One Week in a
Buddhist Monastery

It was still dark when I woke up.

Outside, rain was falling and the surroundings were already making a wall of sound. I can only describe it as jungle noise. The darkness, the rain, the calls and movement outside all mixed together before the day had properly started.

Then came prayer.

In 2011, I spent one week living inside a Korean Buddhist monastery in Lumbini, Nepal.

I had arrived at a moment when I needed to slow down. For seven days, my life became extremely simple: wake early, pray, meditate, eat, walk, rest and return to prayer.

I was normally used to moving constantly.

Here, I stayed.

Before daylight

The mornings are one of the things I remember best.

We woke very early, often while it was still completely dark.

There was something powerful about stepping outside at that hour in the rain. The monastery was quiet in one sense, but the world around it was not quiet at all.

There were noises everywhere.

Not traffic or people shouting. Natural sounds. A dense, almost jungle-like background coming through the darkness.

Then I would go inside.

The difference was immediate.

Inside the prayer hall, everything was ordered. Long lines of lanterns hung from the ceiling. Cushions were positioned on the polished floor. People faced the altar.

You found your place.

You knelt.

You prayed.

You sat.

For somebody accustomed to travelling constantly and deciding what came next every hour of the day, this routine felt completely different.

I did not need to organise the morning.

The morning already had its structure.

A week inside a Korean monastery

Lumbini holds a special place in Buddhism because it is traditionally identified as the birthplace of Siddhartha Gautama, the historical Buddha.

Different Buddhist communities have established monasteries in the wider Lumbini area, and the one where I stayed belonged to a Korean Buddhist tradition.

I was not sleeping in a hotel nearby and visiting for an hour.

I lived inside it for the week.

That difference was important because I experienced the empty periods as well as the impressive ones.

There were no ceremonies being performed for me.

There were mornings when nothing happened except getting up, eating, walking and returning to the prayer hall.

There were long quiet periods.

There was rain.

There was sleep.

Then prayer again.

The sleeping room was basic.

Thin mattresses and blankets were spread across raised platforms. Our backpacks were left around the room. Clothes were hung from whatever lines or hooks were available. Ceiling fans turned above us.

A mosquito net hung from cords stretched across the room.

There was very little to think about.

This was where I slept.

When morning came, I got up.

The monk who never spoke to me

The person I remember most from that week was a monk from Mongolia.

He did not speak.

This was by choice. He was observing a period of silence.

At first, this was one of the strangest things for me.

Here was somebody I saw repeatedly and who was clearly friendly toward me, but the normal way of getting to know another person was unavailable.

I could not sit down and ask him about Mongolia.

I could not ask why he was in Nepal.

I could not ask what he thought about the monastery or how long he had been there.

Yet somehow we communicated.

We went for walks together.

We attended prayers together.

We could acknowledge one another, understand when the other person wanted to walk somewhere and simply share time without needing to explain it.

It surprised me how quickly this became normal.

Silence was his practice, not mine.

I could speak.

He had decided not to.

But after spending time with him, I started noticing how much communication happens without words anyway.

You walk beside somebody.

You wait.

You gesture.

You smile.

You enter the prayer hall together.

Nothing needs to be discussed.

Of all the people I encountered during that week, the man I could not have a normal conversation with became one of the people I remember most clearly.

The food

Meals followed the simplicity of everything else.

One of my photographs shows a typical plate from my stay: rice, cooked green vegetables, cucumber, pineapple and other vegetables, with a small bowl of soup or broth.

It came on a metal tray with a metal cup beside it.

There was no question of studying a menu.

Food arrived.

You ate.

Then you continued with the day.

It suited the rhythm of the place perfectly.

For one week, many of the small decisions that normally occupy travelling disappeared.

Where will I sleep?

Already decided.

Where will I eat?

Already decided.

What happens tomorrow morning?

Wake up early and go to prayer.

There was something very useful about having so little to organise.

Then a bus arrived from India

One night, the monastery suddenly changed.

A large group of people from India arrived by bus.

Until then, my experience had been dominated by small routines, quiet spaces and relatively few people. Suddenly there were people everywhere.

They camped at the monastery.

Then they started cooking.

Not dinner for five or ten people.

They were preparing food for hundreds.

The scale of it was impressive.

People organised themselves, food was prepared in large quantities, and for that night the monastery became a temporary stopping place for a huge travelling group.

It showed me another side of Lumbini.

I had been experiencing the place through individual meditation, silence and my walks with one Mongolian monk. The people arriving from India experienced the same place collectively, travelling together by bus, sleeping together and cooking for hundreds of people at once.

For a while, this quiet monastery became almost a camp.

Then, as happens with travelling groups, they moved on.

The routine returned.

After dark

At night, the building looked completely different.

From outside, most of the monastery disappeared into darkness.

The large roofs became black shapes against the night sky. Only the prayer hall remained brightly illuminated.

Warm orange light came through the entrances.

The wet stone outside reflected it.

Inside, rows of lanterns stretched across the enormous hall.

Red.

Orange.

White.

Candles burned near the altar.

When only a few people were inside, the scale of the room became even more obvious.

One of my photographs shows two people kneeling side by side in front of the altar while everything around them disappears into shadow.

That was much closer to what my week felt like than any crowded religious ceremony.

Small human figures inside a huge room.

Rain outside.

Prayer inside.

Seven days

A week is not enough time to understand monastic life.

But it was enough time for a routine that initially felt strange to become normal.

I stopped being surprised by waking before daylight.

I knew where to go for prayer.

I knew where I would sleep.

I ate what was given to me.

I walked around the monastery.

Sometimes I walked beside the Mongolian monk who never spoke.

I had originally described the experience as transformative, and at the time that was probably the easiest word to use.

Looking back, what I remember is much more physical and specific.

I remember being awake before sunrise.

I remember rain.

I remember the strange noise of the morning outside.

I remember the polished floor beneath rows of lanterns.

I remember hundreds of people arriving from India and cooking enormous quantities of food.

And I remember walking beside a man from Mongolia whose voice I never heard.

After seven days, I left the monastery.

I still remember the sound of those mornings.

Continue through my best travel experiences for more stories from Lumbini and the rest of the country.