Yesterday we had a great visit with some monastics from Abhayagiri, and for me the best part
about having time to get together and talk is to talk about the Dharma and hear different
perspectives. Our tradition, the Buddhist tradition, is really a oral tradition foremost,
and so we learn things being passed down from person to person. Yes, things are written
down and it's important to read those, and we did notice that the biggest sections in
their library, outside of the Pali, was the Tibetan tradition, and in our library they
noticed that we have a lot of books from the Pali canon, which is certainly the case. But
still, it's the oral tradition. Because this is a living tradition, things get passed down
from teacher to student, teacher to student. And this has been the case since the time of the Buddha.
And so what this looks like is, we're sitting out on the deck and I have had a question
that's been in my mind for a while, and who better to ask than people who read the Pali
canon, because it was a question that related to the Pali canon. And so what's beautiful
about it is the people sitting out there all had different levels of knowledge, but in
their monastery in particular, it's not unusual for the monks to study and learn Pali. In
fact, I think all of them learn the language. But some of them really take it on, and so
the one person I was talking to, the one novice, actually, could just tell me one sutta after
another, you know, like, where my questions could be found-- 'you can find more here,
and in this one it says that, in my practice, you know, I'm working on it like this....'
And this is how the conversation went. And I think this is one of the richest kind of
conversations that we ever have, because what I left the day from was really having a way
to-- Between the visit that other folks made, visiting with these monastics a few days prior
and the comments that they made, and then the whole visit, and then these conversations
here, I was able to look at my own practice and kind of try to put it in a different perspective,
slightly, than I have. It's funny because it shouldn't seem any different, but it does
somehow shed different lights. And so one of the things that they said that kind of
started this off, in terms of my own practice, was their kind of method and their community
is to first have the individual work on themselves, and then try to integrate that person into
the community. That's how it was kind of put to me. And of course in Buddhism we're always
saying this insider kind of thing, and we have to work on ourselves first before we
can help others, but I hadn't really thought about that so much in relationship to community
life in the way that they seem to embody it. I guess that's the big difference, how they
embody that teaching. And so, in their tradition, of course it's going to be different from
how ours is because we have different influences. But still I think we can draw from this way
that they practice. They come together, definitely, as a strong community, but they also have
a lot of individual practice time and individual endeavors that they work on to understand
themselves as it relates to the practice. And so I particularly, for example, just give
a real specific example. One comment that the novice monk made was, it was like: well,
when I'm working on-- I think he uses the five hindrances a lot. 'When I'm trying to
work on this--' Because I asked him, well what do you do in the afternoon? 'Well I do
mostly reading and sitting meditation. And then when I try to integrate myself in the
community I have to see what's taking me away from my meditation. What are the actual mental
factors' I think is what he kind of came down to. 'Is actually taking me away from actually
integrating myself in the community and doing what I'm trying to do in my meditation practice.'
Which is actually no different from what we do here. At all. But somehow it was just,
somehow the way it was all encapsulated felt fresh to me. I don't know. There's some way
that I think it informs my practice that I hadn't really thought about before so clearly.
Because when I say the words even to myself it seems like, well, this is exactly what
we do here. It's kine of like when Venerable gives a teaching and then we go hear the same
teaching from someone else and it goes in, or something. Maybe it's more like that, I don't know.
So anyway, it was a very wonderful day and I think we all benefited very much, and this
is one of the ways that I think we benefit the most is to try to -- from all these different
perspectives, from all the different historical time periods and all the different influences,
and all the different areas that certain masters were able to cultivate quite well and develop,
which is what really a lot of the conversations went to was how their different lineage holders
held this and this and this, and how they went about things, and why they did it this
way and that way. I think it really informs how we move and how we look at our own practice,
and I think this is really the way that the tradition is carried forward. Wonderful.