What Can California Tendai Buddhist Monastery Offer You?
The various categories you see across the top of an online newspaper might read: NEWS – SPORTS – ENTERTAINMENT – BUSINESS – TECHNOLOGY – RESTAURANTS – TRAVEL. Not a single one of these can a monastery offer you. The offer is for realization, liberation, enlightenment, happiness, freedom, and service to the world. The monastery is a place where you can seclude yourself, concentrate your mind, learn to pray, learn how to pray for species going extinct, for the people in poverty and sickness, for people in fear of attack from bombs in the sky, from guns and knives on the street, from drunken and violent people in their own homes, to pray for an end to the greed for money and possessions, greed which is destroying the natural world. The monastery can’t offer you the ability to make more money, to meet the perfect partner, to find leisure and enjoyment, to restore lost youth or lost health. It can’t even offer you a utopian community. The community already exists—the community of all of us—
