Ajahn Sona 32 Years a Monk - Part 1

this is a continuation of a video i made in 2008 12 years ago and it was called 20 years a monk and now 12 years later i have just finished my 30 second reigns or something like 32 years as a monk so i thought i would catch you up if you're interested in this the the autobiographical story of edge and sona it continues i actually went over the talk from many years ago because i didn't remember what i had said but i only got up to just about to depart for thailand so i had done about 10 of 20 years so i'm going to have to catch this up so i left the bhavana society in west virginia at about two and a half years after my ordination and and went to thailand the northeast of thailand because i had heard of ajahn chah and i had heard of the international forest monastery wat pa nana chat a thai monastery is called a water and this struck me as interesting a monk who had been there a canadian monk who was passing through west virginia and he traveled he'd been in sri lanka and thailand a few other places and i said what was the best place you ever had been in terms of good practice and high standards of vinaya and if you don't know what vinaya is these are the ethical and rules of conduct for monks lives and this is not particularly well conducted in many parts of the world by theravada monks and there are a lot of rules and regulations and i was really interested in actually plunging into that life and indeed he had a high appraisal of this so i determined that i wanted to go there and i never i'd never been to thailand i didn't have any grasp of thai language and i went with a vietnamese monk who had shown up at a society he also was looking for a bit of an escape from the vietnamese community in the u.s he had been in the robes since he was eight years old he was a novice at eight years old at 20 he was fully ordained and he had been he was about 30 then he had 10 reigns and he was uh had been sort of had many many duties and demands upon them because the vietnamese community from the vietnam war had migrated to the u.s a very large migration and they needed buddhist monks for counseling and and of course many of them had been traumatized and so forth so the monks were quite overwhelmed by their duties quite often because there weren't very many vietnamese monks in the united states anyway he he wanted to go and find out he'd heard of this wonderful practice the vinaya and the forest practice in thailand so we managed to arrange an air ticket so neither of us had money we didn't handle money so this kind of process is required that somebody is willing to provide these things so somebody did they provided an air ticket and i asked just for a one-way ticket having never been to thailand having no idea what was going there i asked for a one-way ticket that's um that's an indication of my mindset at the time i was all in on the monk life and i wasn't worried about second guessing myself or leaving any kind of emergency exits so we got on the plane arrived in bangkok had no idea where we were what we were doing and whoever sponsored us had booked us a night in the ram of the fourth hotel which is a weird thing for two months it's a luxurious hotel in bangkok we walked in there and uh they had pre-booked uh some meals and everything but anyway we managed to take the little airplane to the northeast of thailand again we had i didn't even know where in thailand we were going northeast of thailand is the poorest area of thailand we arrived at the airport and we had written a head those were the days when you wrote letters you didn't email anything there was no internet so this was 1991 and we we arrived and there was no one there at this airport we had no idea where the monastery was and we had written and they had invited us and we had no idea how to get there and so we flagged a tuck tuck like a it's a motorcycle taxi kind of thing with a little carriage on the back and we couldn't speak any thai so we were monks and what pa na na chat we indicated and finally we actually arrived there but we had no money so we couldn't pay the guy either we knew that and we said wait wait wait we went in to see somehow they had forgotten us anyway they managed to find the uh somebody to pay the taxi driver and um we were there and it was absolutely we had we had not checked it even out on a map where we were anything so there was a quite a it was quite an arrival it was a very enchanting place it was a good nice uh tropical forest very peaceful kind of stepping into the past you could see water buffaloes plowing fields on the side as you went along basically just rice farms small very small little huts and houses yeah we were stepping into the 5th century bc almost were greeted cordially but in us it's a very austere place so we were it was not like you're coming into a hotel or anything it's the first night was just uh sleeping on a bare wooden floor in a little cootie on posts and then the next day you go arms around for the one meal of the day and that was the most painful experience i've had for a long time i came right out of my my winter boots in west virginia my canadian soft white feet and we went on must have been a five or six kilometer arms round across it seemed as if each stone in the road had been sharpened just for me it was just like walking on hot coals terrible kind of every step was painful and the vietnamese monk also was in pain got back to their the monks and they were this is an international forest monastery so the monks were from europe and north america they were from all kinds of different countries germans and english and australians and americans swedes whatever and um we they were all quite toughened uh they had been trained there and so their feet were like animal hooves so they weren't really noticing it but i that night the abbott adjen pasino gave a talk and he happens to be canadian so he gave a talk on being kind to yourself well that was my cue i said the next day before the arms run i i said to him ah that was a very inspiring talk on being kind to yourself and that arms round that i went was it's just agonizing for my i need a couple of weeks to get my feet some callouses on them can i go with you on your arms ron because the abbot usually