Ep12: Meeting A Wandering Ascetic - Bhante Jason

one of our friends here in the Blue Mountains Emily and her husband John have quite a large property and on that property they have a monk a wandering ascetic monk in the Tower of Adam tradition called bantay Jason and we were just about to leave the Blue Mountains actually and Emily said wait a minute you should talk to Banta Jason he's about to enter a month of silence as part of his rainy season retreat but he agreed to delay the beginning of his month of silence for this interviewer so we're going to meet him now that's the podcast boat guru Viking podcast do look like a Viking okay in the first year that we stayed here we had a working B to put up the firewall that's cogged on the other side to block out the moon and this year we opened another cave about five minutes down but the K we're going to is about 10-15 minutes down this is very careless like that and this front wall was built last year this cave is best in the mornings because the Sun slowly moves across the valley there's been one time where I've given eight precepts to a young man sitting in this cave in the morning and it's rained while the Sun was shining and it rained heavily as a storm so that the front of the cave became a curtain of rain so what are they precepts eight precepts are higher precepts that lay people can take if they want to live more aesthetically like a monk for a day or two yeah in the old days faithful Buddhists would do it once every full moon and dark Mary it's a fasting so fasting from food but also fasting from centrally impact and a day where they can reflect upon their lives reflect upon the teachings and then make commitments to change their life so a regular New Year's resolution yeah so it seems there are lots of different grades or steps towards becoming a full month mm-hmm what's your story how did you make that transition and I'm sad you've been a monk for eight years now yeah it was I like before and how did it come to be this mean well I was always a very serious young man so I grew up thinking about suffering and wondering why it is that everybody complains about their suffering but then they do nothing about it so particularly during my teenage years I was attempting to formulate my own philosophy of life particularly centered about what you need to do in order to be happy and fulfilled and when I went to Japan as an 18 year old as a Rotary International exchange student on my gap year I started to reboot literature and discovered that the Buddhist were thinking the same thoughts that are always thinking and of course they'd been doing but the husband's of years they could say any bit of work so then I came back from Japan went to university joined some university buddhist club activities met some monks and gradually started to get serious and by the time I graduated from the University I had the aspiration to become a monk and then I spent some time in New York with a Mahayana Chinese Chan group and they came back feeling very disappointed and disillusioned but one of the interesting things was that when I was in New York I visited a very famous American monk could be--could Bodhi he's most well-known for his epic translations of the early Buddhist literature and at that time I was in Mahayana and early Buddhist literature is preserved by the terabyte Edition so when he gave me one of his books I took it very politely but never intended to read it but I took it all the way back to Australia and in my period of disillusionment and depression I looked at my shelf and the only book that I hadn't read was Baku bodis book and at that point was the only book that could stomach reading and after reading and I found that all the contradictions and not just paradoxes but hypocrisy is that I was discovering inside practice in reality were actually resolved and really straightforward way by the historical Buddha and it became very very clear that the hypocrisy 's had arisen on account of people's concoction of a mythological buddha so I became inspired again I lived in forest monasteries in Australia for a while and then decided that I wanted to go all the way back to the original model and not just live in monasteries but have the skills that I needed to live the walking life a truly homeless life eating one meal per day walking around barefooted everywhere no more property than three robes in a bowl and a few sundries taking no money cooking foods on the streets I want to see whether or not that was possible so I formulated in my mind a plan to go to Sri Lanka to find a monk like that and I decided to go to Sri Lanka instead of Thailand or Burma or any of the other terabyte of countries because I just needed a few factors on my side number one I need a warm weather but that's common across all the terrible countries but number two I needed people who could speak English so out of all the terabyte of countries Burma allow Thailand Sri Lanka the cinemas had the best English so I decided to get a shrine car and then soon I was ordained as a monk I found that I there aren't any monks who really lived this way but I just found the best monastery that I could and then trained myself and what I believed I needed to do in order to live this way myself and become the monk that I was looking for and then after a year inside my ordination monastery in Sri Lanka I decided to pay respects my elders returned to Australia to experiment with this life here some of those early hypocrisy Zoar paradoxes that you found in your own practice were resolved by the early buddha yeah okay one of the things that you find inside Buddhism is a lot of talk about emptiness and it's a real simple formula this rock here is empty right you Steve you're empty therefore this rock and you Steve are the same thing