Monks

Concerning Hugo Quintana's otherwise sensitive and enjoyable review of "La Virgen" (Calendar, Dec. 17): The use of "friar" and "monk" are not interchangeable. Friars are members of religious orders (e.g. Franciscan or Dominican) who move in and out of friaries and do pastoral and teaching ministries in the midst of the greater world. Monks (e.g. Benedictines, Camaldolese, Carthusians, Cistercians) live in monasteries, take vows of stability that friars do not take, leave their monasteries only by way of exception and view their primary work as prayer for the world and the praise of God. Both are worthy callings, but they are distinctly different.

Buddhist monk Ando remembers the toil of all those years, trying to satisfy the training demands of an aging martial arts master who could never be pleased. Silent and impassive, monk Yang-ik perched in the lotus position on a platform above his young proteges, who leaped from mats, kicking two impossibly high bags one after the other, the best adding aerial somersaults before landing gracefully, like big cats. When they finished, panting and sweating, the master dismissed them.

China has sentenced three Tibetan monks as accessories to murder for having helped another monk burn himself to death in a political protest. In the closely watched case in Sichuan province, Drongdru, the uncle of the monk who committed suicide, was ordered imprisoned for 11 years for "intentional homicide" in hiding the young monk, Phuntsog, and preventing him from getting medical treatment. Two other monks were sentenced to 10 and 13 years in prison after a separate trial Tuesday in which they were accused of "plotting, instigating and assisting" in the self-immolation of the 16-year-old monk, according to Tibetan exile groups.

Paul Motian, an influential and much-admired jazz drummer who first gained renown in the late 1950s as part of the Bill Evans Trio and later became a composer and the leader of his own groups, has died. He was 80. Motian died Tuesday at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City of complications from myelodysplastic syndrome, a bone marrow disorder, said Tina Pelikan, a spokeswoman for ECM Records. During his nearly six-decade career, Motian (pronounced like "motion") spent a substantial amount of time with two of the finest jazz pianists: Evans and Keith Jarrett.

The peal of the church bell splits the predawn darkness like a summons from God himself. The hermits of Big Sur rise from their beds, slip on white robes and emerge one by one from their quarters ? concrete-block cells heated with propane stoves and adorned with third-hand furniture and framed inscriptions of St. Romuald's Brief Rule For Camaldolese Monks. Sit in your cell as in paradise. Put the whole world behind you and forget it. If only it were that easy. The Catholic monks of the New Camaldoli Hermitage have lived a world apart in the inspirational majesty of Big Sur for half a century.

A mass grave containing the bodies of thousands of Buddhist monks killed on the orders of Soviet dictator Josef Stalin has been discovered in western Mongolia, British television reported Tuesday. The grave near the western town of Moron was filled with the remains of monks killed in a brutal suppression of the Lamaist faith under Communist rule, the British Broadcasting Corporation said.

About 100 Buddhist monks in a western Myanmar city staged a peaceful march to mark the anniversary of last year's crackdown on pro-democracy demonstrators. Meanwhile in Yangon, recently released political prisoners helped celebrate the 20th anniversary of the founding of the party led by detained leader Aung San Suu Kyi, while police and other security personnel kept a close watch. No protests directly related to the crackdown were noted in Yangon, where last year's protests attracted as many as 100,000 people.

In an isolated Himalayan monastery in India's remote northeast, 150 maroon-robed Buddhist monks have been chanting and praying for something a little offbeat -- a Grammy. One of their own, Lama Tashi, left Thursday for Los Angeles to attend the Feb. 8 Grammy Awards ceremony in which he has been nominated in the best traditional world music album category. "The nomination came as a surprise and I feel lucky," Tashi, 38, said before boarding a flight from Gauhati, the region's largest city.

Israeli bailiffs broke down the door of the St. John in the Desert monastery Sunday, enforcing an order to evict six Melkite monks and return the site to its owners, the Franciscans. The Greek Melkite Catholic monks leased the monastery from the Franciscan order in 1978. The Franciscans filed suit in 1994, saying the lease had expired. An Israeli court ruled that the site belonged to the Franciscans. The monks were ordered to leave by today.

Rival groups of monks wielding crowbars and sledgehammers clashed over control of a 1,000-year-old monastery in a community regarded as the cradle of Orthodox Christianity, police said. Seven monks were injured and transported by boat to receive treatment. They were released after several hours, police said. No one was arrested, but three monks were banned from reentering the Orthodox sanctuary at Mt. Athos, on a selfgoverning peninsula in northern Greece.

