Far East and West
In the Far East, Buddhism is usually practiced in a monastery. You enter a monastery and you live your life there. You get up at a certain time, you have your meals, you tend the garden or copy manuscripts and you meditate. You study with the master or the teaching monks. It’s a particular type of life.
“A Buddhist monastery has a certain chemistry. There’s a certain laughter, a certain excitement, a certain brightness and ebullience…I think that same brightness here is captured in another way, and that’s by living and working in the world.”
Rama, Dr. Frederick Lenz
The spirit of the West, of America, is different than the East. The cultural conditioning is very different, and it seems to be harder for people here to work in teams. It seems to be more difficult for people here to live in harmony, in a monastery.
In the West, while certainly there will be Buddhist monasteries, it seems the best form of practice is to live in the world, to have your own home or apartment, condominium, have your own car. It just seems to work better here.
Conservation of energy is the central study or the component theme of Buddhist practice, of yoga. And that’s why people live, or have lived, in monasteries. The idea was, the walls of a monastery are not to keep you in but to keep everybody else out because you want to develop a certain type of life and most people in the world have other ideas on the subject. Buddhists have, for a long time, lived in monasteries so that they can spend a certain amount of time working and a certain amount of time meditating. And they don’t want to use up all their energy in working.
As a practicing Buddhist in America and the West, or even in the Far East, in Japan and other places, if you don’t live in a monastery then you have to have a job, you have to live and work in the world, and most of the time people spend their lives devoted to working, whether it’s school or work.
Most people get up around 6:00 a.m. to get ready for work, they go into traffic and commute for an hour or two sometimes just to get to work, spend the day there, commute back. They might have to do some study for the next day. For most people, a tremendous amount of time goes into their work. It’s the main thing that we do in life to sustain ourselves just as bodies. It’s a very important thing and it consumes a great deal of our energy.
You might say living in a monastery cuts down the commutation time. That alone would give you a couple of extra hours a day to meditate and do all kinds of things. And in a monastery, you lead a relatively simple life. You don’t need a lot of possessions. You don’t have to work as many hours to sustain yourself so you have more time for play. And spiritual practice is not thought of as an arduous thing or a hard thing, but play. It’s the fun of life.
In the West, people spend most of their time and energy working, and it would be a difficult thing if we couldn’t gain something more than just dollars and cents from working. You have to get up an hour earlier than everybody else if you meditate for an hour in the morning. And if you meditate for an hour at night, there’s not much time but just to meditate and work. And the problem is, you come home and you’re so tired from work you don’t have much energy to meditate and have a good meditation; unless you use work in a tantric way, unless you use work as a way of advancing yourself.
