This talk was given to an audience of people living in residential communities around the London Buddhist Centre, 1998
It was out of the retreat experience that Triratna residential communities grew. People wanted to create or prolong the conditions they had experienced on retreat when they came back to the city and so some of them decided to live together. The community is the Sangha at home, just as the Team Based Right Livelihood is the Sangha at work. So a community is a place where you live with other Buddhists, live with others who share your aspirations. Not just live with other Buddhists, but communicate with them. As Sangharakshita puts it, in a community "you are free to relate at the deepest level of your being, which is very stimulating and inspiring - and also very challenging and demanding."
The
Bare Minimum
You are free to relate to others at the deepest level of your being. As a Buddhist, this means you are free to relate to others in terms of Going For Refuge to the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. People move into communities so that they can grow and develop, so that they can develop friendships and meditate with others. There is no cultural or ethnic level of Going For Refuge for Triratna Buddhists in the West. People who live in Triratna communities are either provisionally or effectively Going For Refuge - or fluctuating between the two.
A community is a group of people living together with the aspiration to Go For Refuge more deeply, as the main bond between them. Two of the advantages of living in a community are that you can enjoy the company of other Buddhists and that you can engage in daily spiritual practice with other Buddhists. What this means in practice is that when we live in a community we meditate together daily, we study together (probably less frequently) and we actively work at cultivating friendships.
These are I think the minimum requirements in order for any community to be really worthy of the name of a Triratna Buddhist community. Now it has to be said that frequently our communities fall short of this bare minimum. I hope in this talk to at least encourage you, if I don't manage to inspire you, to engage in your community life at the level of this minimum - meditate together daily, or at least six days a week, study together sometimes and actively cultivate friendships with others in the community.
Collective
Practice
It is extremely important that we meditate together. It's as if the sum total of our efforts in collective practice is greater than the sum of the parts. You can build up a connection with people just by engaging in a collective meditation and puja together. I have had the experience of feeling irritated or annoyed with someone and then seeing them make an offering to the shrine or seeing them meditate has helped to change my response to them. Seeing somebody practice can be very encouraging. We can feel supported by each others efforts to practise. We need each others support in order to continually make an effort to cultivate metta and mindfulness. In other words we need each others support in order to make spiritual progress, and one very concrete and inspiring way to give that support is through collective practice. If we don't engage in the collective practice of meditation and puja in our communities we will not be getting the full benefit of community life. We will be missing out on an important area of communication, interaction and mutual support and encouragement.
I think it's also important that we study together. In study we not only sort out our ideas and become clearer, but we also have an opportunity to relate to each other on the basis of our ideals, on the basis of what is most meaningful to us. This can have the effect of inspiring us to greater efforts, clarifying what our lives are about and bringing us into closer relationship with each other. Every community should have some time for study and that study should affect your life. Sangharakshita has said that we should distil some precepts from our study sessions. In other words we should always ask ourselves what does this mean for me?, what difference does this make to my life?, why is this important?
Friendship
Now we come to the nucleus of community life. Right at the centre of community life is friendship. Cultivating friendships is, you could say, the raison d'être of the residential spiritual community. Of course it is not enough just to live with people. Friendship won't necessarily happen to you. It is something you have to do. Friendship is an activity, it requires effort. You have to make an effort to be friends with people. You have to take an interest in their life. Don't expect somebody to be interested in you if you are not interested in them. Friendship is something mutual. A mutual interest, a mutual caring, eventually a mutual love. So don't expect friendship to happen to you.
To cultivate friendship you need to spend time with someone and you need to be patient because it takes time. You don't necessarily have to have 'deep and meaningful ' conversations all the time. It is enough initially to have some shared experience and shared aspiration. It is of course necessary to go beyond the superficial level of communication from time to time, but there is no need to have intense, soul-searching, problem sharing talk all the time. In fact that might introduce unnecessary tension into a budding friendship. It is possible to be serious and light at the same time. You need to spend time with someone to cultivate friendship, you need to take an interest, and you need to be patient. You also need to bear them in mind when they are not present. Give them gifts. Keep a photograph when you go on retreat. Take a photograph of your whole community with you. In a community we shouldn't be on superficial terms with anybody and we should have a much stronger bond with somebody. We should have at least one good friend, or be cultivating a friendship with someone and we should be aware of others as spiritual aspirants. I cannot emphasise enough the importance of friendship in communities. I would go so far as to say that if you don't meditate, if you don't study, at the very least cultivate friendship.
