Rugged Interdependency - Amaravati Buddhist Monastery

Golden Highways Revisited: 1998The passing of these two years has also brought about the completion ofthe novitiate period of our first monastic trainee – formerly Tom DeMaria, nowSāmanera Karunadhammo. He had taken his anagarika Precepts on Visākhā Pūjā,the full moon day of May, 1996, the night before we loaded wagons in San Franciscoand rolled up here, to open the Monastery on June 1 st . After his initial year as a postulant(anagarika) he had then taken on the more refined training of the novice,or sāmanera, and as that drew to a close he had requested full ordination as abhikkhu, a Buddhist monk.Whilst I had been away on this long teaching tour, all of the preparations necessaryfor the ceremony had been continuing apace. Tan Karunadhammo had sewnhis new robes, learned all the appropriate chanting and thoroughly acquaintedhimself with all the rules he would now be required to observe. Ajahn Pasanno,with whom I share the abbot’s duties at Abhayagiri, had received permission fromthe Thai Sangha to perform ordinations and had also mastered his (even morecopious) chanting for the ceremony. The Buddha once said that his dispensationcould only be said to have truly arrived in a new land when a son of that countryencountered the teaching and received full ordination as a monk from a Sangha ofbhikkhus on his native soil. And even though before this date there certainly hadbeen other ordinations in the USA, this was to be the very first of ours – so thesewere momentous days for our new Monastery.Late in the afternoon we take some time to have our first full-scale run-throughof the ordination ceremony up in the forest. The community has put up a beautifullymade platform in amongst the spinney of thin oaks in the central clearing. Wedecided to hold the ceremony there in order to begin to get people’s minds aroundthat site as the future center of the Monastery’s spiritual life. Eventually, on the farside of the clearing, overlooking the valley to the south, we hope to build our mainmeditation hall. Also we chose it just because it’s a suitably divine spot for such aunique occasion: bounded by mossy trunks and roofed in oak leaf and sky – givenenough prayers for fair weather, who could ask for better?The evening passes with an informal sitting while news gets exchanged andthe mail heap reduces. By the end of the day weariness is well and truly here,and the sight of the log walls of my kutī, and the bedding neatly prepared for myarrival, is a welcome one. Time to lay the rūpa down and let it rest.60