Rugged Interdependency - Amaravati Buddhist Monastery

Part ISan Francisco – Tampa Bay – Sussex NJ – Massachusetts – New YorkMarch 25 th & 26 thBright and humid – they say the good weather came with us and that the winterhad been strangely damp and cold – Florida is in its customary apparel of T-shirtsand shorts, cumulus clouds and emerald lawns.After leaving my mother, sister and brother-in-law (who had come fromEngland to visit my new home in California for the first time) to the tender merciesof Highway 280 and air-traffic control at midday, a quiet afternoon passed atMarc Lieberman’s: reading and letter writing, suffering and not suffering. Suzanneappeared after 4:00 and Marc swung in breathless at 6:35. With a quick about-facewe loaded up his car and took off for the airport ourselves.Our lives are both so heavily scheduled these days that our friendship bearsits fruits in brief telephone conversations and these sporadic passing contacts.We catch up: he’s quitting his eye practice and setting up alone; The Jew in theLotus film was a roaring, front-page success in Boston; Michael, his son, got in toMichigan State University; Suzanne dropped the manufacturing project she hadand will help Marc set up instead; the Monastery goes well; the Sangha is healthy;the Change of Use application is proceeding… samsāra as usual, albeit with beneficentfaces at present.Brief, quiet flights and we touch down at dawn in Tampa Bay. Steve Ganci isthere to meet – red hot rod of his partner’s son to drive as the kid is in trouble withthe law and mother has had to adopt the vehicle. As we pull out from the terminal’sconcrete labyrinths the luminescent sapphire of a tropical dawn embraces us; a fingernailmoon, low in the sky with Venus more than close enough to start breathlessrumors, hangs framed by dark palms along the highway. Water on all sides – thesky and all that meets the eye impossibly blue – we are the breath of a vast jewel,cyan aquamarine, wavelet oscillations of azure.We talk and replenish our friendship as the other colors soak into the day: thestate of Theravāda/Vipassanā in the USA, the attitudes towards monasticism, thecurrents of change in Jack Kornfield and the growing interest in Pāli scriptures –after owning the vehicle for 25 years you finally take a look at the engine and studythe manual, even give a nod to the provenance of the beast.Up until now individualistic, authority-snubbing and antiheirarchicalAmerican perspectives have (understandably) permeated the Buddhist world here.This was no surprise to us since Ajahn Sumedho had often described how, when hemade his first visit back to the US in 1976, he encountered zero interest in havinghim around to teach: “Yes, nice to see you, thank you very much, now please justmove on – we’re going to do it all differently here.” Us monastics are, after all, apretty conservative lot. England and its old-world institutional forms turned out tobe a much more natural seedbed for this classical, orthodox style of practice, so it’s23