Visiting a Fellow Human at the Benedictine Monastery

Nearly 15 years ago I watched a line of young men file out of a Buddhist temple near the sacred Chinese mountain of Putuo. Then, as now, I had a naive belief in the power of spiritual exercises, if not the spirits to which they are often dedicated. Memorization, meditation, asceticism, devotion, submission—these are the tools with which we sculpt virtue out of the self's raw material, and there in front of me were masters of the craft, clad in saffron robes, their shaved heads surely full of hard-won wisdom, their hearts pure (or at least purer than mine).