Don't Worry, Be Grumpy

Fifty Strokes of the Cat

Ours is a strict monastery. It takes two years of disciplined training before one can become a monk. I call it “quality control.” Even in the first year of training, the wannabe monk has to keep the precept of eating no solid food from noon until the dawn of the next day.

One morning, one such postulant came to see me. He was English and in his mid twenties. He told me that he felt very, very guilty about something he had done the day before. He had not been able to sleep the previous night. He had come to me for a confession.

From beneath a drooping head, too ashamed to keep eye contact, he admitted that, late the previous afternoon, he was so hungry that he’d snuck into the monastery kitchen, made himself a sandwich, and eaten it. He had broken one of his training precepts.

“Very good,” I told him.

He glanced up.

“It is very good that you’re being honest and telling me what you’ve done. Now try to eat more at our 11:00 lunchtime, and if you are still hungry, you can drink some fruit juice or have a honey drink, which are allowable. You may even eat some dark chocolate, that’s okay too. Now you may go.”

“What? Aren’t you going to punish me?”

“No, we don’t do punishments in Buddhist monasteries.”

“That’s not good enough,” he continued. “I know my character. If you don’t give me penance, I’ll just do the same thing again.”

I was on the spot. How does one deal with such a person who believes that only punishment can train one to be disciplined? Then an idea came to me.

The previous day, I had been reading Robert Hughes’ historical novel about early Australia called The Fatal Shore. The book describes the extremely brutal punishments inflicted on convicts using a vicious whip called the “cat o’ nine tails,” or “the cat” for short.

“Okay,” I told our miscreant postulant, “I’ll give you a punishment, a traditional Australian punisment. I will give you… fifty strokes of the cat!”

The poor boy’s face drained of color. His lips started to quiver (so much for the English stiff upper lip). He was thinking “Oh no! The abbot is going to flog me. That’s not what I meant by a penance.”

Because he was new to Buddhism, he actually believed he was going to be whipped for stealing a sandwich. Then I explained to him what “fifty strokes of the cat” meant in a Buddhist monastery.

We had two cats at the time. “Please find one of those cats and stroke it fifty times,” I told him. “Learn some compassion from stroking the cat, and then you might learn how to forgive yourself. That is the secret of discipline.”

He took his punishment very well.

So did our cat.