There's a question, if a monk is not allowed to touch money, what happens to the money that people pay for retreats?
Anyone, anyone?
Well, you don't have to pay when you come here for a retreat.
You can't pay.
You can't pay, it's technically not paying, never paying.
When you come here you can give a donation,
You're allowed to give a donation if you want to, we're not asking for it now.
Money that we receive here is being used either for construction, renovation, things that have to be bought so that meditation can take place here.
And we have here someone, a steward who is actually taking care of our money affairs.
So monks don't touch money here, that's correct.
I wrote a couple of blog posts on this issue because we were having difficulty with the idea of continuing to run a meditation center.
Most monks don't run meditation centers.
The majority will have a monastic center, a monastery, and most of the residents will be monks and they will just go off and do their own thing.
But here we're trying to move things a little bit more globally and more universally available.
So running a meditation center and allowing people to come for a week or a month and then leave, it creates some difficulty.
You need to have extra food for the meditators.
You need to have
water and facilities because sometimes they will fly from another country and they've only got just enough time to do the course so you can't expect them to prepare or to
to develop and to fit in with the monastic lifestyle.
You can't expect them to go on alms round and so on.
They don't have the time to study and to ordain and so on.
So you have to have a room ready for them, food ready for them,
and everything available for them to allow them the time to develop.
And that takes resources.
The resources can't come naturally where you just receive whatever food that is available from the local community.
So the use of money really makes that possible.
Without any money in the monastery, it's just a timing thing really, right?
Because we have the patience, we can bring water up from the river and we can live with whatever clothes, whatever food that we have.
We can go hungry or not eat for one day or so on and our practice will recover in the next days.
But for the meditators coming, for the meditation center, we need things when they're needed to make a meditator's practice really fruitful.
They have to have the resources on hand when they arrive.
So money is kind of the simplest answer to that problem.
And for that reason we have a steward.
So normally we wouldn't need that.
We wouldn't need someone, a treasurer actually, using money or a bank account or so on.
The point is that the monks are still on the monastic side.
It's just that we have lay people involved and we have an organization that includes lay people simply because we're running a meditation center.
It has nothing to do with buying things for the monks or necessities for the monks.
It's buying things for the meditation center.
So the monastic life really still has very little to do with money.
It's not like the donations that come are for the purpose of buying stuff for the monks.
Not directly, anyway.
I mean, obviously, things that the monks use to teach and so on, and things to allow the monks the ability to teach, it's going to be paid for.
But there are laypeople involved.
And the reason there are laypeople involved is basically because we're running a meditation center.
So we have one layman who's our official treasurer, and he looks after receiving and using donations that arrive.
So go on, explain that again.
I was just saying that it's actually part of the Buddhist ideals to not ask for a payment for meditation, for any teachings, that actually they work on dana, on donation, which is how much you want to give, not some set amount of money.
And that when I was looking into meditation retreats in my home country in England,
There were many centers that asked for quite a steep payment, not donation, and it was set.
And these places actually, when I looked into them, turned out to be not really in line with Buddhist ideals and not really somewhere I would recommend.
So if someone's asking for a payment, I would be slightly suspicious.
And so what I was saying is that we're actually trying to go one step further.
Because the understanding that I have of a donation is that it's from someone who wants to give.
That person has the intention to give.
And it may be because they want to give up.
They have some resources that they want to...
see used in a certain way.
They want to see the cultivation of this or that, and so they ask to enhance the meditation center.
There may not be a need by the meditation center, but they think, hey, could I build another kuti and allow you to have another meditator come, because I really want to see this progress.
So they want to expand things because they have resources.
And the other one is because there may be a need.
So someone might hear that the meditation center needs electricity, for example, or maybe the water pump is broken and they want to donate a water pump because there's a need.
It should not be, from my point of view, that we expect a donation from any meditator, or that we expect our donations should come from meditators.
The donation should come from whatever person appreciates the things that we do, has the resources, and either sees the need or the usefulness,
usefulness of their donation, of their resources.
And this is what I was talking about in regards to the free lunch idea.
