"Travel, my son, giveth experience, and experience wisdom, and wisdom every good thing: the sword cannot gleam in the field of victory till it leaves the scabbard, nor the pen discourse of eloquence and poetry, till it is taken from the kullumdan"
-- Asiatic Journal of British India
The Buddha enjoined male and female recluses to be wanderers. Not only was it a frugal and environmental way to live, many spiritual benefits come to the practitioner. Samanas ("wandering ascetics") were going against the grain, in the opposite direction of settled, temple-bound brahmin priests.
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Bhikkhus ("monks") and bhikkhunis ("nuns") live dependent on discarded cloth sown together and recycled as robes and alms gathered the way "a bee gathers nectar -- without harm to flowers in the collection process," that is, without begging or insinuating. The benefits of the mendicant path were never limited to monastics, as this environmentally-conscious American couple are proving.
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