November 28, 2008
Free Meditation Instruction… oh, really?
"Meditation instruction should be free."
I get an email saying this about once a month. But the idea of free meditation instruction is a misunderstanding.
The people who send these e-mails have often been to India, and either studied with meditation teachers or spent time in ashrams where they weren't asked to pay for the instruction. Sometimes they paid for room and board, with the idea that the meditation instruction itself was free.
It's not as simple as that, though. Here's what goes on behind the scenes.
In places where everything is seemingly offered for free, especially in the East, it's often the case that the community supports the meditation teacher's lifestyle. They give him or her a house to live and food to eat. Getting clothing to wear is not much of a tissue when you're walking around a pair of robes.
In places where they ask you to pay room and board, sometimes those costs actually have hidden fees that do go to the teacher.
Other times, there are benefactors who support the teacher or the center. It's sort of like an invisible scholarship for meditation practice.
For example, back in the 60s and 70s, there was a Buddhist meditation center in Burma where, if you came from another country (a great expense back then), you were only asked to pay for your food. From this experience, a number of the people who attended the meditation center concluded that "everything was offered for free, and was only supported by donation that you could make after you've completed a meditation course."
The reality, though, is that the meditation center had enough money to sponsor these foreign students, mostly because of the payments made by the local students.
Here's a variation on the theme. I helped manage a meditation center that did not take any upfront payments, but only accepted donations from students at the end of the course. What I saw when I was helping collect those donations is that quite a few people made payments that barely covered one day's worth of their meals. And then there'd be the occasional student who would write a check for 10 or 20 or $30,000. Needless to say, their large payment made it seem like everybody else was getting free meditation instruction.
But here's the odd twist. I've also seen the accounting at meditation centers where they charge you for room and board in and give you the opportunity to make a donation directly to the teacher. In fact, they encourage it. In fact, there's quite a bit of peer pressure, prompting you to give money to the teachers. The irony is that when I saw the books for this kind of arrangement, the numbers ended up being about the same as for the place that accepted only donations. The number of students was far greater at the place that charge no fixed fee, but the finances worked out very similarly.
Comments on Free Meditation Instruction… oh, really? »
Great point! The finances behind running a meditation camp are so important to the whole meditiation presentation, and hence to the whole experience of the student. The problem with charging for meditation is that when it is a commercial commodity with a price tag, it can never be the true teaching of the Buddha, an awakened being, because then the student will feel entitled to receive something they very rightly paid for. Give and take! The full benefits of the Buddha's teaching can never be had unless one experiences all the ten paramis, of which dana–donation–is one. Both at the receiving and giving end. Dana. Which is so very important in the teaching of the Buddha.
Traditionally, the monks offered meditation guidance. The monks did not handle money. Only in recent history have lay-teachers offered meditation guidance. The problem with lay teachers will always be that the temptation to charge the students for instructions will be so strong, because the lay teacher has to pay her bills, too. So in a commercially minded society, many such teachers cannot resist. The temptation is too strong, and voila!- the spiritual supermarket was born. Welcome to America, where everything is for sale!
While the monks may not have handled money in the past, they often had benefactors and managers for their centers who did. Stephen Batchelor's new book "Confession of a Buddhist Athiest" describes some Pali texts that explain that while the monks may not have "touched" money, they were undeniably involved in raising it to support their needs and their mission.