all right so I think about religion is it tends to take these sorts of things really really seriously and it can get really dangerous so killing is empty not killing is empty they're exactly the same thing right lying is empty telling the truth is empty they're exactly the same thing but ordinary people you don't get it say you ordinary people you're still stuck with ordinary morality but when you're enlightened you say that that's just all empty stuff and you don't care anymore which allows the master to do horrible things and then just say to the people you just don't get it did you witness that sort of thing going on it happens all the time yeah was it the possibility of that that was disturbing you I mean I just met lots of people who are experiencing that didn't have it so bad myself but even today when I travel around I like being stories yeah what do you think it is about the historical Buddha's teachings that addresses that particular quite a few things ok so history of humanity is really really simple in every field whether it's religion economy law government you start with good ideas or somebody's got some good ideas right and those good ideas will make that somebody and he said hair is really popular and then popularity leads to power and wealth and power and wealth leads to corruption and then corruption leads to changes to the original ideas behind the backs of their ordinary people to justify the corruption to make the corruption look normal and even good yeah so people in general there are ok so long as I've got somebody above them who has really good virtue and it's watching them but what happens with you at the top what if you're the Pope what if you're the head honcho or whatever put a sect there is out there yeah you feel well nobody's watching me and everybody will just believe me if I change the rules oh I make one set of rules for them and notice that it also may and thou not they hadn't be happy about it yeah that's unfortunately the reality of human intelligence the fact is most people can't tell if you lie and most people can't tell if you shift the argument and most people aren't trained as lawyers so there was one thing that the historical Buddha did that was different to every other form of Buddhism he said that the leaders of the dispensation should be ascetic monks who live homeless Lee why is that important in terms of the corruption cycle well very simple if you're in a setting monk who is homeless Lee you've physically can't gather power and wealth so although there's not a 100% guarantee against developing resonance as a monkey and does happen um it's pretty good safeguard and safety valve because essentially there are two types of ascetics in the world crazy ones and sane ones so have you travel to India okay so if you've ever been to India then you'll see the sadhus on the streets right and they're crazy and clearly so yeah they stink I mean I love them everything and they're a great fun to be around but they're smoking hash and they smell and they were wild look in their eyes you wouldn't make them your religious leader you wouldn't follow them and trust them saying yeah if you say things that are counterintuitive they're probably right you think you're saying things count intuitive because you're crazy yeah so if you do asceticism badly without wisdom basically go nuts and you smell but if you do asceticism well in a way that develops your wisdom your compassion and your enunciation your humility then you become wiser and brighter than everybody else despite your circumstances and you don't need a certificate given to you by an institution for that to shine out to people if people don't go to you and say what lineage do you belong to where's your ordination certificate what test did you pass at Buddhist University how many years did you did you study all they need to do is come to you you know maximum five times and have a really difficult um deep conversation about difficult matters and actually see from the way that you talk the way that you look at them that you're more lucid than everybody else despite your circumstances and that's no guarantee of enlightenment but at least it's something yeah so I think in the original model these sorts of Wanderers the Buddha his monks his nuns they of course kept a check on each other to stop the corruption within the song car but also they became a really good way to police lay Society because they don't actually have any political authority or any financial authority or they have is moral or they can't order anyone to do anything but people when you're in the presence of purity and really deep wisdom an ordinary person will feel ashamed of themselves for doing the wrong thing so if you're the King and you're making the rules if an ordinary person comes up to you and says you're not doing the right thing the King engage they say to you right off with your head yeah but it's harder to do that with a wanderer because the wonder has got mojo yeah you can look the King in the eye and say right do you want to go to hell son do you really want that because I'm not afraid of you where is everybody else to go I'll be quite now what was it at University where you studied law is that right yes yeah that so drew you to Buddhism well when you study law you see your measures worth of hypocrisy so I was the kid in the back of the class always raising his hand saying that doesn't make any sense and the rest this genes would roll their eyeballs and come on let's just get on with it and pass the testing it out at our degree I mean somewhere down the track I I gave up and did the same thing but I never took my degree very seriously so what I was looking for was truth and what attracted me to Buddhism was it's at least Primus Pacey commitment to investigation