Friendship and Responsibility as a Path to Insight

This talk was given to an audience of members of the Triratna Buddhist Order, January 2000

Insight is a process. It is the process of awakening to the true nature of Reality. As we go for refuge to the Three Jewels we are gradually awakening to the Truth, awakening to the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. Insight and Awakening are metaphors. They are particular ways of speaking about something which really confounds language. To cope with reality, language has to flash forth in increasingly brilliant metaphors or it has to turn its back upon itself in the playfulness of paradox.

No-one has ever attained Insight. There is Awakening but no-one who awakens. As Bhante Sangharakshita puts it: “Liberation is not so much of the self as from the self. He who conceives the spiritual life as a means of attaining eternal bliss has not understood. The whole conception of attainment is fundamentally wrong. One has simply to break down the barriers of his separative individuality and allow himself to be penetrated by everything that exists. Then he will himself penetrate everything. This mutual penetration is liberation, is happiness. The self is the sole obstacle to the “attainment” of happiness. Misery is the inseparable shadow of self. And the more solid the substance is, the blacker will its shadow be. To seek happiness is to seek sorrow. It is another of the paradoxes of life that he only is happy who does not care for happiness. The spiritual life has no goal. The means is the goal.” (Crossing the Stream p. 206) 

 Insight is a process. Awakening is a process and it is essentially a process of liberation from the self; liberation from selfishness or self-centredness even. The process of liberation form the self, is the process of ever-increasing Metta or compassion. Insight is a process of growth in metta and compassion.

To quote Sangharakshita again: “Constant mindfulness of emptiness is the secret of success in the spiritual life. Only we must be careful not to discriminate emptiness from non-emptiness, since then it would not be emptiness but some kind of self-existence. True emptiness is empty even of the conception of emptiness. The void itself is void. Otherwise we fall into the heresy of nothingness.

Strangely enough, the remembrance of emptiness, far from decreasing one's power of spiritual activity, increases it enormously. It becomes easy, effortless, spontaneous, full of joy. Because the obstacle to activity, which is the self, has been removed.The activity of the self is really not activity at all, and is always frustrated. The activity of emptiness is true activity, and is never frustrated. The activity of emptiness is compassion. 

Emptiness, activity, and compassion are not three things, but one thing looked at from three different points of view.” (Crossing the Stream p. 208)

Insight or Awakening can also be spoken of in terms of Compassion, in fact I think it must be spoken of in terms of Compassion. Compassion and Insight are not to be distinguished. There is no Insight without Compassion and no Compassion without Insight. There is no distinction between Compassion and Insight. This is the meaning of the Yab/Yum figures in Tibetan Buddhism. This is why the five Wisdoms are really five Compassions.

When it comes to talking about Insight and a Path to Insight, I think we are justified in talking about Compassion and a Path to Compassion. In fact I think it may be of more practical use to most of us to think in terms of expanding or increasing our compassion, rather than attaining Insight. The attainment of Insight can be too easily hijacked by the ego and become a rather self-obsessed affair. We want to get firmly established in the process of “liberation from the self”.

Attaining Insight is often seen in terms of of practices which analyse the person and mental states. The whole process of Awakening could also be seen in terms of the arising of the Bodhicitta and the practice of the Paramitas or even in terms of the Brahma Viharas. The approach taken or the emphasis given may depend on temperament and personality types as much as anything else. However I think the important thing to remember is that whether we emphasise awareness or emphasise compassion we are not looking at two different things, but just at the same process from different angles. Awareness and Compassion are identical. Insight is a process, a process of liberation from the self, a process of growing compassion or as Bhante Sangharakshita puts it, a process of moving from the power mode to the love mode. (Complete Works, Vol.2, p.362)

How do we know whether we or others have some Insight into the nature of Reality? Do we need to figure out where we stand in relation to the bhumis or the fetters? I think not. In the Triratna Buddhist Community, under Bhante Sangharakshita's guidance, we emphasise going for Refuge to the Three Jewels and as Bhante tells us, “Going for Refuge must find expression in the observance of the Precepts”. So for us, our Insight or Awakening will be evident in our observance of the precepts. And again according to Bhante, “ones lifestyle is an expression of one's observance of the Ten precepts”. So in fact our Insight or Awakening will be evident in our lifestyle. Lifestyle here means our particular attitudes, beliefs, habits and behaviour. So if we want to know whether we or anyone else has got some insight we need to look at our attitudes, beliefs, habits and behaviour and assess them in relation to the Ten Precepts. The more that our attitudes, beliefs, habits and behaviour are spontaneously in accordance with the precepts, the more real is our going for refuge and therefore the more substantial is our Insight. This is not to reduce Insight to a matter of moral discipline but rather to elevate ethics to the spontaneous activity of Insight or Awakening.