goes on a very short little arms round so he said yes okay he was that was very nice so that was my encounter with jin pasno so the first experience was one of compassion kindness and reason so these obviously this place was really demanding and i want to talk more about actually how much admiration i have for the for mostly the young men they were almost all young men in their 20s who somehow decided they were gonna actually sign up for this they're from european societies which have lots of economic potential we went to one of the poorest areas of thailand which is uh is was not a it was more or less a third world country and they resigned all other possessions their future and the they could have gone to thai watts that would have treated you a bit like a celebrity a westerner ordaining and you would have gotten nice food everything but they didn't want that they they wanted the the basically the hardest life you could find not all of them succeeded not all of them lasted but they all it was it's very admirable that young men from a very much more cushioned society could endure this and live up to the demands because the demands were very very hard uh you know we're up at three o'clock in the morning every morning one meal a day of food that this also had the reputation that area of the worst food is thailand thailand has a one of the best cuisines in the world and a lot of thai monks wouldn't go there because the food was not good it was poor farmers and they tended to eat sticky rice as a central part of their diet and so a lot of sticky rice not everybody can digest this stuff it tends to not pass through you very well and a lot of them the european monks were always concerned about this so we all lost weight every single one of us was probably 20 pounds underweight uh you know down to about a five percent body fat ratio but that blended with the thai monks because i i never saw a thai monk in that area that had more than four percent body fat these were farm boys and it's a way of life monasticism is a way of life and it's there are thousands of monks and monasteries in the northeast and that's the kind of the heartland of the forest tradition and i think probably poverty and austerity as a way of life in the farming villages shapes the expectation of how the monks should live because if the villagers are sleeping on a hard wooden floor with a wooden pillow yes they have wooden pillows then how how do you as a monk how do you [Music] how is your life any more austere than than a village person so short hours of sleep uh strong demand for energetic practice uh participation in the community now this is the secret of ajahn chah's recipe adjunct was from the northeast a village boy who grew up and just inherently a genius and i don't think his formal education he probably had a great two or three education but he understood human nature and he understood dhamma very well and he understood also how to train people and how to shape a community this is not the case for all monastic communities quite often they're monks are solo type people they don't have a long much of a communal training sense so this is the idea is that we would meet and function as a community for months at a time and i'll have a very refined sense of communal duties which we would be assigned various monks would take up work projects wood gathering office work whatever needed doing and you were regularly rotated through them without any expectation of preference and you were to do them within your capacity which isn't always your skill area or anything you were just it was a training to let go of all your preferences and your your sense of wanting to be skilled or the best in something etc sometimes you were sometimes you weren't it didn't matter and then there would be periods when the meetings would be dissolved and you would be told go off to your cooties and practice alone so you wouldn't hear the three o'clock bell anymore the three o'clock bell was a in a bell tower you would climb this it monks took turns being the bell ringer and i actually took quite a few turns being the bell ringer and this would usually be a two week rotation and one of the reasons why i took turns being the bell ringer because you had to get up at three o'clock but the bell ringer had to get up much earlier than that because he had to be ringing the bell at three o'clock so i had been a musician before i was a monk and my one of the reasons i liked being a musician was you didn't have to get up in the morning and i never liked mornings i'm not that's not my thing so i thought i don't the idea of getting up to three o'clock in the morning is bad enough why would i want to ring the bell and that's why i did it so i would volunteer on a regular basis to get up earlier than that and go be the bell ringer now this is the way you can train yourself in the spiritual life is it you know your your preferences are are often your impediments that's what's hanging you up so you need to not just go along with your natural tendencies you have to fight them sometimes as far as the food went i didn't really have much problem with it because it was actually better than i had made for myself in my hermitage days where i was not just 20 pounds underweight probably 30 pounds under weight so that somebody else gave me rice and i have a good digestion system so the sticky rice didn't really get to me as it did to saran a lot of the monks anyway we persisted there and i went through many experiences and i was extremely impressed with these young men because they were dedicated and one of the my first experience was to arrive at what's called the posita and it's a recitation by memory of the all of the rules for monks 220 rules for monks in pali and a german monk or uh somebody one of the european monks sat down in this stark simple marble hall which we recited it in and uh sat down and recited it at high speed by memory about 45 or 50 minutes of talking as fast as you like sort of like an auctioneer in imagine reciting a poem by homer in latin or greek at high speed so these monks had memorized this thing and were able to recite it almost flawlessly by memory this is not part of european or american or canadian education we don't do that anymore but they