ratnaghosha

Happy Indeed We Live

2011-11-19T10:05:00.000-08:00

This talk was given on Sangha Day, November 2011 at Cambridge Buddhist Centre.

The Buddha often talked about the importance of Spiritual Community. Before he died he talked to his disciples about the conditions for the stability and continuity of the Sangha and on another occasion he exhorted them to look after each other as if they were family and early on he sent them out to spread the Dharma far and wide for the welfare of the many. His vision for the spiritual community was a vision of a community of people who made continuous efforts to transform themselves , who took his teaching out into the world and who were supportive of each other. So the Spiritual community is both a condition for spiritual practice and a spiritual practice in itself. We need the support of others in order to practice and we need to support others in order for them to practice effectively.
In the Dhammapada that vision is given in a very condensed form in the following three verses:

“Happy indeed we live, friendly amid the haters. Among men who hate we dwell free from hate.

Happy indeed we live, healthy amid the sick. Among men who are sick we dwell free from sickness.

Happy indeed we live, content amid the greedy. Among men who are greedy we dwell free from greed. “

I will look into these three verses and try to draw out their relevance to us as a spiritual community here in Cambridge. All three verses speak about being happy in the midst of or among those who are greedy, sick and given to hatred. The ideal being put forward is not one of complete withdrawal from the world but of being in the world and unsullied by it. Being in the world but not being worldly. It is an ideal of remaining in positive and skilful mental states even when surrounded by those who are predominantly negative and unskilful. The reason for being in the world in this way is to spread the truth of the Dharma out of compassion for the suffering caused by spiritual ignorance. This is what came to be known later as the Bodhisattva ideal. So that is the first thing to note about the spiritual community – to be an effective spiritual community it has to be in the midst of the world and working for the welfare of all. This is not to say that individual members of the spiritual community should not withdraw from the world from time to time. It is important that we all have the opportunity to withdraw from the world and be alone on occasions. In fact it is probably not possible to attain to the state of being happy among those who are unskilful and negative unless we do withdraw into retreat quite frequently.

Each of the verses begins with “Happy indeed we live”. The word for 'happy' here is 'susukham'. 'Sukha' is the word for 'happy' – we use it sometimes in the mantra 'sabbe satha sukhi hontu', meaning 'may all beings be happy'. Adding the prefix 'su' intensifies the word – 'sukha ' is happy, and 'susukha' is something like 'very happy'. In other words this is not just ordinary happiness, it is an intense happiness, a deep happiness and given the context it is an unshakeable happiness. It is a kind of equanimity. So this is a very high ideal. This happiness is not a fleeting ephemeral thing,it is not a good mood, it is a deep river of positivity flowing right through our whole being continuously. So for most of us this is something yet to be achieved. This is what we are aiming for. This does not of course mean that the verses have no relevance for us. The verses give us a sense of the direction in which we are heading both individually and collectively. We are aiming for this deep integrated happiness – 'susukha' – which will enable us to be an effective spiritual community easing the suffering of the world and deepening our own insights.

Then the verses talk about what that looks like in practice – friendly amid the haters, healthy amid the sick and content amid the greedy. This gives us an idea of how to practice to achieve the state of happiness. When we are happy in this sense we will be friendly amid the haters, healthy amid the sick and content amid the greedy and so in order to get to the state of happiness we can practice these things that are manifestations of that particular consciousness. This is the same principle that applies to ethical practice. The precepts are a description of how one who is Enlightened acts spontaneously and in order for us to be able to attain to the same experience we practice the precepts as a discipline.

How then do we practice being 'friendly amid the haters'? There are various elements to friendliness and various levels of friendliness. Friendliness includes hospitality, being interested in others, listening to others, being a friend in the sense of befriending others and it also includes Metta, Karuna, and Mudita. And as with the Metta Bhavana we can practice friendliness towards ourselves, our friends, our families, our work colleagues, the local community, the rest of the city, the whole country, all other countries and all other forms of life.

The practice of hospitality for us as sangha members should involve making any new person feel welcome here in the Buddhist Centre, whether they are a visiting Order Member or mitra who is new to this centre or someone who has come in out of curiosity or those who have booked on a course. Hospitality also means being welcoming and friendly even to those who we are familiar with. Many of us may be shy or introverts and therefore have a tendency to sit quietly in the background and others of us may have our own set of friends whom we want to chat with, but we need to always try to be aware of others and be friendly and welcoming to them. This means going beyond our comfort zone sometimes, but it is a necessary stage on the way to being so lacking in ego that we are deeply happy all the time. If we are to become the sort of people who can be friendly amid the haters, we need to start by being friendly amid the friendly and that means being hospitable and welcoming in the first instance.

