This talk was given to those practising in residential communities, London Buddhist Centre, February 1996
I thought I'd begin by saying a bit about the word 'community'. I'm not going to define it and tell you what Dr Johnson said about it in his dictionary. All I want to point out is that it's important how we use words and what they conjure up in our minds when we use them. It's important for those of us who live in Triratna residential communities that the word community means the same thing, brings to mind a similar image.
For instance, a community is not a building. A community may need a building to live in – shelter is one of the four requisites or needs of a monk traditionally – but a community is not a building. A community is not a thing either. It's not an abstract entity. So if you live in a community you can't really talk about 'it', 'the community' as something separate from you. It's more a case of 'us' and 'we'. A community consists of people. People living together, but not just living together - people in communication, in open and honest communication with each other, people building or cultivating friendships with each other, people sharing each others lives. People practising Metta towards each other, loving and caring for each other.
Let's be careful how we use the word community, because it does make a difference. If when you think of your community, what comes to mind is a building that makes a difference - it affects your perceptions, your ideas and your behaviour. If when you think of your community it is a sort of abstract entity for you, then you will be somewhat alienated from what you are involved in. It's best then to think of the community as consisting of yourself and those you live with; 'we' rather than 'it'. The community is us, our interactions, our communication, our friendships – that's the community. Well let's say we should make a distinction between painting and decorating the community building and painting and decorating the community!
The community consists of the people. Stating the obvious aids clarity. And it consists not just of the people sharing a building and eating together. The people need to be endeavouring to Go for Refuge and they need to be in communication with each other. We go for Refuge to the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. In the context of community living, going for refuge to the Buddha means relating on the basis of our highest ideals, it means relating to the best in each other. That means trying to see the best in each, trying to be aware of the best in each other, and that may mean having to think about the people you live with, reflecting on their qualities, putting them in your Metta Bhavana practice.
Going for Refuge to the Dharma in the context of community living means studying together, meditating together and doing devotional practice together. It's very important that we do these things – meditate, study and puja – together otherwise our communal life will amount to no more than community night once a week and eating together, perhaps talking about what's in the newspaper or what's on at the cinema and sharing the same roof and there is nothing very spiritual or radical about that. We need to go for refuge to the Dharma in the community context by engaging in spiritual practice collectively – meditating together, studying together and doing puja together.
Going for refuge to the Sangha in the community context is of course about communication and I think, very importantly, confession. Much more of our communication with one another in the spiritual community needs to be confessional in nature. Communication is obviously a very important aspect of community living, so I want to go into it in a bit more detail. I'm going to look at communication between people living communally under the headings of body, speech and mind.
Under the heading of body isour activity, what we do, how we behave. Well we do communicate quite strongly by how we behave – in fact I think we often communicate much more in how we behave than in what we say. This is probably not surprising since we were communicating through bodily actions before we learnt to communicate verbally.
We can communicate an overall attitude by how we behave – our attitude to the people we live with, our attitude to communal living, even our attitude to life. And we communicate our moods physically. In the course of community life this comes out quite often around things like doing chores, washing the dishes, tidying up, being helpful or not, giving of gifts. For instance I've noticed in communities that a great deal of non-verbal communication happens in the kitchen and around the whole area of food, cooking it, eating it and clearing up after it. How people behave around food communicates a lot about their general attitudes and their particular moods. It's as if we are at our most basic level at feeding time and if we are not careful we can lose touch with Going for Refuge when we are in the kitchen. I think we need to apply extra mindfulness to our behaviour, around food and washing up. The principle that has to run through community living is the principle of co-operation. And co-operation requires a spirit of generosity.
There seems to be two extremes around chores like washing up (it seems to be most particularly washing up for some reason!). The two extremes are the person who does it all the time, almost can't help doing it, but is resentful about it and feels hard done by and martyred and maybe does it with a lot of banging and clashing of pots and pans and cutlery. A bit like an adolescent who's being punished or having to earn their pocket money.
The other extreme is the person who tries to avoid it at all costs but without being too obvious. They will always manage to wait just long enough until someone else does it and then suddenly they discover something incredibly important that they've got to do just at that moment
These as I said are two extremes and most of us probably fall somewhere between them or even move more towards one or the other from time to time. But we need to be mindful here. There is unskilfulness involved. We may be generating ill-will or practising dishonesty. And we will certainly be communicating something to our fellow community members about our attitudes. I would like to encourage a spirit of generosity and helpfulness in our activities. Perhaps we should have an attitude of serving towards each other. We could encourage ourselves to think that the main thing is to serve the other community members at all times, not to look out for ourselves, not to look after no.1 but to serve our companions and friends.
