MONASTERY NIGHTS
Again I lay me down to sleep in the hoot-owl monastery woods | august12.2024
‘THATAWAY’ | Take a left to Sivali kuti (or cabin) on the grounds of the Bhavana Society Buddhist monastery in West Virginia. | thestoryisthething.com photo | july2024
by douglas john imbrogno | thestoryisthething.com | august12.2024
The nice thing about staying in a cabin in the forest — or a ‘kuti,’ as they call them at the Bhavana Society Buddhist monastery — is that deep in the night, when your bladder insists on your immediate attention, you have a whole forest where you may pee. Standing near a fallen oak tree in the middle dark — is it 1, 2 or 3 a.m.? — all I hear besides myself is wind whooshing through millions of leaves, an intermittent chorus of whistling tree frogs, and the eternal hoot of a night owl on the hunt.
In most of the last decade of visits to this monastery and retreat center in the back hills of eastern West Virginia, I have coddled myself. I’ve asked to stay in one of two neat, small rooms with an attached bathroom and shower in Asoka House, the men’s group lodging house, up a blacktop road near the top of the monastery’s 60-odd acres of land. Having recently sorted out some male plumbing issues — I view my unflappable urologist as a sort of shaman, but with scary tools — I now feel more comfortable returning to a woodland kuti, and to the blessings of a monastery night in a cabin sans electricity, with only a wood-burning stove for warmth in colder weather.
It has been years since I lodged in a favorite kuti built by a dear friend and longtime Bhavana traveler. This cabin, painted an orange hue reflecting the resident monks’ robes, bears his Dhamma name of ‘Sivali,’ the Buddhist name given to practitioners wishing to more formally pursue the Buddha’s teachings.
I was very much in need of a night of woodland solitude.
“I was a man who thrived on solitude; without it I was like another man without food or water. Each day without solitude weakened me.” ~ CHARLES BUKOWSKI
‘BLOOM WHERE YOU ARE PLANTED’ | Tandem lotus blossoms bloom in the pond between the Bhavana Society dining hall and meditation hall. | thestoryisthething.com photo | july202
I should be dead by now, not enjoying more nights in the woods. If you get to read my ‘sorta memoir,’ the reasons for this will be crystal clear (Subscribe to this site’s newsletter for news of its birth as both a physical and digitized book.) I wonder sometimes if it is the amorphous concept of ‘grace‘ that has kept me breathing, free to ponder life at the lip of 70 years of existence, mostly happy if sometimes moody and foul-mouthed in sputtering private bursts of Wrong Speech. I am agnostic on the idea of grace. Yet, like most things involving the machinations of The Great Mystery, I remain open to possibilities.
Or is it something else?
“You must have some good karma left,” said my now 96-year-old meditation teacher, Bhante Gunaratana, after I told him decades ago about one of the more significant and dramatic attempts upon my own life.
All I know is that I am happy to sit across from him and chat, as we did a week ago in the library of the Theravada Buddhist forest monastery that he and some spiritual fellow travelers founded way out in the Allegheny Mountain range of West Virginia in the late 1980s. (Read more about that history in a keynote address I gave at Bhavana Dec. 7, 2023, at the 96th birthday celebration for Bhante G, as he is known worldwide.)
I am pleased to report that Bhante G is still going strong, if slowing way, way down and often balanced by a cane or two. It was a real blessing to chat again with this teacher and spiritual friend, who has long guided so many of us around the planet in meditation, mindfulness practice, and the Buddha’s teachings. We talked of a new book project (here’s our first one, titled ‘WHAT WHY HOW’). And, later that evening, I was delighted to fall asleep deep in the monastery woods.
“I do not at all understand the mystery of grace — only that it meets us where we are but does not leave us where it found us.” ~ ANNE LAMOTT
‘A BODY AT REST’ | Sivali kuti (or cabin) awaits retreatants and vistors, one of many kutis sprinkled across the forested grounds of the Bhavana Society. | thestoryisthething.com photo | july2024
It has been a few years since I spent a night or two on the Bhavana grounds. More than that since I attended a retreat — either a short three-day one or the more challenging 10-day retreats. After more self-damaging drama of late, I was forced to face the eye-opening conclusion that I have been rather a dilettante about meditation, mindfulness, and Buddhist practice, as my 7th decade of life approaches its 8th. I was giving myself more credit than I deserved as to how well I understood the path I supposedly walked. I had, in fact, wandered quite off what is literally referred to as The Path in Buddhist practice. I’d gone and got myself muddied, bloodied, and tangled in thorns. Again.
