Starter Kit. Idea 194 of 500. Cluster 9
Monastery stays under proper protocol, with the rules made clear in advance
The mechanism, from the book
What cannot be copied. Every competitor can build a beach hotel. No competitor can offer a Buddhist tradition more than 2,000 years old, still practised at the places where it first took root on the island.
The first step
Draft the rules a lay visitor must keep during a stay: dress, silence, meal times, what may not be photographed, how to address a monk. Take the draft to the lay committee of a monastery that accepts overnight lay visitors and let the chief incumbent correct it until it is his document. Offer to send it to every enquiry and screen visitors against it. The proof is an approved rulebook and one booking made after reading it.
- Who pays first
- A visitor who has read enough to know a monastery is not a hotel and will gladly pay for transport, briefing and arrangements to stay correctly.
- What leaves today
- Without clear rules in advance, monasteries either refuse visitors or suffer them, and the longest, most valuable stay the island could offer never gets made.
Ask first
- Department of Cultural Affairs. Ask whether they hold guidance on visitor conduct at monasteries that you could follow.
- Sri Lanka Tourism Development Authority. Ask whether monastery stays for foreign guests must be registered, and with whom.
Check before you spend
Whether the chief incumbent agrees in writing to the stay, the rules a guest must keep, and who answers if a guest breaks them.
Find out these three numbers
- How many nights can a guest stay without disturbing the monastery's routine?
- What donation does the lay committee consider fair for a night?
- How many guests a month ask for a monastery stay now?
A comparison from the book
Japan. Chapter Eleven
"Institutions were imported. Identity was not, which is why the borrowing never read as surrender."
Borrow the booking and the protocol from abroad, and keep the monastery's own rule unchanged.
The test
Does it keep value that now leaves the island, or build the proof that lets somebody else do so?
From the appendix of Why Not Sri Lanka? by Dr Maheshika Halbeisen. The idea and the mechanism are the book's; this kit was written for the site.