July
2017
Travels
from April to July
Greetings
from Hartridge Monastery, Devon, England. I arrived here in early
July,
a few days before the beginning of the Rainy Season Retreat. Since I
was in Europe anyway,
and as it is uncertain when I will be back to Europe in future, I
thought that it would be suitable to spend yet another Rains Retreat
in England. I chose Hartridge Monastery because it was the only one
of the four British monasteries where I had
not previously
stayed
for any length of time.
Ajahn
Jutindharo was very open to the idea,
and even promised to 'reserve' the 'hermitage hut' at the far end of
the property as a suitable location for further intensive work on my
on-going book project. I am thus residing in a comfortable hut,
surrounded by lush Devon forest,
under the usual grey clouds on a mild summer day.
The local village of Rawridge as seen from Hartridge.
The
monastery is located about 30 kilometers east of the
cathedral city of Exeter,
in an area of outstanding natural beauty called the Black Down Hills.
These are actually a series of very flat ridges intersected by
deeply-sloping valleys. The flat ridges make excellent pasture land,
and
so are mostly wide, open fields providing panoramic but wind-swept,
views across the countryside. The numerous small villages are
situated in the sheltered valleys,
and various farm houses, barns and hedged pastures are scattered up
and down the slopes as far as the eye can see.
We
are a small community of five monastics – three monks, one novice
and one anagarika,
plus various long and short term guests. The other monastics have all
been resident here,
before so I am the only 'incomer'.
Sumedharama
Monastery, Portugal
My
third stop in Europe, in
early April,
was Sumedharama Monastery, Portugal, where I resided for seventeen
days. The present 'temporary' monastery is a large rented property,
with a four-bedroom, two-storey house providing a meditation hall and
library on the ground floor, a guest house and some good-sized
gardens. It is situated about forty kms
north-west of Lisbon
and
some four
kms from the coastal town of Ericera. The association
which is leading the project
has already purchased 10 hectares of land nearby,
and is
in the process of finding contractors to begin the
construction
of a multi-purpose building complex,
with four monastic huts, a meditation hall, kitchen, monks'
lodgings,
storerooms and numerous toilets and showers. The
cost including taxes is estimated at over 1.2 million
Euros. When
this first of eight phases is complete,
the community will move from and give up the rented accommodation
which,
although adequate,
is not suitable as a long-term
monastic residence.
Harbour of Ericera. (A. Vajiro photo)
The
Sangha has been resident in Portugal for five years now,
has
a dedicated community of supporters
and has built up
a favourable relationship with the local people. One monk walks the 8
km round trip to the market in Ericera for alms-round each day,
and almost always returns with a generous donation of food. One
morning when
I was
out for my early walk,
a woman spontaneously offered me three bags of buns!
During
my visit,
some of the dedicated supporters living nearby took Ajahn Vajiro and
myself for an outing to central Portugal to visit some limestone
caverns and ancient dinosaur footprints. Visiting these places
certainly puts human beings in their minor place in the universe. For
example, the stalagmites (on the ground) in the caverns 'grow' one
centimeter in one hundred years from the dripping of calcium-laden
rainwater. Thus, one of them near the walkway, 2.2 meters
high, has
taken
22,000 years to 'grow'. Meanwhile,
the dinosaur footprints preserved in sedimentary deposits date from
about 145 million years
ago!
To get some perspective, the dinosaurs survived on planet earth for
165 million years, whereas Homo Sapiens has
been around for about 200,000 years (and some people doubt whether
we
will survive into the next century).
Where Dinosaurs roamed. (A.Vajiro photo)
April
13 is the Southeast Asian New Year,
so a number of Thais living in Portugal took the occasion to come to
the monastery and
celebrate in the traditional way with offerings,
followed by the 'washing of hands' ceremony, symbolizing the washing
away of any hurt they may have caused in the course of the year and
beginning the New Year afresh.
Shortly
before my departure for Switzerland I was invited for a visit to the
historic town of Sintra,
situated around a rocky hill north-west of Lisbon. We first meandered
through the botanical gardens of the royal palace high up the slope
of the hill
to arrive
at the highest point,
which gave us a panoramic view over sprawling Lisbon city and up and
down the western coast. I recognized several trees from New Zealand
and the Western Cedar from the Pacific Northwest of North America.
