One Month at a Monastery

Northfield, Minn.—Before arriving at Carleton College as a first-year student this fall, Taylor Oatis spent four weeks reading and meditating at a Buddhist monastery in Vermont.

Then, after a month of silent contemplation and walking through the New England woods, he spent the rest of his summer working with jackhammers and breaking concrete.

Taylor Oatis went from living like a monk, reveling in the practice of walking meditations and chewing each bite 30 times before swallowing, to a full-time construction worker.

Oatis, who chose this course to make money for school, still marvels over the juxtaposition. “At the monastery, it was about being present in the moment and at the construction site it was about looking at the end goal of getting the job done. I was a commodity and the only benefit of being there was getting money, which is a very external goal. It was hectic. In Buddhism, it’s about internal goals. At the end of the summer, after having worked construction, I was definitely entertaining the idea of having a regular 9 to 5 job behind a desk after college,” he said.

While many people take advantage of meditation retreats and weekends of planned solitude at monasteries around the world, Oatis happened to pick a monastery run by the most famous Buddhist monk after the Dalai Lama: Vietnamese teacher Thich Nath Hanh. Hanh, who was nominated by Martin Luther King, Jr. for the Nobel Peace Prize and has the bragging right of being a top-selling author in Toledo, Ohio, has written a number of books on Buddhism and is well-known in both Buddhist and secular circles. While Hanh spends the majority of the year at his French flagship monastery, Plum Village, Oatis got the rare opportunity to be in the presence of Hanh for a few days when the teacher visited Maple Forest monastery where Oatis was researching Buddhism for a final high school project.

Prior to appearing at Maple Forest in person, Hanh would phone in a weekly sermon to the monastery. Oatis initially felt a jarring contrast between the rural atmosphere at the monastery and the technological world that the speaker phone sermons represented. “We’d go to this meditation hall and sit on these mats and then there would be this high tech speaker phone and we would listen to Hanh talking to the monks. It was strange, but really cool,” he said.

While this description seems reminiscent of a commercial where a giant room of saffron-robed monks is entranced by a large-screen TV showing a soccer game a half-world away, Oatis’s experience was far more pedestrian. “The monastery was some converted farmhouses and the property was owned by a rich businessman who donated it to Thich Nath Hanh.” The community of Maple Forest was also very small, consisting of Oatis, a friend of his from high school and around five monks.

So, when Thich Nath Hanh came to visit after a speaking engagement in Boston, the monastery shut down and all visitors were asked to leave, except for Oatis and his friend. On the monastery grounds, Oatis did not often see the famous teacher. “When I saw him, he didn’t say much, but he seemed to be the epitome of everything I was practicing.” As an example, Oatis mentioned a discussion where Hanh and the monks were discussing violence. “Someone started talking about Columbine and, at first, he didn’t know what had happened there. Then we explained it to him and his mood shifted from happiness to a sort of intense despair.”

Oatis spent much of his time at Maple Forest reading Buddhist texts and engaging in routine meditations. After a month of “eating not to eat” and observing the monks, he headed home and started working construction where he “felt lost a lot,” due to the sudden requirement that he speed along through his days.

While construction work may have not been the best follow-up to a religious retreat, Oatis still felt the impact of that month on his daily life. “Everything I learned at the monastery was very practical. You can meditate when you’re driving, when you’re eating, when the phone rings. This is just the way I live now. The whole idea of how I affect others and how the world affects me is something that I tied to every aspect of my life. It was all just a matter of reading it and putting it into words.”