Kopan Monastery

This will be the view I remember from Kopan.  It’s another monastery, which we could see from the dining hall at Kopan.  Since we had most of our meals and breaks in silence, I spent a lot of time sipping tea and staring out at this beautiful building with the mountain views behind it.

We stayed at Kopan Monastery for ten days to attend a Tibetan Buddhism and Mediation Course.  Living at a monastery was a completely new experience for the both of us, and a pretty fascinating one.  Though we stayed in separate buildings from the monks and nuns, we could still hear them chant at all hours of the day, watch them debate one another in the courtyard, and see the young monks playing at the school just down the hill.

The grounds of the monastery are beautiful, with two beautiful stupas and some lovely gardens, two huge gompas (meditation halls), and many buildings for the 360 or so monks that live there.  The views from the hill are quite stunning (especially on the days when the sky is clear, which wasn’t many.)
For the first eight days our daily schedule looked like this:

• 5:45am     Wake up
• 6:00am     Tea
• 6:30am     Meditation
• 7:30am     Breakfast
• 8:00am     Break (I usually did yoga during this break)
• 9:00am     Teachings
• 11:30am    Lunch
• 12:00pm   Break (I think most people napped during this break)
• 2:00pm     Discussion Group
• 3:00pm     Teachings
• 5:00pm     Tea
• 6:00pm     Meditation
• 6:45pm     Dinner
• 7:45pm     Meditation
• 9:00pm    End of day

The days felt long – it’s amazing how exhausting it can be to sit all day long for meditation and teachings.  We kept silence from 9pm until after lunch each day.  The last two days were a “retreat”, meaning we kept full silence and swapped in more meditation for the teachings and discussion groups.

While I believe the course was well run, I was a bit disappointed in the content.  I had hoped for a bit more meditation and a little less….well, religion.  Everything I’ve read about Buddhism in the past has seemed very practical and logical, and on the first day of teachings the nun running our course explained that Buddhism was more like psychology than religion.  I have to disagree with her statement, however, as over the next several days we were taught most of the Buddhist beliefs and many of them seemed less logical and more religious than I expected.

I wasn’t alone in this expectation, either – many of the other attendees had anticipated a more meditation based course as well.  We spent many hours meditating, it’s true.  However, most of the meditation practices were exercises in thinking about Buddhist concepts rather than clearing the mind and attempting single pointed concentration, which was more what I was looking for.

Regardless, I still got a lot out of our ten days here.  I have a much more thorough understanding of Tibetan Buddhism (and I know now for certain that I do not want to be a Buddhist practitioner, not that I ever really thought I would be.)  In the future, I will undoubtedly draw upon some of the more practical and helpful Buddhist principles and ideas, and perhaps some of the meditation techniques.  We also met some really top notch people at the retreat.  Apparently only high caliber interesting individuals sign up for this type of experience, because everyone was a tier above most travelers we meet on the road.  I learned much about the world just from dinner conversations with this diverse group.

Unfortunately, at the end of the retreat I succumbed to the cold I’d been fighting for days.  We’ve headed back to Kathmandu for a few days to recover and eat some delicious Nepali food (monastery food is quite bland and basic, as you can imagine.)  Hopefully I’ll be feeling good again soon and we can head out to explore this amazing country a little further.