This means that Insight is evident in our actions, speech, thoughts, beliefs, emotional attitudes and habitual tendencies. Whether we have any Realisation of truth, whether we are Awakened to some degree, is evident in the small things as well as the large. For instance we can be more or less awakened in how we eat, how we deal with money, what we do in our spare time and so on. And it is in looking closely into areas like this and reflecting on our behaviour and experience that we can become more awake. Reality is here, Reality is now, therefore Awakening or Insight can be here and can be now and in every place and every moment. There is no special place where Insight is going to arise and no special time when Insight is going to arise. The loving heart is compassionate irrespective of place and time. If you are thinking that at some point in the future you will go away and meditate intensely for a year or so and gain Insight in that way, I would say you are probably making a mistake. You need to be involved in Insight practice all the time, not just when you're meditating and our everyday experience is excellent material for reflection. Insight does not take a year or three years, it takes a matter of seconds, and it takes lifetimes. However it will be argued that solitary retreat provides better conditions for reflection and this is undoubtedly true. But we can set up the conditions of a simple life and an ethically blameless life in the city. The conditions we live under are largely mind-created after all.

Idyllic surroundings don't guarantee the arising of Insight and living in the city does not prevent the arising of Insight. And when we think of Insight in terms of compassion, which is unavoidable, it could be argued that the best conditions are those which demand a response of love and compassion from us. As David Smith puts it: “to get to the bottom of life, love and compassion have to be cultivated – love being the mysterious hallmark of all that is, and compassion that which cultivates the return to full awareness of love”. (A Record of Awakening, p.60) Compassion is love with awareness. And it is this awareness which enables us to act appropriately, spontaneously even. This wise Compassion is the hallmark of the Bodhisattva, it is the flowering of Insight and the pinnacle of human achievement. I have been asked to talk about friendship and responsibility as a path to Insight, which means as a path to compassion.

Friendship 

There is a little quote from Bhante: “Very few people know the real meaning of friendship. More often than not, there is too much emphasis on sentiment and too little on action. Metta is something that must be lived.” (Peace is a Fire, p.58) Bearing this in mind, I think it may be better for us to forget about friendship! Better not to think in terms of friendship. Friendship can seem like an obstruction, something other than one person relating to another. There's me and you and then there's our friendship. Perhaps it would be better for us to think in terms of befriending rather than friendship. We don't need to cultivate friendship, we simply need to befriend people. To befriend someone requires engaging with them and taking an interest in them. I have sometime heard people complain of not having friends and on investigation it has become clear that they are not really interested in other people and not willing to make the effort to engage with others. If we want to have friends we have to befriend people, which means we have to be interested in people and willing to engage with them. You can have mates or buddies or pals without being interested in them. There is that kind of superficial friendliness that doesn't require much effort, except the effort to conform to expectations. There is another kind of friendship where there is “too much emphasis on sentiment” to use Bhante's phrase. This might be called romantic friendship and again it doesn't demand taking any real interest in each other. It demands the constant expression of feeling, especially reassuring feeling. Romantic friendships can be a bit like sexual relationships in that the relationship itself can be a frequent topic of conversation, as if it were some third party. These kind of superficial friendships are not a path to Insight or compassion as far as I can see. This is because they are mainly egotistic and have little to do with taking a genuine interest in others.

Friendship or befriending becomes a path to Awakening when it helps us to experience and overcome our limitations. Our limitations in this regard amount to our self-centredness. Self-centredness is the opposite to Insight because it is based upon a delusion. I would say there are two ways in which friendship works as a path to Insight. The first is, as I've been talking about, the way in which genuine friendship takes us beyond the boundaries of self and into the world of other. Another person, any other person, is probably unknowable, unfathomable. I have known some people for many, many years and yet I could not claim to know them completely or claim to be able to predict their actions. This is perhaps especially true of Buddhists who are constantly re-making themselves and constantly discovering more of themselves and more of reality. People are vast universes. There is plenty to be interested in, plenty to engage with. And if we take an interest, if we move beyond self-interest and engage with others then we will be cultivating compassion, that loving awareness that David Smith talks about. And the cultivation of love and compassion is Insight. It is in accordance with the way things really are.

