West Virginia

Monks are everywhere in Sri Lanka. They are members of Parliament, they are educated and teach at universities, they go out to people’s homes when someone dies. I can hear their chanting and drumming at 6 in the morning and again at night. I see them every day out on the street, their forms ranging from skinny little school-aged boys to old fat old men. Dan and I even saw a monk urinating in public on the wall of the prison in the middle of town. There are even one or two white monks around Kandy town also who look a little too serene in their burgundy robes. Despite living in a sacred city and walking past monasteries every day, the only time I have ever interacted with a Sri Lankan monk was in West Virginia.

About a month after I met Dan in early spring of 2006, he needed to go and interview an ex-pat Sri Lankan monk in West Virginia, Bhante Henepola Gunaratana. He asked me to come along as his research assistant to share in the 3 hours of driving from our home town of Charlottesville. It was a clear and beautiful April day, still slightly chilly, when we set out across the Blue Ridge for Wardensville, WV, in the foothills of the Allegheny Mountains. The last major town was Winchester, Virginia. Just outside of Winchester we passed a Kingdom Hall of Jehovah’s Witnesses with its large picture window boarded over. I imagined that perhaps it had been smashed in. Once passing through Wardensville, we drove for a few miles on a dirt road appropriately named Back Creek Road. Occasional non-descript driveways marked only by faded mailboxes quietly branched off along the route. When we rounded a bend I spotted an eight foot tall white cross and an enormous American flag marking a driveway down the road, “Those must be the neighbors,” I commented to Dan. As we neared the blazing white cross we could see the demure granite marker of the Bhavana Society driveway 20 feet away. We parked in the paved parking lot at the front of the property and started unloading the alms that were suggested from the website as follows:

steel-cut oats, granola, jams (fruit), prunes, nuts (low in salt), sunflower seeds, olive oil, sesame oil, tahini, firm tofu, dry beans, canned beans (garbanzo, black, kidney) , whole tomatoes (canned), tomato paste, tamari, coconut milk

We started on foot up the driveway to the kitchen area with our four bags of groceries. Dan had been to the Center before and knew the way to the kitchen. Small buildings with dark salmon wooden siding and white trim dotted the wooded property connected by dirt foot paths. It reminded me of overnight Girl Scout camp. We removed our shoes to enter the main building and to drop the food off in the kitchen. A white man in robes exited the main meditation hall and greeted us as we started down the short hall. As I surveyed his robes for Eco-Explorer, Knot-Tying, and Cookie Biz patches, Dan was already on the floor bowing with his hands in prayer and his forehead on the floor. He made the move swiftly and deftly despite his dress pants and sport coat. The monk was obviously profoundly uncomfortable with the gesture. Dan had warned me before hand, “I might bow to some monks,” but I hadn’t envisioned something so drastic. Dan got up as quickly as he had gone down and the white monk cleared his throat, “You have some, uh, alms to give?” the monk asked. We nodded our heads, “yes.”
“You see I can’t accept them because it’s after noon, but you can put them here in the kitchen,” he explained, indicating a counter in the kitchen. “One of the lay workers will take care of them soon,” he re-assured us. Dan explained that we had an appointment to interview Gunaratana. The monk then showed us to the bathrooms for us to freshen up before our interview.

“Why the hell’d you do that?” I icily asked Dan about his bow when we met up outside.
“I think it is important to bow to the monks to remind them of what they are,” Dan replied. “The monks in the West aren’t used to it. Bowing is a really important part of their training as monks. It reminds them that they are representatives of the Buddhist tradition and should act the part. This is something that these monks just don’t get here. They may be ignored, tolerated, or respected, but Americans don’t like to bow,” he finished.
“You know, it’s weird,” I replied, “I bow to my yoga teachers like that when I think they are good teachers, but they sort of have to prove themselves for me. I’m not going to hit the deck for just anyone. I am not going to just bow to the robes. Plus it’s easier because I do it after Savasana, when I am already on the floor. What was the bowing like for you when you were a monk in Sri Lanka?” I asked.
“It was weird,” Dan admitted. “When a monk ordains, he bows to his parents before the ordination. After he is ordained they bow to him. When I was ordained I bowed to my Sinhala teacher and then he bowed to me. That really made me feel like I was doing something major. After that, with the lay people, I got used to it. My only thing was I had to really work on it not to look down women’s shirts when they bowed to me.”
“Good grief,” I replied, rolling my eyes, thinking about all of the women bowing to monks around the world and inadvertently flashing them. “How long again were you ordained anyway?” I asked.
“Four months,” Dan replied.
“What about the no food after noon thing, how’d that go for you?” I asked.
“People bring alms all morning long. They bow and you eat all of the food. That is the main thing you do as a monk, you do some chanting, but mainly you eat. I was pretty popular and it was like ‘more food for the white monk,’ all the time. So I would eat so much in the morning I wasn’t that hungry at night. I got used to it.”
“More food for the white monk,” I echoed him laughing as we went into the office area.

As Dan introduced us to the secretary I looked at the name-labeled Polaroid pictures of the monks and nuns arranged under the piece of faded red construction paper with the words “Monastic Community” written in black magic marker. Gunaratana was the only native Sri Lankan. There were five white monks, one black monk from Uganda, two white nuns, and a Vietnamese nun. All of their heads were shaved. I learned from their typed bios under the pictures that all and had entered into the monastic life as adults after significant lay lives on the outside ranging from auto mechanic to psychologist. My mind then wandered to the pictures I had seen of Dan’s ordination. My first impression had been that he looked really hot in robes. He had been a novice monk, living the same lifestyle as the fully ordained monks but without the stigma attached to disrobing. In Thailand for example it is common for all boys and men to live as novice monks for periods of time. This practice is not as common in Sri Lanka. The secretary showed us into a neutral sort of small conference room where we were to wait for Gunaratana.

Gunaratana entered after a few minutes. He was bald and also had no eyebrows in accordance with the tradition of the higher caste monastic lineage of Sri Lanka. Gunaratana struck me as someone whose presence was different. He exuded the sort of peace and serenity that I would expect from a monk or any well developed spiritual person. He was cooperative, straightforward, and even funny in the interview with Dan with topics ranging from the ethnic conflict, to religious matters, to the tsunami. My job was to run the digital voice recorder and take a few notes.

Dan slowly worked his way from politics to religion to his money-shot questions of Buddhism and war. As Dan predicted Gunaratana was unequivocal in his condemnation of war of all kinds. When asked if a soldier who had killed on the battlefield could in the future attain enlightenment, Gunaratana replied with the Pali Canon story of Angulimala. In the Sutras, the story of Angulimala is brief, presenting him only as a sadistic killer whose goal is to kill 1000 people. Later texts have fleshed out the story to give background causes for his actions such as being put under oath by a teacher. Angulimala had killed 999 people when he encountered the enlightened Buddha and decides to make him his 1000th victim. Once he speaks with the Buddha and hears his teaching he not only renounces and becomes a monk, but also an arhant, a spiritually perfect being that is released from the cycle of birth and death.“So nobody can really say,” Gunaratana finished.

The story of Angulimala stuck with me after the interview. “How could the murderer of 999 victims become an arhant? How was that fair?” I asked myself. Thinking over the story on the way home was my first step toward understanding that spiritual development according to the Buddhist tradition is not linear, nor is it a balance sheet of action and reaction. Both Angulimala and the Kali story taught me the emphasis placed on the idea of the Buddha as a transcendental teacher with the ability to reach even the most deranged heart and got me thinking outside the paradigm of poetic justice.