had just abandoned uh our notions and had really just committed themselves to this this takes for the ordinary person this is it's almost beyond the capabilities of most ordinary people but if you have a decent memory that can take you months or even a year to to memorize it so i this is just like being in the time of the buddha this is just true dedication and really quite appreciating and have made me think about like why why are all these young men here i know why i'm here but they're all here too because something is not enough in the west the ties were very very impressed and supportive of us as well we were very very touched by this support because they also knew that we're coming from a place where you know the streets are paved with gold like and we're going to the most austere monasteries that why are we doing this and kind of celebrate that like yeah that's amazing so they they also kind of began to reappreciate that they really have something of value if these these westerners from very wealthy countries are are coming here maybe maybe we have taken this dharma for granted maybe these the monks you know we have something here and this is we're we're telling them you do have something here you have something here that we don't have we have the material stuff but it's it hasn't worked out it's not what you think so we're also plunged into the thai forests and and all of the wildlife that lives there i lost count of how many encounters i have had with cobras every kind of poisonous snake and including big constrictors uh these forest monasteries are full of these snakes and you're completely vulnerable uh monks do not carry weapons at all and they do not kill any conscious beings including malarial mosquitoes and so you're in enmeshed in a in a place which is teeming with life and this is this is what i also did not quite realize how i was being trained by these things i if you reach for a cup you've certain soon learn that there might be a scorpion behind it or a frog in it you never just drink you you look first because you've had too many experiences where there's something underneath or a spider behind it or something i didn't realize how it had trained me until i came back to the west and i would i was reaching for something and i was expecting a and i realized there aren't any scorpions here you know it it had been trained into me unconsciously your only protection is loving kindness and you really are sincerely practicing this because you're constantly in an engagement with these these animals at every level including types of many many types of ants that are stinging poisonous insects everything seems to be chemically armed and also even i again i moved from wat panana chat to a to a place called watkun for a year and it was full of wild pigs and these wild pigs travel in herds and they can be quite dangerous and faster than any dog i've ever seen they're unbelievably fast and you and you're making your way through the jungle at three o'clock in the morning in the pitch black usually with a candle lantern and then there's a herd of wild pigs in the middle of the path 20 of them and all you can do is just stand there and then usually they're very shy so once they detect you they they vanish in a puff of smoke they're so fast into the bush but you you have to consider well what if they take a little animosity you know there's nothing you can do they're just too fast big snakes i remember encountering a great big just the tail of a great big constrictor just poking out from behind a tree on this path as i'm walking and i'm thinking they're it's it could be behind that tree waiting for something you know and so i couldn't walk past i had to wait and then the tail slithers behind the tree now i don't know if it's just waiting behind the tree so i can't go there i wait i wait an hour it's you know it's i'm coming back from the evening sitting it's pitch black candle lantern it's about a kilometer through the forest to my cootie and i sit there for about an hour just waiting till that snake has gone and then i i take a very large detour around the tree but every day then if i when i pass that tree i think that there could be a snake behind it i mean the tree must have been eight feet in diameter so it's a big it's right near a path so this is the kind of thing you're just constantly having to be alert and aware and your only option is you have no other there are no ways to protect yourself there's only loving kindness uh you have to you have geckos and 2ks which are kind of lizard beings that live stuck to your ceiling with great yellow eyes with slit pupils staring into infinity at you from the ceiling and rats rats can be under the boards 2ks are stuck to the ceiling and they're in a perpetual war with each other the rats come out when the 2k leaves the rat goes up and eats the two case eggs when the rat leaves 2k goes down and eats the rats babies and you cannot if you disturb this order of being then you will get an abundant super abundance of rats or two cases so you have to live between these two realms the two k's above you are stuck to the wall the rats under the floor and you just simply have to tolerate this and so this is the this is the life of the forest monk you're enmeshed in nature but you also find out you can live with nature and you can cooperate and they have discovered all kinds of ways to not just kill everything or poison everything and you can cooperate and it's very rare that monks are injured by the by these beings it does happen i i know two monks that have been bitten by cobras both survived by the way um so the the life of the forest monk went on and i thoroughly trained in that and i think i was so fortunate because the northeast of thailand was just starting to experience some of the benefits of new economics and they were getting some roads paved and villagers were getting motorcycles and plows and stuff there are downsides to that as well the villages were originally plowing fields with these water buffalos which would munch off of the the product of the rice fields but then they would drop fertilizer into the fields and so it was a perfect cycle when they got they got these two-stroke engine plows which belched gas fumes into the air produced no