A short stroll with a Buddhist monk

Press, 20 July 1984, Page 13

A short stroll with a Buddhist monk

JAMES HOMES

Walking through the Christchurch Botanic Gardens on a recent Sunday morning, the tall, shaven-headed Buddhist monk, in his saffron robes, stopped here and there to point out to his companj ions New Zealand varieties of | plants, trees and shrubs, accurately identifying everything he named. His walk took him back almost i 30 years to an entirely different way of life as a student gardener s at the Royal Botanic Gardens at | Kew in London’s western suburbs. : Then he was a British exi serviceman who had become in- ■ terested in Buddhism while serving : for 19 months in Egypt with the j Army. ■ Now he is Abbot of Wat Buddha- ■ Dhamma, a Buddhist monastery at J the picturesquely-named Ten Mile Hollow, in a national park north of Sydney. i In the years between he has ! served as a Buddhist monk in India, Thailand and Sri Lanka. His Buddhist name is Phra Khantipalo, and in spite of his many years living in Asia, he still speaks with a trace of the cockneyHome Counties accent of his youth. He was born and grew up at Waltham Cross, then on the outskirts of northern London. He was in New Zealand to visit Kampuchean and Thai Buddhist families and students, whom he visits regularly now that he is based in Australia. Phra Khantipalo had hopes ofbecoming a journalist when he left school, “but that didn’t come off, so I trained as a horticulturist.” He was quite a good gardener, so after he left school he did a diploma course at the Essex Institute of Agriculture. Then the army sent him as a conscript to the Suez Canal Zone for 19 months — “a rather difficult time.” “Towards the end of that time, to keep me sane, my mother used to send out parcels of books, and among these was a Penguin on Buddhism by Christmas Humphreys,” he said. “This was my first interest in Buddhism. I hadn’t thought about it before, although at school I won a ! prize ,on the history of the Far East. ’ When he left the army, Phra Khantipalo joined the Buddhist Society in London, then headed by Christmas Humphreys who had been president since 1924 and who died last year. “I went to classes there; in those days there weren’t any meditation centres, monasteries or monks, or anything like that in Britain.” He had enrolled at the Kew Botanic Gardens, and spent two years there. Halfway through the course he decided “it wasn’t going to be gardening, it was going to be Buddhism.” At the end of his Kew certificate period he stayed at a house where two or three Buddhist monks lived, and after a few months he was ordained as a novice. His mother, who had been “faintly bemused at my becoming a Buddhist,” was at the ordination to follow the Buddhist tradition of the parents giving the robes to the son. Phra Khantipalo’s next move was to India, to join some Thai monks at Buddha Gaya, the place of Buddha’s enlightenment, in the Ganges Valley of Northern India. In India he learned the Pali language in which the Buddhist scriptures are preserved. He stayed nine months with his teacher, and after three years in India he went to Thailand, “Thailand is a place where Buddhism is alive; in India there are little spots of Buddhism, here and there.” He stayed in Thailand for 11 years, travelling briefly during that time to Burma, Laos and Malaysia. His teacher then asked him to go to Australia in the company of a senior Thai monk and help establish a Thai Buddhist monastery in Sydney to serve Asians and any Australians who might be interested. The result was not altogether satisfactory. “707 s were scraping the roof and there were semitrailers outside the front door, not a quiet place for meditating.”

But six years ago a meditation pupil of his offered money for the purchase of a Buddhist centre. "We travelled around quite a bit, and then found this 220 acres about 60 miles from Sydney — a place called Wisemans Ferry. “It is actually in the middle of a national park. You have to go through eight miles of national park to get to this secluded mountain valley — a beautiful place." It has a number of huts for nuns and monks, and provision for lay people to come to stay with their families. “So there is a village there now, with about 15 adults, seven or eight children, myself, one Australian monk and a novice, a young man who is going to become a novice, and four ladies who are going to become nuns.” Phra Khantipalo was invited to New Zealand by various Buddhist groups here, to visit Thai Buddhist families and students, as well as a few westerners interested in Buddhism. Interest ■ in Buddhism and in meditation (“the word that seems to come to mind when you hear of Buddhism these days,”) is increasing in New Zealand, as in other Western countries. • Historically, meditation was something that was largely confined to monks and nuns, Phra Khantipalo said. Very few lay people would meditate. “They would undertake the precepts and give generously to support the monks and nuns, but you didn’t find many of them meditating in the past.” But meditation was now really catching on, because the pressure of society, the pressure of change and of coping, produced a lot of disturbance in people. “They need to have some resource inside them. If they don’t have resources inside they cannot cope.” However, Phra Khantipalo does not believe that people are turning away from their own religions when they take up meditation. “If Christians come to me to ask questions about meditation, I answer them in terms that allow them to continue meditating as Christians. “I don’t have the idea that everybody should be a Buddhist. I certainly don’t try to convert people. I don’t have that aim in mind. "Meditation has been a practice at some times in the Christian religions. There have been meditative Christians. “But there has always been a bit of suspicion about meditation; some modern Christians echo that strongly. I think the reason is that there is a kind of fear that they might go beyond the book — find something that was better than the book. “This is quite encouraged in Buddhism. Buddhist scriptures are looked on as fingers ponting the direction. “You don’t think it is a bad thing if people don’t stick by the letter of the books any more. The books are there to point out the good direction to go.” Phra Khantipalo said there had to be balance in Buddhism, and Christians had a balance too. “Christianity has all kinds of movements to help people. That is very good. But if people don’t have inner resources they really can’t help you. That is how Buddhists see it. “On the other hand, if you went to the other extreme and just sat in meditation all day, that could become quite egotistical and narrow. “You cannot actually develop spiritually by doing that. You can! cut people out of your universe; they are part of it and you have to consider them. “The balance for different people is a bit different. That is where a teacher is useful to tell how much time one should spend with oneself. “When you practice to make your own heart pure, thankful and clean, that is called wisdom. Then when you express this in deeds to others, that is called compassion. “These are the twin pillars of Buddhist ethics.”