The second way in which friendship is a path to Insight is that it is the best way for us to get objectified to ourselves. In friendship we encounter a mirror which reflects us as we are. This can be simply because our friends tell us honestly how they experience us or it can be because we experience the consequences of our actions in a very immediate and emotionally intense way. Personally, I feel I've gained a great deal of self-knowledge through my friends, both from what they have said to me over the years and through reflecting on my responses to them. It is very easy to see the working of egotism in relation to close friends. We can see that we want them to be a particular way, we want a particular response from them, we want them to change at the pace we want and in the ways we prescribe and so on. In other words the tendency is to want them to be an extension of us. We do this with people all the time and especially with those we are close to. If we stop and reflect on this, reflect on our responses to our friends and what we want form them, we will gain greater self-knowledge and develop a more human heart. More objectivity and more humility will dawn on us in the face of the reality of another human being. This is a path to compassion, which is Insight. Bhante, of course, teaches that friendship is essential to spiritual development. His traditional sources for this are the well known conversations between Ananda and the Buddha in the Samyutta Nikaya, and the conversation with Meghiya in the Meghiya Sutta. We need to take friendship or befriending seriously and work at befriending people as a path to to the Kalyana, the higher dimension of consciousness where we experience the hearts release into compassion and Insight.

Responsibility

This brings us to responsibility as a Path to Insight. From what was said about friendship, we could imply that befriending is a spiritual responsibility. But before we can take up that responsibility to befriend, to go beyond ourselves, before we can do that there is one other responsibility to fulfil. According to Bhante this is the responsibility “to appreciate our own worth and feel that it is appreciated by others, to love ourselves and feel that we are loved by others.” (Complete Works, Vol.14, p.415) Before we can care for others, before we can concern ourselves with the needs of others, we need to have this emotional positivity and security of loving ourselves and feeling loved by others.

Our first responsibility in spiritual terms is to love ourselves. It is only on this basis that we can progress to caring for others and to have compassion for all. Loving ourself is perhaps the first real step on the path to Insight. David Smith puts this level of insight at the stage of of the fourth Bhumi. Whether that is true or not is irrelevant. But what is true is that, as he says: “this is the platform for insight.” As Bhante says: “If you are not happy with yourself, if you are not at ease with yourself, if you don't like yourself – and many people nowadays, unfortunately, don't like themselves – you can't like other people.” (Peace is a Fire, p.62)

We might add that not only can you not like other people but you can't really care about them, you can't be compassionate. This means that if we want to gain Insight, if we want to make our Going for Refuge Real, then we have to take responsibility for loving ourselves. We can love ourselves by not denying what we experience emotionally and mentally and by not condemning ourselves for experiencing whatever mental states we experience. This means maintaining an attitude of kindness towards ourselves even when we are unskilful. Again to quote Bhante: “It is better to establish real, living contact with our negative emotions (which means acknowledging them and experiencing them but not indulging them) than to remain in an alienated state and not experience our emotions at all.” (A Stream of Stars, p.45) The first step to loving ourselves is a broader acceptance of who and what we are.

Another point to bear in mind with regard to appreciating ourselves is that habitual negative mental states are simply a story we tell ourselves, and are not justified by the facts. Self-view is just an idea and a narrow idea at that. We can change the story, we can decide to have a different idea. Ideas are powerful, even very small subtle ideas have the power to fill us with happiness or misery. We need to use our minds, use our thoughts, to change the story of our lives and start laying down the platform for insight, the basis for compassion.

We are responsible for ourselves in a very immediate and basic way. Our thoughts are our thoughts and cannot be channelled or changed by anyone else. Self-hatred is something we do to ourselves and self love is something we must do for ourselves. In the course of my work at Buddhist Centres over the years, I have met a lot of people and had intimate conversations with a lot of people. And it has been my experience that self-hatred or low self-esteem is the single most pervasive obstacle to spiritual growth. And often people feel trapped in a cycle of low self-esteem or lack of confidence. They have a low opinion of themselves and then they act on the basis of their worthlessness and prove to themselves the truth of their opinion. But it doesn't have to be like that. It is a matter of a change of attitude, a change of mind. And to do that it is necessary first of all to see clearly - “This is something I am doing” - and then to resolve and endeavour to do something different.

It is as if there is a war going on in the mind and we continually think that one side is right and is going to win, but the reality is a much bigger picture than that. The reality is that the war is all wrong and can never be won or resolved by conflict. The sides of the conflict need to shake hands and learn to co-operate so that they can stop squaring up to each other and look out to the wider world with the expansive gaze of compassion.

