Advice for monastics

• Help others and if not don’t harm others
• Following the daily schedule and discipline
• Interruptions to dharma practice faced by lay people
• Not engaging in unnecessary activities and cultivating compassion
• Verses from ordination ceremony
• Give up attachment
• Guard integrity and aspiration
• Cut non-virtue and cultivate compassions
• Imbued with precepts
• Appreciating the qualities and lives of monastic lifestyle

44 Advice for Monastics (download)

Contemplation points

1. Consider the words of His Holiness the Dalai Lama: Benefit others, and if you can’t benefit others, at least don’t harm them. Explain in your own words why this is actually the whole spiritual path. How have you seen that living in this way benefits yourself and others? What changes can you make in your own life to embody this moto more fully?
2. What are ways in which the daily schedule and discipline in a monastery supports the cultivation of good qualities and the abandonment of negative ones? If you do not live in a monastic environment, what can you do in your own life to surround yourself with this kind of beneficial environment?
3. What are some of the disruptions to Dharma practice that are experienced in lay life that a monastic is free from? How do these freedoms benefit spiritual practice? If you do not live in a monastic environment, are there areas of your life where you can minimize these kinds of disruptions in order to have a better environment in which to practice the path?
4. What are ways in which contentment can be a challenge in a monastic setting? Whatever your living situation, in what areas do you struggle with contentment and what can you do to work with these situations?
5. Spend some time contemplating each of the stanzas from the ordination ceremony from the text and the benefit of living in that way:
   • Transmigrating in the three realms, one is not able to sever attachment. Give up attachment and enter nirvana. That is the true way to repay kindness.
   • Guard integrity and aspiration. Cut the bonds of family and kin. Leave your worldly home to practice the Dharma. Aspire to lead all beings to full awakening.
   • Go forth to enter the path. Cut off bonds and bid family farewell. Now you are imbued with the precepts. Resolve to cut non virtue and cultivate compassion. Renounce illusion, return to the truth. How happy is the door to liberation.