Rules for everything.
You can’t eat in the afternoon.
You can’t drink. Complete celibacy. No sex.
And it’s like “What’s going on here?”
It’s very strict in our order and we’re not allowed to have contact with women.
No, I’m not allowed to hug my mum.
So many people think isn’t it wonderful that your son’s a monk?
Until you’re the mother or the father of the monk.
Because that’s when it becomes really difficult.
My name is Ajahn Khemavaro and I’m the current abbot
at Wat Buddha Dharma.
I’ve been a monk for the last 17 years.
I was living the high life in Thailand,
earning a couple of hundred thousand dollars a year.
Not uncommon to work 12, 14 hours, 16 hours a day,
sometimes seven days a week.
I thought I’d made it, whatever that meant.
The universe conspired for me to become a monk.
The reason that drove me to seek a different path? The stock market crash.
If I didn’t have the answers to the stocks, which I thought I was pretty good at,
I might not have the answers to the rest of my life.
My name’s Venerable Kovido.
I’m 33 and I’ve been a monk for just about four years now.
I always had a passion to be an actor.
I auditioned for drama school and got into Victorian College of the Arts.
Midway through VCA, I started to go a bit off the tracks, I suppose.
A lot of frustration.
I used to go out sometimes and want to get in a fight. It was really weird.
When I told my parents that I was going to become a monk,
though the reaction wasn’t entirely positive...
On the day of his ordination he held me and whispered to me,
“Mum, I won’t be able to hold you after this.”
And I can still feel the thud in my heart
when he told me that.
It wasn’t a happy day.
I noticed Josh was always searching.
And he was looking for something.
He started getting into a pretty strong routine of meditation.
And then I thought that’s a bit weird...
I still would hope that at some point he might leave the Buddhist monastery
and come back to normal life.
You have hopes for your children.
And one of the hopes we had, that he’d have a partner, family life...
So when it’s not turning out that way, you do have a sadness.
- But it was a good trip, wasn’t it? - Yeah, that was a lot of fun, actually.
You were quite wild that Christmas.
I’ll always call you Josh.
I say the name Kovido if I’m ringing the monastery.
But I put a lot of time and love into choosing your name.
I’ve consciously resisted calling you Kovido.
I know, I know, I know. I can sense it.
It is marking a transition and a movement
away from things that you’ve previously been identified with.
So the name does that.
Despite having a lot of friends, I’ve probably always had a lot of friends,
and made friends very quickly,
there was that feeling of being lonely still.
When Josh first told us he was going to become a monk,
it wasn’t a complete surprise I guess.
Thanks for that.
I might need you to do the old offering thing.
You can just pass it to me.
- Which one’s yours? - That’s a good question.
Yeah, you can do it like that. I just need to get it offered.
It’s interesting, because sometimes I might chat to someone
who hasn’t seen Josh in ages.
And they might say “What’s Josh like?”
I can only say “You see him and he’s the same person.”
Did I delete my Facebook account? No, I haven’t deleted it.
There was a new rule that was passed by our whole organisation
that no monk was to have a Facebook account,
and I haven’t followed through on that one.
It is a means of just dropping in every once in a while
and saying “Hey, I still exist.
“I think I still exist, anyway.”
Welcome to my hut.
This is my resting place where I sleep and also do meditation.
There is not a lot here in my room.
But that is where the freedom lies.
In the modern society we seem to be swinging towards
sensuality, consumerism, buying everything.
Whatever you want, buy it.
Buy your happiness in pills, in clothing, or in holidays and experiences.
But there is a yearning for something beyond all this.
I guess these days when I see people go into shopping centres, or buying things,
or I see adverts on television,
I guess I don’t, I don’t, I don’t... I don’t get it.
So this ability to balance the modern lifestyle, fast-paced, and some quiet time...
I think that’s the reason why meditation
and Buddha’s teachings of peace and stillness
will be in high demand in the future,
in the next twenty or thirty years.
I’m not sure what it is about Australia in particular,
and why Buddhism is growing here.
I think, on the whole, Australians are very open-minded people
and very generous people.
There’s just that willingness to engage.
Each winter, I knit maybe half a dozen wool beanies.
And for some of the monks whose mums and dads and families aren’t near them,
this is one little way that I can reach out to them.
A lot of other parents of young people Josh’s age,
their kids have gone off the rails a bit,
would probably love their son to be living a good life in a Buddhist monastery.
And we sort of kept telling ourselves that.
It’s eased a lot and I feel a lot more comfortable.
I feel much happier.
He is still the same Josh. He hasn’t changed.
He comes home and we have a lot of fun.
He’s a very happy young man.
Although I live up here in the monastery,
I still have that sense of being connected to my family and friends.
I think that’s just because I’ve got a deeper understanding of human nature
and the trials and tribulations of life.