a day in the life
A couple of people have asked me what a typical day is like for me, so I thought the topic might be of some general interest.
I usually wake up around 7:30 or 8, and the first thing I do is pour water into seven offering bowls, light a stick of incense and sit down for my first session of the day. It’s a practice that I learned from John Makransky, who is a teacher in the Theology department of Boston College and a lama in the nonsectarian Dzogchen lineage of Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche, one of the most highly regarded meditation masters of the past century.
For the record I do not consider myself Buddhist in any exclusive sense. I was baptized Greek Orthodox, educated by Jesuits and owe much to the Church of Apostolic Succession. My initial reasons for coming to Nepal and learning about Buddhism were purely intellectual, but I soon discovered that intellectuality means nothing without love and compassion, and so decided to stick around and see what else I could absorb. The ongoing process of internalizing the wisdom of the Tibetan Buddhist lineages has only made me more conscious of and determined to understand my Christian faith.
Most of my day is spent taking classes at a monastery about a 5 minutes’ walk from my apartment. The first class of the day begins at 9:15. I didn’t go for a while, because I was super-depressed and could barely get up in the morning, but lately I’ve been making it. The class is taught by a lopön, a graduate of the monastic college who hasn’t yet earned his khenpo degree (to get one you have to have a record of virtuous conduct for several years after graduation). The text we’re studying, Words of My Perfect Teacher, is a commentary on how to do what are known as the “preliminary practices,” traditionally seen as a prerequisite for any more advanced meditation training. They involve accumulating 100,000 (or more) prostrations, recitations of a particular mantra, and so on. When I'm feeling good I'll wake up at 5 and do a few hundred prostrations, for instance. Right now we’re learning the proper way on which to rely on a teacher, which comes after the "outer preliminaries" of contemplating the preciousness of our human life, impermanence and death, the sufferings of conditioned existence, and the process of cause and effect.
The next class is at 10:30 and is taught by a khenpo. The text we’re studying in that class (the Root Verses of the Middle Way) is most basically a refutation of all four extremes of existence, nonexistence, both existence and nonexistence, and neither existence nor nonexistence as the final abiding mode of reality. Khenpo Jampa (his name means “love” and in addition to being a most accomplished scholar he simply exudes it) reads each verse of the root text, and then delivers his own commentary, always sticking very close to the text (sometimes only rearranging or slightly expanding its words). It is rote, methodical, and utterly alien to contemporary Western pedagogy. But once you get used to it, it isn’t so bad.
After that is lunch. I have a didi, a Nepali woman who cooks, cleans, and--there being no washing machines in Nepal--most importantly does laundry. It does feel slightly colonial, but we’re personally quite close and she desperately needs the money. Her husband, whom she married out of love and in the process alienated her entire family, left her for a better life in Doha. He doesn’t send her any money, and she can’t afford her kids’ education. Anyway, she comes and makes food three times a week, the other days I eat in a hole in the wall restaurant; I mean that literally, there is no front wall or door and the three tables fit in barely nine square meters. They make various things but we always have rice, lentils, and curried vegetables (dal bhat tarkari), the Nepali national meal. (The national sport is attempting to get change for a 1,000-rupee note).
I have two different classes at 1. Half the week it’s classical Tibetan, the other half of the week it’s a class on a very technical doctrinal/philosophical issue that I won’t bore you by talking about here.
For most of this academic year I was doing colloquial Tibetan lessons with a language partner, but my psychiatrist informed me two months ago that he’s leaving Nepal more or less for good on Tuesday, so I’ve been seeing him every day for the last few weeks. We’ve slowly built a relationship over a year and a half, so I’m quite sad to see him go, but on the other hand it’ll be interesting to see how I fare without him. In any case, between getting all the way to and from the other side of Kathmandu (traffic can be horrendous and the roads are either unpaved or have huge gashes), and the hourlong session itself, my afternoons are pretty much full.
I’ll usually check my email if there’s power; power cuts are now at 16 hours a day, that means we have 8 hours of power a day. If, as is most frequently the case, there isn’t power, I’ll read or have another practice session.
At 7 I go to a different monastery to do Chöd, this crazy and amazingly profound tantric practice that involves graphically dismembering your own corpse. (To do it properly you need a trumpet made from a human thigh bone). The monks at that monastery are some of my best friends here.
Most everything shuts down by 8, and 9 is outrageously late, so I’m usually in bed by 10 or so. Tonight I’m up until 11, though, writing this. So I hope it’s worth it!
