Kathina and the Red Sphere

“Kathina”. Santacittarama. Poggio Nativo. Rieti, 23 October 2021

There are places that are like open passages in space and time: crossing their threshold means losing the link with one's city and everyday life. It's a kind of vacation from reality.

The “Santacittarama” Buddhist Monastery is one of those places.

The first time I went there was in September 2010, at the invitation of some of my dear friends from Sri Lanka to attend one of their family funeral ceremonies. Since then I have been back many more times and have seen it change over time.

It has now turned thirty: it was 21 March 1990 when it was founded. At the time it was a small villa in Sezze Romano, in Latina, offered by Vincenzo Piga, one of the leading scholars of Buddhism in Italy, to fill the lack of Theravadin monasticism in our country.

In the hills of Poggio Nativo, in Rieti, the first Theravadin Sangha (the monastic group) took up residence in Italy, with mainly Thai and Sri Lankan monks. Although at the head of the Sangha there is still Ajahn Chandapalo, the English abbot who has lived in Italy for decades.

 

“The Garden of the Peaceful Heart”, is the meaning of its name, and between its walls and vegetation, the Dhamma, the teaching of the Buddha is studied: the Satipaṭṭhāna, the important Buddhist term in Pali which means “establishment of awareness” or “presence of mindfulness”.

I learned about Buddhism as a boy, like many of us, thanks to Herman Hesse's 1922 masterpiece, “Siddhartha”, which tells the story of the Buddha through the life of Siddhartha Gautama, even if in the novel the historical character of Buddha is incarnated from Gotama.

This short novel is one of those books that, when you are a teenager, is always given or received as a gift to and from the people you love, be they simple friendships or real loves.

I also received it as a gift on one of my birthdays from a girl I deeply loved in secret and who always remained just a friendship.

After that masterpiece of literature came the most demanding Aśvaghoṣa, the greatest Buddhist poet of the first century AD, with his fundamental “The Deeds of the Buddha”, in which the teachings of the Buddha are put into poetry.

Of course, it's not easy for teenagers to understand that ascetic way of renunciation which becomes radical if read in his verses:

“Then he firmly came to the conclusion that with the elimination of birth, old age and death are suppressed, that with the destruction of existence, the birth itself is destroyed, and that existence fails due to the suppression of attachment.” (Canto XIV, 80)

 

I have read other books because I am always curious and eager to know other religions and ways of reading existence, but with a certain detachment.

Then in the last few years, I have intensified my study and followed the Hindu events and found myself, especially in Malaysia, looking again at the face of Buddha, intricate to those of Trimurti Shiva, Brahma and Vishnu.

However, regardless of my interest in religion, the certainty of the beauty and spirituality of the monastery remains.

While I was living in Malaysia, they also completed the construction of the actual temple, and the care of its gardens is enchanting.

 

 

I went back a few days ago, for the great Kathina ceremony, which I am following and photographing for the third time, including the most important one in 2015, which also inaugurated the construction of the temple.

Kathina is the ceremony that takes place at the end of Vassa, the three-month rainy season retreat for Theravada Buddhists in Bangladesh (known as Kaṭhina Cībar Dān), Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, India, and Thailand, and begins after the full moon of the eleventh month of the lunar calendar (usually October).

Kathina is a Pali term used for the wooden frame used to measure the length and width with which the robes of Buddhist monks are cut. According to legend, thirty bhikkhus were traveling with the intention of spending Vassa with Gautama Buddha, when the rains caught them before they reached their destination and they had to stop at Saketa. Since, according to the Buddha's commandments for Vassa, the mendicant monks did not have to travel during the rainy season, the monks had to stop.

The bhikkhus spent their time in peace and practicing the Dhamma, so the Buddha rewarded them by giving a piece of cloth that had been given to the Buddha by a lay disciple, telling to make a robe to offer to one of them.

This is the meaning of the ceremony, in which – every year – the faithful, who have come from various Italian cities and from Rome, meet to deliver as gifts the new fabrics and rice to each of monks.

