Nidahas

Nida­has is the web­site of Bhikkhu Yogananda (Pāli: Yogā­nanda), a Bud­dhist monk liv­ing in a remote for­est monastery in Sri Lanka.

I received pab­ba­jjā (going forth) in March 2008 and upasam­padā (ordi­na­tion) in June 2009.

Why Monk?

I have tried to explain here. Also, see Ven. Ñāṇavīra Thera’s In & Out:

For this dis­cus­sion we shall need the fol­low­ing décor: a: a door marked IN, b: a door marked OUT, and c: the Estab­lish­ment. To arrive at araṇa we must go through four stages. In the first we are brought up as Eng­lish gen­tle­men (or mutatis mutan­dis for other times and places) in the Estab­lish­ment and by the Estab­lish­ment. We are taught quite clearly that it is right and proper, nay our duty, to go in by the door marked IN, and out by the door marked OUT. And, obe­di­ently, we do so. But it some­times hap­pens that, as we grow up, we ask the ques­tion, Why is it my duty to go in by the door marked IN, and out by the door marked OUT? Of course nobody can give us a con­vinc­ing answer, and the Estab­lish­ment fobs us off with threats and brow­beat­ings and attempts to get us mar­ried to some sen­si­ble girl… [Full arti­cle]

What Bud­dhism?

My main inter­est is in Early Bud­dhism, which in many ways is quite dif­fer­ent from what we encounter in con­tem­po­rary Bud­dhist prac­tice, regard­less of whether it’s Ther­avāda, Mahāyāna or Vajrayāna. The quest for the orig­i­nal teach­ings would never be con­clu­sive until we our­selves are awak­ened, but until we reach the goal, it is best to main­tain a crit­i­cal approach to what is passed around as Bud­dhava­cana.

Bhante Sujāto sums it up nicely:

In much of the Bud­dhist world, the num­bers of monks is falling dra­mat­i­cally, the Sangha feels less and less rel­e­vant, and inspir­ing lead­er­ship is hard to find. Attempts to reform Bud­dhism in tra­di­tional lands have failed, not because they don’t enforce the rules strictly enough, but because they do not address the actual prob­lem. Too often, monks sim­ply have no spir­i­tual voca­tion, but ordain out of cul­tural expec­ta­tions, and the idea of prac­tic­ing Dhamma is entirely irrel­e­vant. The scrip­tures are stud­ied, if at all, sim­ply as a set of leg­ends with no rela­tion to actual liv­ing. As long as such con­di­tions pre­vail, attempts at reform will con­tinue to fail.

There is, how­ever, a dif­fer­ent face to Bud­dhist monas­ti­cism, one which is not based on ful­fill­ment of a cul­tural ideal, but on a thirst to find the true Dhamma. This new monas­ti­cism lives in an uneasy rela­tion­ship with the tra­di­tional Sangha insti­tu­tions. It is not about giv­ing a mass of stu­dents a stan­dard­ized ground­ing in con­ven­tional Bud­dhism. It is about try­ing to re-discover the essence of Bud­dhist monas­tic life in a way that speaks to us.

-Bhikkhuni Vinaya Stud­ies, Chap­ter 1.33–34

Con­tact

You may write to me at bk.yogananda at gmail dot com.

Copy­right

All con­tent of this web­site by Bhikkhu Yogananda is licensed under a Cre­ative Com­mons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

As for the Dhamma, that belongs to the noble ones.

Colophon

Nida­has adj. (Sin­hala: නිදහස්): Free, as in freedom

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