fertilizer and then they had to buy fertilizer and fertilizer companies would sell them based on the harvest to the next crop and then they started to get into debt with fertilizer companies and they couldn't repair their putt-putt plows and they had to buy gas for them and they had to get to town to buy these things and they had so they got a motorcycle and then they're back and forth between the motorcycle needed a paved road as they they paved the roads and all of this stuff so we saw the we were just at the beginning of transition from what what could have been around the time of the buddha the fifth century to i would say the early 20th century of of the west in in a period of a few years transition televisions came we could you'd be on alms around it six in the morning walking in a village and there would be a television blaring out of a little straw roofed hut so you can see this in congress kind of flood and the western monks were saying you don't know what you're you don't know what you've got till it's gone we're here for a reason we it's not because we couldn't afford a college television so this is the feeling of this thai thing i stayed until the end of my fifth reign and i got an invitation to come back to vancouver from a sri lankan man kirti senaratne who had encountered me quite early when i was a hermit a lay hermit and he had started a temple and part of his inspiration was that he that i was practicing buddhism so diligently and he is born buddhist and they weren't doing much so they decided they better start doing something and import some monks so he did and then he wrote me a letter so after your fifth reign as a monk you're given independence and you can travel and you can live on your own without being accompanied by the teacher you know you're you don't have to live with your teacher so i i wasn't actually planning on you know permanently leaving thailand or anything i just thought i'd take an invitation to visit my parents live in vancouver so i thought i'd see them for a bit and see the new community and see how things were going and so i end up on a plane back to vancouver that was an interesting experience i really hadn't been out of the forest for about three and a half years and then suddenly on in an international airport in a plane crammed in there tightly with with a lot of people but i arrived back in january with bare feet and my robes my mother and cousin came to pick me up with a pair of socks and i was taken to the sri lankan temple which was a a house a rented house in surrey and there was a burmese monk and a sri lankan monk and myself the burmese community and the sri lankan community had gone in cooperatively on the on the rent and so they had two kind of different ethnic communities in there both taking turns offering alms and doing their various things very very different from the forest tradition so this is the suburban [Laughter] experience which i had no intention of remaining in anyway we a german monk who i met in thailand who had also finished his fifth reign we had talked about going someplace what you know where did we want to try and so forth and so he wrote to me and i i was in vancouver so he he came a few months later arrived a few months later and there was all kinds of issues with visas and elect and stuff but it was interesting we had a flood of canadian uh westerners coming and they were very happy to see a canadian monk who you know spoke good english with them and so there was quite a lot of interest in in the western community but i wasn't interested in being in the suburbs so one day the german monk said to me where is this hermitage that you talked about that you went when you were lay herman i said well it's about a three hour drive from vancouver into the north into the coastal mountains they said i wonder if somebody would drive us up there let's go see that and i said sure if you want to let's see and so somebody did volunteer we drove up there and we arrived and we went in to see it now the old shack was still there we walked in there and the german monk couldn't just couldn't believe how beautiful the the nature was there and it indeed it is beautiful anybody who knows it's it's about 50 kilometers or more uh north of uh whistler the famous uh international ski resort in the mountains there and it's just it was near a glacial fed river and eight surrounded by eight thousand nine thousand ten thousand foot mountains uh old growth forest and he said could we possibly rent this place by the way so we had no funds where we do not use money and we don't have any storehouses of money so we went to see the old fellow who rented this place to us and he asked he rented it to me he didn't recognize me i was now shaven headed and wearing robes and i reminded him of who i was it had been about six years since i'd seen him oh yes he remembered me then and we asked is this place for rent and he said yes and then we asked how much fifty dollars a month so the person with us put down two months and we had a two months rent and we had a monastery now we just had to figure out the rest and the the shack i ended up living there again for three and a half years it was broken down shack by the birkenhead river it had no electricity no phones no just a primitive outhouse no way to get to town we had no vehicles no real way of support there was only about three or four neighbors within several miles of us it was in the middle of a valley at each end of which was a small indian reserve and there was a few lagers sprinkled up the valley a few you know various people just a very small population in a large area no reason for being there except that it was 50 a month and and in nature true beautiful raw nature somehow we managed to survive i have a number of stories from that one of the things the transference of animal life so we were again inundated by pack rats mice and no poisonous snakes but bears bears everywhere bears on our porch bears everywhere black bears but somehow i don't regard bears as much of the problem as poisonous snakes so i've just been around bears my whole life and we're still around bears so i don't regard them as all that much of a problem but at the higher levels if you walked into the mountains the grizzlies were