yeah I mean what happens in reality is a very different thing but that's what attracted me in the beginning yeah so you went to Sri Lanka yeah and became what was it were a day in there what was that like landing in Sri Lanka joining the monastery and what sort of things did you study there well when I first got there what was great fun because I knew Sri Lankans from living in monasteries in Australia and they're very very supportive of any young man who wants to become a monk because in Sri Lanka monastics are seen as heroes again whether or not that's the reality about that's that's the way the culture has been built they're the ones who are really searching for the truth and giving up everything they have in order to find it for everybody's sake so island in Sri Lanka and no strangers on the street saw me dressed him Wyatt I was a foreigner asked me what I was doing I tell them I was looking for a monastry gordanian and everybody would help me it was a really beautiful thing I love Sri Lankans they're incredibly beautiful people and a great culture so I felt very very comfortable in Sri Lanka for that reason and great weather as well but I was keen on becoming a monk quite quickly so I ordained only a few weeks after I got know I got to the place where ordained only a few weeks after landing and about a week or two after that I asked the head monk whether I hope I could ordain and he just looked me up and down and said yeah and so about two months after that I was a novice monk I really loved my ordination monastery it's called now you know in a province Gordon could renege ala near town called Mill City Porter what I particularly loved was the comradery amongst all all the young monks I remember a time after I was ordained evident office where I just developed a heavy chest and cough and early one morning these five young monks are just knocking on my door with loads of medicine inside their hand trying to make sure that I was okay they do all sorts of funny things from a Western perspective but you know my rule whenever I'm in a new country is to learn the culture and do as the Romans do so for example when I was ordained as a novice I was covered in turmeric so they shave your head at now you know and then you'll strip down to your underwear and then they paint you yellow like a corn-fed chicken in cheering yeah it was great fun I mean all these monks are around you and even some of the light people are helping out the monastery and it's like this festival and you're the pinata and so it's it's a bonding experience they get all the young men who were tore down to stain the the one Hut or night before the automation just in case the Buddhist devil comes for you and gives you cold feet and you run away in the middle of the night then your day the next day in front of must have been about a thousand people and they're they're all came to give you offering so that you can have a good start to your monks life a little bit like relatives coming to a newlywed couple and I cried and I cried and I cried when I when I would ain't ya - ordination when I went for my lay clothes into my monk's robe that was the most touching yeah when I got my higher ordination my second ordination one year after that it was nowhere near as powerful yeah I felt like okay this is what I've wanted all my life and smiley happening yeah what are the sort of vows that a monk takes Automation yeah so Norma's ordination you take ten precepts to not kill living beings to not take what is not given to be celibate - not why to not take alcohol or drugs to not eat after noon time to not engage dancing singing music and vegetable shows to not wear cosmetics perfumes and jewelry to not sleep on high-end luxury beds and to not take any money and then in the high ordination you take on there are 227 rules of something called the putty ball car which is the rules are strike for the sake of freedom laid down by the buddha 2,500 years ago yes amazing what sort of things did you study you said that when you went to the monastery anchor you had to decided to learn the things you'd need to learn so you could become a wandering homeless monk yeah what were those things okay so now you're wearing is a really good monastery in that they make sure that the monks understand the monks rules before they all day so I had to study the old putty more goo rules and the commentaries on the open mocha rules and they had to go pass the test as well and we spent some time with any order at the monastery once a week to to learn all these rules also I studied similes and also I studied parley which is the oldest Buddhist language that we have which the Terra Barton Canon is written in but in order to become a walking mug I knew I'd have to go beyond what everybody else was studying I knew I would have just have to train myself on how to just sleep in the middle of the forest was just my three rows in my bowl I knew that I actually worked out how to find water and to survive with very little water in in bad circumstances how to eat only one meal per day and be satisfied with whatever people happen to give to me how to arrange my robes in different ways that I could sit out in the forest without mosquitoes eating me alive yeah well all the practical details are the wandering life how did you learn those things Charla Niro huh yeah I'm reading the old texts I mean essentially if you want to learn anything in life all you really need to know is it's actually possible and if you can get a few hints along the way that's that's some bonus but all you really need to know if you're committed is just to know that it's possible and that's what faith is all about yeah so the texts make it clear that's the way that the monks and the nuns were living in the old days and I saw no good reason why