EMD the Virtual Monk

I founded of this work-in-progress here on the Web as a labor of love. While traveling around the mindless avenues of Innerspace, I was impressed with the great amount of intellectual flotsam that a place such as this generated. Athens seemed a home to me, yet the lack of any sort of cyber-monastic presence dismayed me.

This, then, was the calling; to gather together the wisdom of several monastic traditions and to take them where they seldom, if ever, could go. Into Cyberspace.

What is the point?

Why monasticism? What possible use could a nearly three-thousand year old tradition serve in a medium as new and as fluid as the Web? It seemed a good question, and a fertile field.

Traditionally, monks of most sorts travelled to the desert as a place of purification and communion, a hiding place from the distractions of the world where Infinity and humility could be grasped, paradoxically at the same time. In the Christian tradition, this began to take place very early on, perhaps within the second century C.E. Hermits in the Egyptian desert went away to find solace in solitude; not to turn away from the world, but to explore their place in it. Only those who have not fully learned to appreciate the monastic calling dare to call it escapist. In the Buddhist tradition, which pre-dates the religion of Jesus by a full five centuries in India and China, the followers of Gautama the Buddha secreted themselves in groups or alone--the legendary Bodhidharma, who brought Zen to China, was a hermit for nine years--to plumb the anatman of their own being, which was non-being. They did this, as the early Christians, both in deserted places and in the midst of crowded cities. Place was for less important than intention, even though place played a large role.

Similar in aim (if not in focus) to the non-self that underpinned the Buddhist monastics, the heartcry of the Christian contemplatives was the echo of St. Paul in his letter to the church at Galatia early in the Christian era: "I am crucified with Christ, yet I live; not I, but Christ that lives within me." The base idea of a loss of self, the Orthodox concept of Theosis, "deification," still stressed in the Eastern church to this day but more or less alien to the Augustinian dogma of the West, and of a closer identification with the resurrected Lord of the Church was in its beginning a very early Christian doctrine. Here, many contemporary monks of several traditions, Merton, Basil Pennington, and David Stendhal-Rast for example, have found solidarity with the Buddhist tradition. And Buddhist monastics, specifically the Zen Monk Thich Nhat Hanh and the 14th Dalai Lama of the Gelugpa sect of Tibeten Buddhism have also been able to see a close tie. None of these men have said, "It's all the same." For, of course, it isn't. Still, the closeness should not be overlooked as cooincidence. Surely, the loss of self (or even the denial of the Self) found in these traditions has one root, deep and strong, and growing even today.

More to come, including bios and photos . . .

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