To engage more deeply with the Spiritual community we need to be interested in others and we need to listen to them . Being aware of others and taking an interest in them is a training on the path to compassionate involvement in the world. The most practical way to develop this faculty is by learning to listen – listening to what is being said and being aware of what is being communicated non-verbally too. In the Sangha we will have some friendships which are much more intimate, where we share ourselves more fully. It is important for our spiritual and psychological welfare that we have good friends and the only way to have good friends is by befriending people. Friendship is active; it is something we do rather than something that happens to us.

To work on this ideal of being 'friendly amid the haters', we need to make an effort to be friendly in whatever situation we find ourselves in. We can try to be friendly with our family for instance and friendly with our work colleagues. These are two arenas that can often bring out the worst in us and sometimes we have to make a special effort to maintain awareness of our aspirations – to be happy and friendly in the midst of the world. The reason why these situations – especially perhaps the family – can be especially difficult is because we have roles that can be limiting. We may be a husband or wife, a mother or father, a daughter or son, a grandfather or grandmother and sometimes these roles can be a hindrance to being a human being in relationship with other human beings in the family context. We have to make an effort to see our mother as another person in her own right or we have to make an effort to relate our son as a person independent of us. But this is the sort of effort in awareness and friendliness that will lead us in the direction of our ideal.

Friendliness in relation to the wider community is a matter of taking an interest and supporting positive initiatives that encourage the values of kindness, generosity and awareness. There are many positive things happening here in Cambridge, whether in the area of the arts or ecology or caring for the elderly and less fortunate and as a sangha we need to be aware of what's going and and co-operate with and encourage what is positive and life enhancing when and where we can. Perhaps the very least we can do is to rejoice in what is well done, whether it has been done by a local politician or business person or artist or whoever.

Being 'friendly amid the haters' means above all that we do not take sides in any acrimonious disputes and where possible we try to calm troubled waters, if not build bridges over them.

The next verse is a little more difficult to understand – it exhorts us to be 'healthy among those who are sick'. Now we could take this literally, because research has shown that those who are happy are generally healthier and live longer than those who are not happy. And the Buddha speaks about non-violence, (another way of talking about friendliness), as being beneficial to health in the Culakammavibhanga Sutta of the Majjhima Nikaya (no.135). Also in the Anguttara Nikaya there are eleven positive results of practising Loving Kindness, some of which would be very health giving, such as sleeping well, not having bad dreams, not being injured by weapons or poison, having a serene complexion and not being confused when death approaches.
However, you can also take this verse about being healthy among those who are sick in a more poetic way. In the Maagandiya Sutta of the Majjhima Nikaya (75), the Buddha meets a wanderer who doesn't like him called Maagandhiya and in the course of their discussion the Buddha recites a little verse and then proceeds to explain it. The verse is “The greatest of all gains is health. Nibbana is the greatest bliss, The eightfold path is the best of paths, For it leads to the deathless”. He goes on to explain what he means by sickness and health. He talks about clinging to the five skandhas as the disease and the cessation of clinging as health. Clinging to the five skandhas is another way of talking about clinging to a fixed self-view, or clinging to ego. So being healthy among those who are sick comes to mean being egoless among those who are egotistic, or more simply being selfless among those who are selfish. This verse of the Dhammapada is about overcoming the delusion which binds us to selfishness through fear and ignorance. Being deeply happy and therefore being able to let go of self-centredness becomes easier if we are able to realise on a deep level that we are constantly changing beings and that all around us is also constantly changing so that the attempt to shore up our security by grasping and clinging on to our sense of self or to possessions or people will only cause pain and suffering. In case this all sounds a bit abstract, here is a quote from Bhante Sangharakshita that gets to the heart of the matter in a very direct way.
“A common misapprehension is to think of Insight and egolessness in abstract, even metaphysical, terms rather than as comprising concretely-lived attitudes and behaviour. But realizing the truth of egolessness simply means being truly and deeply unselfish. To contemplate the principle of egolessness as some special principle that is somehow separate from our actual behaviour will leave it as far away as ever. If we find it difficult to realize the ultimate emptiness of self, the solution is to try to be a little less selfish. The understanding comes after the experience, not before.” Living with Kindness, p.134.
It is worth noting that most of us probably have some experience of being selfless on occasion and are therefore not completely at sea when it comes to having some understanding of the truth of egolessness.