This is important for us stumblebum wannabe practitioners to underline: There is a reason they call it Buddhist ‘practice,’ you might say. Because, dear Dunderhead Boy, it takes daily practice. And we have to tell you this, Self: You were more going through the motions of your on-again, off-again meditation and spiritual practice. Believing, maybe, that since I could talk so well about it that I was fully living it.
Once again my treasured Oxford English Dictionary app comes to my aid, yanking back the etymological covers on the deeper meaning of ‘dunderhead.’ The OED reports on its roots: ‘Early 17th century: compare with obsolete Scots ‘dunder, dunner’ or ‘resounding noise’…’ This definition stirs the corpuscles of Scottish blood coursing in my veins, since my grandmother on my mother’s side entered the world in Aberdeen, Scotland, as ‘Nan Cameron,’ of Clan Cameron. ‘Resounding noise‘ aptly describes the clamor and clang of the unmeditated mind, full of its ego-jazzed obsessions and self-glorifying preoccupations. The phrase would fit right into the Buddhist critique of what goes off the rails when we chase after the parade of the ‘resounding noise‘ of our unrestrained urges, compulsions, and lusts.
“At first you’ll make mistakes. When you realize it, stop, come back and establish your precepts again. Maybe you’ll go astray and make another mistake. When you realize it, re-establish yourself.” ~ AJAHN CHAH
‘MONK AT WORK’ | Bhante Dhammaratana studies up in the Bhavana Society library. | thestoryisthething.com photo | july2024
Lodging at a Buddhist monastery presents body and mind with a challenging reset of one’s circadian rhythms. At Bhavana, morning meditation begins at 5:30 a.m., in the big orange-as-a-pumpkin meditation hall. The call to early morning meditation during formal retreats — as well as the invitation to the 7:30 a.m. breakfast and the 11:30 a.m. last meal of the day — comes in a series of resounding metallic booms from a black gong framed in painted red wood on the side porch of the main hall. The sequential gongs recall for me a line by Virginia Woolf from her novel “The Waves,” describing the chimes of Big Ben across London as ‘leaden circles dissolving in the air …’
My keynote address at Bhante G’s 96th birthday celebration Dec. 7, 2023 was reprinted later that month in the Buddhist magazine Tricycle. Click the image or here to read. The Bhante G photo is by West Virginia-based photographer Paul Corbit Brown
I often find myself bringing to Bhavana a chugging trainload of exhaustion and ennui, the burden of which I had not realized I was carrying. I usually collapse in the first 24 hours there, wrestling with this fatigue. It may be that coming to rest at a spiritual center — where, after all, ‘awakening’ and mindfulness is the point of spending time there — brings into stark relief how frantic and overstimulated we let ourselves become from the racing, go-go pace of 24/7 contemporary life.
Those dissolving leaden circles booming through the Bhavana woods are an invitation to come to a cushion or chair — and to slow down. To locate your in-breath and out-breath, those GPS directions back to the present. (You remember the present moment, don’t you, Self?) We are so often out of sync with the present, given how much we obsess about our past and fret about our future. This fritters and drains attention from the only place where we can actually make changes and live consciously. The elusive present. So, then, rouse yourself, sir! Up and dress. Swing open your kuti’s door. Greet the purple woods, which at 5 a.m. have begun their shift from their deepest tranquility to the front-line songcraft of birds, chirping, warbling, and peeping the breaking news of the dawn to come.
“Stop measuring days by degree of productivity and start experiencing them by degree of presence.” ~ ALAN WATTS
‘SONG OF THE GONG’ | The metal gong on a side porch off the dining hall calls monks and visitors to meditation and to meals at the Bavana Society. | thestoryisthething.com photos | july2024
After a monastery night in a kuti amid the rugged bark of thousands of old trees, there is something ineffably soothing and hopeful about strolling a woodland path toward a great meditation hall. As the woods begin to lighten, the now bluer sky throws into sharp relief the glittering pas de deux of the Moon and Venus lined up above the treeline. You come to the golden Buddha overlooking the lotus pond. He has been up all night meditating. His perfect posture recalls my mother’s constant exhortations while growing up to sit up straight! Perfection seems a far-off, impossible aim this morning, given my sequential stumblebum blunders, cock-ups, and flounderings. Growing up seems a far more doable and immediate task, though, on this fine morning in the mountains of a new day.
‘SITTING PRETTY’ | The lotus pond Buddha is already meditating on the Bhavana grounds at 5 a.m., role-modeling for monks and visitors the day’s first sitting in the meditation hall. | thestoryisthething.com photo | july2024
Thanks to Jeff Seager for his editing feedback on this piece.
RELATED
Click the image or this link to read
A lovely, winding meditation.
To be able to sit inside the constant swirl around us is an accomplishment unfathomable to me. I salute your devotion to the way. Nice piece, Doug, on what look to be a lovely place and singular leader.