The Humbling of Arrogance

Posted on August 4, 2002 in Encounters Spirituality and Being

We went to the Asian Garden Mall in Little Saigon, Westminster, yesterday. I was fascinated and intimidated as always by the sacrifice of the Buddhist monk who stood outside the back door. He stood barefoot. Looked down. Said nothing. His eyes were shut, contemplating the nothing that falls short of the Real Nothing which is Nirvana. The first time we encountered him, I made a mistake. I didn’t lift the lid of the begging bowl. I just laid the cash out on the skin. A modest wind blew it off. It swirled around in front of the double glass doors. The monk made no attempt to pursue it. Nor did he thank me. I felt confused. Had I acted wrongly? Why didn’t he go after the money that I had given him?

“You’re not going to get a thank you,” my friend Tony Chen from Hong Kong explained. Though his begging bowl looks like half a bongo drum, he doesn’t sing or dance for your donations. I had not done wrong to give him money. I needed simply to make sure that the money went into the begging bowl, to make it clear that the money was certainly intended for him. He wasn’t allowed to ask me for it or to thank me for it. He couldn’t chase the loose change. For my part, I was to stay silent and not gloat over my donation. If my soul is better or worse for the offering, I could not tell you. One gives. One receives.

People who aren’t monks tend to see them as extremely unselfish and humble. A monk doesn’t share their opinion of him. He suspects that he is both selfish and arrogant. He must stand there barefooted, advertising his sorry state by the wearing of flaming robes, the color of ripe peach flesh. To reaffirm that he is not an extraordinary being capable of great deeds, he places himself in a position where he must depend on others. I don’t think the word “shame” gets at what this is all about. Nor does “self-sacrifice”. The monk conditions himself to have no feelings. When he stands with his begging bowl, he merely stands. We are not to pity him — he does not pity himself. We give to validate the purpose for which he lives, that of triumphing over our personal obsessions with the material. The monk will not own things because that joy is, to him, a sickness, a sickness unto death, the sickness of this world.

I took a few quick pictures and then rushed in to buy some soft egg rolls and a few t-shirts that were three for ten dollars. I worried that he’d be gone when I finished. I wanted to give him some money the right way. He was. I shyly took a few pictures and gave the Empress a dollar to put in his begging bowl. He gave no thanks. We walked away carrying the artifacts of our own addiction to materialism in a pink plastic bag.