it could be done in the old days it couldn't be done now so I just just threw myself into it glean what a few clues I could from the ancient texts and found that you know if you try these things use it's not too hard to work out it's all I just playing around with the video recorder without the instruction booklet [Laughter] so I have to sort of questions immediately come to mind how do you arrange your rope so you don't get beaten by it person by mosquitos all right so for the first few years of my monk's life I found it's actually impossible that mosquito is if you just wear cotton will always buy through so your your shoulders and your knees will always be very very painful and it'll be difficult to get to sleep at night before about two o'clock when they see mosquitos go to sleep so that was just a really high period for the first few years but later on I allowed to myself a monk's woman rug which is allowed for inside the party moko and what I found was that if you throw the rug over your head and your shoulders and then you throw and so that's around your back and only big enough really to go across your head and your back and then it flops against the ground around your the backside of your body and then you throw the rest of the robes over the front so all the contact points are covered by the thick rock and the the other road you can just go over the front to stop the miss gates from getting in and that stops and one thing you didn't mention yet is meditation yeah and I imagine that most people when they think of a Buddhist monk particularly a wanderer the images of meditating in caves all the time that sort of thing yeah how how much a part of your life and your training at that monastery was meditation a huge amount although with meditation I've more or less always gone my own way because I think that's what the Buddha wanted his monks to do see today when people think about meditation they think about techniques and religious based upon techniques or taking spaceborne images right and it seems to me from the early literature that the buddha didn't actually takes techniques what he taught was principles which is a different thing so it's sort of like you don't necessarily need to teach a person cooking by giving them recipes all the time that they have to follow very very strictly you can just say well that's a pause and that's a stove and if you heat things up they change and with her knowledge a smart person can work a lot of things out so the buddha in the early literature doesn't give any techniques he just gives general guidelines about how the body in the mind work and how you can change the body of mind using the actions of body speech and mind and then you says you want to observe those changes really really carefully and then look for two different patterns when you do an action that leads to long-term suffering and an action that leads to long-term free from suffering and that's the difference between the wholesome and the unwholesome and essentially all Buddhism is is developing the wholesome and abandoning the unwholesome all the way to the end you create Haitian delusion and at the ending of rebirth and suffering so even before I got to the monastery I was always I was already thinking this way because before I was ordained or any new the early literature and had a vision of my mind about how the early months are different to amongst today and I'd also from my experience inside Buddhist circles seen a lot of problems inside meditation communities so there's a lot a good PR for meditation today like you know do mindfulness meditation and bring down your blood pressure but you know so we're walking your dog so having a hot bath so watching Superman on television so what meditation looked like today what sort in other words have you arrived at certain usual ways that you do it yes certain technical approaches that you come across or settled on yeah so when I teach I still teach like a basic formula but I always tell people look you can scrap that once once you get you're just losing the formula right now so you can get some experiences of the principles and you can scrap that after if you want yeah so the basic technique is you know sitting in a quiet place and getting to know your body really really well while sitting up straight and but I'm sitting up straight means feeling your body so that you can tell whether or not you're too tight or too loose in any place inside your body including your left thinking and whatever you feel on the inside learning to be okay with it that's like the first step and you've got to learn how to breathe calmly no matter what you find so it's like if you're trying to overcome a phobia you see a spider and you're dead scared of it your breath will change you won't be breathing like a calm man you'll be breathing like a frightened man but if you just decide to slow down and take ten breaths like you pretend that your car it actually calms you down so if you don't know that then the more exposure you have to the spider the more sched we're going to get because you just training yourself to throw your system out of control but if you're just told you can actually change your body's reactions and your mental reactions deliberately using your breath and your thoughts then every time you expose yourself to your fear you actually get stronger so in the same way we have lots of fears a lot of angst anger frustration sorrow haven't a shin pain grief despair all those things locked up inside our body and the first stage is to just be okay with it or there's not really a good description because not just being okay but it's really hard so it requires a lot of commitment and a lot of training in just observing how when you notice something your body responds and then using your