In terms of things we do that communicate something, I would like to encourage a wholesale giving of gifts. Birthdays maybe but perhaps even better on the occasion of Buddhist festivals, Parinirvana Day gifts, Wesak gifts, Dharma day gifts, Sangha day gifts and so on. Perhaps we should even have special community evenings around the time of the main festivals and exchange gifts. The exchange of gifts is like a physical rejoicing in merits and it has a very warming effect on both giver and recipient.
Now to look at communication under the heading of Speech. We can talk a lot and perhaps communicate very little. I think we could usefully look at the Speech aspect of communication under three headings which correspond to three verses of the Sevenfold Puja, namely Confession of Faults, Rejoicing in Merits, and Entreaty and Supplication.
I said earlier that I thought more of our communication needed to be confessional. Perhaps, to put it quite simply, we need to be more concerned with the ethical than the psychological in our communication with one another. We need to confess our unskilful mental states, not just explain them. Please don't misunderstand me, I do think it is useful for us to know why we habitually get into particular unskilful states. Well it's useful up to a point, but then we have to work at trying to transform ourselves and one very potent and effective way to do that is via communication and especially confession. By developing a confessional attitude in our communication we are helped to recognise the unskilful as the unskilful and if we can recognise the unskilful then we are in a better position to do something about it. It isn't enough just to acknowledge our unskilfulness – our resentment or our greed - and then say “Oh well, that's me, that's the way I am, can't be helped” - that's not a confessional attitude. A confessional attitude involves regret and the intention to try and change. And we need to avoid extremes again, the extreme on the one hand of breast-beating guilt and heaviness and the other extreme of revelling in a constant outpouring of the minutiae of our failings and foibles. In communicating with our friends in the community we need to acknowledge and confess when our ill-will or selfishness is getting in the way. We need to clear the air from time to time. Too often our tendency is to either try to justify our unskilfulness by blaming others or to add to our unskilfulness by getting into self -hatred - again two extremes to be avoided.
Then Rejoicing in Merits: I won't say much about this. It's pretty obvious. This is the practise of harmonising speech and it brings people together in a very energetic way. It creates a lovely atmosphere of security, pleasure and goodwill. You can practise it all the time. It is metta as the oil to lubricate the engine of the Sangha. If we make the effort, and it does require an effort, to rejoice in each others' merits, frequently and genuinely, we will create a very vibrant and happy Sangha.
And Entreaty and Supplication: I've noticed that often when people want to see me it's about some personal difficulty they have or maybe they just want me to know that they are still around and practising. This is very good. This is excellent. I'm very happy to see people for whatever reason. However I rarely get anyone wanting to clear up confusion about the Dharma or just discuss a Dharmic point. I can only think of one person having come to me for that sort of reason.
The speech aspect of communication involves confession, rejoicing and entreating. The mind aspect of communication involves all that the speech aspect involves; metta, rejoicing. Perhaps particularly we should think of bearing people in mind. For instance if we go on retreat we could take a photograph of community members with us and look at it and think about them. And when somebody is away their photo could be displayed on the community shrine or noticeboard. The community is the people and it exists even when we are apart for a while.
Those are three aspects of communication covering body, speech, and mind. Being mindful of the attitude and moods we convey through our physical activity – confessing, rejoicing and entreating with our speech and bearing each other in mind. What this is all about of course is Friendship. What community life is all about is friendship, spiritual friendship. I just want to say a few things about friendship.
First of all, friendship is an activity. It is something you do, not something that happens to you. It involves all the things I've spoken about in relation to communication, confessing faults and unskilfulness, rejoicing in merits, open, honest communication. It involves spending time together, doing things together, giving gifts, sharing each others interests, helping each other and talking to each other. I'm spelling all this out because I think sometimes people think of friendship as simply talking to each other about each other. There can be so much more to it. Above all friendship is something to be enjoyed. It's a pleasure. It's a source of mutual pleasure. We need pleasure in the spiritual life. Most of the reasons why we distract ourselves by chasing after the ephemera of samsara is because we want pleasure. As we progress spiritually we need to find more and more pleasure in spiritual practice and in friendship. Of course there is the Path of Beauty via the Arts which helps us to refine our pleasures and experience happiness in relation to the Beautiful. Friendship can be one of the easiest ways to experience pleasure in the spiritual life. Community life is about friendship, about cultivating friendship with the people you live with and cultivating strong friendship with at least one of the people you live with.
