December 12, 2017 | UHCL Staff
Five Tibetan monks from the Gaden Shartse Norling Monastery in Mundgod, India made a weeklong stop in November at University of Houston-Clear Lake on their two-year tour of the U.S., sharing Buddhist philosophy through lectures, and demonstrating the construction of a sacred sand mandala to students, faculty and the community. Edwin Vega, who will complete his Communication Bachelor of Arts in spring 2018, said that his professor offered his class extra credit to attend the monks’ presentation on climate change. Within moments of the beginning of the lecture, Vega said, “I would have gone without the extra credit. It was that interesting.”
Vega said that he really didn’t know much about Buddhist monks and didn’t know what to expect from their visit, or from their lectures. “I didn’t know that climate change is something that monks speak so openly about,” he said. “I was very interested to hear them speak about how climate change directly affected their lives.”
Listening to their lecture, watching the monks focus on the painstaking process of creating the mandala, and briefly interacting with them in purchasing some bracelets, Vega said he’d gained some new insights on his own life. “I watched them making the mandala. It requires so much time and patience, and I am not a patient person,” Vega said. “Listening to their lecture made me reflect on my own life. The monks are like no one I’ve ever met before. I wondered why I am the way I am, and why do certain things bother me? These monks seem to be happier than I am.”
One point the monks made in their lecture about climate change that impacted Vega was a reference to living by six rules. “One of the rules they talked about was how useless it is to want material things,” he said. “They said, the more things you want, the less satisfied you’ll be, and that stuck with me because I believe that’s true. We don’t really think about all that we already have because we are too busy thinking about the next thing we think we need to get. It never ends.”
Vega said he was struck by the fact that the monks seemed completely connected to everyone around, but also strangely disconnected from so many things that bother him daily. “The things I worry about, like, will I hit traffic? They don’t seem bothered by anything,” he said. “Imagine how great life would be if you could just not worry or be bothered by materialistic things or the other problems that we face. I get frustrated when I can’t get Wi-Fi in this building.”
The monks’ level of academic sophistication was another revelation Vega experienced during their visit. “I envisioned monks living a very quiet life where they are by themselves praying or meditating most of the time,” he said. “I learned that these monks are highly educated and very knowledgeable. They challenge each other intellectually and they’re not as removed from the outside world as I thought. They spend a lot of time studying and learning about the world.”
Vega said that he’d gained some new perspectives on life. “I learned that I get frustrated about a lot of things that don’t matter,” he said. “We stress a lot about things that I call ‘first world problems.’ It’s about materialistic things, and wanting more of those things, and I learned that it’s just not that important and we should be happier with what we have.”