Let's have a look at what some of those concretely-lived attitudes might be if we want to be 'healthy amid the sick'. Well firstly it is important that we look after our physical health, so that we can practise the Dharma and be of use to others. In the Bodhiraajakumaara Sutta (Majjhima Nikaya 85) the Buddha outlines five things that enable someone to practise the Dharma and the first is “being free from illness and affliction, possessing a good digestion “.
So, eating nourishing food and taking exercise are part of our spiritual practice and as well as helping ourselves can have a positive influence on others.
If we look at some of the unhealthy delusions that we could be prone to, this might enable us to see what it would be like to have healthy attitudes and behaviour. Here then are some of the things that come to mind when I think about our delusions:
the delusion that we can have a perfect life
the delusion that anything will last forever
that material things bring lasting satisfaction
that we are victims and others are to blame for our dissatisfaction
that security is a matter of money or housing
that we can control the future
that we know what other people are thinking (especially about us)
the delusion that we are not dependant on others

If we are to have 'concretely-lived attitudes and behaviours' that lead us to being 'happy indeed- healthy amid the sick' , we will need to try to let go of our delusions- there are many more than I have mentioned.

Becoming even more practical, we could start by looking at our relationships with other people and consider how we might be more wise and less deluded in those. For instance, we could ask are we possessive in relation to partners or lovers ? do we allow them the freedom to live their own lives and be themselves or are we trying to mould and change them to suit ourselves? In relation to parents – do we expect them to take responsibility for us and always be there for us or can we see them as individuals who have their own needs and desires? In relation to children – de we feel that we own them or do we let them go at the appropriate age? In relation to friends – do we treat them as supports to lean on all the time or do we also provide them with the warmth and support they need? In relation to the wider sangha – do we think in terms of what we can get for ourselves or do we think about what we can contribute? And similarly in relation to the local community or the country – do we expect to be provided for without having to contribute? Do we think in terms of our rights only or do we also think in terms of our duties?

The third verse of the Dhammapada that we are looking at is “happy indeed we live, content amid the greedy.”

The word used for greed here, ' ussuka', has a sense of restless longing to it. Sometimes it is translated as restlessness. So contentment has the sense of not being restless. Contentment manifests in non-attachment, which could be more positively described as generosity and a sense of abundance. Contentment also expresses itself as living a simple life, with few possessions and taking joy in ordinary beauty. Contentment allows us to be generous and think of others.

To develop contentment we need to learn to find enjoyment and satisfaction in simple things – the colours of the leaves, the lights of cars on a wet street, rain falling in puddles, flowers, pebbles, a wrinkled face, a smile. Or the pleasure of sitting still, or walking or the sound of voices in the street, or the taste of water. There are so many things that we can enjoy if we can relax into being aware of them. If we can relax into the present free of restlessness we can get even greater enjoyment from chatting with friends or seeing a painting or listening to the wind.

Contentment can also be cultivated by focussing on what is positive in our lives and cultivating a sense of gratitude for all that we have. We could reflect at the end of each day on what enjoyment and pleasure there has been during the day. It might be the pleasure of seeing a happy child or the evening light on the autumn leaves or it might be a chat we've had or a friendly interaction with a shop assistant or even our usual breakfast. It's a matter of noticing what is good and pleasing in life and one effect of making the effort to do that is that you start to notice more and more things that you enjoy.

Another aspect of contentment is having a bigger perspective on our lives and the events and people we encounter. If we place ourselves in a context of vast time and cosmic space, or in the context of the great Freedom envisaged by the Dharma, we can start to see that our worries and stresses are perhaps not as significant as we take them to be when we are without any bigger perspective.

Contentment is the opposite to greed, because it is the absence of a restless longing for more stimulation. Generosity is the natural activity of contentment and acting generously can help to cultivate contentment, as we go beyond a narrow self-focus again and again. There are no shortage of outlets for generosity within the sangha and beyond the sangha.

The most obvious way to be generous is to give money to our Buddhist Centre, which is the institution that fosters the growth of the local sangha. People have all sorts of conditioning and emotions around money and it is an area where a great deal of attachment and delusion can be experienced. Because of that it is an area in which we can learn a great deal about ourselves and our deepest motivations. Issues of security and identity are often experienced in our attitudes to money. If we want to make spiritual progress then a thorough exploration of our relationship to money will be very helpful. And it will be even more helpful if we do it in the context of the sangha – exploring with others what money means to us, what our conditioning around money is, how our attitudes to money affect the rest of our lives, and what is real or delusional in our relation to money. It is even worth trying to understand what money is. All of that could help us to be less neurotic and more generous with money and all that it represents and symbolises in our lives.

