Ringkasan dibuat dengan bantuan AI • Belum diverifikasi
Dalam ceramah berjudul 'Seeded Life', Ajahn Pavaro berbagi refleksi pribadi tentang perjalanan spiritualnya, dimulai dari perkenalannya dengan Luang Por Pasano dan pengalamannya tinggal di Abhayagiri, yang kemudian membawanya ke Thailand. Ia menggambarkan kehidupan di Abhayagiri sebagai masa pelatihan yang konsisten dan persahabatan yang mendukung, serta kesan pertamanya di Thailand bersama Luang Por Pasano. Pembicara juga merenungkan tentang keluarganya, rasa rendah hati, dan bagaimana usia serta pengalaman hidup memberikan perspektif dalam praktik spiritualnya. Konsep utama yang diperkenalkan adalah 'kehidupan yang bersemi' (seeded life), yang menggunakan metafora berkebun untuk memahami pertumbuhan spiritual, menekankan bahwa kualitas batin seperti kebijaksanaan dan rasa syukur adalah kondisi yang dapat dipupuk. Ia juga menjelaskan pergeseran pendekatannya dari analisis dan daftar-daftar menuju penggunaan metafora dan pengalaman langsung untuk menjaga kesegaran Dhamma. Ceramah ini menyoroti pentingnya menemukan keindahan Dhamma dalam momen sekarang, dan diakhiri dengan refleksi bahwa tidak ada yang lebih baik daripada keheningan. Pesan utamanya adalah bahwa kehidupan spiritual adalah proses menumbuhkan benih-benih kualitas batin melalui kesadaran, kerendahan hati, dan hubungan yang baik dengan sesama praktisi.
So I should begin with an admission, which is that I wasn't ordained here.
So some of you may feel you can leave now, you know, in just a little disappointment.
Lumpur assured me this morning, yeah, but you're one of our monks for sure.
I was here in 2010 for a year, and I think the year before that for a month.
But my whole monastic life really has been, you know, I've sort of revolved around one of the suns,
but maybe it's a constellation, but there is Lumpur Pisano at the center of things,
or very near the center all the time over these years.
I was a layman still.
So when I visited Birkin Monastery in B.C., and Lumpur was there.
Maybe Debbie was there, and I'm not sure who the others there were present there.
This is the Agenzona.
Birkin was not yet the Birkin III, which it is now.
It was on a farmland, and there was Lumpur Pisano.
And so that was my first meeting with him,
and he permitted me to have a chat.
I had a chat with him privately.
I didn't know how to do any of this.
I knew very, very little, almost nothing about any kind of monastic etiquette.
But he was used to ignorant Westerners and ignorant in such things.
And I remember the gravitas from the very beginning of the conversation
and just being with him and the quality of pauses and reflections that he offered.
And it occurred to me.
At that time, that life can become a kind of work of art,
and one begins to aspire to something in a more tangible sense
when you're in the presence of a person of this kind of quality, caliber.
So that was the beginning for me.
It really wasn't the beginning.
Beginnings are very hard to identify in life, I think.
Conditions are very complex.
But that was the beginning.
So when I came here, I came from a community that varied from about six with sort of tops
down to about, there was just Ajahn Sona and myself for a time, plus Michimon.
So that'd be three.
And it was a small community, and of course with visitors.
And then when I arrived at Abayagiri, it was like coming to a city or something.
And at Birkin, I had a hand in, at least I knew it was going on everywhere,
and I had a hand in most of the things.
And here, there were whole building projects I'd never even visited.
But what I found throughout my year here was the quality of training,
which I benefited a great deal from.
There was a consistency in the training.
Of course, Ajahn Amra was here for almost that whole period as well,
and there was a consistency and obviously a pattern to things
because it had been going on by that time for many years already.
And there was also a quality of friendship.
Everyone was different.
We had, you know, we gravitated naturally towards this or that monk,
and you had less in common with some others.
And, of course, issues of seniority were relevant because if someone was 15 years,
they were senior to you.
Being kind of an older monk, I mean, I was 47 when I entered,
when I became an Anagarica.
