I visited the region (eastern Sichuan, Tibetan plateau) in 2006, and played counterstrike and diablo 2 against monks at the local internet cafe. Very surreal, getting shot in the head by a monk.

Heh I used to play CS 1.6 with my Catholic priest. He was very very good too, though his favourite game was Wolfenstein. Apparently shooting Nazis and their monsters was cathartic

Larung Gar is quite clean. Whilst the living conditions are basic, it's certainly not a slum. The surrounding towns definitely have a lower standard of living.

As you noted, I spent time hanging out in teahouses with monks passing their afternoons on their iphones w/ flawless 4G / LTE connections :)

>iPhone 6s

It's a funny thing with monks. Quite a few are former businessman who want to try something more spiritual for a change but still are wealthy. I walked a bit with a young monk on the way to Tengboche Monastery and his main interest as we talked seemed to be designer sunglasses and which brand would be good to get.

>It's a funny thing with monks. Quite a few are former businessman who want to try something more spiritual for a change but still are wealthy.

So mostly phonies being tourists in spiritual-land?

Renunciation is defined with reference to your mental attitude towards possessions, not the presence or absence thereof. See, for example the 'Royal Sage' (Raja Rshi).

Hypocrisy though is defined by "the presence or absence thereof".

Not really. Detachment from love of material possessions doesn't imply having no material possessions. It implies a lack of a disordered love for them. The true test of hypocrisy would be to see how one of those monks responds when his phone gets stolen.

That is a Western view of things where spiritual and material realms are different. Dharmic religions consider the spiritual realm to be a superset of the material, not separate from it.

You meant to write "the spiritual realm to be a superset…", I'm sure.

Gah!

Attachment also applies to doctrine and ideas.

You're right, of course, but it's not binary (either you're attached or you're detached). Instead, the idea is to become attached to subtler (read: causing more lasting happiness) aspects of life, as a consequence of which one becomes detached from the grosser (read: causing more fleeting happiness) aspects. This moving in stages applies on physical, emotional and intellectual levels.

Jumping to absolute detachment is not really possible.

I'm not sure a former businessman being spiritual is particularly more phony than anyone else doing it.

Perhaps, but based on a similar experience I had with a Tibetan monk, I'd say there's actually quite a lot of room for flexibility. Just because someone has a handful of materialistic interests doesn't mean they're incapable of being a good person or teacher. That was probably the main lesson I learned from the monk I knew. As outsiders, we often have a very romanticized, storybook view of monkhood that doesn't line up with reality.