ELTAB-B member Frank Steven Weir came to Berlin from Toronto, Canada in 1984 and has been teaching in various Volkshochschulen for about eight years. Having attended a workshop of his some years ago, I was struck by his inventiveness as well as his ability to connect with the participants and to create an atmosphere that helped make the event a pleasant experience. In recent years he has specialized in compact courses in general Business English, public speaking, hotel catering, and theater techniques. He has also organized trips for students and teachers to Britain, Canada and Australia. In the following interview he tells us about a six-month stay in a Buddhist monastery in Thailand in the mid-eighties. For half of that period he taught English to resident monks.

Not directly. I had a job as an assistant teacher the year before and had done a lot of reading. I became interested in Asia and decided to take a trip to Thailand and India.

How did you wind up in the monastery?

After arriving in Bangkok I proceeded to an island called Ko Samui and decided to stay there for a while.There was a monastery called Wat Suan Mokkh about 40 kilometers outside the town of Surat Thani and I entered it. For DM 2 a day you could stay on as long as you wanted.

There were certain things you were expected to do, for instance to help with the cleaning and taking part in various spiritual exercises.

No, it was a completely different set-up. The resident monks and longer-term visitors lived in kuties, which are small huts made of wood and tin and built on stilts. They were situated 50 to 100 meters apart from each other in the middle of the rainforest. There were hot springs on the grounds and also caves where you could meditate. In addition, there was an international center that we helped to build and which was located far away from the road, in the middle of a palm orchard. The whole complex covered a vast area.

No. There was a separate section for women to sleep, but men and women ate and meditated together and the main teacher for foreigners was a woman monk, Ajarn Runjuan.

There was a retreat period from the first to the eleventh of every month when you were woken up at 4:00 in the morning by a huge gong that resounded for miles around. It was still dark and you had to proceed through the jungle to the meditation hall where thirty or forty monks and foreign visitors were assembled on mats on the floor. After a reading from Buddhist scriptures we did anapanasati breathing meditation followed by yoga and tai chi under the direction of various masters. The only other sounds you could hear were the animals and insects outside. After the sun had risen we had breakfast, which usually consisted of vegetables and tofu. The rest of the day was spent in fifty minute periods of breathing and walking meditation, with one break for lunch. There was no meal after noon except for a small snack, such as bananas. Everything was done in an attentive way, with no speaking allowed for the 10 day retreat period other than short interviews with the teachers after day 5.

I lived in a kuti most of the time. All you had in there was a straw mat, some candles and a mosquito net. There was a water pump outside, but during the monsoon season you didn't need it. It rained so hard you just had to put a barrel under the drain pipe and you got all the water you needed. There was so much water that the local farmers put small boats on their fields and went fishing! When I entered the place in the evening the first thing I had to do was to remove the scorpions from the walls. Buddhism does not allow the killing of any living creatures, so I would have to steer them toward the door and shoo them out. There was also a huge snake that had made itself at home on the roof of the hut. There were lots of poisonous snakes around, including king cobras, but I didn't hear of anyone ever getting bitten.

No, I volunteered. I saw it as a kind of donation, and the abbot liked the idea. The master of the monastery, Ajarn Buddhadhadassa, was very well known all over Thailand and had written over fifty books on Buddhism. He supported the need for the monks to learn English as part of their gereral education.

The classes took place at the same time every day and lasted ninety minutes. There were usually from ten to fifteen participants, most of them in their twenties. The abbot, Ajarn Po, was the oldest. He must have been in his late forties and had spent 10 years meditating in a cave. The building was shaped like a ship which was supposed to be sailing on Mara, the sea of suffering. There was a roof to keep out the rain, but otherwise it was open.and the classes took place in the bow. There was a blackboard, but no English textbooks books, so I had to come up with my own exercises every day.

They were amazingly sharp and focussed and seemed to pick things up effortlessly. Most of them had had English in school. The problem was they had never learned how to speak. They could form complex sentences, but you often could not understand a word they were saying. So I had to dream up a lot of activities to practise pronunciation with them.

It was almost exclusively frontal teaching, which is what they were accustomed to. In the local schools the teacher is an authority, and the pupils are reluctant to answer alone for fear of losing face. So we worked a lot with chants. There were certain subjects you had to avoid. Anything connected with sexuality for instance. In addition to my own material, I worked a lot with Buddhist texts.

I didn't get anything worse than a few infections. When you do a lot of meditating you acquire an amazing resistance to illness. There were no medical facilities within the monastery.

I believe I learned as much from the monks as they from me. Their peaceful, smiling presence inspired me to make a contact with them which facilitated the learning process. In my courses now, I still try to see the beautiful, curious and smiling people behind the sometimes tired or frustrated participants. I think my time in Suan Mokkh showed me that teaching can be a very intimate experience where you have the honor to share in the personal lives of other people and become enriched by this experience, at least as much as they are rewarded by your own contribution to the lesson.