Brahmavamsa, Sujato And The Nuns

The ‘Ajahan Brahmavamso nuns’ ordination’ saga continues. Until recently the discourse on the matter has been forthright although civil. But now things are starting to turn nasty. Recently several Bangkok tabloids have covered the issue, making false charges against Brahmavamso, accusing him of mismanaging his monastery in Perth and even going so far as to call him ‘an idiot monk’. Now it seems monks in Thailand are ringing Thai people in Perth encouraging them, not to distance themselves from Brahmavamso, but to dismiss him as abbot and take over his monastery. Brahmavamso for his part is maintaining a dignified silence. Ajahan Sujato on the other hand is fighting back with articulate and cogent arguments. On his blog recently Sujato has convincing rebuttals to the accusations made against Brahmavamso and said what he really thinks about the Thai Sangha - in the bluntest possible terms (although some of his more ‘blunt’ comments seem to have been deleted since I read then a week ago). ‘Education is a big challenge, one which Theravada has, so far, failed dismally. Yet it is not the heart of the matter…The problem lies deeper. It goes to the heart of how the Sangha is imagined, desired, in Theravada. We want our monks to be ignorant, inarticulate. We want them to repeat them same bland platitudes again and again. We loathe any deviation, any innovation, that might suggest that something new might be valuable.’ This is only partially true. The influence of monks in Theravadin societies is enormous. It is they who set the tone for everything to do with religion. It is they who have groomed the laity to be content with just ‘making merit’, to passively listening to dull sermons, to consider it ‘disrespectful’ even to ask questions, let alone correct or disagree even respectfully with what a monk might say. On the rare occasions when a lay person takes a deeper, a more inquiring interest in the Dhamma it is usually the monks who try to disparage and discourage them.
‘I’m struck, again and again, at the vast gap that exists between how the Sangha is seen and the reality of what it is.’ I was too, about 30 years back. But I eventually recognized this problem and pointed it out. But the only response I got was to be accused of being unfair, biased and of ‘letting the team down, including by Western monks. ‘As a monk, I am all too aware of how I offer a field for projection. Wrapped in our ochre robes, with shaven heads, we monastics deliberately strip ourselves of personal identity… We are removed, separated, distant, surrounded by layers of formalities, rituals, and taboos. For the Buddhist lay community we are the ‘other’, forever inaccessible. The things we surround ourselves with – robes, bowl, and the rest – retain little of their original functionality, and serve primarily as symbols that associate us with the lineage of the Buddha. We don’t just offer ourselves for projection, we positively invite, almost demand it.’ No Sujato, you and most of the other monks, but especially those in the Thai forest tradition ‘demand’ special attention – I don’t and a few other modern monks I know don’t either. You deliberately ‘offer a field of projection’ to the lay community, you choose too, indeed you insist on surrounding yourselves with ‘formalities, rituals and taboos’. As I have pointed out many times before, the first thing one is instructed in when one goes to a Thai temple on in the West and especially one in the Thai forest tradition, is all the ‘formalities, rituals and taboos’.
Sujato points out that the accusations of mismanagement in Brahmavamso’s monastery is not just untrue but also hypocritical, given the widespread corruption in Thai monasteries. One can only wonder why senior Thai monks are so concerned about supposed mismanagement in the Perth when they do nothing about the pervasive corruption closer to home. ‘In the forest monasteries you will constantly hear stories of how corrupt the city/village monks are: the monks who set up a still to brew the leftover sticky rice from alms-round – and then tried to sell the liquor back to the villagers; the monastery that was running a brothel out the back; the use of temple boys to pleasure the monks; the monk who had an affair with a novice, and then when he got jealous, murdered his unfaithful lover; the tudong monk who stayed overnight in a village monastery, only to wake up with a naked monk in his bed; the village who got so sick of their monks’ behavior they took their Buddha image to Bangkok, dumped it and declared they would no longer be Buddhists; the monastery that was so jealous when a nearby monastery actually started teaching meditation that they accused the meditation teacher of being a communist spy; the monks who salt away all the temple money for years, then disrobe and retire rich; selling drugs from monasteries; or the claim by the Thai Religious Affairs department that 10% of Thai monks were addicted to methamphetamine. And on it goes.’ Only 10%! I always assumed it was much higher than that. Oh no, wait a minuet, I was thinking of alcoholism.
‘The notion that there are a set of ‘uniform rules’ that ‘effectively govern’ monasteries in Thailand is utter nonsense. Mainstream Thai Buddhism is rotten to its core. You don’t have to take my word for it, look at the actions of Phra Mongkut, or Ajahn Mun, or Ajahn Chah. They all operated under the quite reasonable knowledge that mainstream Thai Buddhism was bereft of any genuine Dhamma, and that only by reforming or living on the margins of the system could one live with integrity. Things have not improved since their times. On the contrary, it has got much worse. The past generation has seen unprecedented wealth pour into the coffers of the Thai Sangha. There is precious little oversight and no proper policies on how to deal with this. Everyone agrees that the existing system is inadequate at best and needs overhauling, yet no-one has been able to do it. So it just lurches along from scandal to scandal.’

Sujato goes on to reveal quite a few more home truths about Thai Buddhism, most of them equally true of Burma, Sri Lanka, Laos and Cambodia. So now it seems that finally, at last, late in the day, but eventually, it is becoming mainstream to tell the truth about Theravada. It’s not a pretty truth but unless it is told we Western Buddhists run the risk of copying all the arcane practices of Asian Buddhism and thus ending up with all their problems.
For more of Sujato’s comments go to www.sujato.wordpress.com and have a look at ‘Sooner of Later We’ll have Female Monks Everywhere’, Dec. 28, 2009; ‘Reform – A Challenge’, Dec. 17 2009.
All this has prompted me to consider republishing on this blog my Broken Buddha, something I wrote 10 years ago about my assessment of the problems of traditional Theravada, the cause of these problems, and the need for Western Buddhists to distance themselves from Asian Buddhism and evolve a Buddhism for the 21st century West. Look out for it.