On Lay Monasticism Bro. David Steindl-Rast O.S.B. and Ram Dass

I read Dr. Suzuki’s The training of the Zen Buddhist monk and I couldn’t believe it! Details, little details out of the Rule of Saint Benedict! They didn’t borrow it, it just happened to be the same thing.

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Out of spite we would go to monasteries. There was a certain suspicion attached if you went to a monastery. In groups you weren’t allowed to go there. But you weren’t allowed to do anything, so it really didn’t matter what you did. Furthermore this made going to the monasteries that much more exciting. In the course of this I came to know The Rule of Saint Benedict [a text of 73 chapters giving instructions for the formation, government, and administration of a monastery for the spiritual and daily life of its monks, completed by St. Benedict of Nursia, 540 A.D. -- ed.].

I was enormously impressed by the Rule, but I never saw it lived. The monasteries I saw were generally in the Benedictine tradition, but for someone who was looking at them objectively, they had very little in common with the Rule. So what really turned me on was not the monasteries and not the monks, although I liked them, but it was that book! I liked the book so much. I liked it like a music lover likes a score that has never been performed. The monasteries I saw were not like the book and probably they never were, but just to read the Rule as a possibility -- that really turned me on.

Then I studied psychology and years later ended up here in the United States. My family had come over here and I was the last one left over there. One of the first things I experienced here was talking with a friend about vocations. I told him that I liked the Rule of Saint Benedict and that if I had lived at the time of Saint Benedict I suppose I would have become a Benedictine. Then he told me that some Benedictines had just founded something in upstate New York, and it sounded like they were really going to follow the Rule of Saint Benedict. But he couldn’t remember the name. Still, just on the hearsay that they were really following the Rule, I asked where Elmira was and found out that they had a bus going there from New York and I took the bus.

I arrived at Elmira in the morning but it took me half a day to find the monastery. I arrived at noon after hitchhiking for some time in the wrong direction and being totally lost. Even the neighbors did not yet know where the monastery was because the monks had just come there. That afternoon I was promptly put to work planting squash with Father Placid. That gave me the opportunity to ask a few questions, because Father Placid is not one who observes the silence too strictly. I just had two basic questions: “Do you really want to follow the Rule of Saint Benedict here?” That was the first one. And: “Do you have lay brothers or do all have the same status as monks?” “Yes, we really want to follow the Rule of Saint Benedict. Yes, everyone shares the same status.” I asked one or two other questions, never met the abbot, he wasn’t there at the time, went home, wrote a letter, and went there. That is one decision I’ve never regretted.

Then my great sorrow, my great disappointment was that they did not really live the Rule of Saint Benedict! They lived something which I greatly admired. They lived in a loving community -- Mount Saviour is a loving community. What more do you want? But it wasn’t anything like the Rule of Saint Benedict, at least for me. It was only “in the Benedictine tradition.” This conflict went on in me for years and years. Finally every time I opened my mouth they knew I was going to say something about the Rule. This eventually led to a traumatic situation where I finally decided, “You do your thing, and I will try to do mine.” It wasn’t a matter of leaving the community or anything like that. I belong to that community. Whatever you want to make of the vow of stability, it is very stretchable. It was very generous of the community, they could have thrown me out. But we agreed that if it can’t be strictly the Rule of Saint Benedict, I can come up with something else that is “in the Benedictine tradition.”

At that time I had occasionally substituted for the abbot when he was asked to talk about monasticism. My name got around and I was invited to speak to some club at Fordham that was interested in monasticism, but they were also interested in Eastern spirituality. I became afraid that I would have to face some Buddhist monks there and I didn’t know if they were even monks. You call them monks but are we the monks or are they? So out of an intellectual honesty I had to raise the question and so decided to read something about Eastern spirituality. I read Dr. Suzuki’s The Training of the Zen Buddhist Monk and I couldn’t believe it! Details, little details out of the Rule of Saint Benedict! They didn’t borrow it, it just happened to be the same thing.