So I spanned things a little bit, but that could be a little bit uncomfortable
because I could be perhaps a little presumptive sometimes because I was kind of old,
yet I didn't really have the monastic form well enough in place.
But anyway, people have been very considered and kind around that for a long time.
And it was here that I became deeply steeped in the stories of Thailand, really.
The stories because Lumpur had been with Lumpur Cha for so long,
and other Thai monks were here, and some senior monks came and went as well.
And so the possibility of going to Thailand really became kind of brightened in my picture.
And that turned...
And I was encouraged to do so by Lumpur, by Ajahn Amaro,
and by many of the friends that I had here.
And so off I went in December of that year, at the end of my year here at Bhai Giri,
I accompanied Lumpur Pasano to Thailand.
And I...
Okay, the first, you know, you land in Bangkok, and, you know, I don't know what to expect.
And Lumpur...
And we got our bags and everything.
And all of a sudden, there's this woman, this Thai woman,
and she's just beside herself with faith and pleasure and just joy at seeing Lumpur.
And she's bowing right there on the tile in Swarnabhumi.
And Lumpur is just taking it all in.
It's completely...
So I just got his beautiful little smile on his face.
And, oh, how are you?
Nice to see you again.
And off we go.
So that was my introduction to the quality of...
the expressive quality of faith and joy that one finds in Thailand
when you're right in the heartland, in a sense.
Of course, I had seen wonderful Thais here over the year,
and there are certainly and still are Thais that come to Birkin,
as well as Sri Lankans and others.
But being in Thailand and just seeing...
seeing this in its place was for a, you know,
a kind of conservative Canadian guy from a small town in B.C.
I mean, it was still a little bit, this is new, this is new.
Those first few weeks traveling with Lumpur in Thailand were interesting
in that he seemed to have energy for everything.
And the days were utterly packed.
We went from one event to another, from one meal offering to a tea somewhere else.
To a talk here and partial day retreat to this group here and on and on.
And finally, I landed at Wat Nanachat.
Everywhere we went, Lumpur was greeted with reverence, with respect and appreciation
and made his mark and spoke in the Thai language, and I didn't understand any of it.
So I'm avoiding, but it's taking...
With some difficulty, I'm avoiding speaking about one period in my life.
In Thailand, when my preceptor was prominent, even though he saw me,
but I don't remember seeing him, but I was in hospital at the time.
But what I remember about that period in the hospital was that he came to mind often
with a great deal of appreciation.
And I expect, without having had this confirmed, but I don't think I need to,
that...
That he was bringing me to mind with all of the consideration of his wonderful practice, Kibir.
So I was trying to avoid that, and I've spoken of it as delicately as I can.
But it's a little like getting married, isn't it?
You know, people stand up and then all of a sudden,
they're their parents, they're on the side.
And I suppose, you know, you're reminded of something your mother did or your father did.
And people in these big gatherings, permitted at some gatherings,
even in staid Western culture, to shed a few tears.
And Lumpur has that kind of...
bears that kind of quality in my life.
Because I didn't live long enough in a Baiyagiri,
I should be actually giving all kinds of...
Baiyagiri talks as stories, but I can't.
So everything's, you know, it's all going to stage right here.
But that's the way it is.
Yeah, having entered monastic life quite late in life,
although I'd been going to retreats for 20 years by that time since about 1980.
But maybe for someone of my age now, because believe it or not,
we're not that different, you know, we're not that...
far apart in age in Vasa, Lumpur's 30 years senior to me.
That's not going to change.
And you wouldn't catch him up here, you know, shedding tears
and getting all gooey about things.
No way.
But it's given me some perspective because now I've been in monastic life
since 2001 and 2012.
Two years is a big, you know.
And, you know, but I have a life before this in my own birth family
and then with wife and children and now grandchildren.
And so it, you know, it does offer a kind of interesting perspective.
It's always, I guess it's never been surprising.
It's still a little bit humiliating at times.
At least.
It's always modesty provoking to recognize how little,
what little impact your spiritual life seems to have had
on your actual birth family.
So that's, you know, it just keeps you humble.
And humility, there are a few qualities which are any better than humility,
I don't think.
So there is that.