A free lunch is, they say there's no such thing as a free lunch, but I think that's exactly what is being explained here, is that you give something because it needs to be given.
The Buddha didn't go out and teach because of his expectation of getting anything in return, or
exactly the idea that he would gain something from it.
He was fully enlightened.
He had no need for merit.
He had no need for good karma.
He had no need for anything and wouldn't gain anything from it because he was already where he needed to be.
And yet he still taught.
So this was his giving a free lunch to people, giving people free teachings.
because there was a need, because there was a benefit, and because there was the invitation and the request.
And I think that's really what we're doing here.
So the people who would give to the Buddha, the point would be that they were giving because there was the need.
The Buddha needed the food to continue teaching, or you could even say needed the food to survive.
And this is how people do it with Buddhist monks.
they may have their ideas of what they're going to get in return, but ultimately it comes down to the fact that the monk needs food to continue.
The people need teachings to practice.
And so you give according to the need, you don't give according to the reciprocity of expecting something in return, or even expecting that that person will pay it forward.
So I was looking at these three models.
One is where you expect something in return.
Two is you expect that person to
continue the giving, so to expect them to give something to someone else, the pay it forward idea.
And three is that you don't expect anything at all.
You give because there's a need, because there's a request, or even just because there's a benefit to be gained, or there's a beneficence, there's a benefit to be accrued by the gift for the person who receives it.
And I think this is really how it goes.
So
If anyone wants to give a donation to our organization, they're of course welcome to.
Whatever the donation is, if it's an object, then we'll use it for the purpose that it was intended.
If it's a monetary donation, then the treasurer and the lay organization will take it and we'll use it to pay for, as Jessa said, construction, and we'll use it to pay for maybe juice for the meditators, or oats, or whatever things are necessary.
But it really should be on an intention basis.
So to relate this back to your question, really the point is that if we have resources, if there is money, then it will be used by the laypeople.
And if there's a need, then the monks will request this or that from the laypeople, and the laypeople will use the money to acquire that.
If there is no money, then what is the answer?
The answer is that we stop.
We stop doing what we're doing.
If we have no money, then we go back to our alms round and we just have no meditators come.
But when money comes, it is kind of really answered that.
It's used by the lay people, but mostly, as I said, for the meditation center.
Okay, so actually quite a comprehensive answer to many questions that weren't even asked.
All in all, in regards to money and
Miriam also mentioned that where she is in Mexico the places are asking for payment and I just say if places are asking for a set payment to maybe research more and try to find somewhere that isn't asking for a set payment because
If somewhere is really in line with Buddhism, then they're not going to ask you for a set payment.
I mean, in my experience, the same.
I mean, there is something, there is an exception to that.
And that is that
In Western countries, I mean, the whole point is that then there is the desire to run a course.
And once you have the desire to run a course, then of course you need money to make it work.
But if the center is run by laypeople, then they can agree amongst themselves that everyone pitch in.
And in that sense, you could think of it as a pitching in.
There's the requirement for everyone has to eat food, and so you need enough food.
You need enough food for each person.
So you can say one way of simplifying that is to have everyone give a set amount for the food for the day and then you need to rent the place and since you don't have a sponsor to rent the place then everyone has to pay something for the room and so on.
And often that's what the payment is for, that it's just because of exorbitant, you know, they find a resort or something and do a meditation course and you're paying resort prices, not to the organization, but because everyone has to pitch in.
And yeah, you might be paying a little bit to the organization for their clerical work and even for salaries for certain people and so on.
And so then it really depends on what are the intentions of the people, because there are pretty serious expenses.
I mean, even we have expenses, so...
Our model is this way because we are... I think because we have that one extra element of not really caring.
If we don't have enough money we'll just shut down.
So we're not really doing it out of desire.
We're doing it because there are people who want to come and people who are supporting.
It's because the people are donating money that we are continuing doing what we're doing.
That's how I put it out there.
It was like...
If it comes down to it, then we'll just have to stop what we do and we'll go back to just running a monastery and not a meditation center.
So you might say that it's missing that element.
But I think you could come up with some situation where it was just we all want to practice meditation and so we all have to pitch in as lay people.