Ecology
Another advantage of community living which has wide ramifications both ethically and socially is that community living is more ecologically beneficial than living alone or in a small family unit. Shared use of fridge, freezer, washing machine, water heaters and so on, could make a huge difference to our environment if it were a sufficiently widespread practice. In this respect we may indeed be pioneering a lifestyle of great significance for our society at large.
Little Things Make a Difference
As we pursue the practicalities of community living, we can feel a sense of adventure and experiment. There will always be a strong tendency for us to simply re-create whatever domestic situation we were most familiar with, perhaps out of a desire for security. But we don't have to follow the models of suburban domesticity or current fashion. We can be much more daring than that. We can be radical in our experimentation and create from the principles and practices of community living, the sort of conditions which are most conducive to spiritual development. We can ask ourselves what part the internet and social media play in community life. Do they help or hinder communication and friendship? We can reflect on our attitudes to the practical chores, the washing-up, cleaning, watering plants and so on. Do we see them as opportunities to practice generosity and mindfulness?
I've said that friendship is central to community living. Friendship is grounded in communication. The communication which shows what we really feel and think is often not verbal. We may think that our most authentic and deep communication happens over a cappuccino in a cafe but often we will communicate much more of ourselves through the way we respond to the details of life. How do we respond to the washing up or our household chores? How do respond to somebody else's habits? What is our attitude to sharing things?
Sharing should be our key word in communities. If there is ever any question in your mind about the way forward through any particular dilemma, then call to mind this word 'sharing' and see what solutions it carries in its wake. Sharing is of course an attitude of generosity. We need to bring the spirit of generosity, the spirit of sharing, into every aspect of our community living. When we cook we are sharing. When we wash up we are sharing. When we clean the bath we are sharing. When we water the plants we are sharing. When we feed the cat we are sharing. We can help ourselves immensely by doing all the small things with an attitude of sharing, in a spirit of generosity. If we do these things begrudgingly or angrily or with resentment we only cultivate negativity. This is something which can be quite easily overlooked in community living. We know that community life is about collective meditation and study and cultivating friendship. But we can easily forget that cultivating friendships is not just about reporting-in, not just about heart-to-heart talks, not just about community evenings - it is also and equally about how we live the details of our lives together, how we share our living space, how we interact with each other about the small everyday, routine matters that constitute the business of living in a community. It is not just a matter of what we do but also of how we do it, our attitudes and views and beliefs which can affect the community atmosphere so strongly.
The Imperfect Community
Into this whole topic of our response to the details of community living comes our response to how others in the community behave. There is plenty of scope for righteous indignation in a community. There is always something to be annoyed about. All our differences emerge quite quickly in a community: our different standards regarding tidiness and cleanliness, our different views about what is homely and what isn't, our different views about what is beautiful or what is kitsch, our different tastes in food. Lots of differences become apparent. And on top of that there are all our little faults and foibles which we can't hide so easily. And then there is our unmindfulness, our laziness and our selfishness. All in all it seems a miracle that communities function at all when there is so much that could go wrong. We need to bear in mind the fact, the indisputable fact, that the perfect community doesn't exist.To live in a community is to live in an imperfect community. Now your idea of the perfect community may be of one that is very clean and tidy or one that is very lackadaisical and easy going, one that is decorated with Zen-like simplicity or one that is teeming with objects and colours. Your perfect community might have a diet of all organic food or all health foods or your ideal community might have loads of butter, French bread and coffee. You cannot have your ideal community. Because it's a community and your own ideas, views, desires, and wants cannot always prevail. That is the whole point of it. It leads us beyond ourselves. It knocks off the rough edges of our selfishness and moves us towards co-operation, sharing and generosity. You could say that if you find that you are not getting what you want, if your views are not prevailing, that it is a very good thing. It is good to learn to live in the bigger, broader world of other people's ideas and ways of being and to loosen our attachment to our own way of being, our own way of doing, our fixed selves. This is what communities are about. A community helps us to enter into the world of other people's lives in a very intense and intimate way and it is because of this that community living is a spiritual practice, a practice that can lead to an expansiveness of consciousness and even to insight into the true nature of our relations with other human beings, insight into the nature of the reality of life.
