Rugged Interdependency - Amaravati Buddhist Monastery

Golden Highways Revisited: 1998(the nuns’ order that has been crafted at Amaravati Monastery in England, byAjahn Sumedho and the Sangha there) could be exactly according to the vision ofthe Buddha – who knows?Of course this is complete speculation, arguably heretical to boot – and secondguessingthe Buddha is probably fated to be always wide of the mark – however,it is worth taking a moment to consider what his reasoning might have been whenhe laid down these kind of strictures on the women’s order.He was well-aware of the need to keep his system of training adaptable toother times and cultures, and he established the mahā-padesa rules (the Four GreatStandards) to facilitate this. Furthermore, it’s conceivable that he realized that theplace of women in society was going to be so variable from place to place, andover the ages, and also such a tender and heated issue, that he placed such tightlimits on the Order so that it would naturally need to be regenerated virtually fromscratch in every locale it migrated to. Perhaps he trusted the wisdom of comingeras to craft the training of women according to their own time and culture; certainly,since the Theravāda lineage of nuns died out 1,000 years ago in Sri Lanka,that is exactly what is happening within our culture now. Elder nuns from theNorthern tradition, Theravādan women, ordained and lay, plus some monks sympatheticto the plight of women aspirants (e.g. HH the Dalai Lama) have all beenjoining forces to find ways to enable a valid and viable, full monastic training forwomen to be established in the Theravādan and Tibetan worlds.It’s certainly a painful and demanding process but it’s one that bears great hopewith it as well – by many people wisely and patiently working with the confusingarray of contingent elements, something great and noble is enabled to springforth.The afternoon turns cool and we go for a walk in the Arnold Arboretum, whereBuzz Senior spent much of his latter years as a docent and photographer of plants.Along with Buzz’s relationship with his mother having been brought to greaterbalance and ease in recent years – particularly in his devotedly taking her ”home”to India – his somewhat fraught connection with his father was now transformingitself via Buzz being entrusted with the 15,000 beautiful transparencies of the entireflora, in all seasons, of the Arboretum – his father’s greatest legacy.How sweet an irony that this is how the bond gets to be worked out andbrought to some completion too. To make sure that, somehow, the fruits of somany hours, months and years of loving labor do not just turn into forgotten pilesof mottled plastic. Lineages get passed on in strange ways, and sometimes it’s onlyby operating at a distance that we can cope with what is handed to us – or maybemore that it’s only when we chose to accept the bequest rather than have it thrustdown our throats, that its value can be revealed to us. Buzz confessed that, oncehis father had died, he realized he was actually quite interested in plants – evenglad to know their Latin names that his Dad had belabored him with when he wasyoung.We move on to Cambridge Insight Meditation Center for a get-together withLarry Rosenberg and Michael & Narayan Liebenson-Grady before the evening talk38