Lunchtime at the Bago Monastery

Curiosity and Shame

I didn’t pay much attention when our guide said we were going to the Bago monastery to see the monks at lunchtime. I like monasteries, I like monks and nuns of any denomination, so it was fine by me. This monastery is a teaching monastery, she said, one of the biggest, often housing anywhere from 400 to 800 monks of all ages. In Myanmar, it is compulsory that a man enters the monastery twice in his life: once after the age of seven and once after the age of twenty. When exactly is a personal and family choice. They live at the monastery for three months at a time, learning the Buddhist scriptures and meditation. They then may choose to stay in the monastery for longer, to take a monk’s vows for life or to return to society.

A long, covered open-air corridor led into the sprawling monastery complex, offering respite from the hot sun. It was much cooler here than outside the monastery walls. 

The kitchen, a cavernous room, with huge open windows, located in the middle of the monastery complex. boasted enormous wood-burning stoves where cauldrons of rice and vegetables were being cooked for the four hundred-odd monks currently living there. Volunteers were stirring the huge pots with what could have sufficed as rowing paddles, adding salt and spices or cleaning little mountains of fiery chillies and green vegetables. Lunch, the second and last meal of the day for monks, is normally around 10:30 a.m. Today they were running well over half an hour late and I could imagine the monks, especially the younger ones, waiting for the lunch gong to sound, their bellies grumbling, having had their breakfast at 6 a.m. 

The cooking pots in the monastery kitchen

Opposite the kitchen, a large room was being set up for lunch. Two monks were placing tea, a small pot of rice and condiments on each of the small, low, round tables, where three to four monks would soon sit together, cross-legged to share their meal. Just outside the dining hall was another enormous vat with rice. 

A meagre meal of rice and vegetables

The rice pot

Water jars and Alms Bowls

As lunch was still being cooked, we took the time to wander around the monastery. A narrow, tiled pathway demarcated the yellow, dusty earth leading around the complex. Tall trees dotted here and there  offered shade. The dormitories—two-story buildings, with a room on each floor—were built around the kitchen and the dining hall.. Glimpses, from ajar doorways, revealed airy rooms, with wooden flooring and low, wooden cots. No other furniture or adornments. Each room housed two, three or four monks, depending on the occupancy numbers at the monastery. Freshly laundered burgundy robes billowed in the wind and all around monks wearing only a burgundy cloth around their waist  were bathing themselves and shaving their heads, splashing cooling water from the numerous open air cisterns in front of their quarters. We walked casually by and they looked at us—two tourists and their guide, curious yet trying to be as unobtrusive as possible. Some gazed at us with interest and some with indifference. The light was bright; there was a slight breeze giving respite from the strong sun whose hazy, almost-noon light gave the place a dreamy quality.

Thinking that the tour of the monastery was over, we returned to the dining hall area only to find a couple of busloads of tourists lining the procession way to the dining hall. Apparently we were to wait and see the monks file into the hall for lunch. Uneasiness began to creep up on me. Thai tourists set up shop preparing to offer packets of noodles, crisps and biscuits to the monks, whilst Singaporeans and Germans were politely jostling for vantage points for their cameras. The gong went off. This set the resident dogs howling in time to its thudding vibration. A red serpent of monks began to flow into the corridor. Measured, quiet with downcast eyes, the monks took the offerings from the Thais and opened their alms’ bowl for the rice being dished out of the big pot. A few of the tourists, looking like eager beavers, took plates full of rice from the monk scooping it out of the pot and offered it revertially to the passing monks. I just barely managed to suppress a judgement: Did they really think that showing up and passing a plate of rice from one monk to another would earn them merit on the wheel of karma? The monks filed into the dining hall and without hesitation each quickly found his spot. Soon their collective prayers rose to fill the space with rhythmic gratitude and blessing, slightly disconnected, like sound under water.

Again I thought we were about to leave when our guide ushered us inside the dining hall along with the other tourists. We stood along the side of the room observing these people eat. I was curious and yet ashamed. This was not a zoo. It was a place of worship, of peace and tranquillity and of retreat. What were we doing there?—gawking at these people bathing and eating and doing the normal things that people around the world do I watched as young monks laughed and surreptitiously had a small food fight; another seemed isolated and withdrawn; some ate fast, taking seconds from the rice bowl, soup and vegetables on the table, whilst yet others ate contemplatingly. We, the tourist-intruders, looked at them, took photos as some Asian tourist ladies, all prim and pious with prayer hands on their heart, were kneeling, posing with the monks in the background.

My shame rose inside me once more and we left the hall. I wondered what the monks thought of being gawked at. Does it bother them? Do they find it intrusive? Do they take it in their stride? Or is my shame and these questions just the sentimental sensibilities of a Western mind?