News and Observer "Faith" section, Friday, March 16, 2001, by Vicki Cheng, Staff Writer

BOLIVIA, N.C.—Patiently, the abbot Phrakru Buddamonpricha tried to explain the secret to world peace.

"Our mind is like a monkey," the monk said to the four college-age guys kneeling before him. "It always moving. It want to go somewhere far away. ... Bad things can happen in our life if we cannot control our mind."

The men sat in their tennis shoes and T-shirts and sideburns, furrowing their brows and struggling to understand the abbot's less-than-perfect English. They listened hard as the golden-robed abbot explained, with Yodalike simplicity, how to keep your thoughts on where you are. What you're doing.

"If we can control our mind, concentrate our mind, our mind will be calm down," said the abbot. He sat in the lotus position on a low platform, his posture mirroring that of the dozens of statues of the Buddha on the altar next to him. "If everyone be peaceful in their mind, our community will be a peaceful community. Our world will be a peaceful world. It can start from training to control our minds first."

On this sunny Saturday morning, the mostly twenty-somethings studied the Wheel of Life and Death, shared a Thai meal, meditated, honored their ancestors and learned a little about how to reach Nirvana.

All this in the first three hours of their four-day spring break retreat to seek God, Ultimate Truth or spiritual enlightenment at the Wat Carolina Buddhajakra Vanaram, a Thai Buddhist monastery near Wilmington.

They came to this temple in the middle of North Carolina farmland through the Self Knowledge Symposium, a Triangle-wide group, made up mostly of college students, that focuses on spiritual and emotional growth. Their goal is to explore the inner life not just by reading and talking, but by doing.

By organizing spring break trips to monasteries, the students apply their spiritual lessons by chanting, meditating, doing yard work or just sitting in silence.

Members of the Self Knowledge Symposium organized their first trip last year, when they went to Mepkin Abbey, a Catholic monastery in South Carolina. For a week, they awoke at 3 a.m., prayed, meditated, ate in silence, cleaned chicken coops, and picked up trash from the highway.

Along the way, some of them reached a new understanding of themselves.

"More than anything, I came out of it with a sense of how important it is to take the time to reflect, to have the quiet times in the day to pray or go outside and notice a beautiful day," said Becky Pipas, a graduate student at UNC who had questions about her Catholic faith. "That was the biggest lesson: to take time to breathe."

One group returned to Mepkin this year during spring break, which wraps up for most Triangle college students this week. But a smaller group -- men only, because women aren't allowed to stay overnight --visited Wat Carolina.

Jonathan Horowitz, a senior at UNC-Chapel Hill, grew up in New Jersey pretty much not practicing any religion at all. He said this trip was part of his quest to live conscientiously.

"You see Buddhist monks, and they're the epitome of conscientious living," he said.

The students took off their shoes and entered the old farmhouse that serves as the home base for the Buddhist monastery while construction continues on the mammoth temple nearby. Visitors drop by almost daily, and on special holidays, hundreds come from all over the country to worship with the Thai Buddhists, who represent an ordination lineage that's 2,500 years old.

The abbot Phrakru Buddamonpricha has lived in Bolivia, about 30 minutes from Wilmington, about 10 years. He chose the spot, though it's a bit swampy, because it has "good vibrations," he said. Typically, one or two other visiting monks also live at the monastery.

The monks spend their days meditating and practicing the 227 precepts that are law for them. They eat only one meal a day, for example, so that they can focus most of their energy on developing their minds, the abbot said. They also counsel others.

"How long have you been a monk?" asked Zach Klughaupt, who graduated from Duke in 1999.

The abbot held up three fingers on each hand.

"Six years?" Klughaupt asked.

"Three, and three," the monk said. "Thirty-three! How old are you?"

"22," Klughaupt replied. The abbot chuckled. When the seekers before him ran out of questions, he teased them. "So, you know all the answers?"

If they didn't have the questions, none of the students pretended to have answers, either. But they were all open to learning something new. Many of them were atheists or agnostic before joining the Self Knowledge Symposium and examining their spiritual lives more closely.

Chuck Eesley, a Duke junior, grew up in Ohio, the son of a teacher and a stockbroker. He's into jazz. Brad Rolen, a sophomore at UNC-Chapel Hill, was raised Southern Baptist. His mom's a social worker, his dad's a heavy-equipment salesman, and Brad's interests range from poetry to feminist sculpture. Klughaupt works in sales for a software company. Horowitz wants to go to law school.

Saturday, the abbot tried to keep his lessons grounded in what these American students might understand. Controlling your mind is like driving a car, he said. Your mind is the driver. Your body is the car. If you don't control your mind, you might have an accident.

Still, the idea of being reincarnated as a deer or a fish might have seemed strange to them. And when the abbot and others began to chant in an ancient Thai language before the meal was served, they just sat, soaking it in.

Every afternoon, the young men helped out with painting and yard work around the monastery. Every morning and night, they chanted and meditated.

"It's really hard to just sit for an hour when you're not used to that," Eesley said. All kinds of thoughts ran through his mind: the future, the past, his girlfriend. "Everything but my breath and the present and what I was supposed to be concentrating on," he said.

But by the end of the four days, the calm seeped in.

"It's definitely shown me that I don't want to lead a busy rat-race life," Eesley said after returning Tuesday. "Being around good people, in an unhurried situation -- it's really uplifting and really soothing."

Klughaupt said: "We felt that our heads were a lot clearer after leaving the monastery. There was a lot less noise going on."

The abbot wished them well. On Saturday, after the meal, he poured some spring water into a chalice, dipped a bundle of straws into it and, chanting, flung droplets at the people who had gathered at his feet.

"I will give you blessing," he said. "May you have a happy day. Success in your studies. A-plus."