Full Ordination in Singapore: Expectations vs. Reality

In a 22-minute talk recorded about a week after returning from Singapore, Venerable Thubten Ngawang of Sravasti Abbey describes the triple platform ordination he took there, a sequence of three ordinations completed in a single stretch: the novice ordination retaken, full ordination, and the bodhisattva precepts. He arrived braced for something like an ordeal, anxious and wanting the whole thing finished. What he found was an enclosed Chinese monastery in the middle of a skyscraper city, a team of guides whose job was to correct the smallest details of robes and posture, a nightly repentance chant sung by men with unexpectedly beautiful voices, and a set of expectations he had built in advance that the real month dismantled. The talk is less a travelogue than a study in how anticipation distorts practice, and how an environment built on constant, gentle feedback can become mindfulness itself.

Why Was the Dread Bigger Than the Ordination Itself?

Ven. Thubten Ngawang opens by admitting how he felt going in. "I was feeling some anxiety, uh fear, stress, even dread," he says, and he describes a wish that the moment would simply be over. The preparation had been long, and the weight of one ceremony had come to feel like the whole of it.

That detail matters, because it is the hinge of the talk. Dread rarely sits quietly in the background. It builds a picture of the event, and then it reads every new fact against that picture. He compares the feeling to an earlier threshold, the moment before he first came to the Abbey, when a Buddhist monastery was "totally different than anything I had ever done in my life." Even after several years as a novice, he says, he had grown comfortable with how things were done at the Abbey. Singapore looked like a departure from that comfort, and the apprehension followed.

"It was like, this is different. This is new." (Ven. Thubten Ngawang, in the video, around 2:25)

The rest of the talk is him checking the predictions one by one, and finding most of them wrong. Anyone who has walked toward a stressful event, whether an exam, a surgery, or a first retreat, will recognize the pattern. The picture you carry in is often more vivid, and more threatening, than the room you actually enter.

What Is Triple Platform Ordination, and Why Does It Matter?

The talk's structure assumes a listener who knows the basics, so it helps to name them. In the monastic tradition Ven. Thubten Ngawang describes, the triple platform is three ordinations received in sequence: the novice ordination, which he retook here, then full ordination, and then the bodhisattva precepts, the commitments taken in the Mahayana path. In his account, all three happened on the final day of the program. The monks were ordained at one monastery, while the nuns were housed at a separate temple, and the two communities met for a group photo, an introduction of the preceptors and witnesses, and a large lunch. Otherwise, he says, the groups stayed apart for most of the month.

The stakes of that final day are what fueled his anxiety. A single ceremony was meant to mark a lasting change in how he would live and what he would commit to. Yet the talk's real subject is the month that surrounded it, the daily life of practice that prepared him for those vows.

Could a Monastery in the Middle of a City Feel Like Its Own World?

Here the romantic image gave way. He had heard and seen online that the monastery sat in the middle of Singapore, right beside a highway. He admits his expectations were shaped by the mountain monasteries that many of his Abbey colleagues had visited in Taiwan. "I was romanticizing that," he says. "Oh, how nice that would have been. And I'm in the middle of a city."

The reality, as he tells it, was more layered. The monastery was founded in 1898 and is among the oldest temples in Singapore. He notes that it had been under renovation for more than 30 years, and that the work was a restoration of an already old complex of buildings rather than a fresh build. Its 36 monks lived together in one room in what he calls the basement, and the many buildings between the highway and their quarters blocked most of the noise.

"I was like in my own little world. And it was really amazing." (Ven. Thubten Ngawang, in the video, around 6:34)

He describes a small courtyard, a view upward of the main hall and the sky framed by Chinese roofs, and the skyscrapers visible only from the upper floors. The daily route moved through the building in layers. The monks walked from the basement to the Buddha Hall for morning and evening service, then to the dining room on that level, then up to the floor where teachings and rehearsals took place. "Down at the basement, it was this our own little world," he says. The city was present but held at a distance, which is itself a lesson for anyone who imagines that practice requires a mountain.

