Back at the Monastery

I've returned to the monastery outside Vancouver for the finale of Rinpoche's stay here. There are twice as many monks--20 just now compared to 9 in April, and endless slews of visitors. Everybody in the Western hemisphere is trying to get here before Rinpoche goes to the East. Niki is here from London, Julia just arrived from Puerto Rico, Caroline came yesterday from Moab, Utah. The residence area has become a busy hotel, and the inner circle of monks busy trying to accommodate everyone's gotta see Rinpoche requests, while protecting him from the throng. He is frail and smaller than he was in May. 

The Chinese still come to cook and clean. Joan, who I just learned did not own a restaurant but rather a gold mine, has been here with her $150,000 Mercedes SUV, bright smile and flashy clothes, turning out lunches and dinners for hordes of people. "I'm glad I can use the money from the mine to do this good," she told a Chinese speaking friend of mine who is here from Kansas. "I love to cook and I love how it makes people happy." Bless her!

The volunteers still come Wednesdays and Saturdays to change beds, mop floors and do the bleak work nobody else will do to keep the whole enormous place spic and span. The kitchen elf is gone though, at least for the moment. The monks told me she is doing a six week retreat at home.

The monks themselves are caught up in the traditional six week retreat known as Yarne, which means rains in Tibetan. For centuries during monsoon, Tibetan monks holed up inside their monasteries to do  continual prayers. They took vows to not eat anything between noon and the next dawn. They gave up certain foods as well, particularly yogurt, which in the Ayurvedic scheme of things it's considered wet, heavy food and that's just plain wrong for heavy wet weather. So Yarne traditionally ended with a "yogurt festival" when the white ferment flowed for days. Yarne here is going to end Sunday, or so I hear, with a picnic.

Some of the monks in Rinpoche's inner circle and the cooks are not keeping Yarne which means they eating after noon. They enjoy sweets and fruits with tea at 3 and have a light dinner sixish. It's quite confusing to figure out who is and who isn't eating, and quite painful to watch monks who can't eat hang around watching the ones who can and are. Happily, not one of the noneaters has given in to temptation, even though they've made it clear they're quite hungry. "It's not fair," one of them joked with me, " that you start making your cakes right when we have to stop eating." So I've had to make two of everything, hiding the second for breakfast. 

"It's funny," one of the younger monks said last night as I was taking a peach pie out of the oven, "when you can eat you feel hungry and when you know you can't you stop feeling the hunger." Then he desperately scavenged the fridge for any remaining fruit juice--liquid being allowed. 

At least one Westerner forcefully complains how brutal this Yarne regimen is, pointing out what suffering it causes monks who really do get weak from hunger, or get migraines. She goes on about the hypocrisy of a Rinpoche who teaches liberation from suffering, compassion and the need for kindness, then half starves his monks. And worse locks them inside to makes them stay in the meditation hall for six weeks, the only six weeks Vancouver has basically sunny weather. "They should be outside! They should have the warm fresh air," she vented. "This is NOT our rainy season. What's wrong with these people?" That's her personal perspective, her way of seeing things. The Tibetans of course see it differently.

All the cultural collisions around here makes the monastery feel like the bumper car ring at a carnival. It's not just that some Westerners are appalled by the rigid adherence to strictly Tibetan tradition even though nobody is in Tibet anymore. It's not just that some local Caucasians are turned off by the overwhelming Chineseness of this place--no photo of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. That also offends Tibetans. It's not just that the Chinese spend dearly to tend the marigolds and boxwood out front but will not even look at, let alone lend a hand to, the troubled orchard out back that Westerners had to establish to meet the land mandate for their Chinese funded building. To Hong Kong Chinese, farming is disdainful peasant work.
NO thank you.
 
Yesterday I asked the newly arrived Tibetan monk who serves as the cook if there was going to be yogurt at last at the end of Yarne and he said, with some exasperation: "We've pretty much had to give up eating yogurt all the time. It just doesn't go with all the oily Chinese food they insist on cooking for us." Last night my Chinese speaking friend who was baking cakes for the monks with me overheard the Chinese in the dishwashing part of the kitchen talking rudely about the two of us as "those foreigners." 

And yet everything runs perfectly on schedule, everybody gets fed, and everyone from here and those come from afar together look forward to the big end of Yarne celebration Sunday.


~Sandy Garson"Wordsmithing to attest how the Dharma saved me from myself!"
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