In the lecture on A Method of Personal Development, Bhante says: “I'd even go so far as to say that without strong positive emotion, no spiritual progress is possible. I'd even put it as strongly as that. This means that many people's first duty to themselves and to others is simply to be happy.” ( www.freebuddhistaudio.com/search.php?at=audio&r=10&b=p&referer=%2F&terms=&q=A+Method+of+Personal+Development) I can say that my experience is that he is right. Time and again I observe that lack of positive emotion, and lack, even, of the vision that positive emotion is necessary, causes people stress and difficulty, creates conflicts, causes people to withdraw from compassionate activity, causes the pain of small-mindedness, causes the suffering of anxiety and busyness, and so on. By giving priority to positive emotion, by taking responsibility for loving and appreciating ourselves, we can create a happier and more expansive world for ourselves and others. This is our first responsibility on the path to Insight, which is the path to spontaneous compassionate activity. The Bodhisattva Ideal demands that we love ourselves thoroughly, fully, without holding back. As Bhante puts it: “Once we understand that it is desirable that we should devote ourselves to working for the spiritual progress of all beings and that in order to do this we have got to think in terms of the needs of others rather than our own needs, we still have to go one step further back and realize that we need to get ourselves into a positive enough state to be able to start thinking about the needs of others quite naturally and easily.” (Complete Works, Vol.14, p.415)

Assuming we accept and act on the responsibility to love and appreciate ourselves, we will then be in a position to occupy ourselves with the needs of others. What people need is the Dharma and conditions in which they can practice the Dharma. The purpose of the Triratna Buddhist Community is to make the Dharma available to as many people as possible and to create the best possible conditions for Dharma practice. This is the purpose of the Triratna Buddhist Community and it is also the work of the Bodhisattva. A Bodhisattva, having experienced the Bodhicitta, the urge to Enlightenment for the sake of all beings, works to make the Dharma available as widely as possible and to create the conditions for Dharma practice. The work of the Bodhisattva and the purpose of the Triratna Buddhist Community are identical, because the Triratna Buddhist Community is Bhante's Bodhisattva work. The Triratna Buddhist Community is Bhante's means of of building the Buddhaland.

The next responsibility of a Triratna Order Member that will constitute a path to Insight, is the responsibility for Bhante's vision. Bhante's vision is the Buddha's vision and it is a vast and profound vision. It is no less than the vision of an Enlightened universe. And the Triratna Buddhist Order is the thousand-armed Bodhisattva who vows to make that vision live. According to Bhante we each need to become a non-egoistic stream of spiritual energy and work together in profound harmony to alleviate the suffering of the world. In the Triratna Buddhist Community we have the means that enable us to achieve the state of being a non-egoistic stream of spiritual energy and when we achieve that state, we have the channels through which to express it effectively for the benefit of others. How can we become a non-egoistic stream of spiritual energy, how can we take responsibility for Bhante's vision, which by extension is our vision? Being a member of the Order is about sharing Bhante's vision.

Earlier I spoke in terms of the ten precepts as a manifestation of awakening and obviously a thorough practice of the precepts will help us to become less egoistic and more Bodhisattva-like. Bhante has also spoken of the effective Bodhicitta in terms of the practice of the Six Paramitas. So generosity, ethics, patience, energy, meditation and wisdom are all necessary to the arising of Insight. In 1988, at Guhyaloka, Bhante gave his talk on 'Fifteen Points for Order Members New and Old' and at the end of those fifteen points he said, “If you bear them in mind you should continue to make good progress. In fact, if you bear all of them in mind, one might even go so far as to say that Stream Entry will be within your reach, and your having been ordained will be what the Buddha in the Pali scriptures called a rich and fruitful and growing thing.” (www.padmaloka.org.uk/shop/booklets) Bhante is recommending these fifteen points to us as a path to Insight.

What are they? The first one is to keep up contact with Bhante which I think can now be extended to keep in contact with your preceptors. The next six are all about the responsibilities of an Order Member to the Order and on the face of it they might seem unconnected with Insight. However the Order is what we do, not some abstraction, and the Order is a vital part of the conditions that will enable us and thousands of others in future generations to practise the Dharma. Simply to keep the Order operating at optimum level is an altruistic activity of far-reaching consequences. It is the work of Avalokitesvara and these six points are about co-operating with the compassionate activity of Avalokitesvara, which is quite a responsibility and not something we should make light of. The points are:

• attend chapter meetings regularly

• attend order weekends regularly

• report in to Shabda regularly

• try to realise the unity of the Order

• identify with the Order as a whole

• operate in the love mode towards Order members

The rest of the 15 points are more concerned with what might be called personal practice, ethics, meditation and wisdom:

• practice kindly speech

• act kindly to mitras

• keep up your sadhana

• keep up Dharma study

• take an annual solitary retreat

• take part in the post-ordination process

• avoid distractions

• keep beginner's mind

These are Bhante's fifteen points which he suggests will lead us to Stream Entry. These then are basic areas of responsibility which we can practice as a path to Insight. No cremation grounds, no decomposing corpses, just our hearts and minds moving towards love and compassion and doing what needs to be done in a simple everyday sort of way.

