My First Monastery — An Introduction to Buddhism

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Welcome to the Eastwesticism podcast where our host Todd Perelmuter shares the lessons he's learned spending eight years living with gurus, monks, lamas, and shamans across 35 countries and five continents. Join in the journey as he brings the best scientifically proven methods for living your best life from the east in the West, straight to you. The path to peace, love, health and happiness starts here.

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Welcome, welcome. Welcome to path to peace with Todd Perelmuter. I'm your host Todd Perelmuter. And today, I'm going to tell you about the time I visited a Buddhist monastery in Dharamsala, India, which is the home of the Tibetan people in exile from Tibet, India has been very kind in letting the Tibetans have sanctuary in Dharamsala and McLeodGanj in northern India, very few, if any, I don't know of any countries that were willing to take all of the Tibetan Buddhists who were forced out of their homes during the Chinese takeover of Tibet. And India, very generously made a home for these people in the Himalayan Mountains. This is where the Dalai Lama lives.

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And they have many beautiful Buddhist monasteries. And I visited one and I decided to stay for a few months. And I just was blown away by the beauty of this place, and the mountains, beauty of the Buddhist art in their temple. And thankfully, they had a either Australian or British gentleman monk, who was able to teach me a lot about Buddhism. This was my really my introduction to Buddhism. I didn't know really anything about it. And this was my grad school of Buddhism. 

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At the monastery, there was mostly no talking, except for in meditations, there might be someone guiding the meditation or there would be debates of Buddhist ideas, all to help their knowledge and wisdom evolve, and become refined. So they would debate Buddhist ideas. There would be some guidance, in certain meditations, there would be these group meditations that would beled together. But outside of the temple, there was no talking.

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Every day, we meditated for about five or six hours, different kinds, some walking meditation, some silent meditation, some guided meditation.

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And there was also some Buddhist teachings every day, so I could learn about Buddhism and Tibetan Buddhism specifically. Many of the monks were the happiest people I had ever seen in my life.

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I really can't recall seeing people smiling to themselves. When they think nobody's looking. We all see someone and we smile and nod at them. But when nobody's looking, unless you're a crazy person, most people don't have a smile on their face.

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And I just saw these just genuine, natural smiles. You could tell they weren't thinking of funny thing that happened yesterday. They're just like, beaming with joy of living.

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I even tried walking around with a smile on my face. And I'm pretty sure I looked like a crazy person. Like I didn't have that genuine, natural joy that just couldn't help but make me smile. I was really forcing it. And I think other people noticed that too. And I probably looked like a crazy person. But I knew there was something something to this place.

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And the teachings of this place really spoke to me. There was pretty much no religion. In this place. There were no stories you have to believe.

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They didn't even talk about the Buddha very much unless they said the Buddha taught and then they would talk about what the Buddha taught. And it was all philosophy really, it was all psycho analysis essentially, we would talk about the nature of the mind, the nature of suffering, what causes suffering, why they're suffering, and the way out of suffering. And when we talk about suffering, we mean negative, unpleasant feelings, thoughts and emotions.

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We're talking about how the human mind constantly craves pleasant experiences, and has an aversion hatred and a resistance to unpleasant experiences. And it is this craving for pleasantry, and craving to not have unpleasant experiences.

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That causes all misery, the Australian fella told me, life typically fires the first arrow at us, but we fire the second one at ourselves in our resistance and our aversion to that experience, and the key is to turn that second arrow into an acupuncture needle of healing. And I'll never forget that sentence because it is so relevant to my experience, we might stub our toe on a chair or a table.

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And the pain isn't really that bad. But we're like, mad at the table. And we're mad at ourselves for not seeing the table. And that is the part of the suffering. The pain was minimal, but the suffering were screaming profanities, right? How can we turn that pain into healing into a teaching moment, that is always the goal, when you can limit that second arrow to instead of being few minutes, being mad to just a few seconds to no time, that is when suffering ceases. You weren't craving not to hit the table? It you hit it. And there's a moment of pain. That's okay. Pain is just a signal to the brain. Don't try to do that.

