A Short Stay at Wat Luang Por Sot

A Short Stay at Wat Luang Por Sot � Wandering Dhamma

July 3, 2010 by wanderingdhamma


Wat Luang Por Sot’s Buddhist Meditation Institute (BMI) is a unique meditation center for a number of reasons. The two most obvious are the ways of teaching meditation in a guided format 3-4 hours per day and that most of the foreign meditators here have come not just to meditate but to volunteer their English-teaching skills to the many monks at Wat Luang Por Sot.


Phra Khru Baitika (Dr. Barton Yanathiro or Phra Bart) is the international outreach coordinator for this temple. The focus of the temple is mainly on Thai laity and monastics but he is in charge of the foreign programs. Currently there are two types of international visitors coming to Wat Luang Por Sot: the meditators and the teachers. The teachers have a chance to meditate as well but not as often as they have classes in the morning and evening to teach and prepare for.
Phra Bart’s first student was a man from Holland who was part of a volunteer travel website. Eventually, after contact with this student, Phra Bart came up with the idea that foreigners could come to teach the monks as volunteer service, and this became called a Buddhist Immersion program on some of the volunteer travel sites, advertising that they would provide an experience for those looking to teach as well as experience Buddhism. Through these interactions the English-teaching program at the school on Wat Luang Por Sot’s grounds is thriving and Phra Bart hopes to make it larger in the future.

 

But Phra Bart also focuses on the meditators. They do not come as part of a group, they do not get the tour of Bangkok when they arrive and brief tutorials on Thai culture, Buddhism, language, and history, as the teachers do. They arrive on their own at the wat ready to meditate. For the meditation program, one can attend up to four one-hour long guided meditation sessions per day. Phra Bart first guides the meditators in a relaxation exercise repeatedly telling them in soft tones to ‘relax’ and ‘let go.’ Phra Bart finds that it takes about a week of this before the meditators can get a sense of calm and be able to move on with the meditation. Wat Luang Por Sot advertises their meditation technique as samatha-vipassana based on the Four Foundations of Mindfulness. More specifically they teach the method created by Luang Por Sot (after which the temple is named) or Luangpu Wat Paknam (see previous post about The Middle Way retreat). In this meditation one is guided to see a sphere of light in the center of one’s body. Advanced meditators who progress beyond the initial calmness and ability to see the sphere, can have their own personal higher-level guided meditation. Phra Bart likes to have about 3 meditators so he can guide each one individually, and there have been upwards of 10 meditators but then Phra Bart feels he loses some of the ability to guide each person. However, Phra Bart is hoping to obtain bigger numbers for the BMI and the teacher programs.


Because of the individual guided meditations, Phra Bart is able to boast of a high success rate of progress in the meditation, of which he has kept careful statistics (he has a PhD in Social Psychology from Cornell). He attributes this to the small numbers and his ability to guide individually. His teaching style is to see where each person stands in their meditation and guide them accordingly.
Phra Bart’s approach to teaching meditation is to teach it as a science. He finds this is the best way to communicate it to foreigners as most of them are non-Buddhists. He will teach about Buddhism for those who want to know and recommends going to the evening chanting if one wants a cultural/tourist experience. Phra Bart believes that Buddhism is a science, but one that has far more knowledge than the science we know today. His teaching philosophy is that Westerners have given up on Christianity and in turn have given up on religion. But he believes Westerners today do have a religion, they just do not recognize it as such and this is the religion of science.

 

Through the five years of the BMI’s existence, Phra Bart has had to make some changes in


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introducing foreigners to life at the wat. He used to tell them the rules and regulations for staying there the morning after they arrived. This was until some of the participants broke the rules of the wat prior to learning them. Now Phra Bart, working with the volunteer travel websites, sends a packet with letters explaining the dos and don’ts at a Thai wat, how to respect a monk, comments from past participants, and some basic information on Buddhism. Phra Bart also used to have a ceremony giving the 8 precepts to each participant. This was until some of the teachers told him they were not Buddhist and did not want to participate in keeping these rules. Now foreign visitors are offered the choice of taking the 5 or 8 precepts.
Thus there is much flexibility at Wat Luang Por Sot’s BMI. One can come to teach or meditate, or do both, and one can keep the 5 or 8 precepts. One can receive few or many guided meditations per day. Phra Bart is serious about progress in meditation as his statistical record-keeping shows, but his sense of humor also keeps the program light for the participants. After many of his guided meditations Phra Bart tells the participants to “go have fun.”

 

Thanks for the message
I just learned how to meditate in dhamma kaya way
Now i know how to control my circuit of my inner self energy.
I nearly gone mad
Dhamma kaya of luang por sot taught me well
Now i become healthy and peaceful