Opening
the Heart
We all have needs, emotional needs, physical needs, cultural needs. Two basic emotional needs are firstly the need to feel emotionally secure and positive and secondly the need to experience some pleasure in our life. So our communities need to be or become situations in which we are nurtured into emotional positivity and security and situations in which we have an experience of pleasure. This does not deny the need for the discipline of spiritual practice and the need for challenging communication. Indeed, without the discipline of spiritual practice and the challenge of open and honest communication it is unlikely that community life could give us any pleasure or be helpful in developing emotional positivity and security.
Emotional positivity and emotional security is another way of speaking about metta. We need to experience metta in our lives. We need to value and appreciate ourselves. We need to feel loved by others. This is what spiritual friendship is about. It's about the experience of metta in relationship. Friendship, as I said earlier, is not something that happens to you, it is something you do. You need to befriend people in order to experience friendship. Metta is also something that doesn't happen to you, you have to cultivate metta. If you want to fulfil the basic emotional need for positivity and security you have to take action. You have to enter into communication with others. You have to reveal yourself. You have to lower your defences and open your heart and mind to others. According to Sangharakshita, "It has been said that self-disclosure, the making of oneself known to another human being, is essential to human health and happiness."
We need to disclose and reveal our ideals, our enthusiasm, our joy, out faith, our love, especially our love, our inspiration, our understanding. We need to reveal our tenderness, our fears, our needs. We need to disclose our mistakes, our unskilfulness, our ill-will, our greed, our confusion. By disclosing or revealing what is hidden in our hearts and minds we begin to create connections with others and we start to cultivate the tender shoots of friendship in our communities.
We can begin very simply by just letting other people in the community know where we are going when we go out and what we are doing in our lives generally This is just a matter of courtesy and sharing the externals of our lives. We can also care for each other when we are ill . Sometimes it's enough just to be aware that someone is ill and check up on them from time to time. Sometimes more care and attention may be required. It's worth noting that people have different responses to illness. Some people may want lots of visits, others may prefer to be left alone. Some people feel very sorry for themselves and moan and groan so that everybody knows about the slightest imperfection in their health. Others carry on working and being cheerful even when they are quite ill. So the same response is not appropriate to everyone. We need to try to be aware of each other to a sufficient degree to act appropriately. In a sense we have to be like family to each other - or at least what family symbolises - caring, tenderness, intimacy, a safe haven.
Not Just Another Lifestyle
If we all make the effort to be aware of our fellow community members and look out for their welfare, we will create an environment of happiness and pleasure, which we will want to live in. We will also be moving beyond the limitations of self-concern and selfishness and entering the more spiritual realms of metta and generosity. This of course will be to our own benefit as well as to the benefit of others. Other people are part of the conditions of our lives, part of the conditions that will enable us to live the spiritual life. It is not possible to live the spiritual life divorced from other people. By entering into community life we learn about other people: about their differences and their similarities, about the need for co-operation and friendship. We start to gain some insight into the immensity and sublimity of the Bodhisattva Ideal. By finding ourselves up against our limitations in relation to others we gradually begin to realise the absolute necessity of the spiritual perspective, not just for our own sake, but for the sake of humanity. Community living is not just another lifestyle, it's an insight practice.
Complacency
As with any spiritual practice, we are likely to experience resistance. There are two kinds of resistance to the practice of community living which I would like to highlight. They are complacency and complaining. Perhaps you could say the first is characteristic of the greed type and the second is more characteristic of the hate type. It's probably obvious what happens with the deluded type! Complacency or settling down is a kind of resistance to community living. It's the tendency to try to replicate in your community whatever form of domesticity you have been most comfortable with. It's a case of old habits re-asserting themselves. It could manifest as an over-concern or even obsession with comfort. The furniture has to be just so and the curtains and the carpets and so on. I'm not saying that the furniture and carpets and curtains and so on are completely unimportant. They have their place, and it is important that our community environments are aesthetically pleasing, but if you find yourself or your whole community concerned mainly with these things, then you are going astray and beginning to settle down into something different from a community.