That brings us onto demons. Yes, there are demons in communities. In the Visudhdi-Magga, Buddhaghosa lists the near enemies and the far enemies of positive mental states – for example the far enemy of compassion is cruelty and the near enemy is pity, the far enemy of metta is ill-will, the near enemy sexual desire. Later on in Buddhist history, the Vajrayana makes much more use of symbolism, and in the story of Padmasambhava taking Buddhism to Tibet, he is spoken of as having subdued the gods and demons of Tibet and transformed them into protectors of the Dharma. The gods and demons are the near and far enemies. The far enemy or the demon indicates something which is the complete opposite of the skilful or positive state and the god or near enemy something that is sufficiently similar to genuine skilfulness or positivity to be easily confused with it.
Communities have their demons and their gods. Perhaps more gods than demons. I'm going to mention a few of these gods or demons – I'll leave it you to decide which they are – suffice to say they are all enemies of the spiritual community and we should do what we can to subdue them and transform them. The first one is called complacency, or settling down. Whether this is a god or a demon, he certainly looks rather smug, rather pleased with himself. I'll quote Bhante Sangharakshita about complacency. This is what he says: “Here I am, living in a community, working in a co-op, and I meditate every day, well, nearly every day – and, well, here I am, that is that. I've arrived”. If you're not careful you can adopt an attitude of complacency to an admittedly positive situation. It isn't that the situation isn't positive, it is highly positive. It isn't that you should necessarily be out of that situation, no, it may well be the best position for you – but it is only an opportunity, it is not an achievement. It is a base upon which you have to build; and there is the danger that you may become complacent.........This is something I have really noticed in the case of practically all the communities and certainly some of the co-ops that have come under my personal observation. There is the tendency for every single person, if he or she isn't careful, to just settle down in that agreeable situation and not really be making a rigorous effort. You take it for granted that, well, you are in a co-op, live in a community - “Well, I suppose I must be growing”. Well I suppose you are, in a way, but it needs more individual conscious effort than that, this is something that really needs to be taken notice of.” (Mitrata,TheTantric Path1, p56-7.)
I think one of the signs of complacency is what I would call six days a week Buddhism. Sunday shouldn't be a day of rest for Buddhists – every day should be a day of rest and relaxation for Buddhists. But what is rest and relaxation, what is restful and relaxing? Well it is noticeable that most people look a lot better when they come back from retreat – they look rested and relaxed and seem more energetic; just from meditating, doing puja and leading a simple routine life. Perhaps that should give us a clue as to how to rest and relax. In this regard it's probably worth noting that communities in the Triratna Community began as a result of people wanting to bring something of the retreat experience into their lives when they came off retreat.
I think a lot of what people do for rest and relaxation is force of habit and the gravitational pull of conventionality. The world around us exerts a strong influence on us, an influence that is constantly pressing us to conform. Conform, conform, conform, be conventional. That's what the world keeps saying. I'll tell you a secret. I'm an extremist. Yes, people think I'm a mild-mannered approachable chap – but I'm an extremist. I hate conventionality. My ideal of a community is something wholehearted, full-blooded. Not just a fairly conventional living situation, but something radical, something that is always questioning and coming up with radical solutions, something that brings spiritual principles alive and confronts mundane expectations.
I always prefer people to be wholehearted. If you want to settle down and have a family life, do it wholeheartedly. If you want to live communally with spiritual friends, do it wholeheartedly. Let our communities be places where the Tantric Dakini of open, honest communication and wholehearted practice dances her wild abandoned dance. Let us not fall under the sway of the gods or demons of complacency and settling down. Let us always try to be more radically spiritual in how we communicate physically, through speech or mentally. Let us be more radically wholehearted, alive, fiery, passionate in how we Go for Refuge with our community; let us not be complacent about relating to the best in each other, or about study or meditation or devotional practice. Let us be radically engaged and transform complacency and the tendency to settle down into a more alive and vibrant pleasure in actually practising and living the spiritual life.
I'll just mention two other enemies of the spiritual community. The first one is a god, a near enemy. That is friendliness. What I mean by this is a superficial camaraderie that can pass for friendship but isn't the real thing at all. This is probably a close relative of complacency. It is of course good to be friendly and perhaps a certain amount of superficiality is necessary to keep us happy and congenial. But superficiality in communication can very easily be a form of dishonesty where we are being false in our speech by omitting to say what is really going on. And I'm not talking necessarily about expressing criticisms. It may even be affection that we don't express straightforwardly. Beware of false friendliness and strive for genuine communication. Again I don't mean that you have to be serious all the time or talk about the Dharma all the time. All I mean is that there shouldn't really be anybody in your community with whom you always and only communicate on the level of what's in the newspapers or what's on at the cinema. With everyone your communication should al least sometimes go a bit further, a bit deeper than that.
