Fool’s Gold: A Reflection on Religious Bureaucracy

I’m Vanessa Love, an architect by training, a painter and writer by nature, and someone who has spent years walking with the Buddha. I run Gaia Healing as a space for channeled teachings from Buddha, Guanyin, and Green Tara, but this piece isn’t one of those. This is my own story. I spent seven weeks living at a Burmese Buddhist monastery, and what I saw there left me with both questions and answers about what gets done in the name of Dharma.

I want to say clearly: this isn’t an attack on Buddhism. It’s closer to a surgeon’s diagnosis, careful and unflinching, meant to save the patient rather than wound them further. I prayed before writing this that it would come out as discourse on truth. My intent is to let the Buddha’s own words be the blade, not mine.

This is a beautiful monastery to visit, but I can’t recommend it to anyone sincerely seeking to deepen their meditation practice through a longer stay. I made genuine friends here, and I hold real affection for the place itself. But if your goal is to learn the Dharma and practice somewhere that reflects the Buddha’s own teachings, I’d encourage you to look elsewhere.

The Gold That Was Mold

The monastery’s main pagoda gleamed gold. A resident told me the walls beneath had been black with mold before they painted over it. I couldn’t stop thinking about that image the rest of my stay, how much of what shines is just a good paint job over neglect. The kitchens were old, the kutis held mold in their floors, flies gathered over the dining hall. I got sick for long stretches while I was there, and I no longer think that was a coincidence.

The Buddha taught that the mind and its conditions are not separate from the body and its environment, that heedlessness (pamada) shows up everywhere it’s allowed to take root. A place that isn’t cared for reveals something about the care its keepers are actually capable of extending to the people inside it. There is a difference between simplicity and neglect, and the difference is love.

Service Without Dharma

The long-term residents received virtually no guidance in the Dharma. During the morning chant, there was a Dharma talk, but beyond that there were no teachers assigned to any residents. Anyone hoping to deepen their practice had to study entirely on their own, with no guidance to advance beyond where they started. Instead, they spent most of their days cooking, cleaning, and maintaining the monastery. Service can be its own wholesome practice, but the Buddha taught that generosity should walk alongside the teaching of the Dharma, not replace it. I didn’t see that balance there. Residents who cooked and served every day, some for over a year, were told publicly they’d need to leave because the summer electricity bill was expensive, while new donors were already being welcomed to take their rooms.

Power Without Compassion

Some monks ran the place through fear rather than through the Dharma. Authority, for them, was something to wield, not something to be worthy of. One monk, Nalaka, tried to have me removed three separate times. The first time, I later learned, was because of a bias against Chinese and Japanese people, though I explained to him I am from the Philippines. I had also explained to him I was there to heal from a medical condition. He didn’t ask about my health or my life. When I shared that I was taking a break from work due to illness and wanted a quiet place to meditate, he told me to leave because “I don’t have a place to go,” even though I have my own place in Austin and was only seeking temporary lodging for practice. “Pick a day this week to leave,” he said. A friend had to intervene before I was even allowed to stay through the illness I’d come there to recover from. The second time, he simply seemed to forget I was someone he’d already spoken to, and tried the same thing again. The third time came later, after I’d left briefly to prepare for an international move. He was preparing to kick me out because I’d left without his approval, despite having already told me I could remain until my departure.

Another monk harshly berated me for unknowingly entering the library before a meeting, when a simple explanation would have done. The language he used was unnecessarily unkind.

The Buddha’s teaching on anger uses the image of a person who picks up a burning coal to throw at another, and is the first one burned. I did not feel any anger. But I don’t think the answer is to swallow the injustice and call it equanimity. The Kalama Sutta is explicit that we are not meant to accept a teaching, or a teacher’s conduct, merely because of their robes, their tradition, or their claimed authority. We are meant to test it against what causes harm and what causes freedom from harm. Ego with a title is still ego, and fear used as governance is control, not discipline.

