Life Together
Three hundred people share this place. They are fed three times a day, the courtyards are swept, the hall is set out before a ceremony, and someone sits with an elder who can no longer walk easily to the dining room. None of that happens by itself.
The tasks are assigned and they rotate. What a visitor tends to notice is not the organisation but something missing from it: the flicker of this is beneath me. It is community service in the plain sense of both words — service, in service of living together. Buddhist teaching has a term for the way this all hangs together, pratītyasamutpāda, dependent origination, taken up on the pillar of community. In the kitchen it is just the rota.
The monastery has run this way for seven and a half centuries — through the years in Mang-yul Gung-thang as much as since 1972 in South India. Exile did not create the arrangement. It made it briefly visible, because everything had to be built again at once.
The Work of an Ordinary Day
The work is not an interruption of the practice. It is where a good deal of the practice actually happens.
The Kitchen
Cooking for three hundred starts before the rest of the monastery is awake. Rice, vegetables, tea in quantity, in pots too large for one person to move. Monks rotate through the work, and a young monk who arrived last year will find himself doing it alongside someone who has been here for thirty.
Nobody describes this as a spiritual exercise. It is simply the case that everyone in the hall eats because a few people got up early.
Courtyards and Common Rooms
The debate courtyard is swept by the monks who debate in it. The temple grounds are kept by the people who use them. There are no staff for this.
Living four to a room, taking your turn at the washing, waiting for others before eating — the effect of it is not dramatic, and it is not announced. It is simply harder, under these conditions, to keep thinking of yourself as the main character. The same understanding shapes the work of the health clinic and the monastery’s approach to simplicity.
The Young Monks
A good part of the community is children. They come from the Himalayan border regions — the Monpa community of Tawang in Arunachal Pradesh, the Tibetan region of Tsum in Nepal — and from Tibetan settlements across India. Some arrive at eight or nine.
Who Looks After Them
The school is residential, and the young monks live in monastic houses with guardian teachers who live alongside them rather than visiting. The job is closer to a parent’s than a housemaster’s: whether a child has a cough, whether his homework is done, whether he has fallen out with someone, whether he is homesick.
Which is the part most easily left out of an account of monastic life. These are children a long way from their families, and somebody has to notice when one of them is unhappy. What they study is set out under Buddhist education and the western school.
Who Decides What
Three hundred people living together need someone to settle who cooks on Thursday and what happens when two monks stop speaking to each other.
How It Is Organised
The community operates under a transparent hierarchy designed to support practice rather than exert power. Spiritual leadership is guided by the Abbot (Khenpo), while day-to-day discipline, coordination, and communal organization are managed by the disciplinarian (Gegu or Gegeu) and an administrative committee appointed by the monastery’s general board. The people who hold these roles are introduced under abbots and leadership and administration.
When It Goes Wrong
People who live at close quarters fall out. Here that is dealt with by talking it through rather than by adjudicating between the parties — the aim being that both can go on living in the same building afterwards, which a verdict does not accomplish.
It is worth being plain that this does not always work smoothly, or quickly. A monastery is not exempt from irritation, and three hundred people in one place is three hundred people in one place.
What Is Not Here
A monk who takes twelve years over material another finishes in eight is not behind. He is studying. Nobody is ranked against anybody, because standing here rests on conduct, attention and restraint rather than on output — and those are not the kind of thing that produces a league table.
The effect is easier to notice by its absence than to describe directly. There is no anxiety in the room about falling behind, because there is no line to fall behind.
Something You Can Check
Monks walk differently, and it takes a while to work out why. They are not slow. They set off and arrive when they arrive. What is missing is the slight forward lean of someone whose mind is already at the destination — a lean anyone who has hurried down a street will recognise in themselves.
Nothing has been added to produce that. Something has simply been left out. Seven and a half centuries of people cooking for each other and sweeping their own courtyards is one way of leaving it out, and the monastery will go on doing it whether or not anyone is watching.