Beyond our responsibility to ourselves to love and appreciate ourselves and our responsibility for the vitality of the Order as a pumping heart of the Bodhicitta, we also have a responsibility for the Triratna Buddhist Community in a more institutional sense. I think it takes more of an imaginative effort to see this because it has less to do with our immediate gain or even the gain of those who come to our centres or work in our businesses.

The institutions of the Triratna Buddhist Community, especially our communities, businesses and centres are in my view our gift to the unborn generations. What we have achieved so far is very small, no more than the planting of seeds and it is our responsibility to look after these seeds, to keep the soil cultivated and watered, to weed out the harsh blemishes and ensure that what we bequeath is healthy and growing. This is a very altruistic activity. It is the compassionate activity of the Bodhisattva with unlimited vision over time and space. When we narrow down to the specific institution of centre, business or community that we are familiar with we may feel that it is fanciful to see them as a gift to the unborn generations, but that is just a lack of imagination. Any institution is just the manifestation of an idea. Ideas take time to come to full fruition because they can only exist to the extent that a sufficient number of individuals embody them. We can only express something in the world to the degree of our consciousness. As more and more of us reach to higher levels of consciousness our institutions will express that and the ideas and vision behind them will manifest more clearly for all to see.

The institutions of the Triratna Buddhist Community are the conditions in dependence upon which the Order flourishes, the flourishing Order is a condition dependence upon which the non-egoistic stream of spiritual energy which is the Bodhicitta can act in the world for the benefit of all beings. Therefore the Triratna Buddhist Community institutions are of direct importance to the work of Avalokitesvara, providing him with more and more implements for his compassionate activity. This is an importance that extends beyond any particular place or time, but our responsibility has to find expression wherever we are, in a very specific place and time.

As well as the responsibility to love ourselves, and the responsibility to ensure that the Order is healthy, I would say we also have a responsibility to support and contribute to the institutions of the Triratna Buddhist Community in whatever way we can. As Bhante says: “In the same way that one makes time for for one's meditation practice, one should make time for disinterested activity on behalf of others – that is, responsibilities. It is a good idea not to be too particular about exactly what jobs one takes on to do; a choosy attitude will obviously undermine the whole project of of breaking down the subject-object dichotomy. And to float around with no responsibilities at all, with no sense that what one does should be in some way for others' benefit, is for most people quite dangerous.” (Know your Mind, p.256)

This is responsibility as a path to Insight and compassion. This is responsibility that will help us to grow beyond narrowness and expand into the non-egoistic stream of spiritual energy that flows compassionately through the world, unlimited by time and space. Again to quote Bhante: “The deeper the internal realization, the broader and stronger should be the outflow of energy.” (Peace is a Fire, p. 39)

Friendship has been a great blessing in my life and is one of the main ways that I have learnt to love myself. Friendship gives meaning to my life in a way that nothing else does. When I think about my death, I feel a great satisfaction about my life because I have good friends. And more and more my experience of friendship is that it is a very fluid and changing thing and strangely non-personal. Friendship has become more about the calling of Shraddha (faith) in me to the Shraddha in others. Where I find a responding aspiration I feel great friendship. Personality has less and less to do with it.

I have always seen responsibility as a way of going beyond limitations. my self-view has always been challenged by taking on greater responsibility. But I think the most difficult responsibility to take on has been the responsibility for my own mental states. To see clearly that I am causing my own suffering, when all the force of evidence and habit wants to point the finger of blame at someone else, that is always the biggest challenge. In 1989 I experienced a breakthrough in this regard, when I finally saw through a habit of self-pity and loneliness. At the time it felt like nothing happened, just a simple thought had passed through my mind. But in retrospect I can see that that simple thought, the thought that my self-pity and loneliness was of my own making, was a significant breakthrough in my spiritual life. That was when I shifted to an attitude of metta towards myself and that has enabled me to take on many challenges since. That simple thought must have reached the parts that other similar thoughts had not reached. I firmly believe in the Bodhisattva Ideal and the path of compassionate activity, but I believe our activity needs to be constantly permeated by reflection. As Bhante says, we should reflect on everything that happens to us. I'm not sure that is literally possible but I think the spirit of it is clear. We need to act in the world and reflect simultaneously and in that way we can turn our lives into a path to Insight and compassion or rather we can become compassionate and wise.