thoughts and and your breath to calm down so you can say it clearly at the very least and then the second stage after that is learning how to use the the posture the breath and the thoughts to not just be okay with all the unwholesomeness the inside by how to transform it into horse and nurse that's pretty much it how is the second step well the second step is where it's really important to know the early literature because it's hard on your own to know exactly what states are wholesome and unwholesome because one of the things about unwholesome state is they can be really fun in the short term but they really burn you in the long term so the early literature stands as the cheat sheet from the Buddha about where things go in the long term yeah so essentially the Buddha taught that any sort of thoughts and perceptions and emotions based upon sensual desire and ill-will and [Music] aggression will lead to suffering in the long term you know so when the interesting thing is about early Buddhist and compared to other forms of Buddhism is that it's just completely uncompromising about that point and it seems that that boundary got lost over time because you can meditate say on your anger in a way that makes you really powerful Darth Vader meditation yeah and you can also meditate on central design in a way that makes you really powerful like Michael Jackson meditation but they have their side effects yeah now none of this is to say that you're a bad person if you have anger and you're a bad person you've got sexual desire because I've got those things too but its Buddhism more early but it is all about just direction like nobody judges anyone for where they are but out of compassion what an early Buddhist says look this further to go yeah so I know you're having fun with whatever anger you've got right now or whatever sexual desire you've got right now but you know I know I've been further down this like the Buddha talking not me I've gone further down and if you were to remove that as even though I know it looks like it's fun right now it's gonna be more fun so when you went back to Australia and started living the life of a wandering ascetic yeah what are the things that I think is often said is that certain countries like Sri Lanka or India have a cultural support yep for the ascetic lifestyle in places like Australia yeah less so yeah what was it like when you started that outside of things in Australia when I got back to Australia I landed at Gold Coast Airport and I'm from New South Wales so I didn't have a friend do you know anybody what saw when I got off I'm from the plane I got off the plane with just my robes in my bowl and no Clippers no couldn't have now because they take that probably at the airport and I I walked out into the road and I saw the ocean and I had in my mind the idea that if I can walk from the Gold Coast of Townsville about 1,500 kilometres just my bottle my roads and no organized support and just rely on the kindness of strangers then I will have proved that this lifestyle is still possible because everybody says it's not possible you know I thought to myself right that's the ocean in front of me which means ever I turn left that's north and I just keep going oh it's Queensland there aren't that many roads and I be sure I get to Townsville and so I did how do I find food I mean the first day it was raining and I didn't know how to get food it was ten o'clock I have to eat before twelve o'clock I thought okay I'm just going to out of faith do I didn't show my god so in Sri Lanka you just walk as a monk with a bowl in front of people's houses and people literally run out of their houses to put food into your bowl and I'll chase you down the street foot food in your bowl because they want to make good karma doesn't happen in Australia so by eleven o'clock I find God is not working and I think ok I'm looking at any food today I'm just gonna have to be right and I put my bowl away and I'm walking past a supermarket and then a girl gets out of a car and says oh hello can I take a photo of you when I grumpily cuz really grumpy in those days said yeah sure and I said so what he won't take a photo and she said well you know I read a book by the Dalai Lama once and I think it changed it saved my life I said what really how does save your life he said well I realize I'm not the say of the universe quite inside what's a bow falls I said well you know I'm an old-fashioned monk and I'd have any money and we just get by by clicking future now I'll buy some food go with me to a supermarket so something like that basically happened every single day all the way to Townsville just saying what with were there any challenges I mean living out in the Australian bush I don't you know moving from place to place there must have been long stretches in the bush yeah well long stretches in the bush straddling highways so I would just wake up in the morning start walking after there was enough daylight for people to see me on the road and then pull out my bowl for my bag and around about 7:30 and just keep walking tour eleven o'clock and people would always stop and give me food yeah and in the early days I was really really strict if people stopped and said do not elite a lift mate I'll say no thanks they'll drive off and they asked do you need any help mate I'd say no thanks don't drive off only if they said do you know any food vote I say yes I'm collecting our food or if they said something like what's the ball for I say well I'm collecting answers I give me food and even then I've got food every single day before dog walk Wow yeah that was fake years that's been like that pretty much yeah so you've come here and you were staying in this series of caves and can you tell us a little bit about this place yeah why are you here