Mine of mindfulness
The Meethirigala forest monastery leads the way in spreading the word of sati across the country and beyond
The primeval rain forest in Meethirigala near Kirindiwela is cloaked in blue mist and silence. We ramble up paths where fern and foliage bristle in thick wet darkness with mushy jak fruit and sweet jungle smells. Once we reach the meditation centre we discover a clearing in the forest with giant trees looming all around us, a ringing silence broken only by bird call and cicadas.
Against the thick green foliage where macaques chatter and leap about, sits the Ven. Uda Eriyagama Dhammajiva Thera, the kindly abbot of the Meethirigala forest monastery called the Nissarana Vanaya, an abode that is a sanctuary to many reclusive forest monks, with copper and sepia coloured pools dammed out of mountain streams and a deep dark peace throughout.
This monastery, says Ven. Dhammajiva, has little to do with traditional Buddhist rituals or even meditation. In fact, there is not even the annual katina pinkama (offering of robes after the monsoon retreat) here. “Whether it is Vesak, Poson, Christmas or New Year, we do not vary in our daily monastic schedule,” he says.
Sati, or mindfulness, is the sole ‘guru’ and tradition here.
A concept not absent in other major religions, sati was best articulated by the Buddha. It is basically being mindful or aware; a process “of unlearning, of deconstruction”. The first step is to just focus on existing here and now the ‘universal unconscious’. All other forms of knowledge are only a block to attain this state of intrinsic ‘innocence’.
Anyone, even the greatest ‘sinners’- “the Angulimalas or Patacharas of this world, or drug addicts or prisoners”- can experience the benefits of sati.
Nissarana Vanaya was founded 1967 by Asoka Weeraratna, who also founded the German Dharmaduta Society and the Berlin Buddhist Vihara in Germany. Ven. Dhammajiva is its third abbot.
Born as Karunaratne Banda in the village of Uda Eriyagama in Peradeniya to a farmer family, he was the ninth of 11 children and after schooling at the Peradeniya Central College, in the 1970s entered the Faculty of Agriculture at the Peradeniya University.
Following postgraduate studies he went on to become an executive in an international firm and held the post for six years.
It was brushes with the West (he mastered English expressly to learn the Dhamma) that intimated to him that Europeans have, with some kind of a magpie’s flair, extracted some vital elements of the Buddha’s teachings that we tend to overlook with our dyed in the wool approach which promotes little open-mindedness.
In the meantime his father’s untimely death
was to put him inexorably on the path to monkhood.
After taking robes he left for Burma, then the epicentre of vipassana meditation, where he learned the language and was a disciple of Sayadaw U Pandita, one of the foremost masters of vipassana.
It was also the tutelage of Australian Bhante Dhammika that led Ven. Dhammajiva to focus on the practice of sati.
To spread the word of sati, what he stumbled upon as the earthly passage to Nirvana, the Ven. Dhammajiva has fashioned many a path.
One is the Sati Pasala, ‘mindfulness school’, a bustling brainchild which teaches children and youths how to integrate mindfulness into their daily activities.
It encompasses early childhood development, schools, daham pasal, pirivenas and universities. The weekly sati pasal mainly happen in Meethirigala as well as their capacious Kaduwela school, their base close to Colombo.
The younger the children, the better they are at being mindful, in Ven. Dhammajiva’s experience. In the beginning participants are taught to sit mindfully and walk mindfully and are gradually trained to eat and play as well.
Sati Pasala today also operates in 180 centres or schools, catering to almost 100,000 students and with as many as 1083 volunteers.
The Ven. Dhammajiva is also promoting sati as part of the mainstream school curriculum.
Sati is now being taught as a separate subject but also as a way of making all academic syllabi - from math to chemistry- enjoyable pursuits. Ven. Dhammajiva has worked closely with the Education Department on this.
SMS was the key word in sati as taught by Ven. Dhammajiva to young people, standing for Slowly, Mindfully, Silently. Today Sati Pasala is a growing influence in Australia and Britain.
In 2018 Sri Lanka hosted the Global Summit on Mindfulness and a couple of years later Britain (where sati had been propagated earlier) would request Sri Lanka’s expertise in that area; testimony to what a triumph Ven. Dhammajiva’s sati pasala has been.
As for the Meethirigala monastery itself, there are around 40 permanent monks and lay yogis while apprentices can reside for periods of five, seven or 10 days to learn sati. Branches have now been established in Imaduwa, Vijitapura, Peradeniya, Horana and Wayamba.
Recently, Meethirigala was the venue for a felicitation of the Ven. Dhammajiva with virtual worldwide participation. Among the speakers were Dr. Tara de Mel, Richard J. Davidson (Professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison) and Christopher Shaun Ruane (a Welsh Labour Party politician who served as MP for the Vale of Clwyd).
Also contributing was the American monk Bhante Yogavacari Rahula who while at the Nilambe Centre in the 1980s was instrumental in showing the path of the forest monk to a bearded and troubled youth in search of a spiritual lifeline- none other than a young lay Ven. Dhammajiva (then in his thirties).
We wind up our spiritual amble down the forest paths with a wind rustling the high crown canopy as macaques set up a howl - it is time to leave the forest to its solitary sentinels.
As we walk away we bear in mind the words of the Ven. Dhammajiva: “Sati is everyone’s birthright; and it is the one and only path to Nirvana… hidden in plain sight; like a diamond mine”.