Our journey took us westward along the base of the hillside to a
former Capuchin monastery
(Convento dos Capuchos),
with its simple buildings moulded into the surrounding rocks. This
order was the most ascetic tradition of Catholic monastics,
and the simplicity of the place attests to their ascetic inclinations
with tiny, unheated cells, although they were lined with cork for
insulation from the chilly winters. The monastery was founded in
1560,
but abandoned when all religious orders were abolished by the
Portuguese royal family in the 1830's.
We
then continued on to the most westerly point of continental Europe,
called the Cabo da Roca,
on a rocky promontory overlooking the crashing waves of the Atlantic
Ocean below. This was the point which the early Portuguese sailors
were so eager to view,
because
it signalled
their return to home waters, often after years exploring strange and
mysterious lands.
The Lighthouse of Cabo da Roca.
Switzerland
I
departed from a balmy 25C Lisbon,
and after quite a scenic flight across northern Portugal and Spain,
southern France and the foothills of the French Alps, arrived in a
cool 10C at
Geneva
for my visit to Dhammapala Monastery.
The unusually cool weather was due to the 'bise', a
cold northern breeze. However, one side effect is that the crisp,
clear air accentuates the view of the snow-capped mountains – the
towering mountains appear to be hovering virtually within arm's
reach. Thus the trip up to Kandersteg was a very powerful experience.
In the three years since I was there I had forgotten the exceptional,
mind-stopping wonder of being surrounded by towering peaks.
However,
it was not long before the other side of extreme nature was revealed.
At the end of April we were buffeted by a three-day blizzard. April
snowfall is not, however, a serious danger,
and once the sun returned the fields were soon green again, although
some of the wild flowers were
a bit flattened.
On
May 14 Dhammapala arranged a Vesakha Puja celebration near Bern.
Several hundred Thai supporters and a number of Swiss gathered for
the meal offering, my talk in Thai and a very 'cosy' circumambulation
inside the hall. One of the Swiss attendees was Ariya Nani, whom I
had known
many years ago and who subsequently ordained as a nun in Burma. Over
the years she became a well-known international meditation teacher,
but more recently, due to health and family reasons,
she
has had to leave the robes, although
she is
still quite active in teaching.
Ajahn
Thanissaro, a Thai monk resident at Dhammapala for many months,
was booked to lead the annual Thai-language retreat,
so I was more free to make my own programme.
I visited two of the meditation groups, in Geneva and Bern, attended
by
quite a few people.
England
and the International Elders Meeting
(IEM)
On
20
May Ajahn Khemasiri and I travelled to Amaravati Buddhist Monastery
for several days of meetings with the International
Sangha of Ajahn Chah's monasteries around the world. This major
event is only held about every three to four years,
as a means of helping to keep the widely-spread Sangha connected. I
am quite fortunate in being able to make personal visits to many of
the monasteries
worldwide,
but most of the senior monks are tied down to the duties of looking
after their respective communities,
with
little time for friendly visits
elsewhere.
This
year about 120 monastics from the various continents gathered,
and the overall atmosphere was one of exceptional harmony and
cooperation. A number of weighty and pressing procedures were quite
smoothly agreed upon,
and initial structures set up, for example, a standardized process
for establishing further branch monasteries.
Photo and news can be found at:
https://forestsangha.org/community/news/uk_triennial-sangha-gathering
Following
the IEM I travelled with Ajahn Munindo to his
monastery at Harnham
near Newcastle, where I stayed for three weeks. The monastery was
recently able to purchase a
four-bedroom house about 200 meters down the back-entrance lane. This
provides a much-needed extension to the accommodation
for the
Sangha,
especially a comfortable and quiet residence for visiting elders.
Mangala House.
I
had a reasonably peaceful time at Harnham,
with one Sunday-night talk, a double-header
visit to Edinburgh and Glasgow and leading
a
seven-day retreat at the
monastery's Kusala
House
retreat centre.
Since many monastics had
gathered in England for the
IEM,
there was also much coming and going of Sangha members
passing
through
Harnham on the way
to different places.
Ireland
My
travels next took me to visit Paddy and Ger in Aghada, south-east of
Cork. They had been working very hard to get the meditation room
above the garage in shape for the weekend non-residential retreat.
