Rugged Interdependency - Amaravati Buddhist Monastery

ern shore of Lake Michigan, we might actually see the water stretching out to ourleft. No such luck...The drive was almost unrelentingly level freeway with the margins occupiedby 300–400 yards of field or forest the whole way. Only once or twice did we climba small rise and get a view for a few miles, but even then it merely revealed morescarcely modulated landscape of flat fields and forest. It is true that such land hasits own beauty – and if you were born there it would be God’s Own Country –however it was a surprise to see how very plain it all was. And no sign of the GreatLake either – oh well.As it transpired, perhaps the blandness of the landscape was an advantage –it certainly did not draw our attention away from the avid conversations going oninside the vehicle. Despite the fact that I had been talking nonstop for the last week,the others had not and indeed had a lot to say and (yes) many questions to ask...So the hours rolled by – gas stations came and went – bikers from the DetroitBad Boys and RVs, trucks and cars – all glid quietly by our windows. Cocooned inour rolling capsule, this little collective wound its way through the gathering dusk– to pull in at Richard’s house in Troy, nestled at the edges of the northern suburbsof Detroit, at 10:00 p.m. Sulipon and Maria took themselves home; we breathed outand retired for the night.June 15 thA long, deep sleep, filled with strange dreams (of austerity and hairy-leggedhumans) carried the night hours away. I had been weary after the retreat and thejourney here, and it seems as though the whole system needed to release andunwind.During the day Richard and I set to work on The Pilgrim Kāmanīta, pickingup art supplies and getting going on the map and the layout for the illustrations.This was a book project that I had been working on for some years already. It wasa Buddhist novel (written by the Danish Nobel laureate Karl Gjellerup in 1906)that another of the monks at Amaravati and I had been inspired to put into moremodern English. The idea had been to redo the text and publish it for free distributionthrough our monasteries, in the way that almost all our literature is done.The project had been hatched sometime in the mid-90s and, on hearing aboutit, Richard Smith had eagerly offered his services (and considerable funding) tohelp bring it into the flesh. The story is a romance set initially in the time of theBuddha, however – what with the hero Kāmanīta being gored to death before thebook is half-done, and the plot eventually spreading over several lifetimes (somelasting up to billions of years) and the hero and heroine meanwhile set on the pathto enlightenment – it is a very unusual and essentially mystical love story.Now that the raw editing of the manuscript had been completed it was timeto pull all of the physical elements of the book together. Richard was eminentlycapable of this – he had been instrumental in the publication of my earlier bookSilent Rain – and so we had pegged out some of these days at his house in Michiganto bring Kāmanīta to its next stage of development.92