Other areas for the expression of generosity are volunteering, whether within the sangha or outside, and in our personal practice of ecological awareness. We can volunteer to help out at the Buddhist centre, something which we would probably gain a great deal from as well as benefiting the Centre. We can also volunteer in the local community as some of our friends do. I have known people in the sangha who volunteer at a night shelter or for the Samaritans or to write letters for Amnesty International. All very positive contributions to the community.

Ecological awareness is a matter of extending the meaning of the first precept-the precept of non-violence or loving kindness – to all aspects of our relationship with the world around us. It is necessary that we come to see clearly that we are not separate from our environment, but that we are intimately bound up with it. It is not the case that we have humanity on one side and the natural environment on the other side. We are an intrinsic part of the natural environment. So, in order to practise loving kindness even towards ourselves we need also to practise loving kindness towards the whole natural environment.

I have been talking about these three verses of the Dhammapada:

“Happy indeed we live, friendly amid the haters. Among men who hate we dwell free form hate.

Happy indeed we live, healthy amid the sick. Among men who are sick we dwell free from sickness.

Happy indeed we live, content amid the greedy. Among men who are greedy we dwell free from greed. “

I have been talking about these verses as an expression of the Buddha's vision for the Sangha. I said at the beginning that the Buddha's vision of the spiritual community was a vision of a community of people who worked on themselves to develop positive mental states and go beyond selfishness completely, a community of people who would go out into the world and share the Dharma with others, for the welfare of the many and a community of people who would befriend and support each other in these endeavours. This is what spiritual community is about in the Buddhist tradition and this is what the Triratna Buddhist Community is about too.

The Triratna Buddhist Community is a community of people who want to grow in awareness and kindness, a community of people who want to share the message of that awareness and kindness with others and a community of people who are willing to befriend and support each other in all of this.

We grow in awareness and kindness by meditating, going on retreat, being ethical, reflecting on the Dharma and communicating with our friends.

We share the message of awareness and kindness, the message of the Dharma, by living it, teaching it, and helping those who are able to live it and teach it more fully than we can as yet.

We can support each other by being friendly, by taking responsibility for our own mental states, both positive and negative (not attributing them to or blaming them on others) and by giving encouragement, money and a helping hand where needed..

A Sangha that is effective will have a positive affect on the world around it; it will be a beacon of sanity in a deluded world. We can be that Sangha at the local level here in Cambridge and on a much larger scale by integrating as fully as possible with the wider Triratna Buddhist Community throughout the country and throughout the world.

The Paradox of Happiness

2011-10-23T07:03:00.000-07:00

A talk given at Cambridge Buddhist Centre Oct 2011

I want to begin with a few quotations from different periods in history.

The first is from an 8th century Indian poet called Shantideva. He says:
"All those who suffer in this world do so because they seek their own happiness. All those happy in this world are so because they seek the happiness of others."

Then from the 18th century we have the philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who is seen as the father of the European enlightenment. He says:

"The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation"

And influenced by Bentham we have Thomas Jefferson with the American Declaration of Independence, which states:
"We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying it's foundation on such principles and organizing it's powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

Then coming right up to date here is quote from Professor Richard Layard. He says:
"Most people want more income and strive for it. Yet as Western societies have got richer, their people have become no happier. This is no old wives tale. It is a fact proven by many pieces of scientific research. We have good ways to measure how happy people are, and all the evidence shows that on average people are no happier today than people were fifty years ago. This paradox is equally true for the United States and Britain and Japan" Layard, Happiness, p.3

The first quote sees happiness as a profound paradox. The second and third quotes see happiness as a right and the last quote says happiness is much more elusive than is generally suspected. It points to another seeming paradox - more wealth does not equate with greater happiness. And perhaps hidden in there is another paradox - even though most of us may have no difficulty in believing that greater wealth does not equal greater happiness we still want greater wealth.

The American Declaration of Independence was mainly written by Thomas Jefferson who visited Paris around the time he was working on it and had contact with the revolutionaries there. The French revolution's declaration of human rights was influenced by Jefferson and that in turn has had a huge influence worldwide that continues to this day.
The American Declaration of Independence was written in 1776 and it states that the pursuit of happiness is a God given right. It also infers that government that is not effective in helping people to be happy is not an effective government.

