MONKS

Buddhism. I’m finally coming to my conclusion on Buddhism. After all Buddhist countries I’ve visited I never got the entire picture and maybe I don’t have it yet but after three weeks of seeing hundreds if not thousands of Buddha’s in all shapes and sizes and visiting many, many temples I have my opinions. We have had “round table Q and A’s with many monks and both our Laos and Burma guides are Buddhists so we’ve heard it all. First, Buddhism is not a religion as we think of it. There are no services, set times or places to worship, no one person (priest type) that you go to all the time. It is a belief system and has some excellent tenets. For the average person there are five simple rules. No lying, no stealing, no killing, no sex out of marriage (between a man and a woman) and no intoxicants. Our guides drink beer with us and I don’t know about the other no-no’s but the killing of people would be very rare. We met the chief of a village of 1000 and asked him about crime. He said petty theft, they sit down the two parties and resolve it, big time thieves, which is rare go to the big city for trial. We asked about murders, he just shook his head, never been one in their memory. They do eat meat that has been killed, they can not be around or have it killed for them, but if presented with it they are fine with it. They do take mostly poor boys as novices for schooling with about 5% staying on to become a monk. So far so good, now the part, we as Americans have a hard time understanding. The only thing monks do is meditate and pray all day. The people take total care of them. They cannot cook or prepare what they eat, so every morning they go out with bowls and people come out of their houses and fill their bowls with rice. All morning people take prepared food to the monasteries for the monks to eat. They cannot eat after noon. The people, and by our standards most of the people are dirt poor and the middle class would definitely be considered very poor in our country, pay for all the temples, pagodas and stupas and they are under construction all over. Our problem (purely our culture) is the monks to nothing to build their temples, they are all filthy dirty, they do nothing to clean them, in other words they don’t do anything for themselves. Our guide says those are worldly concerns. OK but filth. Secondly they do nothing for their community, no help for anyone suffering, no education for children outside the monastery, nothing. So a lot of us are a little conflicted. The good news I finally have a better understanding of meditation, not that I’m ever going to do it. We had monks explain and demonstrate how and since it takes years to master I’m not giving it another thought.