well I started this journey as a wandering monk in Queensland and then I decided to come back to New South Wales for my dad's 70th birthday so I walked from Brisbane to Sydney in about two months to get my dad birthday party and I've been in New South Wales ever since because it's hard to get back to Brisbane and they came upon my stay in New South Wales where I just decided that I want to live in caves and I'd already been invited once to give talks in the Blue Mountains and that friend who'd made the invitation I knew was a bush walker so I decided to visit her and ask if she knew any caves in the Blue Mountains area she took me to a cave and it was beautiful and it was very large but the problem was is that was that it's about an hour's walk from any roads but I just thought well this will do and then she said well it's gonna be pretty difficult to get food you have to walk a long way if we got to walk all the way into town because that'll take you like maybe two hours so before I was everyday and you probably don't want to do that for your ranger treat so I was looking for okay for my ranger tree three years ago as we're walking out of the National Park we stopped at the first house by the entry to the National National Park and we heard some drumming and my friend said I know I know the drummer I've done some performances with him maybe he'll let you set up a marquee here so that you have to walk all the way to town for food or I set up a mark aids inside the National Park and the Rangers might take your way so she set up a meeting with the drummer and turns out that he already knew about a set of caves near his property and we talked and he said all he always wanted to turn one his case into a meditation cave and he discovered it something like 13 years ago and he'd already made a few rock steps and I'm flattened out a few areas for meditation and done some meditation there himself and he welcomed me to stay and I've been using it ever since that's John from yeah so I understand that you delayed the beginning of your rains retreat by one day to talk to me is that right no so I've been on range retreat for about a month now but I've delayed my one month of pure silence not talking to anybody for one day to make a special appearance on this excellent podcast thank you what is the daily routine of an aesthetic monk yeah so if I'm stationary then I just get up really early in the morning for sunrise and I meditate and then I'll eat sometime before twelve o'clock and the rest of the day is filled up with studying meditating chatting with people yeah discussing the Dhamma answering questions I noticed as we were sitting off to do this to come to this Kay a local Beach who came and he brought some nuns and get some other people to visit your that's actually quite a funny story maybe but say why did that but it seems that your role is not just to be aesthetically meditating and in that sort of a personal request you also seem to have a sort of community function yeah absolutely okay so the first thing is that the world is nuts and it's nuts for a lot of reasons but one of them is that people have been fooled into thinking that they wants our needs well first what advertising does is it makes them proliferate on their once and then it falls I'm thinking those proliferate ones actually needs and even though people of our generation can actually remember a time where we didn't have mobile phones and we were still alive if you talk to the average person today and you take away their mobile phone you actually start to say fear in their eyes so even if anesthetic doesn't say anything they at least stand as evidence that a human being can actually live a simple life and be happy and that's a powerful message and then if he can actually talk then he acting less show people what he or she has done in order to live that happy life how do you like almost 38 38 one of the things I think that is a big question about the monastic lifestyle whether it's in a monastery or in the ascetic wandering path is the issue of sexuality hmm what was that like moving from being while moving into the ascetic lifestyle complete celibacy and so on well not so hard girls are never really into me [Laughter] well soulless or denied me every guy I saw the things they could be more into me than they are I mean I was celibate for quite a long time before I became a monk so I'd already set order upon that well there wasn't sell it before that and our celibate for quite a long time is because I actually did have faith I'm already as a lay person that that was the right direction to go before I became a monk I went travelling in Europe to visit a lot of the friends I made as an exchanger in Japan and one of them was an old fine and I already had it very clear inside my mind that you know I was saying goodbye in a chaste manner and to make a long story short it didn't have to be that way and I knew that that would be a test for me to say how serious I was inside my faith and I passed the test so the transition from one stage of life to any highest stage of life is always full of sacrifice and [Music] because giving up sexual interaction is such a large sacrifice it actually brings incredible dividends as well the sexual energy is like rocket fuel so I'll explain it in this poem last chance to say cosmic drama and dance relax you already hold the tickets in your breath is the deeper amounts in your heart the rhythm in your mind the holy trance in your spy the lands of heaven I won't explain any further than that [Music] well fancy Jason thank you very much thank you very much Dave [Music]

Channel: Guru Viking

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Id: B9W4SUepWOQ

Length: 42min 32sec (2552 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 04 2018