Pacific Hermitage

Comings & Goings

The season brings with it new monastic visitors to the Hermitage. Ajahn Cunda arrived from Abhayagiri in late October, and will remain through June 2021. He will serve as the senior monk at the Hermitage for part of the time that Ajahn Sudanto is on sabbatical. Ajahn Cunda took Bhikkhu ordination in 2008, and in addition to Abhayagiri, has practiced at monasteries in Canada, Australia, England, and Italy.

Ajahn Kovilo just arrived at the Hermitage to stay through mid-January, and Ven. Nisabho, who arrived late November, will spend the winter here. (Learn a little more about all of them here.) The community is grateful to have the opportunity to draw near to the monks, and wishes a very big welcome to all!

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Ajahn Sudanto began his sabbatical on December 6th, and will spend December through February at Abhayagiri. He returns to the Hermitage in March for the balance of his sabbatical, which is open-ended but will be for a minimum of one year. With much gratitude, we wish Ajahn a deeply beneficial and fruitful retreat.

Changes with Meal Dana

It’s that time again to shift the meal dana coordinator responsibilities. Chevy, a long-time member of the community, is now managing that role – thank you Chevy! And much gratitude and appreciation to Suzy and Casey for their support while in that role.

With the arrival of winter and the continuing pandemic, the procedures for weekend meal dana visits are changing. The monks have given considerable thought to how weekend donors can comfortably and safely visit, and have developed new guidelines. They adhere to Washington’s Covid-19 safety protocols, and will be in effect December 18 – April 2. The below highlights a few changes, but if you are planning a meal offering, please review all procedures here. If you have any questions, please reach out to Chevy at dana@pacifichermitage.org.

• There will still be the opportunity to visit with the monks outside after the meal, however, only with one household, up to 5 people. Multiple households may still offer a meal, but they wouldn’t be able to visit with the monks afterward.
• The shrine room will be aired out and sterilized in advance so that those offering meal dana may eat there (the monks will eat elsewhere).
• As the winter retreat is an important time for seclusion and silent study and meditation for the monks, they will finish meal offering visits by 1:00 p.m.

It is the hope that these protocols will allow for safe visits that protect the well being of all. The monks are grateful for your support.

Connecting with the Sangha

“And hearing the dhamma frequently taught, these are the highest blessings” is what came to mind upon hearing the joyful news that the monks will soon begin sharing the dhamma on livestreams. During the winter, the monks at the Hermitage will be offering twice-weekly livestreamed conversations, “Hermitage Conversations.” These will fall on every Tuesday at 6:30 p.m. and every Friday at 7:00 a.m. These sessions will likely last 30 to 45 minutes, and will be in a similar format as Ajahn Sudanto’s coffee time with the YouTube comment section open during the session. The first of these will commence on Tuesday, December 15, and the link for the session is here.

Deep bows of gratitude for the monks’ generosity.

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Ajahn Reflects On: Gratitude

[Excerpted from Morning Coffee Time with Ajahn Sudanto, 9.21.20 ]

Favorable conditions are not secure, and not a true refuge for us. There’s a way of being happy and delighted that just keeps us stitched in to taking refuge in worldly conditions – happiness and pain, blessings coming and going, praise and blame, the worldly winds.

One of the ways to step out of that is to cultivate the heart of gratitude for what one has.  We don’t want to not appreciate pleasure and the goodness that exists in our life, the blessings that exist in our life.  But we do want to learn how to appropriately receive pleasure and the blessings of life without exercising the habit of making that the focus and the refuge. Without practicing our sense of well-being being dependent upon conditions which are always ephemeral, always imbued with the characteristic of unsatisfactoriness, and ever beyond our control – not self, not me, not mine…

Gratitude helps support the habit of joy, and joy goes a long way to helping feed and nurture the heart that rests in awareness in the present moment. And the movement towards tranquility, lucidity, serenity, and clear seeing. There are many ways to walk that path, but gratitude is a wonderful launching off point to move down that path towards tranquility lucidity and serenity.

