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.