 

That day I also spoke more with a Thai girl, Aggun, and an Italian friend of hers, Anielka, two bhikkhunis, who are studying as monks, but who will always remain in the Saman era, the novitiate period, since in the Sangha of the monastery female monks are not admitted.

I had met Aggun before but she was always elusive and I also felt embarrassed. But, thanks to photography, we were able to talk and get to know each other better, even if there is always an invisible and solid membrane that prevents any physical contact between us, if not what the camera allows.

Difficult life choice, far from me, but that I respect.

Then, with my dear friend Sandro, we set out in search of the stream in the dense vegetation, painted by its wonderful autumn colors.

After the morning in the great hall of the temple crowded with bodies and prayers, we reached the silence of the wood, through the progressive enjoyment of the peace of the caves where the monks go to meditate.

Enraptured by the shades of the leaves, by the intense green of the velvet on the trunks of the trees, by the silence, in fact, I was reminded of those teachings read on the Buddhist books taken in the monastery.

That meditative practice that is entirely based on renunciation and liberation.

As I approached the shore of the small stream, I observed the yellow gold or ruby red ferns, I thought of moha, or the illusion (avidya) which is the foundation of ignorance of man unable to acquire consciousness of the impermanent and fundamentally painful nature of things.

Bowing on the square stones in the center of the running water carrying the dry leaves with it, I tried to understand the choice of those monks, of Aggun, of Anielka. That nekkhamma, renunciation, which is considered perfection, because it is the awareness of how every experience of our life, whether happy or sad, in reality, has no weight, it's evanescent, since the whole reality is impermanent, as well as our “I”.

We let ourselves be fooled by the pleasant waves that the senses give us, but nothing lasts forever, as well as our satisfactions, pleasure, pain – everything is volatile.

The very concept we have of ourselves is a trap of “becoming”: what we think we are “now” does not really exist, since we only have images of what we have been in the past and visions of what we could be, but if we decide to pay the strongest attention to who we really are at this moment, “we discover that the images shatter like reflections in a stream where a finger dip”.

Everything should vanish, the pain, the joy, the smiles and the tears: finally liberated, enlightened.

 

And it's at that moment that, looking at the dry leaves trapped between the stones of the stream, I see a Christmas tree red ball.

There, in the stream of the monastery estate, among the stones and leaves.

This my eyes see, this collects my perceptions and senses.

An unnecessary, futile pleasure.

But in that pleasure, I recognize that my life will never be able to understand or share that choice, that renunciation.

I am too deeply attached, and happy to be, to my wounds, pains and joys.

I chose photography (or it chose me) precisely because it reminds me at every shot-moment that my happiness is linked, chained, to what my senses give me, to what my eyes see, even if it was an illusion.

And I know that they are impermanent precisely because every photograph of the same subject can never be identical, but – as every photographer believes in his heart – I love to fool myself into thinking that what we photograph remains permanent thanks to our images extrapolated from becoming.

 

I have chosen to accept my darkness, carry on my shoulders and engrave on my skin what has hurt me in the past.

I cannot and do not want to give up the amazement of the senses. Of what I see. Of these splendid colors, of the torrent that swirls among the stones; of lust and anger. Of water and fire.

Marvel at the surreal presence of a decorative Christmas ball in a stream of a Buddhist monastery in October.

I leave to others the privilege of liberation, of that ascetic serenity which is far from all pleasure and suffering, from love and hate.

Everyone is what they choose to be.

 

However, in picking up Herman Hesse's “Siddhartha” again, I read the dedication written by that girl over thirty years ago. These were the words of Hesse himself:
        “At the bottom of your eyes there is no serenity, there is only sadness;
        as if your eyes knew that happiness does not exist,
        that everything beautiful and dear does not stay with us for long.”

She knew me very well. Who knows if she would still agree with those words about me.

And me? 

Better not think about it and go back to observe that little red sphere among the leaves.

 

Ajahn Sucitto: “The Perfections. Ways to cross the waves of life" (Santacittarama Edizioni, 2018)
My photos from Kathina 2018: Foto: Kathina 2015 e inaugurazione dell’avvio della costruzione del tempio

Italian version