Mid-week they also organised a public talk in the local town of
Middleton and it just so happened that Venerable Thanavaro
(Hungarian) and Venerable Indapanyo
(Irish) were both on hand to give
the occasion
some 'Sangha weight'.
The small, friendly crowd was very responsive and several people
signed up for the weekend retreat.
Since
the two Venerables were beginning a five-day walking tour in rugged
West Cork, we all travelled out to a remote peninsula for lunch and
an excursion. The 'excursion' turned out to be rather more than we
bargained for when we tried to trek directly overland from the rocky
coast to the footpath above us. If you have not heard of them before,
be warned about Irish bogs! What appears to be smooth, evenly
contoured country can easily become waist-deep depressions with
sticky mud on the bottom. We must have staggered around a variety of
hidden obstacles, zigzagging slowly up the slope for several hours,
before stumbling upon the partially-paved walkway. This was a very
intimate exposure to Irish trekking, all the time being buffeted by
the breezes barrelling
in from the Atlantic Ocean and funnelling the cold, clear waters to
crash against the seemingly endless stretches of rocky coastline.
(Photo by Paddy Boyle.)
On
our trek we also discovered the remains of a number of 'famine
houses', crumbling remains of farms devastated in the Great Potato
Famine of the 1840's when nearly one million Irish starved and
another million set sail to begin life again in the New World.
I
finished my trip to Ireland with a well-attended talk in Dublin for
the Irish Sangha Trust,
and then departed early the next day for Torino, Italy. I had
forgotten I
was flying
at
the beginning of the holiday season,
with the usual crowds of tourists, full planes and delayed flights.
Fortunately, I had quite a long wait at Gatwick Airport for my
connecting flight,
so the delayed departure from Dublin was not a problem. More
troublesome were the crowds of people awaiting flights at Gatwick.
Santaloka Hermitage,
Gressoney
Valley, north Italy
After
some fifteen hours of journeying from Dublin,
I arrived at the spectacular Santaloka Hermitage at an
elevation of 2,000
meters in the Italian Alps. Unfortunately, the previous week's
hot, dry weather had just been broken by a series of tumultuous
thunderstorms,
and the morning temperature dropped to 3.3C! However, what a contrast
to
the rest of Europe – one looks out the windows to endless vistas of
towering peaks in all directions. The only sounds are the wind in the
trees, the cascading water and the occasional ringing
of a cow bell.
For
the
first two
days of my stay,
Santaloka supporters trekked up to the hut with the meal, but on the
third day I ventured the half-hour
walk down the mountain to almsfood at the edge of the village. The
trek back up the hill is a reasonably gentle but steady climb,
and once back at the hut one has worked up a healthy appetite.
I
arrived on a Wednesday evening and on the Sunday Ajahn Chandapalo
joined me
after
leading a retreat on Lake Garda.
The weather was not too cooperative and each
of us was
nursing a cold,
so we only had a few short excursions. However, the day before our
departure, Cristian
took us both for an outing by cable car up Mt. Blanc, the highest
mountain in Europe. We stopped halfway up for lunch and some
acclimatizing,
and then, as the clouds were lifting, made the last stage to 3,600
meters. Needless to say, climbing the stairs to the observation deck
was quite an exercise,
but we were rewarded with spectacular views all around
and
various peaks, including the
summit of 4,810
meter Mt. Blanc, appearing and disappearing in the swirling clouds.
We
continued our cable car journey across the wide
glacial plateaus on the French side to Aiguille
du
Midi at 3,840 meters. This is an especially scenic route,
particularly as the cable car consists of a series of three
four-person cabins spread along the cable at distances
of about
100 meters.
Thus the cable stops every five minutes as the cars are unloaded and
re-loaded at each end,
and
so
the five kilometer distance takes about half
an
hour,
with many panoramic stops along the way.
(Photo by A.Chandapalo.)
My
European travels finally wound down,
and the following day I started my 13-hour
journey to Exeter Airport via Milan and Manchester, arriving only 10
minutes late! Now that I am settled at Hartridge for the next three
months with my computer and some interesting books, it remains to be
seen how much progress I can make with
writing
my own next book.
Wishing
everyone a beneficial and rewarding summer.
