Journey to Mindfulness by Henepola Gunaratana

Author:Henepola Gunaratana
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780861718832
Publisher: Wisdom Publications

As soon as I arrived in Benares, I started looking for a place to live near the university. Luckily, I met a monk while touring the campus. He said I could stay in his room with him, even though we had just met. By coincidence he had the same second name as I: Gunaratana. He had something else I considered very precious: a Pali textbook. For days, we pored over that book together. I couldn’t believe my luck.

Then, two days before the entrance exams began, my friend abruptly announced he was going to stay somewhere else. Our brief stint as roommates was over, and I had nowhere to go. In desperation I visited the Benares office of the Mahabodhi Society. The monk there kindly found me a room in a Burmese temple close to the university. From the temple, it was only a short walk to the examination hall.

I was to take exams in several subjects: Hindi, Sanskrit, Pali, Indian history, and Hinduism. Luckily, I had had some exposure to Hinduism during my studies at the Vidyalankara monks’ school.

Each exam was held on a separate day. The day before the Pali exam, I found my friend Gunaratana and asked to borrow his Pali textbook for a couple of hours.

“Do you know the five precepts?” he asked. “The eight precepts? The ten precepts? That’s all you need, because that’s all they’re going to ask you. Anyway, I no longer have the Pali book.”

It was only a few hours before the exam and I desperately needed that textbook, so I went to Venerable Sadhatissa and asked his help. He gave me a Pali text, and as he handed it to me, he said, “Last week I gave a copy of this book to the other Gunaratana. You could have borrowed his for a few hours.”

I studied the Pali book all night. The next morning, as we entered the examination hall, a monitor told us to leave our cloth shoulder bags on a table in the hallway. As I started back out the door, Gunaratana thrust his bag in my hand and asked me to put it on the table with the others.

Of course, as soon as I got out in the hallway, I peeked in Gunaratana’s bag. As I expected, there was the Pali book he’d said he didn’t have. That wasn’t the first time or the last that I discovered a fellow monk breaking a precept. It always makes me sad, because monks are supposed to be role models for laypeople. Laypeople trust us. We administer the precepts to them, and if we ourselves aren’t following those precepts, we’re hypocrites.

When even one monk is caught lying, it damages people’s trust in the Sangha. People start to generalize that perhaps all monks are liars. So the honest monks have to work harder to earn trust and respect.

I feel sad whenever I see anyone lie, because I know what unwholesome kamma it engenders. I know firsthand. When I was a boy and I lied, I’d do anything to cover up those lies.

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