A lay person named Chathuranga came to the International Institute of Theravāda looking to ordain in November, 2022. He is now a sāmaṇera (novice monk) and not yet a fully ordained bhikkhu. I thought that it would be interesting to show his path to monkhood to you. Stage 1: Regular Person First he was a regular lay person working as a construction assistant engineer in the Maldives and then made the transition to a devoted layperson.

Ven Sunanda (China) One of the Chinese monks named Venerable Sunanda recently had his birthday. For his birthday, he determined to offer 100 shoulder cloths to various monks and ended up making 123. What is a shoulder cloth? It is a small robe that monks often like to wear underneath their upper robe. from http://www.justwalkedby.com/2016/03/sweeping-monk/ creative commons attrib nc We have an abundance of robes in the storage room and with vassa coming up, we will get more and more.

A couple of months ago, I was contacted by a professor of World Religions in the College of Religious Education at BYU named, Alonzo Gaskill. He had read my previous article on Buddhist Monk’s Robes Information and wanted to interview me for another Buddhist robes article for Patheos.com. We talked for quite a long time about Buddhism, my past, and why I ordained, and then the time was up. So we scheduled another call to talk about robes the next day to actually talk about the robes.

A venerable tending the fire for cooking dye Here are pictures about the natural dyeing process. The monks boil the ironwood tree bark chips for a long time (days). When a drop of dye is dropped in a glass of water, a ball will form and sink to the bottom. At that point, the dye master will empty that batch of dye into containers and then reboil the same chips with fresh water to make more dye.

It occured to me that people don’t know one type of Buddhist monk from the other and a post was needed to explain this. First a little bit of history. Theravada is the closest thing as one can get to the original form of Buddhism and is based on the Pali texts. The countries that have Theravada as their national religion are; Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Sri Lanka, and Cambodia. It dates back to the Buddha from 5th century BCE Later, came Mahayana - Chinese Buddhism of the 1st century BCE.

Sewing pattern from BMC 1 (creative-commons, Thanissaro Bhikkhu) Robe Information Few people realize that the Theravāda monk’s robes are actually a piece of rectangular cloth with no sleeves.[mfn]While some monks use shirts with sleeves underneath their robes, it is not actually allowed [/mfn] If you see a Theravāda monk wearing his robes in different styles, then rest assured it is due to the art of “tying the robes” or “rolling the robes” or what I call “robe origami.

Here is an instructional video on how to make a foot-rug from old and discarded monk’s robes. If you are a monk, perhaps you will be very interested in this. I made the video as I was making my very first rug. Ven. Khemavamsa is the one who helped in the end. It was his idea and I have never seen this before. The story from the texts is below: