Deer Park Monastery, Escondido, CA

Lazy Day:
I don’t think I’ve managed a single lazy day without leaving the monastery. Bruno arrived on Friday with a car, and I found he wasn’t adverse to driving down to the internet café in Escondido. He’s also a potential monastic aspirant, but not in this tradition. There are three major branches of Buddhism: Tibetan, Mahayana, and Theravadin. This monastery is Mahayana (and Zen is a branch of Mahayana), and Bruno is Theravadin. Theravadin is considered more “conservative” in that it is closer to the historical Buddha’s teaching, whereas Mahayana sects implement a much more liberal and expansive application of the teachings.
Both of us having studied quite a bit on Buddhism were surprised at how much we didn’t know about each other’s traditions. Not that I consider myself “Buddhist”, much less of the “Mahayana school”, so I’m not sure I would have been able to trace the core similarities between the two traditions the way he was able to.

He’s staying at Deer Park for a week, expanding his experiential horizons, and next he’s going to a place just on the other side of our eastern ridge, a monastery that is strictly in the Theravadin forest tradition, and was founded by a fellow Oberlin graduate, who I think I wrote about a while ago when he was featured in the alumni magazine. That article mentioned his monastery was in Southern California, but didn’t mention the city it is close to, so I didn’t realize how close it was to Deer Park.