there and so you had to be a little wary of that uh so there were grizzlies up a few thousand feet and the black bears stayed in the lower elevation so we're just surrounded by these large large animals and again as monks we cannot defend ourselves we our only defense is meta and we you just learn to be aware and be cautious in the forest and people discovered us and came all the way from vancouver two and a half to three hour drive the sri lankan community and the thai community would bring food drive three hours to bring us food and offer a meal and they would leave bags of rice when we had a steward with us a one one young man who volunteered to stay with us in this broken down shack with no facilities whatsoever very very primitive very primitive very cold leaky not meant for winter use we we had to find firewood and we had no chainsaw we borrowed a neighbor's chainsaw very kindly neighbor and we it wasn't a half an hour before we broke it and now we could not return it broken so the steward had to hitchhike to town with his chainsaw 25 kilometer hitchhike standing on the side of this highway with a chainsaw and then he got it fixed and it cost basically all of them all of the money the monastery had and now we quickly gave it back to that neighbor before we broke it again we were afraid to use it again but we still had no firewood it was that's how desperate it was it was really edgy that edginess though is like if you heard my prior some of my life stories about winter camping and living as a as a hermit in that shack and so forth you know that i have lived on the edge of things for many many many years before that and so it didn't bother me he didn't bother the german monk either he had been in thailand for about six or seven years and he'd been living in caves and austere little huts and i don't think he understood what a canadian winter was either so he wasn't really particularly concerned but i had to i had to somehow arrange all this but we there's no way to we have no foam we have no way of communicating and the nearest phone is a radio phone at the neighbors so you can't even write a letter because the mailbox is 17 kilometers away and this kind of stuff so it's a very interesting situation to be in you just kind of have to wait and wait we did and eventually people did discover us and started to make contact the local newspaper in whistler came up one time and did a story on us and it became the most popular story it's called the peak p-i-q-u-e newspaper in whistler and i think it's still functioning and the photographer and the journalist came up and we got a front page shot with a fisheye lens i think he was he was attempting to imitate rolling stone magazine or something like that i am eerily looking i am peering as a monk in this shack into this fisheye lens front page like this on the peak newspaper it's a free newspaper by the way but it was their best-selling edition so people discovered us uh in whistler and we used to get little groups of lifties and various people come up and they asked if they we could met so we started a saturday night meditation so in the middle of this of nowhere in the middle of the shock it was a saturday meditation the shack by the way was 14 feet by 20. that's a little larger than your i don't know your bedroom so but we had sometimes a dozen people come up and join us for a saturday night sitting and we used to sit do all night sittings as well so the the thai a group of thais found us and they they were a mixture of phd students and nannies so nanny phds and they would drive up once a month and they would do an all-night sitting with us and listen to dhamma and then they would offer a meal in the morning and they would and then as a group maybe sometimes 10 of them they would drive back in a rented van to vancouver and they became very devoted practitioners and they had been in a thai buddhist society and they had not just taken it for granted but they had kind of discovered buddhism here with these with this they could become intrigued by the practice and they went on to become some of the leaders of thailand they did their doctorates in economics and in dentistry and all these things and chemical engineering and things like that and the nannies are amazing hearty pioneer types who had taken a chance and come to the west and had to do two years uh as an obligation canadian immigration obligation as nannies to these western brats you know but they had their own skills they became cooked some of them bought their own restaurants some of them went to work they got married etc they flourished just a remarkably uh tough and enduring and persistent and talented people so that was a very beautiful interaction the shack is full of stories and it but it was a period of about three and a half years and at the end of the three and a half years i had enough people by that that time the german monk had gone to burma and i was there for the last year on my own and which is fine with me i remember this is now almost six years i'd spent in that shack by the river slightly less than three years as a lay hermit and then three and a half years as a monk and it struck me as time to see if there was enough support to actually buy a piece of land where we could establish a monastery we could actually do something you know so that is the next part of this story i will overlap in part two a little more fill in with stories from the shack but i will show you the transition the fairly radical transition to the first you know monastery we actually owned and it was in princeton bc and we bought land and we bought a house on the land which had a telephone it had electricity it had running water it had everything and that was a radical transition and by the time we moved there i think what was it i had eight or nine reigns and i was ready to ordain my first novice my first monk dependency so i will leave that for part two because this story is is is a long and rich story of dhamma you

Channel: Ajahn Sona

Views: 12,316

Rating: 4.9904761 out of 5

Keywords: Ajahn Sona, Birken Forest Monastery, Sitavana, Theravada, Thai Forest Tradition, Dhamma, spiritual biography

Id: 1CWqCYZgDyY

Length: 42min 25sec (2545 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 25 2020