Obviously, none of the Buddhists were Christian, but most of them had grown up in that tradition, and were not the sort of people to turn down a chance to party. After an unending vegetarian feast, I wobbled off to my room to sleep it off, very pleased to be fed, warm, and heading to bed. I was there on a working holiday – an arrangement common in the New Kadampa Tradition of Buddhism in the West – wherein the visitor cleans the toilets in exchange for a shot at Enlightenment. In Britain, the NKT Buddhists have a habit of buying up extraordinary mansions belonging to families who have fallen on hard times, fixing them up and moving in. The Losang Dragpa centre in West Yorkshire is inside a real castle (there was a monk on a five-month total retreat in the tower when I was there) and the Manjushri centre near England’s Lake District is a fantastic mix of gothic church and medieval palace, with stunning grounds extending down to the beach. During my sojourn there, I learned the rudiments of how to build a stone wall – the astonishing kind you see all over Britain, built the old-fashioned way, without concrete, just by balancing the right stone in the right hole, over and over again. Normally, the work is a bit of gardening, or some cleaning, but the monks and nuns of Madhyamaka took one look at me and sent me into the gompa. The Buddha at the head of the prayer room was a giant fellow, sitting in great golden tranquility. With a light coating of dust. It seems, for reasons that became clear later, that none of the monks or nuns were svelte enough to slide into the little access door to the cabinet that housed him, so he hadn’t been cleaned since he was installed. They armed me with a pink duster and the promise of good karma. I wasn’t sure of the protocol for Buddha cleaning, but tried to be as respectful as I could, and not to step on anything. When I was done, he shone brilliantly. The monks and nuns at the NKT centres are usually young, friendly and very open-minded. On a working holiday, guests are welcome to join in as much or as little of monastic life as they want.
Some chose to go full on for the meditation classes and evening prayer, while others are just there to get away from the stresses of life. Some stay a week, others a month or more. One of the most endearing features of life in an NKT centre is the prayer offerings. Every morning, the monks and nuns (and the odd visitor) enter into the gompa to make offerings to the Buddha and to their own guru. The offerings consist of the finest chocolate, often some rice, a bowl of water, a nice cup of tea and various other treats. They lay these out before the Buddha and then retreat. At the end of the day, if he hasn’t eaten them all, they gather them up and share them out. Many was the night I would be sitting by the fire, discussing dharma and trying to get my head around nothingness, when I’d suddenly get hit in the chest with flying chocolate. It didn’t help with the Enlightenment, but it certainly brightened my day. On the web: First published in the Hailifax Daily News June 16, 2007.
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Madhyamaka Centre
Undoubtedly one of the strangest things I’ve even done is dust a Buddha. It was Christmas Eve when I arrived at the Madhyamaka Buddhist Centre, adrift in Europe and looking for a place to spend the holidays. On a black, rainy evening with a nasty wind blowing over the Yorkshire moors, I knocked on the big wooden door of the stately Georgian mansion, miles away from the nearest village. A cheerful monk answered the door, and I was ushered into a splendid Christmas feast.