IB World Religions 2.5.1. Group and Individual Experience: Monastery, Daily Puja and Learning from Lamas Notes

2.5.1. Group and Individual Experience: Monastery, Daily Puja and Learning from Lamas

Experience in Buddhist terms

1. Buddhists describe religious experience as something cultivated rather than something received. No revelation from a creator is expected, so the tradition speaks of training the mind rather than of being addressed by God.
2. The range is wide. It runs from the quiet confidence a lay person feels at a shrine to the absorption states monks describe in deep meditation, and Buddhists count both ends as genuinely religious.
3. Saddha (Sanskrit shraddha: confidence, trust) names the ordinary end of that range. It is presented as trust built by trying the teaching out rather than as belief held without grounds.
4. Experience is also treated as hard to report. The Buddha is described as hesitating to teach after his awakening, on the grounds that what he had seen ran against the grain of ordinary thinking.
5. Group and individual practice form a rhythm rather than a choice. The same Buddhist may chant with hundreds at a temple in the morning and sit alone before a home shrine at night.
6. Context decides what is available. A Thai villager, a Japanese householder and a Tibetan monk inherit different repertoires, so each branch's characteristic experience follows from what its institutions actually offer.

Time in the monastery

1. In Theravada countries the monastery is not only for those who intend to stay. Many boys and men ordain temporarily, which makes monastic experience something a whole population has shared.
2. In Thailand and Myanmar a period in robes has traditionally been part of growing up, lasting anything from a week to several years and often falling in the rains retreat.
3. The Burmese shinbyu ceremony marks the entry. A boy is dressed as a prince in imitation of Siddhartha Gotama, processed through the village, then shaved and given the robes.
4. The novice is a samanera, keeping ten precepts rather than the full monastic rule and living under a preceptor who teaches him chanting, discipline and basic meditation.
5. Ordinands describe the experience as formative rather than ceremonial. What they report is the shock of the shaved head, the alms bowl and the loss of any say over food and time.
6. The merit is shared out. Families hold that a son's ordination brings great punna (merit) to his parents, and Burmese and Thai tradition gives the largest share of it to his mother.
7. Most return to lay life, and Buddhists do not read that as failure. The period is held to leave a lasting sense of what monastic life is, carried back into an ordinary household.

The monastic day

1. Monastic experience is shaped above all by repetition. The day is fixed in advance, and Buddhists treat that removal of choice as part of the training rather than as a side effect.
2. A Theravada day opens before dawn with chanting and meditation, followed by the pindapata (alms round), on which monks walk in silence and accept whatever is put in the bowl.
3. Eating finishes before noon and nothing solid is taken afterwards. Monks describe the afternoon hunger as an ordinary and instructive feature of the routine.
4. The rest of the day divides between study, chores, teaching lay visitors and meditation, closing with an evening puja and further chanting.
5. Uposatha days interrupt the pattern twice a month, and the vassa rains retreat suspends travel for three months, concentrating the community in one place.
6. Mahayana monasteries run the day differently, since most do not beg and many operate kitchens, schools and funeral services, so the felt shape of monastic life varies widely by branch and country.

Puja and the home shrine

1. For most Buddhists the ordinary form of religious experience is devotional rather than meditative. Daily puja (devotion before an image) happens at home more often than at a temple.
2. A home shrine holds an image of the Buddha with offerings set before it, commonly light, incense, flowers, water and food, and the household tends it daily.
3. The offerings are read as teaching. Flowers wilt within the day, so devotees say that placing them is a way of watching impermanence rather than of feeding a deity.
4. Buddhists are careful about what the bowing means. The Buddha is honoured as a teacher who has passed beyond reach, so the act is described as veneration and gratitude rather than as request.
5. Many Japanese households keep a butsudan, a cabinet shrine at which family members greet dead relatives, report news to them and offer rice and tea.
6. Dana (giving) carries the same devotion outwards. Feeding monks, paying for a temple repair or freeing captive animals are experienced as religious acts and not merely as charity.
7. Service to monastics is itself contact with the teaching. A lay person who cooks for a monastery hears the chanting, receives instruction and comes to mark the year by its observances.

Learning from lamas

1. Vajrayana experience is organised around a teacher to a degree the other branches do not match. Practice is received in person, and much of it is never written in a form a reader could simply take up.
2. Entry to a practice comes by wangkur (Sanskrit abhisheka: empowerment), a ritual in which a lama introduces the student to a particular deity practice and authorises him to perform it.
3. Before that, students usually complete ngondro, the preliminary practices. These commonly include one hundred thousand prostrations, and practitioners describe the physical exhaustion as part of the point.
4. Guru yoga makes the teacher himself the object of practice. The student visualises the lama as an awakened being, and devotion is treated as the quickest route to the qualities being visualised.
5. Long retreat concentrates the whole of it. The traditional format runs three years, three months and three days, spent largely in seclusion under a retreat master's direction.
6. Debate supplies the intellectual half of the training. Tibetan monastic colleges drill students in formal, physically emphatic debate, in which a claim is attacked in public until it holds or fails.
7. Tibetan teachers are open about the risk in the relationship. The tradition tells students to examine a lama carefully before committing, and abuses by teachers have been publicly acknowledged in recent decades.

Solitude and the sangha

1. Buddhists hold the two modes together rather than ranking them. The sangha supplies conditions, correction and company, while the decisive work is described as something nobody can do on another's behalf.
2. Group practice has effects of its own. Chanting together in Pali or Tibetan is reported as steadying, and communities use it to open and close almost every gathering.
3. Paritta chanting, called pirit in Sri Lanka, is performed for the sick and for new houses, and lay people describe hearing it as both protective and calming.
4. Solitude has its own line of exemplars. The forest monk in Theravada and the Tibetan hermit are honoured figures, and Milarepa's years alone in a cave make one of the best known life stories in Tibet.
5. Most Buddhists live between the two. A layperson may tend a shrine alone all year, join hundreds at a festival and take a week of retreat once, and count all of it as practice.
6. Buddhists are notably modest about describing any of this. Texts warn against announcing attainments, and teachers commonly redirect a student from how an experience felt to whether greed, hatred and delusion have weakened.