Atmosphere
The City of Ten Thousand Buddhas is a strict Buddhist monastery adhering to the traditional Asian monastic culture although it is located in a liberal area of California. The organic farm and peaceful way of life appeals to most Westerners who want an alternate lifestyle. This creates an interesting mix of different ideologies. While the traditionalists are more drawn to the spiritual and devotional side of Buddhism, Westerners are often more interested in meditation. Some of the boarding school children are Westerners from the local community who want their children to grow up in a community-oriented place, while some of the children come from Taiwan and China, even from European countries, such as France, Belgium, and Holland, where parents think highly of Hua. The liberalism of Westerners and the strict traditionalism of Easterners may clash at times.
Unique to the City, the monastery houses both male and female Sangha, students from the boarding school, and is open to the public. Many monasteries in China, Taiwan, and in the West house only monks or only nuns but not both, and are closed to the public. However, males and females have separate campuses, with gender-neutral buildings in the middle of the campus.
Read more about this topic: City Of Ten Thousand Buddhas
Famous quotes containing the word atmosphere:
“And so I look on those sentiments which make the glory of the human being, love, humility, faith, as being also the intimacy of Divinity in the atoms; and, that, as soon as the man is right, assurances and previsions emanate from the interior of his body and his mind; as, when flowers reach their ripeness, incence exhales from them, and, as a beautiful atmosphere is generated from the planet by the averaged emanations from all its rocks and soils.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The meeting in the open of two dogs, strangers to each other, is one of the most painful, thrilling, and pregnant of all conceivabale encounters; it is surrounded by an atmosphere of the last canniness, presided over by a constraint for which I have no preciser name; they simply cannot pass each other, their mutual embarrassment is frightful to behold.”
—Thomas Mann (1875–1955)
“The atmosphere parents wish to create when talking with children about birth and reproduction is warm, honest, and reassuring, one that tells children they are free to ask questions as often as they need to, and you will answer them as lovingly as you know how.”
—Joanna Cole (20th century)