The Woodchuckers’ Ball

The ‘Woodchuckers’ Ball’ was a joyous and successful gathering the last weekend of September. This annual tradition is to ensure availability of wood to fuel the Hermitage wood stove for the winter. Over the two days, more than 24 (socially-distanced) members of the community moved and stacked enough wood for at least the next three years! Anumodana!

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Grateful for…

After more than a week of off-the-chart hazardous air quality at the Hermitage due to wildfire smoke, the air quality returned to a healthy range. Ajahn is grateful for the concern of community members reaching out to make sure the monks were safe and well.

During morning coffee time, Ajahn encouraged us to see how long we could remember to be grateful for fresh air.

Comings & Goings

On October 3rd, Ajahn Karunadhammo and Tan Rakkhito returned to Abhayagiri after spending the summer at the Hermitage. Ajahn Cunda arrives from Abhayagiri on October 23rd, and will remain through June 2021. He will serve as the senior monk at the Hermitage for part of the time that Ajahn Sudanto is on sabbatical.

As previously noted, Ajahn Sudanto will be on sabbatical beginning in early December. He will spend December through March at Abhayagiri, and then return to the Hermitage for the balance of his sabbatical (of undetermined length, but least one year).

Venerable Nisabho arrives at the Hermitage on November 29th for the winter.

Progress on Ajahn’s New Kuti

There has been great progress on moving forward with the new kuti. Ajahn has selected a contractor, and will be submitting the building permit application. Construction is expected to begin in the spring, and be complete by summer. Mudita!

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Ajahn Reflects On: Bearing With

[Excerpted from Morning Coffee Time with Ajahn Sudanto, 9.17.20]

The Buddha gives a lot of emphasis to the value of patient endurance, and as Ajahn Amaro pointed out very adeptly one time, “bitter endurance is not patient endurance.” The perfection of being patient and enduring something is to bear with that which is unwished for, unwanted, painful, or unpleasant – absent any tanha or unskillfulness.

So, what might replace tanha and a desire for some different experience – and all the thoughts and emotions that come with that – could be something like equanimity. Or even just some sort of radical acceptance of the way it is. We do have the capacity just to bear with. If we have the skillfulness to pare things back to really attending fully to the present moment, it’s amazing what human beings can bear with. All kinds of unpleasantness, pain, difficulty is something that we can we can hold in consciousness if we recollect this teaching of the second arrow, and are very heedful not to create extra suffering.

And the engine of creating extra suffering is this rejection of the conditions that we’re presented with. It functions somewhat on how we’ve been living and practicing. If we don’t have a habit of dwelling with a heart full of acceptance, absent of greed, hatred, and delusion – like the delusion that it should be otherwise, or that we deserve some other experience, or the delusion that it doesn’t belong – it would be very easy to have an experience that this [e.g. smoke] doesn’t belong. These things definitely belong, this is part of what it means to live in the human realm.

But even more importantly about that, really, is coming back to this question again: is this worth suffering over? Are you going to allow yourself to suffer over something which is painful, unwished for, uncomfortable? Or are you going to rise to the challenge to bear with? And to keep the mind in an equanimous state, and a patient state, grounded in the present, heedful, not to be emoting and spinning stories and a commentary that would feed the tendency to drift toward some form of desire (tanha) for things to be otherwise.

And as one gathers the mind into awareness of the body, and the breath, and the present moment, and pares things back to the way it is, and learns to abide in that, not only do you find a refuge from generating and feeding the extra added suffering of responding to what your experience is presenting you with, you find that we’re quite resourceful in being able to bear with whatever life presents us with. And over time that creates a lessening of anxiety, and a kind of fearlessness that whatever life throws at us, we can probably take it. And we can probably receive it in a way that doesn’t generate any excess dukkha or doesn’t stimulate us to create harm to oneself and to others.