We shared a radical dedication to search for the Source of Meaning and to drink from that source.

Some of my friends found out about my discovery and said that if I really thought the two were so similar, I should meet this Buddhist monk who had just arrived in New York. This was Eido Roshi, Tai-san, at that time. So I wrote to him and we made an appointment to meet in front of the Metropolitan Museum. He later said that he suggested that we meet there because that was the only place in New York he was sure he could find. But at the time I thought we were meeting there so we could go in and talk about Buddhist art, if worse came to worse. Well we met at the museum and never went inside. We sat on a bench and it took one moment and we were totally on the same wavelength. We shared much more in that first hour that we were together than I would be able to share with, let’s say, an Irish pastor. I could share my deepest faith.

Very soon after that Swami Satchidananda came to New York. That was in ’66 I believe, and again it was the same thing. We had something in common that was central to both of us: we were monks. That was a tremendous discovery. Eido Roshi, Swamiji, and I got together now and then and that went on for quite a while. Then Thomas Merton said that this was something important, and asked us to put our meetings on a more permanent basis. That is how the Center for Spiritual Studies came about.

At this point my contact with Eastern monks led me to a deeper understanding of the monastic calling we have in common, and at the same time I began to appreciate the important role monks are called to play in the encounter between East and West.

The moment I came to know Buddhist and Hindu monks it became obvious to me that what we had in common was a methodical effort to deepen our awareness of that reality which gives meaning to life. We shared a radical dedication to search for the Source of Meaning and to drink from that source. This search and this drinking may be expressed and interpreted in a great variety of ways by the different religions. Yet, the experience as such lies deeper than all those interpretations. It lies at the basis of all religions and is their common root. Thus, I came to see monasticism as a basic human reality, and monastic vocation as a response more fundamental than one’s allegiance to this or that religious group or creed. A monk is not a super-Buddhist or a super-Christian, but a person drawn to the monastic venture who happens to find himself in a Buddhist or Christian environment. Of course, that environment shapes and interprets the monastic experience, giving it a specific form of fulfillment.

Obviously, the search for meaning in life is not the exclusive domain of monks. They devote themselves to that quest professionally, as it were, making it their primary occupation. But every human being longs for meaning as the only foundation of happiness. Monks, like artists and scientists, are merely spearheading our common human quest for meaning. But this is a venture in which East and West have always been united. When I came to realize that monks and lay people, East and West, are all engaged in one common spiritual venture, the question arose, how can the claims of Christ and of the Church be squared with these facts? Does not Jesus say: “I am the Way?” Paradoxically, this most exclusive-sounding claim is really a proclamation of the all-embracing unity of all the spiritual paths. Should a Christian who believes that Christ is the Way see him as merely one among countless other ways, the only one that is right among countless wrong ones? May we not rather rejoice that anyone who is spiritually on the way is on the Way, whether he has ever heard the name of Jesus or not? But what does it mean to be on the way? It means going forward. One who stops by the wayside and sits down is not really on the way. We must go. In doing so, we leave the way behind with every step: yet, this is how we stay on the way. It takes daring to live this paradox. The goal must be more important to us than the way. If we get so preoccupied with squibbles about the way that we forget to go forward, the way itself will get in our way, so to say. In this sense, even Jesus can get in our way, unless we let him lead us in the Spirit to the Father.

As Christians we are the ones who are going through Christ, through Jesus, the Christ. We have the Word that comes out of the silence to lead us. The Buddhists are not leaving the Word behind, for as long as they’re on the way, they’re on the way. And there is only one way. But they’re concerned with the silence out of which the Word comes, into which the Spirit leads. And the Hindus are concerned with the Spirit within which we understand the Word, in which we understand the silence, the Spirit that brings the silence and the Word together. When you give your heart to the Word and let the Word take you into that silence out of which it comes, then you understand. But it doesn’t stop there, because when you understand you express that again in another Word.

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