Meditation Retreat at Kopan Gompa

Travel Day 646-47 – Kopan Monastery, NEPAL

After one week of teachings and basic meditation practices, the last two days of the Discovering Buddhism course were set up as a real retreat…

Meditation Retreat at Kopan Monastery

A retreat in this case meant that we had no more Buddhist teachings and just focused on different types of meditations. We had 6 guided meditation sessions per day and in-between we were told to practice short segments of 15 min walking meditations. This meant that even in times if we didn’t have an actual meditation class, we still moved around really, really slowly and focused. On top of that a complete silence for the remaining 48 hours was mandatory…

With a group of people we actually decided to observe the “Noble Silence” for the remaining two days. Noble Silence in this case meant not to interact at all, no nodding or eye contact was possible and we had to move around the monastery as complete strangers, totally blending out all other people. It was quite an interesting experience and not even as difficult as I had thought in the beginning. I guess all my time in India, where ignoring annoying people was daily business, had been quite a good training… : )

Retreat Gompa at Kopan Monastery

The meditation sessions inside the Gompa were more or less good, depending on the topic and teacher and only on the last day I had enough guiding from the western nun and I had to escape. I guess I just reached a point were I didn’t like any more to be told what to think in my meditations. The second issue of the past few days had been that this nun turned out to be rather a religious teacher and I didn’t like that. I came to the monastery to learn about the philosophical aspect of Buddhism and not in the quest for a new religion. What it came down to in my opinion was that the western nun was selling Buddhism as a religion and the Tibetan Geshe, whom I really liked, was rather advertising it as a philosophy…

Also I realized that Kopan was a Mahayana Buddhist monastery and I felt quite curious to also learn about other branches like Hinayana, Theravada and Vajrayana. But in any case, the last two days were still quite an interesting experience and one night we even got to see the documentary “Unmistaken Child”, which portrayed the death of a high lama from Kopan Gompa and the mission to find his reincarnation. It was really great to see the process of finding the correct child and in our case it was even more interesting because we got to see the relics of the cremated lama as well as the reincarnated child at the monastery…

The second documentary we watched during the retreat was about the life of the Dalai Lama and the invasion of Tibet. It was not only very interesting as well, but also quite shocking when we got to see original footage of Chinese police and Chinese military beating up Tibetan monks with sticks and even shooting at them in the streets of Lhasa. What on earth makes people do such cruel things?

Find all Kopan Monastery 2011 Photos here.