China has sentenced three Tibetan monks as accessories to murder for having helped another monk burn himself to death in a political protest. In the closely watched case in Sichuan province, Drongdru, the uncle of the monk who committed suicide, was ordered imprisoned for 11 years for "intentional homicide" in hiding the young monk, Phuntsog, and preventing him from getting medical treatment. Two other monks were sentenced to 10 and 13 years in prison after a separate trial Tuesday in which they were accused of "plotting, instigating and assisting" in the self-immolation of the 16-year-old monk, according to Tibetan exile groups.

Fire Monks Zen Mind Meets Wildfire at the Gates of Tassajara Colleen Morton Busch The Penguin Press: 256 pp., $25.95

In the summer of 2008, a wildfire burning in California's Los Padres National Forest swept down on Tassajara Hot Springs, a historic resort not far from Big Sur that was home to the first Zen Buddhist monastery in North America. Little stood in the way of the wind-whipped flames except five monks with hoses pumping water from a creek. The odds were decidedly not in their favor, but after the inferno passed, nearly all of the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center's historic stone buildings and wooden cabins remained unscathed.

Every Wednesday afternoon, my colleague Douglas Burton-Christie and I try to conjure the desert in a classroom at Loyola Marymount University. We are both bona fide desert rats, but we come to the "land of little rain," as Mary Austin once called it, from very different places as we teach an interdisciplinary seminar called Into the Desert. I'm in the English department and have long written of the deserts along the U.S.-Mexico border and the drama of the migrants who try to cross.

"Of Gods and Men" is a thrilling adventure of the spirit. Austere yet provocative, this is not only a film about faith, it also has faith that the power generated by complex moral decisions can be as unstoppable as any runaway locomotive. Directed by Xavier Beauvois and based on the true story of a profound life-and-death crisis faced by nine French monks in a monastery in Algeria's Atlas Mountains in the mid-1990s, "Of Gods and Men" has been nothing less than a sensation in its native France.

When it comes to creating uniquely delicious cocktails, Eric Alperin is one of the best mixologists in town. And this week his bar, the Varnish ? which is located in a warm, wooden speak-easy behind an unmarked door at Cole's in downtown L.A. ? is celebrating its two-year anniversary. Since the Varnish can be a tough room to get into (it's among the best and most exclusive cocktail dens in the city), we thought we'd share one of Alperin's signature cocktail recipes with you so that you can attempt to re-create his boozy magic at home.

More than 600 people chanting "orthodoxy or death" protested a decision to forcibly evict rebellious Orthodox monks from a monastery on Mt. Athos. The monks oppose efforts to improve relations between the Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches. That has put them at odds with Orthodox leaders. Last month, religious authorities at Mt. Athos told 117 residents of the monastery of Esphigmenou -- one of 20 on the mountain -- to leave.

More than 100 Buddhist monks marched peacefully in a northern Myanmar town noted for its defiance of the country's military rulers, in the first large protest since the junta violently crushed anti-government demonstrations a month ago. The monks marched for nearly an hour in Pakokku, chanting a Buddhist prayer that has become associated with the democracy cause. They did not carry signs or shout slogans, but their action was clearly in defiance of the military government.

The peal of the church bell splits the predawn darkness like a summons from God himself. The hermits of Big Sur rise from their beds, slip on white robes and emerge one by one from their quarters ? concrete-block cells heated with propane stoves and adorned with third-hand furniture and framed inscriptions of St. Romuald's Brief Rule For Camaldolese Monks. Sit in your cell as in paradise. Put the whole world behind you and forget it. If only it were that easy. The Catholic monks of the New Camaldoli Hermitage have lived a world apart in the inspirational majesty of Big Sur for half a century.

For the Trappist monks at the Abbey of New Clairvaux, life follows a pattern centuries old. They spend their days in the field and their nights in silence. They gather in prayer seven times daily, starting at 3:30 a.m. In many of their affairs, they are still guided by the 6th century Rule of St. Benedict ? but not one of its 73 chapters deals with their current travails. Benedict offers no words of wisdom on how the monks might find the funds to complete their most passionate pursuit: the resurrection of a medieval monastery from a jumble of stones William Randolph Hearst shipped over from Spain.