Just Another Thing In The Forest

[camerata]

An interview with Ajahn Amaro about the forest tradition:

What rules have you had to modify for this monastery? Adherence to the rule might be very faithful but totally impractical, perhaps totally stupid. A temple in England spent £37,000 on a heating bill because the monks went bare-shouldered in an English winter. All of the adaptations we've made we waited until there was a real need, and then we changed. When Ajaan Sumedho was in Thailand and preparing to come to England, he decided: we'll just do what we do until we need to change it. So first of all, they went out on alms-round every day barefoot. And then they got to their first winter, and then they'd come back to the vihara and their feet would be blue. There were so many complaints and fears from the laypeople who saw what they were doing that they decided to go out with shoes and socks. If you look at the Vinaya, it says over and over again, "The laypeople saw such and such and they were upset so they took the matter to the Buddha and the Buddha said, 'Monks, I allow you to do such and such.'" There are a number of rules that even highly observant monks in Asia break quite cheerfully on a daily basis. In Thailand, for instance, the size of the robes is vastly greater than what's allowed in the Vinaya, which is supposed to be nine hand spans of the Buddha by six hand spans of the Buddha. And the robes we have are two meters by three meters. And they get around that by saying, "Well, the Buddha was eighteen feet tall." Which is, in my humble opinion, patently absurd. But every monk in the country wears a robe that's too big compared to the size allowed in the Vinaya. And it's against the Vinaya to travel in a vehicle. But that's because a vehicle would have been a cart pulled by an animal and you don't want to burden another being.

Here, it seems that you've departed pretty radically from the Thai forest tradition by creating your own nuns' rules. That's the biggest change we've made. Thailand is probably the worst situation for women's training in monastic life. There's only the Eight Precept ordination. And in Thailand, for a woman of an upper-class family, it's basically a disgrace to be ordained. She would not be allowed by her family to ordain. It would be as bad as becoming a streetwalker. It's believed that a woman who ordains would do so only if she were socially inept, couldn't bear children, couldn't find husband—it's like you're a failed being. And it brings a kind of shadow into the family. Which is bizarre, because to be a monk is considered the most meritorious thing you can do in a family.

What did you base your nunnery on? When we opened up Chithurst, the monastery in England, in 1979, Ajaan Sumedho gave four women the Eight Precept ordination, and everything was dandy. But after a couple of years, we realized that men who had just arrived were getting higher places in the community and the nuns were still in the kitchen, wondering if they would still be cooking the beans in forty years.

In the Buddha's time, the women's order had many more rules than the men's. Right. Three hundred thirteen to the men's 227. When we were discussing all this—and it took seven years to come up with the current structure—it became clear that none of the women in our community wanted to live according to most of those rules. One of the rules—and it's a serious offense to break it—is that you may never sleep more than a forearm's distance from another nun. So if you're a bhikkhuni, you can never sleep in your own room ever again. You can never travel alone, you can never sleep in your own bed.

Why would a rule like that exist in the first place? A huge portion of the rules for nuns had to do with safety. Because a woman in India at that time had to be under the protection of her father, her brother, her husband, or her son, or some other male relative. A woman on her own was extraordinarily vulnerable. A lot of the nuns' Vinaya was about safety—they can't travel alone, they can't sleep alone, they couldn't go out in the forest because of the danger of being molested and raped. In a way, it's almost a blessing that the nuns' order died out in the Theravada so you can reestablish it according to the culture as it exists.

Full interview.