Storytime

[ornoth]

One of my Xmas gifts this year was the slim paperback “A Monastery Within: Tales from the Buddhist Path”. It’s a brand new book from Gil Fronsdal, the guiding teacher at Redwood City’s Insight Meditation Center and one of my absolute favorite dhamma teachers.

It contains about four dozen very short teaching stories, a traditional Buddhist instructional technique, all based around the interactions between the abbess at a monastery and the students who are her charges.

The longest stories are two to four pages; the shortest just a paragraph or two. The 90-page book could thus be a very quick read, but if you take the time to reflect on the stories, each has its own insights to impart. I’ll provide one example here.

Having long since left my wild thirties behind, I opted not to spend New Year’s Eve in a club seeing a band. Instead, I spent the evening in a five-hour meditation session at CIMC.

This year the New Year’s observation was led by Philippe Daniel and Bonnie Mioduchoski, two close dhamma friends. It was also their first time leading an event at CIMC, so I also wanted to observe, share, and support them in their progression from students to community leaders.

Part of the evening included a period for sharing readings or other observances, and I took the opportunity to read the following story from Gil’s book.

An old monk traveled from afar seeking advice from the Abbess.

He explained that all his life he had used stories to tell himself and others who he was. He lived in some stories for decades. When eventually a story proved hollow and meaningless he would find another belief, another religion, another role.

He told the Abbess, “Buddhism and being a monk has been my story for the last thirty years, but now I’ve let go of even that story. With no story I don’t know who I am. How can I live when I don’t have a story?”

Gently the Abbess said to him, “This is good. Now, turn to the people around you and listen to their stories.”

I thought that was a particularly good reading for the occasion, since it brought people’s attention to the act of listening to others, at a time when members of the audience began sharing their selected readings with the group.