..续本文上一页ated as not sleeping on high and luxurious beds, but can be regarded more as not seeking escape through sleeping all the time. There”s that side of us that, whenever life becomes difficult, wants to sleep all the time, eradicate ourselves through sleeping 14 hours a day – and, of course, that”s possible if you have high, luxurious beds. But in the monastic life, we train ourselves to sleep on harder surfaces, which are not the kind of places where you can spend hours lost in sleep. So you begin to develop your meditation and learn to limit the sleep to just what is necessary for the body, and you know how much is an indulgence or an escape. Know yourself how to live with your body and mind in a way that is skilful.

　　These precepts are guidelines; they are not to be burden-some rules by which you feel guilt-ridden if you don”t live up to the highest standard. This is a way of training – you”re not expected to be perfect all at once - a way of guiding yourself towards recognising the conditions of your mind, towards recognising resistance, laziness, indulgence and the resentment of being restricted. You should want to see these things, so that you can release yourself from the burden of repression and the burden of indulgence - and find the Middle Way.

　　This is a training period for one year, so I expect you to remain at least one year under the discipline, and then decide whether you want to stay or not. This life is only valuable as long as you see its value. It”s not a life of compulsion: it has to be voluntary, and the energy for it has to come from your mind. You can”t expect somebody else to enlighten you. This is a very mature way of living in which you”re developing from your heart, developing the effort from your own mind, rather than just being conditioned into being Buddhists or monks. It”s useless if you”re just trying to rearrange your ways of life and thinking just to become something else. That”s not liberation, is it

　　As an anagarika now, you no longer have a lot of choices and decisions to make about what to do. Life here is much more one-pointed, so you have more time to watch. We live here under these principles so that we trust each other. We”re not here to compete with each other, to see who”s going to become ”anagarika of the year” - that would be working from the wrong attitude. Instead, we learn to respect each other and have compassion for each other as human beings, so that we”re not being harsh or narrow-minded in regards to inpidual problems, abilities, or lack of abilities. We can”t all be the same, but we can respect the differences.

　　So, even though we live in a community of many people, we allow the space of the mind, we forgive each other for the things we do wrong. Inevitably, living in a community with other beings means that there are going to be misunderstandings and conflict, but we work with that and with ourselves, rather than try to make the community fit what we would like it to be.

　　This lesson is very important for a human being - to learn how to forgive - as many of the problems in the world arise because of a lack of forgiveness. Hundreds of years go by, and people are still talking about what somebody did to their relatives two hundred years ago! But as religious mendicants, we don”t have to spend our time complaining, criticising members of the community; rather, we learn how to let go of our particular views about them and give them the space to develop. Each of us has to develop from the position of what we are ... recognising and realising, rather than becoming anything.

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　　Notes

　　1. “Homage to the Blessed, Noble and Perfectly Enlightened One”, i.e. to the Buddha.

　　2. The Pali chanting for taking refuge…

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