| The strength of the monks |
| ENZO BIANCHI |
| Endless streams of monks walking silent and resolute in the middle of two rows of the crowd with their shaved heads and orange and crimson clothes, unarmed monks squatting in front of soldiers in riot gear. Ports used to the silence antilacrimogeni covered with masks, old and young monks injured, killed, imprisoned, beaten ... The world seems tragically out only at this time an entire country and, at the heart of it, its monks. And, surprise, wonder what inner strength to face them and move them a lever which relies for his ransom a people oppressed by a dictatorial regime. People we hastily judge "out of the world, detached from the ambitions and worries that inhabit their contemporaries, they reveal more able to grasp the roots of a dislocation and the unsustainability of a life, those most able to voice - paradoxically through silence - the stifled cry of the oppressed, taking on the suffering and dignity of a nation. We see them only in extreme situations, like at the time of the monks who set fire in Vietnam, the former Burma in revolt or resistance and exile of the Tibetan lamas, an icon of a people battered, or confine them in a fascinating world poetic, like the protagonists from the Burmese Harp or the most recent Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter ... and Spring. Yet they know very concrete grasp what eludes the most: the ultimate root of things. This certainly depends on some characteristics of Buddhism and its monks, via a "monastic" in its essence and structure, which inside every young person is invited to spend time as Monaco in their own learning human society where ordinary people encounter every day on their way the monks who, in silence, trust and abandonment to the generosity of others, ask the street a bowl of rice, food for them, yes, but especially at the donor to pursue righteousness in their lives. Not by chance we saw pictures of monks in recent days that kept ostentatiously reversed its bowl as a sign of extreme protest, as if to say we are willing to deprive ourselves of food, but at the same time deprive the company of unfair road to make a 'meritorious action. But this epiphany in the capacity of Burmese monks to catalyze the feelings of ordinary people especially find some common traits of monasticism as an anthropological phenomenon, even before that as an element internal to a particular religious way. The monastic life, in fact, is a human phenomenon, and therefore universal, which has the same characters at all latitudes, this not only in the history of various religions, but also of some current and philosophical schools. It is a form of life that always affects both men and women that is characterized by the celibacy and some separation from the social environment and often also religious affiliation: elements that alone will explain the nature of minority presence always. As part marginal, emerges from the Monaco area exogenous but, being part of the endogenous system of religion and society, is an external agent that works and is effective inside. Monasticism never stays completely exogenous, "other" - the pain became sectarian and heretical - but neither is it ever entirely endogenous, as if it were a force that was created and developed within the institutional system. This dual membership of Monaco is that, as a minority effective inoculants within the religious and social system which is always a diastasis and jointly building and protest. To some extent the Monaco maintains contact with the culture dominant, but is also a protest, and a collision with this research, conflicting with the "middle way." "Peculiar task of Monaco - Merton wrote, a Monaco of the West so familiar to Buddhist monasticism - to keep alive in the modern world is the contemplative experience and keep it open to technological man of our time the possibility of recovering the integrity of its deeper interiority. " Yes, monasticism is counterculture, that other culture, minority, but for this very reason, able to play a crucial role and effective in the long term. So, why not ask for those who exhibit the Burmese monks: they show for us, wrapped in the richness of our short-sighted person with no sense of the West. Article from www.lastampa.it (09/28/2007) |
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