A Dutch Monk in Myanmar: "My whole life is about devotion to the Buddha’s teachings"

Bhikkhu Agga is a Dutch monk living in Myanmar. While back home for a short time, he was interviewed about his life decision to take on robes, found here. Following is an excerpt of his interview:

"My whole life is about devotion to the Buddha’s teachings and to apply this, and this gives my practice much more strength. It’s like an engine in one of this small toy-cars (flywheel) which keeps rotating and supporting you the more you turn it… 

I feel before, and maybe this is because of Gonkaji’s way of teaching, my meditation practice felt more like: ‘you sit your hour and then you do other things and then you sit your hour and the only thing that counts are your hours on the cushion’, it felt a bit like on/off Dhamma. But now it feels like there is not so much division in meditation or in Dhamma, that division is not there anymore, it’s much more like a whole thing and that I think, it’s very important to create momentum and give strenght and power to meditation. You see Dhamma manifesting in much more places and that’s very beautiful, you can see Dhamma almost everywhere. 

Another reason is that as a monk you have a higher sila (morality). 5 precepts is very essential, 8 precepts is very strong, but I feel like when your whole life is based on the sila, this base becomes really strong, and then you can see clearer how karma works… When you make small mistakes in sila you realize: “this is really hurting me, this sila is for my own protection”, so for me, more rules are more protection in that sense, and I think it’s nice to have more protection. 

Another reason is that when you are practicing for example vipassana from Goenka, you depend on an organization , and now as a monk I don’t depend on organization any more, I only depend on the goodness of others. In Myanmar there is a whole culture that supports monks, meditators, so I can go anywhere in Myanmar with a begging bowl and I get food and I get support and that gives me independence from organizations. That makes me very happy. Before I felt like I had to go to the meditation centers because that was the only place where I got the support and I had to addapt and sometimes even not be authentic to myself in order to follow the organization wishes in the form of rules or regulations, and I was adapting to that because I wanted to be able to stay inside the organization, because I wanted to keep sitting my long courses so I would behave as I was expected to behave just to stay inside the organization and that was not healthy for me. 

I also did long time service (long volunteer period) and I realized after a while that sometimes I was not following my heart. I was more following the rules, but not following my heart. Sometimes I felt I could have looked more to the particular situation and not so much to the rules and then for myself decide what was the wisest thing to do. Then out of fear I dind’t follow my own intuition and after some time I realized it was not good. It’s much harder to surrender, to be open, to listen, to be in the present moment and trust in your wisdom at that point and be honest to yourself and decide what’s the best thing to do every moment."

Ingyinbin Journal: Pottery Making and Vipassana Practice

John, a meditator from New Zealand, spends extended periods in Ingyinbin each year, the home of the revered Webu Sayadaw and with his friend Ashin Mandala. This winter, he has decided to keep a journal, which he has kindly offered to share with us. His journal alternates between observation and poetry, between meditation practice and commentary about Burmese Buddhist society, from his learnings and his questions. The full collection of his musings can be found here.

1 February 

"Day trip to the pot-making factory Kyaukmyaung, near the Irrawaddy, west of Shwebo: 

Kyaukmyaung pottery: orange mounds of stone
crushed to fine dust, doused
& struck on the wheel: Vipassana.

Soon on to the Hanlin Museum commemorating the Pyu people’s civilisation, but before that the group is shown various artefacts and scrolls assembled in the upper monastery room occupied by the visiting Russian academic, researching nineteenth century Buddhist Sangha texts - co-incidentally the same person we met a couple of visits back in an ancient cave in the Sagayan hills where he was painstakingly taking photographs of images in the cave and appeared equally distracted. But Kyaukmyaung: a tiny aperture low at the rear of one of the five or six large brick kilns (each some 20 meters in length) allows us to view the fire capering over the pots, a wafting and deadly light. A worker feeds different grades of pre-cut firewood into another of the several kilns: one day to build the fire, having it burn for three, letting it cool a further three. The young woman who carries a few bricks at a time from a large pile of bricks wears cloth mittens, her clothes thick with dust. Children in the adjacent field containing piles of uncut logs carry and drop bits and pieces. In a bamboo chair, a worker, enjoying Uposata, watches a Burmese soap on the old tube television housed in a dusty box of wood. Women in yet another shed produce more than 50 small elegant clay pots each day: one shapes, taking only a few minutes per individual pot, while her companion spins the wheel in a regular motion by swinging her own leg to and fro with a push with each swing, reminding me of the boatmen on Inle Lake. The larger pots made elsewhere are transported using a 6 inch diameter length of bamboo pole, the pot suspended between two Burmen doing the carrying. Jamie can’t resist, and as carrier he does a fair job, just as he did swinging his leg and spinning the pottery wheel."

Ingyinbin Journal: "Vipassana Begins"

John, a meditator from New Zealand, spends extended periods in Ingyinbin each year, the home of the revered Webu Sayadaw and with his friend Ashin Mandala. This winter, he has decided to keep a journal, which he has kindly offered to share with us. His journal alternates between observation and poetry, between meditation practice and commentary about Burmese Buddhist society, from his learnings and his questions. The full collection of his musings can be found here.

27 January 

"Leaving the breakfast hall, in the overcast sky I see a spread V shape of birds, up to 80 ibises in dark shadow, moving to the east, above the pond and tamarind. Sharp at the leading edge, and splaying outward from there, a few individuals cross from one side of the V to the other, edging in there. As the group moves, the lines of the shape undulate, as if it better belonged to the sea. Extraordinary.

One evening, returning from our daily walk to the canal and back, we see in succession three or four such formations, each one containing up to sixty birds, dark in outline, outliers to the main group forming of between two to five birds, soon re-assimilated as the direction pointed is headed in. Children near us, stopping at their top-spinning game gaze upward, reciting something that expresses their own amazement. Similar sights pull our eyes and thoughts upward in the coming days and weeks.

I walk by myself to the hut. Vipassana begins. The mind moves to observe sensations in the body. Attention narrows. Language itself oversized:

                                    Thoughts too large to   

                                    pass through this mental sieve -

                                    inexact fragments!

Sitting is very quiet and soon I cannot remember a happier time being so still a couple of hours. Contented, centred, tranquil, not wanting anything to be otherwise.

                                    Initially confused - does it contain

                                    or is it contained? - or perhaps body’s simply the element

                                    of wind, blowing about.

Very quiet:

                                    An orange peeled

                                    sealing nothing -               

                                    this body!"