What has it meant for the modern world that the pursuit of happiness is seen as a right and that governments are to some extent judged by their ability to effect the happiness of the citizens?
Well governments can only do so much and the way in which they can affect the well-being of the citizen has often been seen in material and financial terms. So happiness has come to be associated almost exclusively with material prosperity. Partly this is because this is what governments can help to bring about but also it is because the evidence shows that when people are lifted out of poverty their level of happiness and well-being increases. It is also one of the easiest things to measure.

However as with many things in the affairs of human beings we have taken something that brings positive results and assumed that if we multiply it indefinitely we will continue to get more and more positive results. The evidence shows this to be untrue.
This is where the economist Richard Layard comes in. In his book Happiness he quotes many experiments which have shown that beyond certain levels extra income does not give rise to more happiness and in fact can have the opposite effect because of disappointed expectations.
In the same vein Barry Schwartz, Professor of Social Theory and Action at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania, has shown that increasing choice can enhance life up to a certain level but when choices continue to multiply they can have an adverse affect on well-being. His book is called The Paradox of Choice.
I think these two books, Happiness by Richard Layard and The Paradox of Choice by Barry Schwartz are quite important contributions to any debate about consumerism, ecology and well-being.

We live in an age of consumerism which is to some extent an experiment in social engineering. During the 19th and into the early 20th century there was a strong culture of frugality, however in the 1920's in the US the economy was changing rapidly and this had far reaching consequences. To quote from America: a Narrative History by Tindall and Shi :
"Dramatic changes in efficiency meant that the marketplace was flooded with new consumer delights. Goods once available only to the wealthy were now accessible to the general public. Middle-class consumers could own cameras, wristwatches, cigarette lighters, vacuum cleaners, and washing machines. But those enticing new goods would produce economic havoc if people did not abandon their traditional notions of frugality and go on a buying spree. Hence, business leaders, salesperson's, and public relations experts began a concerted effort to eradicate what was left of the original Protestant ethic's emphasis on plain living. The public had to be taught the joys of carefree consumerism, and a new industry of mass advertising obliged. By portraying impulse buying as a therapeutic measure to bolster self-esteem, advertisers shrewdly helped undermine notions of frugality."

However the Depression of the 1930's and the world war of the 1940's reinforced habits of frugality, such as, saving rather than spending, repairing rather than replacing and valuing what lasted over the new. This meant that the US economy faced the same problem of over supply in the 1950's. To quote from America: a Narrative History again:
"To perpetuate the post war prosperity, economists repeated the basic marketing strategy of the 1920s: the public must be taught to consume more and expect more. Economists knew that Americans had more money than ever before. The average adult had twice as much real income in 1955 as in the rosy days of the late 1920s before the crash. Still, many people who had undergone the severities of the Depression and the rationing required for the war effort had to be weaned from a decade and a half of imposed frugality in order to nourish the growing consumer culture.

Advertising became a more crucial component of the consumer culture than ever before. Expenditures for TV ads increased 1000% during the 1950s. Such startling growth rates led the president of NBC to declare in 1956 that the primary reason for the post-war economic boom was that "advertising has created an American frame of mind that makes people want more things, better things and newer things.". Paying for such "things" was no problem; the age of the credit card had arrived. Between 1945 and 1957 consumer credit soared 800%. Whereas families in other industrialised nations were typically saving 10 to 20% of their income, American families, by the 1960s were saving only 5%."

So while in the Soviet Union and it's sphere of influence there was a Marxist/Leninist social engineering experiment, in the US and it's sphere of influence there was what we could call a consumerist social engineering experiment. The Soviet experiment has more or less come to an end, however the consumerist experiment continues.

And now with the wide acceptance of concerns about the earths ecology and the continuous population growth, some prescient voices are beginning to question whether this consumerist social engineering experiment can continue unabated.

And also apart from the questions about ecology and population growth, there is the simple question of whether consumerism works as a way to give human beings a better quality of life.

The answer to this question seems to be no - at least according to the research quoted by Richard Layard and Barry Schwartz. No, having more and more choice or having more and more money does not improve quality of life or increase happiness. The reason for this is what is known in the field of psychology as adaptation.

Adaptation simply means that we human beings quickly adapt to new conditions and circumstances. We get used to things so that they quickly cease to give us greater satisfaction. If you buy a new TV or computer you may have eagerly anticipated its arrival and excitedly set it up, but within a very short time it is just another thing in your life and your level of happiness and satisfaction is back to where it was before you got it.

