Pure Inspiration

Chittapala – 100
mode. When I had opportunity to visit his kuṭi (monastic hut) to
deliver some requisites, I remember the path to the kuṭi had been
swept very methodically, as was the entire enclosure. Everything
about Bhante was meticulous - his robes, his requisites and his
dwelling place. He conveyed an air of minimalism, a result of decades
of mindfulness practice. An example of this was told to me by another
senior western monk: when Bhante was on cārikā he was known never
to have left any belongings behind at the places he stayed.
Where I met Bhante most often was at Vajirārāma in Colombo. This
seemed to be his base in the eighties. At Vajirārāma, he stored a few
requisites and some handwritten dhamma notes. Also at Vajirārāma,
he had a mentor in Ven. Kheminda, a very learned senior Sri Lankan
monk. I regularly saw them engrossed in dhamma conversation on the
wide veranda outside Ven. Kheminda’s room. I’d heard that in earlier
years, when more able bodied, Bhante would travel the length and
breadth of Sri Lanka on his walking tours. Later on, the duration and
distance of his walking tours was increasingly less, and so he more
frequently passed through Colombo.
Constant cārikā can be hard on the body and I wondered if decades of
subsisting on alms food in very poor regions of Sri Lanka had been
one of the conditions for Bhante’s deteriorating health in his later
years. If so, I don’t think it would be an issue for Bhante who
cultivated a mind strong enough to overcome all obstacles.
Bhante advocated aloofness and that was his general persona. Once, I
met him at Vavulagala Arañña, Imaduwa, and when we were washing
our alms bowls after lunch, his parting words were ‘keep aloof’. It took
many years for me to fully appreciate the depth of this instruction. On