A couple of nights ago over dinner my brother-in-law asked exactly that, “what is a monk?” I had to stop and think. I could get out, “a group of people who live apart.” Monk comes from “monos” a Greek word which means “alone.” Wikipedia also defines a monk as a person who practices “religious asceticism.” Either of those definitionns could apply to a number of people and not be limited to a group of men or women living in a monastic community.
A question of relevance
Are monks and hippies and poets relevant? No, we are deliberately irrelevant. We live with an ingrained irrelevance which is proper to every human being. The marginal [person] accepts the basic irrelevance of the human condition, an irrelevance which is manifested above all by the fact of death. The marginal person, the monk, the displaced … Read more