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Don't do that again. But we're so conditioned to seek pleasure, avoid pain, that it creates all of this unhappiness in our lives. If external circumstances aren't just right, we lose our mind. And the way out of this suffering is to understand this nature on a very deep level, and the way we understand anything, whether it's science, or anything else in our lives, understanding begins with observation, we study something, we look at it, and we look carefully. 

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And this is what meditation gives us that chance to do we turn our attention inward, and we look at our mind. And we notice the way it works. And as we shine the light of consciousness into every region of our mind, unconscious thinking and habitually generating negative emotions stops. You don't do something unconsciously if you're conscious about it, and why would we consciously create suffering? There were many incredible teachings at this monastery that are pillars of Buddhist thought and philosophy.

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And when you learn them, and you meditate on them, you're truly creating the ingredients for transformation. When you learn something in a classroom, you kind of understand it. But when you put it into practice, you really get it.

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This is why doctors don't read a book and then go perform surgery. They have to practice they have to learn from a teacher, they have to slowly practice on maybe a dead body first.

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And then they after enough practice, they're now experts, but you need both experience and wisdom. Some of these wisdoms that we learned were the nature of emptiness. And what they mean by that is not that nothing exists. But what they mean by that is nothing has an objective, independent meaning behind it. It is only humans in consciousness that puts meaning onto something And so one thing Buddhists might do is meditate on a chair.

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And they'll visualize a chair. And they'll look for where the essence of that chair is. If they remove one leg of the chair, is it still a chair? If they remove two legs are all the legs of a chair? Or the back? Or just the seat? At what point? Does it stop being a chair? Is there a finite moment? And the answer is, it never was a chair? That is just what we call this type of thing. And that at no point can it lose its cheerfulness. And this is also applied in many meditations to ourselves. Where is the eye within me?

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If I lose my hair, and you're holding my hair, is that my hair still? Does being on my body? mean, it's mine? And if it's mine, where is the me?

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If I lose my arm? Is that still my arm? Where does the possession of this arm belong to? Where is the me I'm referring to? Is it my brain?

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What if part of my brain is removed? Is it am I now less me? Is that even possible? Is there some of me somewhere else, the more you dig down, the more you realize there is no physical me. And that is a profound experience, to finally understand that.

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That who we really are has nothing to do with our physical body, which is constantly changing.

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There's not a single cell of me from my childhood self, yet we say I am that childhood self. It's this awareness, the awareness, the consciousness is the ultimate root of who we are. And it's not material.

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There's no physical area where consciousness comes from in the brain or the body. It is just this lifeforce energy, this non material mind which can perceive in which all our senses are perceived by it is a timeless, eternal, unchanging consciousness, like space, space can never be destroyed, space can never be burned or frozen. It just always is an all matter can exist within it.

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This is the nature of emptiness, the nature of our mind, constructing a story, projecting meaning, and that no object has any meaning, except from which we put on to it. And this opens us up to the potential to completely create the meaning we choose in our lives, to completely take hold and charge of how we experience the world. We can be angry, and bitter.

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Or we can be grateful and humble, and joyous and loving. No matter what external situations are happening. We are the writers of our own story.

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After another few months of living at this monastery, with these wonderful monks who took me in and allowed me to live with them and live as a monk, in this beautiful monastery.

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I felt it was time to move on. I really had a good handle on Buddhism. I really appreciated everything they taught me.

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And I told this monk, that I My plan was to travel the world and learn from every spirituality and religion I could. And he gave me his blessing in he's told me my father used to say that everyone knows something, but nobody knows everything.

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And I was just so grateful for his blessing. And so I left the monastery, and I continued my travels through India and Asia. And I'll tell you more about that in the next podcast about what I learned and how I

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I can help you as well. Thank you so much for listening path to peace with Todd Perelmuter. Follow us at @toddperel on social media and subscribe. Give us five stars, please. And check us out at YouTube. You can find us by searching eastwesticism I post a lot of meditation videos there of the kinds I learned at this monastery. Thank you so much again. Until next time, peace and love.

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