Blessed Simplicity; The Monk as Universal Archetype - Raimundo Panikkar

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"By monk, monachos, I understand that person who aspires to reach the ultimate goal of life with all his being by renouncing all that is not necessary to it, i.e., by concentrating on this one single and unique goal." (11)


"The monk is compelled, as it were, by an experience that can only articulate itself in the praxis of one's life. It is an experience of the presence of the goal of life, on the one hand, and of its absence (of not having reached it), on the other." (12)


"To speak of a Buddhist monk or a Hindu monk or a Jaina monk or a Christian monk does no violence to the words. The Christian, the Buddhist, the Jaina . . . are only qualifications of the search for that center, for that core which monkhood seeks. The monastic vocation as such precedes the fact of being Christian, Buddhist, or secular (we shall speak about that too), or Hindu, or even atheist." (16)


"Simplicity is not just given. It has to be conquered, and conquered precisely by overcoming the world of multiplicity. Dazzled by the many facets of the world and the many desires of our hearts, we have to retrieve the essential unity of things and of ourselves if we are to be what we really are. In our first incursions into life we might have been decieved, if not wounded.

...The monk is not just someone who wishes to be a monk. It requires a breakthrough, an initiation, a diksa , a new birth. You have to be twiceborn, a dvija, in order even to begin. All monastic traditions stress the compunctio cordis, the conversio morum, the true metanoia, the firm resolve to leave behind the 'things of this world', the laukika and the stern urge for liberation, plus the practice of all the virtues. Shankara's Vivekacudamani could serve as a classic example here. The desire for liberation (moksa), mumuksutva has to be a burning fire. You have to knock again and again at the door to the monastery, or touch repeatedly the feet of the guru to be taken seriously. Not all who say Lord.Lord! are fit for the Kingdom.

There has to be a rupture of planes, as any initiation requires, but the proper plane here is especially the tissue of one's own heart.

The heart here stands, of course, for the core of the person. This heart has to be broken, or rather, once the heart is broken open one can begin anew by setting out to make it whole again in a wider and deeper way than before. The heart breaks because harmartia, sin, duhkha, suffering avidya, ignorance, injustice . . . pervade the world. 'Save me from death, afflicted as I am by the unquenchable fire', is a typical plea of the Hindu candidate to the monastic way, as Shankara writes. . . . the Christian tradition can speak of the baptism of desire only because the desire for purification is essential to the Christian initiation. The primitive monks, for instance, never claimed to do anything but take seriously the baptismal initiation, the plunge into the waters of death and resurrection which begins one's growth into that Christic sphere where the entire renewed Body of Creation commences its expansion. Christian monks did not want to be special Christians, but just Christians...." (39-40)


"There can be no monasticism without this experience of conversion, of turning around and turning inward, of stripping off the very many things that cling to us, of abandoning the 'usual',
the 'normal', and even the secure and often reasonable way. as one Upanisad says: "On the very day that one is 'brokenhearted', on that same day one becomes a renouncer"; one brokenhearted, i.e., one indifferent to the world, a disillusioned person. . . .

". . . The 'broken heart' is only a one-sided metaphor, for in truth it is only a negative expression when seen from this shore of samsara, of mere creatureliness. It is the 'old' heart that is broken open, often with violence, so that it may give way to a 'new' heart and a healed person with the incipient throbbings of the new life of compassion, love, and true understanding. The metephor is one-sided because, seen from the far shore, from the new life, it is not a broken but a renewed heart. Monastic life is also a life of peace, joy, and serenity. The heart that has been - that could be - broken was a wounded heart, a sinful heart, a heart of stone. It had to be broken because the human condition is unjust, ignorant, sinful. The monk has to break through the thick walls of this heart, the walls of callousness and selfishness in himself and around him; he has to break through mere temporality and inauthenticity in order to be on his way. Ahamkara and abhimana, selfishness and conceit have to be, so to speak, 'exposed', broken wide open, so that the true atman, the real 'I' may emerge." (41-2)


"The monks with whom I lived recently in a Tibetan monastery would not understand that you 'enter' a monastery. You do not enter into a family, you are born into it. The whole is prior to it's parts." (70)


"The principal of simplicity is at work here in a peculiar way. It entails getting rid of the complexity of the individual in favor of the simplicity of the person. An individual is a closed system. Its boundaries are clear-cut. The mine and the thine can not be mixed. A person is an open system. Its limits depend only on the power of the center. Each person is an expanding universe. You need not keep anything for yourself because the real self is not a private substance of your own." (71)


"The holy is neither the sacred nor the profane. The profane is everything that happens outside the temple. The sacred is the realm within the temple. It is the domain of the priest, not the monk.....The sacred stands in relation to the profane, but the holy is the center of everything and of every activity." (82-3)


"Authentic work is not a means to an end, but a basic form of human creativity. Anything short of this is slavery. And when the machine imposes it's conditions on human productivity, it dehumanizes and condemns that activity. Modern technological society cries out to be redeemed from the enslavement into which it has fallen. The contemporary monk withdraws from that society, not to abandon it to its slavery, but to incarnate the authentically human - which turns out to be the most divine." (86)


". . . a fundamental monastic archetype could be described as the life of those who....adopt a solitary journey beyond the supportive environment of their culture, of social life, of religious traditions, etc. The monk is called to go beyond what the culture - even the religious culture - in which he lives allows him to be, or leads him to." -Armand Veilleux (146)