The last enemy of the spiritual community I'll mention is Complaining and Resentment. I think this fellow might be a demon. Now people who live in communities are rarely perfect, never in my experience so far. And being imperfect and being all different in temperament and so on, there are lots of different ways we have of going about things. To avoid chaos, communities usually have agreed ways of doing some things. Everyone agrees this is how we are going to arrange our cooking or cleaning or whatever. You've got rules basically – the ground rules. Without this sort of agreement to do things in a particular way, communal life wouldn't really be possible.
So what happens? Well people don't stick to the agreement sometimes. Perhaps their own personal demons have begun to play up. Usually from my observation there are two main reasons that people don't stick to what they've agreed or what is the agreed way to do things. One is laziness and the other is a lack of mindfulness. If someone is being lazy or unmindful they are obviously not helping themselves to grow, so I think it is quite legitimate to remind them of their duties and to encourage them to do better. It is not only legitimate, it is part of our duty as friends and fellow community members to help each other with difficulties like laziness or unmindfulness. But I think we should try to see it in this way – we are helping each other to grow. We can do this quite reasonably. It doesn't have to be a matter for the whole community, unless of course somebody is being totally unreasonable – then it is a matter for the whole community.
Occasions for complaint can be seen as opportunities for giving. Giving in the sense of communicating with somebody or maybe even just giving in the sense of simply doing whatever needs to be done. In this connection also, it might be worth reiterating something Bhante said in an interview about Ethics. He said let's not be afraid of rules. A rule is an agreed way to behave, an agreement to do things in a particular way. Perhaps we've become too afraid of rules and are not explicit enough about our agreements on how to behave or how not to behave in the community. Perhaps we leave too much room for confusion by being vague. Complaining and Resentment are the opposite of communication. Complaining is usually too general and vague, is an expression of resentment. Resentment is often an accumulation of uncommunicated small complaints, which could perhaps have been quite easily dealt with. Let's try to ensure that we have communication – open, honest, affectionate communication – rather than complaints and resentment.
These then are some of the gods and demons of community life – some of the near and far enemies. There are probably more, perhaps we could investigate that on our community mights. Domesticity is another one that springs to mind, but we won't go into that now. Or Competitiveness. Perhaps you could try to see if there are particular gods and demons in your community.
I said earlier that what takes us away from the community often and away from the spiritual life for that matter, is a pursuit of pleasure, a desire for pleasure. Bhante said in a seminar on The Nature of Existence: “When one experiences beauty as the beautiful, it is also an experience of intense pleasure, a very refined pleasure. It's as though the human organism can't thrive without the experience of pleasure. So inasmuch as pleasure is almost an integral part of life itself, so we find the higher form of life, the higher the kind of pleasure experienced, until, in the course of one's spiritual life, pleasure, ordinary pleasure, is refined into bliss. One's hedonic experience becomes more and more intense, more and more refined – as does one's aesthetic experience. The two are very closely associated.” (Mitrata, The Tantric Path7 , p32.)
Bearing this in mind it would seem important that we look for ways of making life in our communities an experience of refined pleasure. Or we try to refine ourselves so that we can enjoy and gain pleasure from more refined aesthetic experience. Bhante usually recommends the Arts as a sort of intermediary between fairly gross mundane pleasures and the refined pleasures of higher states of consciousness as experienced in meditation. What does this mean for our community life? Should we try to introduce some form of artistic appreciation into our community life? I don't have any answers – but I would be interested to hear any ideas. I'd be even more interested in experimenting with actually putting people's ideas into practice. Apart from the Arts, there is, as I mentioned earlier, the whole area of friendship, again perhaps we have to be somewhat refined to appreciate the pleasures of Friendship. It's on a higher level than the pleasures of sex or food or watching the telly (if that's a pleasure?). And it takes more time and effort. I think you need a certain degree of Sraddha, faith, in order to really engage in friendship. You have to believe in the value of it and even in the pleasure of it, in order to have the interest and energy to make the effort to cultivate friendship. Perhaps you just have to do it to find out. Perhaps you could look at others who've developed friendships and just reflect on that. I always find the story in the Culagosinga Sutta (MN 31) inspiring with regard to friendship and also with regard to communities. You can see how some elements of community life have been brought to the point of perfection there. They are meditating together, studying and discussing the Dharma together. They are helpful and friendly towards each other. There is no competitiveness between them. They don't have to insist on doing things their way. I think this story embodies the principles and practice of an ideal community and should be a vision for us of how we could be. How we could live together in harmony, helping one another and practising the Dharma together. At the best our communities could be retreat-like situations that provide us with rest and relaxation from the vagaries of the world about us and nourish our spiritual aspirations so that we could go forth each day, refreshed and vigorous and capable of being an influence for good in the world. I think it is a vision very worthwhile pursuing wholeheartedly and vigorously.