This summer has brought the return of (socially-distanced, scheduled) meal offerings, allowing members of the community to share time and talk of dhamma with the monks. It is the intention of the Hermitage to remain as open and welcoming as possible, and to make room for more friends of the Hermitage to visit within the Covid-19 restrictions. Hence:

• In addition to Saturdays and Sundays, some Thursdays may now be available for meal offering visits, all continuing with current protocols, including schedule through the dana coordinators.
• If you want to visit and see a name already on the meal calendar for a specific day of interest, please contact dana@pacifichermitage.org. Some of these scheduled visits may have less than the maximum 5 people allowed under state guidance.  So it could be possible for you to visit that day, the meal dana coordinators will let you know.

Our Connected Sangha

Our connected sangha continues to thrive, with dhamma friends from near and far joining Morning Coffee Time and Puja to grow in the dhamma.  In fact, for 114 consecutive days, Ajahn Sudanto generously shared the teachings, offered reflections, included us in puja, and answered our questions every day – guiding us all to skillfully incline our minds, and grow faith and confidence in the dhamma.

And so when Ajahn announced that he would temporarily pause most YouTube livestream events for August except Monday Morning Coffee Time, we wished him beneficial rest, and gratefully said sadhu, sadhu, sadhu.

Morning Coffee Time will resume daily at 8:00 a.m. on weekdays the first week of September.

“There are these two acts of generosity. What two? Generosity with material things and generosity with the teaching. These are the two acts of generosity. The better of these two acts of generosity is generosity with the teaching.”

AN 2.143

This Fall Brings A Sabbatical

In December, Ajahn Sudanto will be embarking on a sabbatical.  The exact length of time is as yet undetermined, but expected to be at least one year.  For some part of that time, Ajahn Cunda from Abhayagiri will be visiting the Hermitage. More details will follow in later updates.  We wish Ajahn Sudanto a deeply beneficial and fruitful retreat.

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Ajahn Reflects On: Incrementalism

[Excerpted from Morning Coffee Time with Ajahn Sudanto, 8.7.20]

I’m a strong believer in incrementalism for many reasons. One, it honors this truth of conditionality which the Buddha points to, which is a far superior way to relate to your world and your experience and your being. Far superior to personality view, I would say. So rather than you being a good person or bad person, you exercise goodness, you refrain from unskillfulness, you resolve the pull to act in unskilled ways. You build the conditions for those things to exist, it’s not necessarily who you are, it’s how you respond, and the energy you put forth and the investments you make into developing goodness and practicing skillfulness in your life.

I think also part of the value in incrementalism is we can oftentimes be paralyzed by big challenges. They can paralyze us, they can provoke doubt, and the truth of it is, you don’t really know what you’re capable of if you could put sustained and relatively constant forward momentum into developing certain conditions. A fair amount of the limitations that you imagine that you’re living underneath are just unexamined aspects of self and personality.

And I think there can be a tendency sometimes to be stuck in wishing and wanting and a kind of longing for a once-and-for-all fix. Sometimes I think of this as kind of a lottery mentality. We’re waiting for that one word, that one book, that new technique, that blazing insight. That transcendental experience in our meditation and our contemplations – the silver bullet. I think there’s a tendency in us to want to a once-and-for-all fix, maybe because we don’t have sufficient faith in ourself and the efficacy of just putting forth effort and building good conditions. Maybe because we’re a little impatient. Maybe because we’re a little lazy to commit to doing the work. There might be many reasons. So that silver bullet lottery mentality, that kind of longing for somehow life just to magically just transform – through some hack, through some tweak, through discovering treasure buried in the words of another book – I think I think we need to be sensitive to that, if not abandon that altogether.

…See if you can develop the strength of character and the humility to be willing to do the work. Sort out for yourself how it is that suffering arises and suffering ceases and in your mind in your heart in your life with the conditions that you are living with in some non-abstract way. And of course, in the here and now. It’s really a bit of a stretch to think about ending suffering forevermore, all you’re really charged with is dealing with the present moment. And that bite-sized task is both more manageable, and in some beautiful way, more humble than our grandiose dreams of being happy forevermore.

Think of wisdom as a dynamic, not as a trophy or attainment, but as a dynamic skill to know and respond to the challenge of being, the challenge of consciousness, the challenge of life.

Ajahn Sudanto