[Cnbaapuy]

FiP, Sorry you're having difficulties with missionaries. A pair of nice Jehova's Witness women knocked on my door this morning, but they were very polite and left promptly when I said I wasn't interested in their magazine. A lot less aggressive than they used to be here.

Actually, I was in some ways grateful for the "argument". I found myself making some reasonably polite comments, but realised that compared to the American Monk I probably sounded really argumentative... It was particularly interesting because he was American so I could see how much being a monk had affected the way he behaved (not that I thnk that American's behave badly ). Later I was asking him about whether he'd seen some partcular movies I'd watched recently that addressed some aspects of Buddhism and he explained that he really wasn't supposed to do anything "entertaining", but could sometimes justify watching a movie if it was educational.

As I said, as I understand it, it's all about letting go of worldly pleasures and being very stable and calm. One of the young Thai men who was a monk for a couple of weeks said that he found the remaining calm aspect very difficult, whereas most seem to adapt to not eating after midday reasonably well...

I actually feel rather fourtunate to be able to interact with the Thai monks over here. In Thailand I was scared of doing something totally embarassing, so I avoided event talking to monks. But since I know the monks here, and some of them speak quite good English, I can ask them various inane questions. For example, I asked them about the eyebrow shaving and the consensus of those present was that only Thai monks shave eyebrows and they started doing it some time ago when the Burmese were trying to infiltrate by posing as monks. I'm not sure if that's historically accurate, but it makes a good story...