Are the Guides There to Catch You Out or to Help?

The most striking part of the talk is his account of the guides. The name is easy to mishear, and he says so himself: "not to be confused with guards." Yet they do patrol, and the feedback is constant. The guides corrected how a monk wore his robes and how he walked. They checked whether a kneeling monk had covered his feet, and when he had not, a guide would pull the robe down to cover them. Other questions were just as specific: whether the alms bowl was creased, whether it was folded properly on the shoulder, whether the collar sat correctly, which hand was used to move the left bowl, and whether the napkin was folded and aligned with the front of the table. He notes there were five guides for 36 monks, and a disciplinarian, "this kind of big, tough-looking guy, looked kind of like a bouncer," who walked the perimeter of the Buddha Hall, stopping and turning at each corner.

"They're not there to harm us or to point out all of our faults. They're there to help us." (Ven. Thubten Ngawang, in the video, around 8:42)

His first reaction was fear. Each time the disciplinarian turned a corner, he expected to be tapped on the shoulder. The disciplinarian never touched him. Over time, the fear turned into recognition. The guides and the disciplinarian were the outward form of a practice he already knew: the mind that keeps asking what the body is doing, what the speech is doing, and what the mind is doing.

"This is like the embodiment of mindfulness and introspective awareness." (Ven. Thubten Ngawang, in the video, around 9:07)

He then describes a shift that happened almost mechanically. "Every time I see a guide, I remember the instructions," he says. Seeing a guide was enough to restart his attention to the napkin, the posture, the robe. "They didn't even have to say anything," he adds, with obvious amusement. "They just had to stand there looking." He describes this as regaining mindfulness, a reminder that a well-designed environment can do part of the work of awareness on a person's behalf.

What Did the Chanting and a Guide's Kindness Reveal?

Not everything was corrective. In the evenings the community often sang the repentance chant, and he found it "extremely beautiful." Many of the guides had fine voices, and he compares the experience to the men's chorus he had sung in before his monastic life, though for a very different reason. The sound changed the emotional texture of the day, and the guides who had just been correcting robes were now part of the music.

"I was just struck by his kindness." (Ven. Thubten Ngawang, in the video, around 12:10, describing a guide who made sure the temple was properly cared for)

The kindness of one guide is where his earlier assumptions broke most completely. He had expected uniform strictness and found instead a person who, after a nap, showed a warmth that surprised him. The talk here is partial, and the excerpt ends as he begins recalling a particular night during the chanting, so the full weight of that memory is not available in this account. What does come through is the change in his assumptions. The people he had imagined as adversaries were, in his telling, the people most committed to his success.

What Does This Talk Leave Open?

The talk ends with self-aware humor. He says he is "not the same," and then, with a laugh, that everything is different now and that he will see how it plays out. The remark is characteristic of the whole account. He does not claim to have resolved the question of what the ordination means for his life. He reports that the reality was not what he feared, and that the shape of the practice around him, from the guides to the chant to the layered building, carried a mindfulness he could not have planned for.

For readers, the useful takeaway is less about Singapore than about expectation. Anxiety builds scenarios, and those scenarios can be so detailed that they feel like evidence. Ven. Thubten Ngawang's talk suggests a practical test: when a dreaded event arrives, notice which parts of the picture were accurate and which were projection. In his case, the guards became helpers, the highway became a quiet courtyard, and a month of feedback became a training in attention.

Where to go from here

To hear the full account in his own voice, watch the video on the Sravasti Abbey channel, and explore more teachings at SravastiAbbey.org and ThubtenChodron.org. The excerpt drawn on here covers the first portion of the talk; the rest, including his account of the chanting nights and the ordination itself, is best heard directly. If you attend online teachings, the video's own request is worth taking seriously: attend in the same spirit you would in person.