Rugged Interdependency - Amaravati Buddhist Monastery

Rugged Interdependencyteachings and by its living presence. Many of these themes are explored in the talkRugged Interdependency, included in the latter part of this book.Although Abhayagiri Monastery is not a retreat or meditation center, peopleare welcome to visit, or to arrange a stay as a guest and to share the lifestyle of themonastic community for a time. The community’s meditation and work providesvisitors with living examples of the Buddhist path. Guests can stay up to a week –longer stays are possible with the agreement of the community. Such visits can givelay practitioners the opportunity to deepen their understanding of Buddhism andof themselves in an environment that encourages peaceful reflection.Abhayagiri Monastery was the first Monastery in the United States to be establishedby followers of Ajahn Chah. After the first six months Ajahn Pasanno camefrom Thailand and joined me to guide the Monastery as co-abbot. We had begun(on June the 1 st 1996) with myself, one other monk (Ajahn Visuddhi) and a one-dayoldanagarika (Tom DeMaria). Those earliest days were an understandable rushof new experiences – both good and bad, predictably – but all was held in a firmembrace of Dhamma practice.During the many years I had lived as a monk in England, I had heardAjahn Sumedho recount repeatedly the way in which he had worked with his mindwhen he had first arrived from Thailand, in 1977: “Every time that I thought, ‘Ihave to bring the Dhamma to the West,’ or ‘All these people are looking to me astheir teacher and I mustn’t let them down,’ or ‘It’s up to me to preserve the purebhikkhu life in the West and to make sure it never gets corrupted,’ then I wouldsuffer tremendously. Instantaneously! But if I just thought, ‘People have invited mehere to live and practice the Dhamma, moment by moment,’ then I would immediatelyfeel ease and joy – ‘How wonderful! That’s what I love to do and I can dothat anywhere.’ It was not a problem.”So I took my lead from that and determined to do the same: simply to practicethe Dhamma and if the Monastery and the Teaching flourished, so be it. And if itall collapsed and fizzled, so be it – the practice would be the same. Over the yearsthis advice has served very well.The three-month travelogue, entitled Golden Highways Revisited, comes froma period a couple of years after the foundation of the Monastery. It was at theend of the time when I accepted all the invitations from around the country thatcould practicably be squeezed into the calendar. As it happened, the travels ofthat spring and early summer encompassed virtually every group, center andMonastery that we had been connected with in the USA., as well as a side trip toan ordination in England, plus a visit to my alma mater there – thankfully the calendarhas never been quite so packed before or since. It also occurred just a fewweeks after Jack Kornfield had put forth the suggestion – to the teachers and Boardof IMS, friends and supporters of ours in Massachusetts and to the monastic communityat Abhayagiri – that a Monastery similar to Abhayagiri should be foundedat or close to IMS.One might well wonder why, with a schedule already so brim-full, one wouldhave wished to load it further with the burden of keeping a journal along the way.