I visited Yaqing/Yachen mentioned at the bottom of the article about a month ago. The experience was surreal. In the middle of nowhere, 4 hours from the nearest city, the monastery is a sprawling complex of huts around the bend in a river in the tibetan tundra.
The hygienic conditions are very poor - people doing their business squatting on the streets, no toilets, rubbish everywhere. I am surprised that was not an argument being made by the government for the demolition.
There is some concern about foreign - especially American and British - influence on Tibetan Buddhists in the government. I am not sure this move will serve to diminish this influence.
Ps: on another note, a surprising number of these ascetic monks had an iPhone 6s+ or Samsung S7 in their pockets!
I visited the region (eastern Sichuan, Tibetan plateau) in 2006, and played counterstrike and diablo 2 against monks at the local internet cafe. Very surreal, getting shot in the head by a monk.
Heh I used to play CS 1.6 with my Catholic priest. He was very very good too, though his favourite game was Wolfenstein. Apparently shooting Nazis and their monsters was cathartic
Larung Gar is quite clean. Whilst the living conditions are basic, it's certainly not a slum. The surrounding towns definitely have a lower standard of living.
As you noted, I spent time hanging out in teahouses with monks passing their afternoons on their iphones w/ flawless 4G / LTE connections :)
It's a funny thing with monks. Quite a few are former businessman who want to try something more spiritual for a change but still are wealthy. I walked a bit with a young monk on the way to Tengboche Monastery and his main interest as we talked seemed to be designer sunglasses and which brand would be good to get.
Renunciation is defined with reference to your mental attitude towards possessions, not the presence or absence thereof. See, for example the 'Royal Sage' (Raja Rshi).
Not really. Detachment from love of material possessions doesn't imply having no material possessions. It implies a lack of a disordered love for them. The true test of hypocrisy would be to see how one of those monks responds when his phone gets stolen.
That is a Western view of things where spiritual and material realms are different. Dharmic religions consider the spiritual realm to be a superset of the material, not separate from it.
You're right, of course, but it's not binary (either you're attached or you're detached). Instead, the idea is to become attached to subtler (read: causing more lasting happiness) aspects of life, as a consequence of which one becomes detached from the grosser (read: causing more fleeting happiness) aspects. This moving in stages applies on physical, emotional and intellectual levels.
Jumping to absolute detachment is not really possible.
Perhaps, but based on a similar experience I had with a Tibetan monk, I'd say there's actually quite a lot of room for flexibility. Just because someone has a handful of materialistic interests doesn't mean they're incapable of being a good person or teacher. That was probably the main lesson I learned from the monk I knew. As outsiders, we often have a very romanticized, storybook view of monkhood that doesn't line up with reality.
Here are some pictures: http://imgur.com/a/v4gYI
The hygienic conditions are very poor - people doing their business squatting on the streets, no toilets, rubbish everywhere. I am surprised that was not an argument being made by the government for the demolition.
There is some concern about foreign - especially American and British - influence on Tibetan Buddhists in the government. I am not sure this move will serve to diminish this influence.
Ps: on another note, a surprising number of these ascetic monks had an iPhone 6s+ or Samsung S7 in their pockets!