Complacency also manifests as an attitude that expects spiritual progress to be inevitable in a communal situation. "I'm in a community, so all is well." Sangharakshita describes this very well in a seminar on The Jewel Ornament of Liberation. He says ...." 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 situation for you - but it is only an opportunity, it is not an achievement.” Community living is a spiritual practice and it requires conscious effort like all spiritual practice. If you are to make progress in your community situation you need to make a conscious effort to develop spiritual friendship, a conscious effort to engage in collective meditation practice and a conscious effort to co-operate and develop a generous spirit. This conscious effort, and the awareness of the need for this conscious effort is the antidote to complacency.
Complaining
The other main resistance to the practice of community living is complaining. At its worst, this is an attitude that the community would be fine if it weren't for the other people. This obviously completely misses the point of community living. More often we tend to complain that others are not doing their household chores, or that they are not tidy enough or that they are too tidy or they are too loud or whatever. Basically, they are not enough like ourselves. All of these things may be legitimate cause for complaint or criticism but sometimes we get into a habit of complaining instead of communicating. Our complaints become very general, they are about 'someone' - ''someone' is not behaving as we would like, 'someone' is doing this or 'someone' is doing that. What begins to happen is that we feel at odds with the rest of the community, we feel that we are being offended, perhaps deliberately and we complain to anyone who will listen. This is not communication and it is not in the spirit of community living. In a community we need to realise and accept that other people are going to be different from us, they will have different standards and different tastes and part of the whole point of community living is to learn to live in harmony with people who are very different from us - this is how we achieve Sangha.
It may be that sometimes someone's behaviour falls below a level that is acceptable and then that is an occasion for communication and perhaps criticism. But there is no real benefit from a habitual attitude of complaint and we need to recognise it, confess it and move on. It is very important in a community that we take responsibility for our own mental states and don't try to off-load our negativity onto others. It is especially important simply because we do spend quite a lot of time with those with whom we live. In our community life, we should perhaps think much more in terms of confession, rather than complaint. Confess our negative mental states, rather than get into complaining about what may after all be trivialities, given the overall context of Going For Refuge.
Pleasure
I would like just to look briefly at one more topic before I conclude and that is pleasure. We need to have some pleasure in our communities The spiritual life involves a process of refining our pleasures. The most basic pleasures that most people have in their lives are food, sex and entertainment. We don't have to give up these things in order to make spiritual progress, but as we make spiritual progress we will hopefully find that other more refined pleasures enter into our lives as well and eventually we may quite naturally give up things that seem essential now. Pleasure is refined through civilisation. Civilisation is defined as intellectual, cultural and moral refinement.
Our pleasures are refined through a process of education, cultural activity and human relationships. We need to bring these elements into our communities too. Our moral refinement is achieved through the cultivation of friendship. At present I think we may have little cultural activity within our communities and perhaps this is something we should remedy. Many of you may be very well educated in the conventional sense, you've passed exams, you've got degrees, but conventional education may be too specialised to have a civilising effect. We need to educate ourselves further in ways that enhance our understanding of the common humanity we share. Sometimes just living and sharing with other people in a community is an education in the diversity and unity of human experience.
In our communities we need to bear in mind the refinement of pleasure and we need to set up the appropriate conditions for this. What those conditions are I cannot say and they will probably be different for different combinations of people. But they will involve the deepening of friendship and ethical sensitivity, the engagement in cultural activity and improved understanding of the human condition through study, discussion and debate.
If we apply ourselves to community living wholeheartedly and with a spirit of adventure and exploration we will eventually move closer to the ideal community described in Culagosinga Sutta. We will "live in concord, as friendly and undisputing as milk and water, viewing each other with kindly eyes". (Majjhima Nikaya, sutta 31)
No comments:
Post a Comment