Pre-Monastery Musings
I’m going to be living at a monastery for a month.
More specifically, I will be living at the South ShaoLin Temple in PuTian, China for all of July. This is part of Woodenfish’s “Humanistic Buddhist Monastic Life Program,” which you can read more about here. I have a lot of thoughts swirling about in my head that I’d like to get down before the start of the immersion, in order to compare with any revelations I may have later.
I realize that in the grand scheme of things, a month is not very long. But people’s lives have changed in shorter spans of time, and I do believe that this experience will be a transformative one. Many facets of life that I have taken for granted for the entirety of my life will be challenged for the next month. I will not be able to eat meat, I must follow a strict schedule for sleeping, eating, and exercise, and I will not be able to talk for a full 5–7 day silent retreat, among many other things.
Why am I doing this program at all?
The biggest reason is discipline. While I am very happy with my path thus far, I find that while I am often passionate about various ideas, I sometimes lack the discipline to carry them out. I’ve lived a very fortunate life where I have been forced to risk very little, and so this program will pose a significant challenge. Through following strict rules for the next month, I hope to get a taste of an extremely disciplined lifestyle that will then translate into my everyday routines.
I also recently took a class called “Tech, Religion, Future” with Professor David Kittay. Before the class, I was pretty sure I believed in Simulation Theory as the explanation for our creation. Along the way, I was introduced to texts by Bostrum, Kurzweil, and Asimov to name a few, and my belief in this idea was solidified. Alongside this highly technical curriculum, however, we were taught about Buddhism and the way that technology reflects religion and how the two develop together towards the future. Even now, I have difficulty explaining the intertwining aspects of Buddhism and, say, the Singularity, but I can promise that this class raised a million questions existing in the fringes of my thoughts as well as a keen interest in learning more about Buddhism. And what better way to do so than to live with monks for a month studying the subject?
Finally, when I signed up for the program the actual destination monastery had not been chosen. After a few switch ups in the location, Woodenfish has settled on the Southern ShaoLin monastery — supposedly the origin for all southern styles of KungFu. The crazy thing is that as a kid in a primarily white elementary school, I was convinced that one of the only “cool” things about Chinese culture was martial arts. After the ShaoLin media hype, I possessed this fervent desire to run off to the mountains of China and study under these highly skilled monks. This was, of course, quickly dismissed as childish foolishness by my parents, but it was something I actually dreamed about for years. And while I’m obviously not going to become a kung fu master, I do think it’s crazy how things work out sometimes, and I’m excited to learn bits and pieces of the ShaoLin curriculum!
What are my goals?
Besides learning discipline, there are a few things I want to (start to) accomplish, both big and small:
- Come to terms with my mental and emotional state. I think that I am actually quite an emotional, temperamental person, but in my inexplicable lifelong effort to avoid traditional “feminine” gender stereotypes, I try so, so hard to hide those parts of me. I’ve known this for a while, and I’ve also known that my efforts to suppress my emotional responses tend to cause more pain than not, and yet I have never addressed this head on. I want to acknowledge when I get jealous, or sad, or mad and be able to dissipate those emotions in a healthy manner.
- Stand (one-legged?) on a quincuncial pile for an hour straight. Mostly a test of concentration, as I tend to be very easily distracted.
- Continue to write about my thoughts openly, like this post.
- I currently have a lot of mosquito bites, so this is less of a goal but more of a question I’d like to have answered. Does inner focus help deal with physical sensations as well as mental ones? I’ve always understood meditation as calming the mind, but will I be able to resist actions such as itching my bites and biting my nails?
One final thing: I’ve decided to shave my head. This is an option offered to everyone who does this program, but is in no way mandatory. The reasoning for my choice is that my hair is pretty much the only thing I care deeply about in terms of how I look, since I don’t usually wear makeup or have fashionable clothing. But, like anyone else, I find this focus on looks very frustrating, as I am constantly comparing myself to my peers and trying to figure out if I measure up. I’ll already be wearing monastic robes for the entirety of this month, and with the elimination of my hair (and my concealer), I will hopefully be able to not worry about looks at all. This decision has already enabled me to release some of the fear I’ve had regarding my own hair: I’ve let my friends give me a haircut and I’ve also gotten a pixie cut(ish), which is something I’ve always wanted to try but never had the guts to. I’ve found that I really, really don’t like short hair on me, but oh well… the next new thing is to learn what a razor feels like on my scalp.
Anyways, thank you for getting through this long, rambling post if you’ve made it this far. Please reach out to me if you’d like to discuss anything I’ve said (especially simulation theory and the like!), as I am so excited and nervous for this experience. Also, special shoutout to Sam Shih and Andrew Guan for introducing me to Woodenfish all those years ago and inspiring me to try it by saying it was the “hardest thing I’ve ever done… ever.”
I’ll be back in a month, hopefully a little tougher and a little wiser :)
