Monastery is an independent piece of land, where people "cultivating dhamma" basically live their quiet lives, growing their food.
First of all, does any one know, if that definition of monastery is completely utopian nowadays (now I got afraid it's always been)? Are there only the institutions, with hierarchy etc, which are more concerned with braining and passing on traditions than life (and death)?
It's silly to expect to find much info on the numerous smaller monasteries (that are hopefully more real then just my fantasies) in the Far East on the Internet, but are there some immigrant-friendly Far East countries with sort of looser... Who am I kidding, the days of laity up keeping the monks are gone, without governmental support it's impossible to make it.
Uhmm, so how about I just tell you a joke:
Several centuries ago there was a monastery in the mountains. Besides a handful on monks and old liberated grandpa there lived a cat with them. So every morning, when the monks we're trying to concentrate real hard on their proudness and mumbled the holiest mantra Tut-sua-mun-ran-ki (which meant "Please grow" in some old forgotten language) the Stupid Cat (that's what the animal was called) always came to the meditation hall and made a lot of noise.
So one day the old master, ordered for the cat to be tied to the post outdoors. This was also done on the day after that and became a habit, which was and carried on after the old masters death.
And nowadays one highly valued old sutta reads about the holy significance of the holy ritual of tying a holy cat to the holy post...
(with a holy rope...)
(Also there are a lot of branched follower-groups of that holy scripture, that agonize and fight about whether the cat should be tied by the testicles for the effect and yet some still continue the ancient debated of whether this ritual is a test to see if a monk would torture an animal...)
