welcome to our monastic community
During an audience in early 2009 with His Holiness the
17th Karmapa Orgyen Trinley Dorje, our community presented our
vision and broad aspirations. The following is adapted from what we
expressed to His Holiness at that time.
We have begun living together, slowly trying out structures
for community life that are both in accordance with the vinaya and
suited to our backgrounds and Mahayana aspirations. We do this with the
dream of building the foundations for a larger monastic community in
the future. For us as Westerners, this may take some experimenting, and
we are committed to working together to find the right balance so that
a strong, stable and harmonious community can slowly take shape. In the
long term, we aspire to help create a community where nuns from many
different countries can move towards enlightenment together. We wish to
construct a beautiful and flourishing platform on which to benefit
others in ways we ourselves cannot now even imagine.
Monasticism as valuable for Westerners
As
Westerners, we all grew up immersed in an environment that tells us
that happiness depends on our acquisition of external goods and sense
pleasures. Among the many teachings the Buddhadharma offers, the
monastic path in particular provides direct and living proof that it is
possible to be content with far less than our society would insist is
indispensable for a happy life. Western monastics living meaningful
lives joyfully can offer a powerful demonstration that the causes of
happiness lie elsewhere than might commonly be thought. As such, we
feel that Buddhist monasticism has a highly valuable contribution to
make to Western culture, and thereby to the global culture that it
influences.
Community life as an integral part of Dharma practice
Living together
as
monastics in community also offers a vivid demonstration of Buddha's
teaching that the pursuit of our individual happiness can only be
successful when it actively takes into consideration the well-being of
others. In this sense too, a harmonious monastic community can offer to
Western society a direct argument against the belief that our own
happiness can ever come at others' expense.
Our purpose in
living together is not simply to find supportive conditions for our
individual Dharma practice and study. Rather, we take our community
life as an integral part of our work to transform our minds, which is
the aim of that Dharma practice and study. We value the chance to
support each other in using community life as a means of recognizing
and confronting our own afflictive emotions and self-cherishing and for
generating tolerance and lovingkindness, and learning to cherish
others.
However, individuals simply living in the same place
do not constitute a thriving Dharma community. To build community, we
find formal practice together important, for stability and a sense of
closeness, and also listening to Dharma teachings together, for
deepening our shared practice. On a practical level, we cook and eat
together, follow a daily schedule that includes group prayers and
practices in the morning and evening and listening together daily to
recordings of Dharma teachings.
Training in the vinaya
We
see the guidelines that Buddha outlined for his monastic followers as
personal instructions we can use to support the transformation of our
minds, by disciplining our bodies and speech. We also see them as
offering a blueprint for our community life. We find it highly
beneficial to go regularly to the biweekly sojong confession ceremony.
We do not eat in the evening, and are sharing financial resources, so
that when we handle money we can do so without the thought that it is
mine.
Although we recognize that many of the rules in the
vinaya were initially designed in response to a different context,
still we want to try to follow this model wherever possible, and adjust
only where it seems necessary to do so. For this, we see as crucial the
guidance of a valid realized teacher - which we have already in Your
Holiness - and a protected environment in which to apply the vinaya
rules - which we are now creating with our community.
Maintaining joy in our vows
Although
it can be hard to confront our afflictive emotions, we feel ourselves
to be unimaginably fortunate to live under the protection of our
pratimokùa vows and to share this noble way of life. Our further good
fortune at coming under Your Holiness' care as nuns fills us with a joy
that is impossible to express. This joyfulness helps us cultivate a
relaxed mind, amidst the sometimes difficult work of
self-transformation. We want to maintain this basic joyfulness as a
cornerstone for our life together in community.
Creating a stable base for other nuns to join later
In
some ways Western cultural backgrounds are not particularly conducive
to communal life. Generally, we are raised to value our 'independence,'
to have our own private space, and to plan and work for our own needs.
As a result, after ordaining Western nuns often find it quite natural
that they should live alone, look after their own material needs and
practice the Dharma privately on their own. Since in any case there is
a dire shortage of places where Western nuns can live and train
together in community, the choice to develop a monastic style that is
private and individual is easily taken. As a result, Westerners
entering a monastic community will often have many adjustments to make,
and the transition will not always be smooth.
Moreover,
although we use the term 'Westerners,' in fact there is no single
Western culture. Small as it is, our community already includes people
from three very different cultures, and so our community life needs to
take these cultural diversity into consideration as well. In any case,
difficulties and conflicts inevitably arise to varying degrees in
community life, where many egos and many sets of afflictive emotions
are all gathered together. Only with time can we build up the needed
confidence and trust in ourselves and each other to face such moments
with equanimity and compassion.
For that reason, our thinking
is not to take any new members until we have first built a stable base
that others can then join, rather than adapting in response to the
individual wishes of each new arrival to the community. At this point,
we envision needing perhaps two years to slowly build the necessary
foundation before we can begin thinking about growing beyond this tiny
community now in its infancy.
Our aspiration is to work to
make ourselves qualified to be of limitless benefit to others, without
missing opportunities to offer our service to others in smaller ways
along the way. We see the forming of a monastic community as an
excellent way to do both, learning how to offer and offering at the
same time. For now, our aim is simply to work to make ourselves and our
tiny community suited to serve as a platform to benefit others in the
future.
Your Holiness, these words have been spoken with one
voice, but their aspirations were written in four hearts. We appreciate
beyond words all Your Holiness' support thus far, and supplicate with
palms folded that you keep us and this community in your close care
always. Please guide us to make ourselves and our monastic lives
together of most benefit to others.