The Nun Who Was the Sun

There was one nun at the monastery, the oldest in age and carrying health problems of her own, who was the most loving and kind person there. She was the sun that shone on that whole campus. Her smile lit up hearts. She cooked until 10pm almost every night, and still was not allowed to chant at the front of the room with the monks. She ate on the side. She was ordered around and spoken to disrespectfully by men decades younger than her, and I once watched a young monk yell at her in front of others, the only ordained woman on the whole campus, and I never once saw it dim her warmth.

The way she was treated didn’t reflect the Buddha’s own view of women. He ordained his own foster mother, Mahapajapati Gotami, against considerable resistance, and there are enlightened women, the Therigatha, the verses of the elder nuns, sitting right in the canon as proof that awakening was never gendered. What I watched wasn’t Dharma. It was a much older cultural hierarchy wearing Dharma’s clothing, the same thousand-year-old expired culture mistaken for the teaching itself. It only made her generosity look larger by comparison: a whole institution built to diminish her, and she remained the brightest thing in the room.

Merit For Sale

Nalaka, the same monk who told me to leave, also tried to teach me, as if it were settled doctrine, that feeding a single monk once outweighs feeding fifty ordinary people every day for fifty years. He believed the multiplier was a thousandfold, compounding with each level of a monk’s seniority, and he told newcomers plainly that feeding the monks was the highest merit they could earn in this life. A whole hidden economy of merit, with tiers and prices, as if devotion could be metered.

This isn’t what the Velama Sutta teaches. That sutta’s actual arc moves from grand material giving, upward through feeding the virtuous, taking refuge, keeping the precepts, and ends by saying a single moment of loving-kindness, or true insight into impermanence, outweighs all of it. The point was never to find the rarest recipient. The point was the purity of the heart doing the giving.

Yet donations at the monastery were announced by name and dollar amount, like a leaderboard. I kept thinking of the widow’s two coins in the Bible, not a Buddhist story but one I couldn’t help borrowing here, where the poorest gift, given without anything held back, outweighs the wealthiest gift given from surplus. Dana was never supposed to be a transaction with a receipt.

Compassion for Flies But Not Food

One detail has stayed with me since. The monks ate meat at every meal, yet compassion for insects was performed with visible ceremony: safety nets were used to catch flies during lunchtime, so they could be carried outside instead of harmed. When I asked about the meat, I was told that eating meat carries no karma at all, while disobeying one’s parents carries grave negative karma.

I couldn’t stop measuring that teaching against the Buddha’s own life. He left his father’s palace against his father the king’s wishes to seek enlightenment, and that act of disobedience became the greatest gift the Buddha as a son could have given his father. If the Buddha’s own path contradicts the rule I was taught, the rule was never really about the Dharma.

Be a Lamp Unto Yourself

I can’t know the intentions behind everything I witnessed, but my time there left me feeling that women and lay practitioners weren’t extended the respect the Buddha asked of his followers. He taught that monastics and laypeople sustain one another through generosity, gratitude, ethical conduct, and the sharing of the Dharma. In my experience, that spirit was largely absent.

I watched trash in plastic bags burned in the open air on a campus meant to embody care for all beings and the planet. I heard monks describe an enlightenment factory temple that could turn out awakened beings by the tens of thousands.

I share these stories only to say that a good system can be built into a poor institution, and that renunciation without love just relocates suffering instead of ending it. Fear can run a place for a long time before anyone names it as fear. The Buddha’s last instruction, on his own deathbed, was to be a lamp unto yourself, not because teachers and institutions don’t matter, but because they were never meant to be where your refuge finally rests. He also gave us the raft: something to carry you across the river, not something to keep hauling on your back once you’ve reached the other shore. A tradition, a monastery, a robe, these are the raft. They are not the far shore.

I believe the answer is to trust the real Dharma, not to outsource our discernment to anyone claiming to have already arrived. May whoever reads this trust their own eyes a little more, and may all beings, inside these walls and out, find their way to real peace.