are all very different, none of us is perfect, and we may not all have chosen each other as friends. But we are here together, doing our best to help each other in our life together as monks. Our community life is a huge blessing. We learn to love each other, and love all beings ‒ or most of them.
Great Master Dōgen calls becoming a monk “leaving home life behind.” We’re not repudiating home life, we’re leaving it behind, looking for something different. We give up many things: family life, a career, many of the distractions and pleasures of lay life. We are celibate: this is a major thing. It’s not just self-sacrifice; it has a positive purpose, both practical and spiritual. I won’t go into it all now, it’s a huge topic on its own.
We have a daily schedule, we don’t just do what we want, eat what we like and when we like, go to bed and get up when we like, and so on. We have rules and we’re expected to keep them. We get called on our ‘stuff’, our anger and unkindness and so on.
All of this helps to wear away at that selfishness, putting ‘me’ first. We put other things first ‒ learning to let go. As Ajahn Chah said, “Let go a little, you get a little peace; let go a lot, you get a lot of peace; let go completely, you get complete peace.” We aim to let go completely. This is the real renunciation: the letting go of the self. We come into monastic life wanting something, otherwise we wouldn’t come into it at all. We gradually learn to let go of the wanting, our self-concern, and we find contentment. We give ourself to the life.
Monastic life is not easy, it can be really hard sometimes, but it brings peace. And it brings joy. The virtues that we try to practice bring joy: gratitude, acceptance, kindness, willingness, unselfishness, and so on. Of course both monks and lay people try to practice these. For monks it’s a constant practice, we’re held to it. As I said, monastic life is not for everybody by any means. For those few people who have that call of the heart, who are suited to the life and come to love it, it’s a blessing beyond words.
