The monk's grit

Probably because most popular Buddhism seems to focus on loving-kindness (mettā) and compassion (karuṇā), which also correspond to the first two stages of jhānic trance meditation, most people seem to think of monks as always kind and loving, preferring the pleasant whenever possible. The proliferation of fat and jolly Budai-style Buddha statues only furthers this myth. (In addition to the mythologization of Budai, those statues may also be a mis-interpretation of the famous Chinese Ten Oxherding paintings. In the final painting, an enlightened monk, who is quite thin, is depicted returning from the proverbial mountain-top hermitage to his village, where he encounters a fat and drunken man, who represents the deluded/confused state of most humans, to whom the monk tries to teach the Dhamma. Because the fat man looks jollier than the enlightened man in the painting, many people have wrongly assumed that the fat man must be the enlightened one. Monks are rarely either fat, drunken, or jolly.). The very extroverted current Dalai Lama probably similarly exacerbates this myth.

Real monks, including the suttas' description of Gotama Buddha himself, have considerably more grit. For example: "I have heard that on one occasion the Blessed One ... stayed in the Icchanangala forest grove. ...the brahman householders of Icchanangala, when the night was gone, taking many staple & non-staple foods, went to the gate house of the Icchanangala forest grove. On arrival they stood there making a loud racket, a great racket. Now at that time Ven. Nagita was the Blessed One's attendant. So the Blessed One addressed Ven. Nagita: 'Nagita, what is that loud racket, that great racket, like fishermen with a catch of fish?' Nagita replied, 'Lord, those are the brahman householders... having brought many staple & non-staple foods for the sake of the Blessed One & the community of monks.' The Buddha replied, 'May I have nothing to do with honor, Nagita, and honor nothing to do with me. Whoever cannot obtain at will — without difficulty, without trouble — as I do, the pleasure of renunciation, the pleasure of seclusion, the pleasure of peace, the pleasure of self-awakening, let him consent to this slimy-excrement-pleasure, this torpor-pleasure, this pleasure of gains, offerings, & fame.' [Then, the Buddha describes, at great length, how monks and nuns should fend off the pleasures of gains, offerings, and fame. The sutta closes with the following line:] 'But when I am traveling along a road and see no one in front or behind me, at that time I have my ease, even when urinating & defecating.'" (Yasa/Honor Sutta, AN 8.86).

Apparently, like accomplishing any difficult task in life, the overcoming of one's habitual delusions requires a great deal of effort, stubbornness, patience, and detachment. Despite every ounce of the body and mind not wanting to meditate -- instead, wanting to go to sleep, to blink the eyes, to stretch the legs, to drift off into a daydream, to dwell on feelings of anger or greed/lust, etc. -- real monks don't give in. They sit there without flinching, aware/watchful and mindful of the impermanence of their feelings, until the feelings always inevitably change/die/stop. The result is peace, the absence of habitual self-torment from incessant cravings, which is worth the trouble.

Pain is not the same as suffering, which is a hard lesson for people who are accustomed to seeking pleasure and avoiding pain to learn. Both pain and pleasure are sensations, which arise automatically, dependent on the body's physical circumstance. They are very sub-conscious reactions to stimuli, which meditation will not change (i.e., Buddhism is not a path to the ending of pain in life). Suffering, on the other hand, is a learned/habituated cognitive reaction to pain (as is enjoyment to pleasure), which can be unlearned. If one can learn to be aware of sensations, and to resist the cognitive urge to automatically label them as either good/enjoyable or bad/suffering, one can learn to live experiencing only a "subtle flow of sensations" (Pali: bhaṅgānupassanā ñāṇa), where one feels sensations but is not emotionally burdened by them.

Living daily life in this state, one simply does what is necessary to keep the body and mind healthy, to take care of other people, abandons preferences, and is not drawn into heated arguments or excitements. To use the suttas' language, Gotama Buddha's personality was very calm and cool, composed, not "roused" by worldly things. He was, however, roused to root out greed, anger, and self-delusion within himself and those who would be his students, often scolding those who strayed into wallowing in sense pleasures. But, he also learned that such scolding, including developing feelings of aversion for oneself, can be taken too far. In one sutta, after advising several monks to focus on the vileness of the physical body -- meditating on things like rotting corpses, and trying to habituate feelings of "this body also is impermanent; this body also only exists by killing other beings, and will one day become just as rotten and disgusting" (paraphrasing the Vesali Sutta, SN 54.9) -- the Buddha left for a month of solitary meditation practice, and returned to find that the monks he had advised had become suicidal and "sought for an assassin." Following this incident, the Buddha gave the famous Ānāpānasati recommendation that breath meditation, which is more cognitively neutral and supposedly can be focused-upon from within all levels of consciousness or sub-consciousness, be the normative meditation method of choice for Buddhists. Ānāpānasati Puja day (usually in late November) commemorates this.