And there's also, you know, having reached, you know,
a few decades now,
now I guess I'm in my early eighth decade.
But still, it's, there's just a sense of appreciation you have
to look over a life even of this number of years
and to see certain patterns coming and going
and also certain things repeating,
but repeating in interesting ways.
And one of the things that I've come to in the last few years
to think about is just the simple idea of maturity
or the simple, the metaphor that we,
that never grows old really of gardening and plant life
and seeded life and how it is that all conditioned things,
all things require certain conditions for growth.
It's, it becomes a natural way to conceive of spiritual life
in these terms, I think, to recognize that thought moments,
that moments of our ascension,
aspiration, that our dearest ideals and wishes in life,
that the qualities that we see in others
and sometimes in ourselves and hold most dear,
that those are conditioned qualities,
that they arise, that they come and go.
But when they come and when we recognize them,
we have an opportunity to stimulate them,
to come to understand them and in a sense,
befriend them, to name them,
to allow them to gain some clarity
in our, in our,
in our experience and see them grow and thrive.
And this is, this is something which it lends itself
so easily to just thinking about gardening
and of course, right effort, weeding and,
and watering at the right time, not too much.
And, and depending on, you know,
depending on the plant that you're dealing with,
some things don't need much water.
Some things need a lot of sun things,
some things don't, but this has been anyway for me,
it's become a one way to,
to conceive of spiritual life.
One of the reasons that I maybe have moved in that way
is that I don't have to tell any of you.
I don't think that Buddhism is a tradition full of lists
and it is an analytic tradition.
It is a very heady tradition in many ways.
And that was the way I approached it for,
you know, many years of my early,
training and my,
my early studies in university and so forth were in very
intellectual ways.
And it's become,
it seems to have become a kind of tendency for me to move
away from that in recent years.
Maybe, maybe, you know, as a, as a big,
you feel like you could contribute more if you were more
analytically inclined and you could write,
you could produce things,
you could articulate them in very clear terms,
poetic terms and so forth.
But, but as a practitioner,
I've found at least that,
that I have sort of moved in,
in a, in a somewhat different direction.
So the use of metaphor and thinking about seated life,
for instance,
and just noticing things such as that the Dhamma is always fresh.
The experience of Dhamma is always fresh and,
and the lists,
you know,
the lists,
the numerous,
the innumerable lists of Dhamma are also fresh too when,
when they're worked with and seeing the causal relations between
different terms and a list can be so vivifying and interesting.
But whenever,
whenever it becomes merely rote or when,
when the life kind of drains out of it and it becomes simply
something,
simply something else that we need to,
remember and keep in mind and,
and so forth,
this becomes more of a duty than,
than a living practice.
And,
and life begins to drain away for a time in that.
So I have,
in my Dhamma life,
I've,
I've come to rely more on this,
on this experience,
this looking for the freshness,
the fresh beauty of,
of Dhamma in the present moment.
And so for instance,
say it now that I've been living for several years with Lumpur Viradhammo
at Tisarana and he has spent many years living with Lumpur Samhedo and we,
we listened to a large,
you know,
lots of Lumpur Samhedo talks.
So just,
you know,
it's like this,
this kind of very,
very simple yet very elegant language is wonderful.
To keep in mind,
it's also very easy to remember.
It's about now that in a Dhamma talk,
I wish there was an occasion when you could say those simple words.
And are there any questions?
Yeah.
As a,
as a Bhikkhu who occasionally is asked to speak,
there is a rigor to this.
And many of the,
of the,
of the senior teachers that we see have been doing it for so long.
And,
and I,
I,
I,
I wouldn't speak,
I wouldn't claim to speak for them,
but it seems as an outsider that,
that it's become a kind of practice there.
They've trained themselves to prepare however they do it.
And each does it probably a little differently.
And,
and yet it all,
it always seems to work out.
And you sense something about the personality there,
but also the,
the authority that there is some experience that,
that is sitting before you.
And,
and,
uh,
reflecting on Dhamma.
In my case,
it's still a puzzle.
It remains a puzzle.
I have to say,
I actually don't think I have anything further to say that can improve on the
silence.
So I'll leave my reflections with that.