Rugged Interdependency - Amaravati Buddhist Monastery

BeginningsPerhaps it is impossible to say where anything really begins, nevertheless, it canbe useful to map out a few landmarks here and there. Accordingly, here is a littleof the background against and amongst which much of the thread of these traveloguesunravels.In the early 1980s Ajahn Sumedho began to make regular visits to northernCalifornia. He was the senior Western disciple of Ajahn Chah, one of the mosthighly respected Buddhist masters of the Thai forest tradition of TheravādaBuddhism, and he had been invited to come and teach in the US by Jack Kornfield,a former Peace Corps volunteer and psychologist, with whom he had spent sometime in Thailand, in the late ’60s, when they were both monks under Ajahn Chah’stutelage.Jack had left the monk’s robes after returning to the States in the early ’70sand, with his friends Sharon Salzberg, Joseph Goldstein and Jacqueline Schwarz(now Mandell), had embarked upon establishing the Buddhist retreat center inMassachusetts called Insight Meditation Society (IMS). This had met with greatsuccess but had also revealed some differences in styles of teaching and practiceamongst the founders. These differences, along with the massive interest inBuddhist meditation that was brewing in northern California, led Jack back to hiscity of origin, San Francisco, to found a parallel center to IMS on the West Coast.When it eventually came into being the new place became known as Spirit RockMeditation Center.These annual invitations to California were doubly attractive to Ajahn Sumedhoin that, not only being an American and an alumnus of Berkeley University andthus being given a chance to visit his old stomping grounds, they also gave himthe opportunity to visit his elderly parents and sister in San Diego. It thereforeduly became part of his annual schedule to step out of the many duties he had inthe foundation of his new monasteries in England (Cittaviveka in West Sussex andAmaravati in Hertfordshire) and to head to the West Coast for a few weeks to teachand to see family.Over the next ten years he developed a devoted following of students in theSan Francisco Bay Area. In 1988 they formed the Sanghapala Foundation, withthe mission of creating a branch Monastery of Ajahn Chah’s lineage somewherein northern California. Dr. Marc Lieberman, Nancy Garfield, Debbie Stamp andDaniel Barnes, whom the reader will encounter in the coming pages, were keyfigures in the early days of Sanghapala, hosting and organizing many of theevents.In 1990 the present author, along with Ajahn Sundarā and Sister Jotakā (twoof the senior nuns of our community at that time), accompanied Ajahn Sumedhoon one of these teaching visits and, when the other three left to return to England,I remained behind to establish a temporary vihāra (monastic residence) as anexperiment for the subsequent six weeks. There was plenty of interest in theidea of founding a Monastery amongst the small inner circle of lay friends but it