A Monk's Rains Retreat in Spain: Beauty, Minds and Deep Time

A monk just back from three months in a stone country house in the hills outside Barcelona opens his Dhamma reflection by apologising for what he expects will be a travel log, and then, one detour at a time, turns the log into a teaching. Ajahn Ruciro, speaking at Amaravati Buddhist Monastery on 26 October 2026, describes keeping the vassa, the traditional three-month rains retreat, at Panyagiri, about an hour's drive from Barcelona. Along the way he works through an old commentarial idea about three kinds of mind, a walk to a prehistoric stone structure, an encounter with two Great Danes that left him "half dog," and a reflection on how moods shape the mind's willingness to speak. The talk is conversational, self-deprecating and sometimes unfinished, and that looseness is part of what makes it useful.

What is the vassa, and what was it like to keep it in a 400-year-old house?

The vassa is the rains retreat, a period of roughly three months when Buddhist monastics traditionally stay put, usually in one place, rather than travelling. Ajahn Ruciro frames his own season in those terms, calling it "a very good vassa" that was "enjoyable," with "lots of emotions" and "ups and downs."

The setting is worth lingering on. He describes a large old country house, a masia, with three floors. The original section dates to the 1600s; he could tell because a carved stone above the front door reads "160-something." Later additions and a renovation, which he places in the 1960s, have updated the building without erasing its age. It is made of big, chunky stones, built, he says, for hot weather. The land runs to about 60 acres of forest, with more being acquired that should bring it to around 80. And it borders a national park. There is no marker where the monastery ends and the mountain begins. "You just walk into the national park and it just carries on going up and up and the views get better and better," he says.

That boundary detail matters to the talk. Much of what follows is about how a practitioner relates to open space, and how easily the mind mistakes walking for progress.

Can a beautiful place soften a delusion-type mind?

The most useful idea in the talk is an old classification he attributes to the commentaries, which he thinks appears in the main commentary, though he admits he is not certain. The commentary describes three basic types of mind: the greed type, the anger type and the delusion type. He is careful to say that everyone has all three, and that different minds simply lean toward different things. He suspects his own leaning is toward delusion.

The commentary, as he recalls it, recommends that people of the delusion type spend time in beautiful places. He admits he took that as permission. "So I justified being there," he says, half joking, "I'm a delusion type. So I deserve to be here."

Beneath the humour is a practical observation. In recent years he has been doing a great deal of walking meditation, and he suspects he has been "taking it too seriously, doing too much maybe." Walking at Panyagiri shifted that. Instead of pacing back and forth, he simply walked and looked. The effect, in his words, was to "let my mind expand with the views," and he describes a high place with a lot of sky and mountains as having a "very very calming effect."

It is worth noticing what he is and is not claiming. He is not saying that scenery cures delusion. He is describing a temperament, a set of inclinations, and suggesting that a mind which tends to get lost in its own narrow loops may be helped by a setting large enough to loosen them. The practice is still the practice. The landscape simply changes the conditions under which it is done.

What do ancient stone structures teach about our own importance?

In the forest around the monastery are dolmens, megalithic tombs made of standing stones capped by a large flat slab. He calls them "very very ancient rock structures, like very small Stonehenges," and estimates they are around 5,000 years old. The nearest is about 45 minutes' walk uphill. He notes that the main capstone on top of that one has come down, and admits he has not done much reading about them. What holds his attention is the idea of people living in these forests and, for religious or spiritual purposes, managing to lift huge rocks into a table-like form.

From there he moves to a reflection that is simple and very old in Buddhist practice: the contemplation of time and of our place in it. He observes how easily we assume that our era is the centre of things.

"It's easy for us to forget that there have been not just a few generations before, but hundreds and hundreds of generations before us. And when you contemplate on that you realize helps you to realize how insignificant we are really. And it helps us to see our problems maybe not quite as so important."

Ajahn Ruciro, in his 26 October 2026 Dhamma talk at Amaravati

The move from stone to sorrow is quick but deliberate. Seeing how small a single lifetime is against the span of human effort does not diminish the person. It recalibrates the problems that have been filling the foreground. The dolmen does the same work that a sutta reflection on impermanence might do, only with a visible object in the hand.

What did a Great Dane encounter reveal about fear?

The talk turns comic here. He describes the Spanish fondness for large dogs, often off the lead, and a morning walk that went wrong. Ten paces out of the monastery gate, a Great Dane came around the corner and ran at him, barking and lunging. A second, slightly bigger Great Dane joined in. The owners, he says, offered no sympathy. "They're only puppies," they said, though the animals reached his chest. His Spanish, he admits, got a little tangled in the moment: he said "grande," meaning big, and was corrected to "grandes," because there were two of them.

What he takes from it is more interesting than the comedy. He says he "didn't do the whole reflection on fear at all." Instead, he "just kind of turned into this half human, half dog," barking back in a human voice and backing away. The reaction was instinctive, faster than any contemplation. The lesson he draws is not that fear should be suppressed, but that a trained practitioner can still be swept into a reflex, and that noticing this afterwards is part of the work.

Why do daily life and language learning expose the mind?

Much of the talk is about ordinary monastic life, and it is refreshingly unromantic. The monastery's track is a steep dirt road, gravelled but washed into troughs every winter, so the team fills in divots and some deliveries never arrive. A companion, whom he describes as a builder who "really loves building," is renovating one of two caravans out back so that more people can stay. Another resident, Eleonora, is "really settling in." He describes living with the builder as easy because he is "very straightforward" and has "no kind of hidden agenda."

He also spent the season trying to learn Spanish, through apps, Google Translate and YouTube lessons, with the enthusiasm coming and going in phases. What he noticed was not the grammar but the mood underneath it.

"It was interesting to see how the mind is so influenced by its moods."

Ajahn Ruciro, in his 26 October 2026 Dhamma talk at Amaravati

He gives a specific example. When his confidence is low, approaching a Spanish speaker and saying anything becomes a challenge. The language is the same; the self standing in front of it is not. For a practitioner, that is a small but precise lesson in how much of what we call difficulty is really the state of mind we bring to a situation.

How does contemplating the body close the talk?

The final portion of the talk, as far as the published material available for this article goes, moves toward the body. The fragments are brief, and this write-up does not want to reconstruct more than the speaker clearly said. He touches on how the body is, in a commonly repeated image, replaced every seven years, and on the habit of treating oneself as something fixed. Because the transcript is partial here, the full argument of that closing section is best heard directly rather than paraphrased.

Even so, the direction matches the rest of the talk. The retreat has moved from a house, to a boundary, to a tomb, to a snarling dog, to a mind unsettled by a sentence in a second language. Each step points back to the same question: what is actually being taken as solid, and what is simply passing through?

Where to go from here

If this reflection resonated, the full talk is the best next step. Amaravati publishes its teachings in audio and ebook form through the Teachings menu on its website, at amaravati.org, and lists its events on the calendar at amaravati.org/calendar. For a reader drawn to the three types of mind, it is worth exploring the commentarial tradition behind the idea and testing it honestly against your own habits: notice where your mind tends to lean, and whether a change of setting, even a walk, softens or sharpens those leanings. For a reader drawn to the dolmens, the reflection on generations is a practice that needs no travel at all. Pick one ordinary worry this week and hold it against the long span of human time. Notice what shrinks, and what does not.