I usually wake up around 7:30 or 8, and the first thing I do is pour water into seven offering bowls, light a stick of incense and sit down for my first session of the day. It’s a practice that I learned from John Makransky, who is a teacher in the Theology department of Boston College and a lama in the nonsectarian Dzogchen lineage of Nyoshul Khen Rinpoche, one of the most highly regarded meditation masters of the past century.
For the record I do not consider myself Buddhist in any exclusive sense. I was baptized Greek Orthodox, educated by Jesuits and owe much to the Church of Apostolic Succession. My initial reasons for coming to Nepal and learning about Buddhism were purely intellectual, but I soon discovered that intellectuality means nothing without love and compassion, and so decided to stick around and see what else I could absorb. The ongoing process of internalizing the wisdom of the Tibetan Buddhist lineages has only made me more conscious of and determined to understand my Christian faith.
Most of my day is spent taking classes at a monastery about a 5 minutes’ walk from my apartment. The first class of the day begins at 9:15. I didn’t go for a while, because I was super-depressed and could barely get up in the morning, but lately I’ve been making it. The class is taught by a lopön, a graduate of the monastic college who hasn’t yet earned his khenpo degree (to get one you have to have a record of virtuous conduct for several years after graduation). The text we’re studying, Words of My Perfect Teacher, is a commentary on how to do what are known as the “preliminary practices,” traditionally seen as a prerequisite for any more advanced meditation training. They involve accumulating 100,000 (or more) prostrations, recitations of a particular mantra, and so on. When I'm feeling good I'll wake up at 5 and do a few hundred prostrations, for instance. Right now we’re learning the proper way on which to rely on a teacher, which comes after the "outer preliminaries" of contemplating the preciousness of our human life, impermanence and death, the sufferings of conditioned existence, and the process of cause and effect.
The next class is at 10:30 and is taught by a khenpo. The text we’re studying in that class (the Root Verses of the Middle Way) is most basically a refutation of all four extremes of existence, nonexistence, both existence and nonexistence, and neither existence nor nonexistence as the final abiding mode of reality. Khenpo Jampa (his name means “love” and in addition to being a most accomplished scholar he simply exudes it) reads each verse of the root text, and then delivers his own commentary, always sticking very close to the text (sometimes only rearranging or slightly expanding its words). It is rote, methodical, and utterly alien to contemporary Western pedagogy. But once you get used to it, it isn’t so bad.
After that is lunch. I have a didi, a Nepali woman who cooks, cleans, and--there being no washing machines in Nepal--most importantly does laundry. It does feel slightly colonial, but we’re personally quite close and she desperately needs the money. Her husband, whom she married out of love and in the process alienated her entire family, left her for a better life in Doha. He doesn’t send her any money, and she can’t afford her kids’ education. Anyway, she comes and makes food three times a week, the other days I eat in a hole in the wall restaurant; I mean that literally, there is no front wall or door and the three tables fit in barely nine square meters. They make various things but we always have rice, lentils, and curried vegetables (dal bhat tarkari), the Nepali national meal. (The national sport is attempting to get change for a 1,000-rupee note).
I have two different classes at 1. Half the week it’s classical Tibetan, the other half of the week it’s a class on a very technical doctrinal/philosophical issue that I won’t bore you by talking about here.
For most of this academic year I was doing colloquial Tibetan lessons with a language partner, but my psychiatrist informed me two months ago that he’s leaving Nepal more or less for good on Tuesday, so I’ve been seeing him every day for the last few weeks. We’ve slowly built a relationship over a year and a half, so I’m quite sad to see him go, but on the other hand it’ll be interesting to see how I fare without him. In any case, between getting all the way to and from the other side of Kathmandu (traffic can be horrendous and the roads are either unpaved or have huge gashes), and the hourlong session itself, my afternoons are pretty much full.
I’ll usually check my email if there’s power; power cuts are now at 16 hours a day, that means we have 8 hours of power a day. If, as is most frequently the case, there isn’t power, I’ll read or have another practice session.
At 7 I go to a different monastery to do Chöd, this crazy and amazingly profound tantric practice that involves graphically dismembering your own corpse. (To do it properly you need a trumpet made from a human thigh bone). The monks at that monastery are some of my best friends here.
Most everything shuts down by 8, and 9 is outrageously late, so I’m usually in bed by 10 or so. Tonight I’m up until 11, though, writing this. So I hope it’s worth it!