However, the research also shows that there are some things we never fully adapt to, some pleasant for instance, intimate relationships and friendships and some less pleasant, for instance, bereavement or a serious illness of someone close to us. Also, those things which give us a sense of life as meaningful, such as spiritual understanding and practice within a community of like-minded people.

So the secret of happiness according to Richard Layard is "to seek out those good things that you can never fully adapt to."

What we get used to most easily is material possessions, and to quote Layard again. "If we do not foresee that we get used to our material possessions, we shall over invest in acquiring them, at the expense of our leisure. People tend to underestimate this process of habituation. As a result, our life can get distorted towards working and making money, and away from other pursuits."

We could say that the problem for contemporary Western societies is that while material prosperity has multiplied many many times, the general level of happiness and well-being has either stayed at the same or declined for the vast majority of people.

So the big question is, is it important to be happy? If so what's the best way of going about it individually and communally? What are the implications for our daily lives? Can Buddhism help?

Happiness is about how much one likes the life one lives. There are two components, firstly, how well we feel most of the time, and secondly to what degree we get what we want from life. To be happy means that, broadly speaking, you like the life that you live, you feel good most of the time and to a large degree, you get what you want from life. Being happy in this sense has advantages, for instance, research shows that happy people are healthier and have a greater life expectancy than those who are unhappy. This is a mundane level of happiness and from a Buddhist perspective is just a stage on the way to complete liberation of the mind which is the supreme happiness. Although happiness is quite subjective, it is important that we don't think that our happiness is totally divorced from that of others. If each one of us pursues our own happiness in an individual and selfish way, then our happiness would contribute to the misery of others, which in turn would come back to bite us one day. And in fact, Jeremy Bentham was quite clear about this, our own happiness is intimately tied up with the happiness of others especially those we are in close contact with. He wrote in a birthday letter to a friends young daughter:

"Create all the happiness you are able to create: remove all the misery you are able to remove. Every day will allow you to add something to the pleasure of others, or to diminish something of their pains. And for every grain of enjoyment you sow in the bosom of another, you shall find a harvest in your own bosom; while every sorrow which you pluck out from the thoughts and feelings of a fellow creature shall be replaced by beautiful peace and joy in the sanctuary of your soul." (quoted in Happiness, Layard, p.235.)

This echoes what the Indian Buddhist poet Shantideva said in the eighth century:
"All those who suffer in this world do so because they seek their own happiness. All those happy in this world are so because because they seek the happiness of others." And Shantideva goes on to give a Buddhist analysis of why this is the case. " the calamities which happen in the world, the sufferings and the fears, many as they are, they all result from clinging on to the notion of self, so, what good is this clinging of mine?" verse 134.

He is saying that the root of human suffering is clinging to a sense of self -- or to put it in more contemporary terms -- the degree to which we protect and defend our ego identity determines the degree of our happiness or unhappiness.

What does it mean to cling to the notion of self? The first thing to note here is that Shantideva talks about a notion of self, rather than a self -- from the Buddhist perspective -- the self is an idea, a construction, a notion. It is not a reality. What does this mean? It seems to contradict our experience. I experience myself -- you experience you. So the notion of self that Shantideva is referring to is the idea of a fixed, unchanging, separate self.

So, to put it rather paradoxically, you could say that the Buddhist perspective is that there is a self but that it is constantly changing and has no boundaries -- so it is not fixed in time or space or anywhere else.

To put this more simply, what we experience when we experience ourselves is constantly changing -- physically, emotionally, mentally -- nothing ever stands still. We are not things, we are processes. We are not nouns we are verbs. Each one of us is a dynamic process of changing thoughts, changing emotions, and even physical change.

This perspective grows out of the more fundamental Buddhist view that everything changes always.

The most fundamental teaching of Buddhism is what is referred to as conditioned co-production (translating the Pali paticca samutpada). What this says, in a nutshel,l is that everything in the entire universe -- material and non-material -- arises in dependence upon conditions. In other words, there is no chance or randomness -- there is an ordered universe in which all phenomena occur because of preceding conditions. This is relatively easy to understand intellectually but the aim of Buddhism is not simply to have an intellectual understanding of this teaching, but to have a full and profound realisation of all its implications, so that our lives are permeated by its significance to such a degree that our actions, our words, our thoughts, our emotions -- the totality of our being -- functions on the basis of this realisation. There are many implications of conditioned co-production, of conditioned co- arising, but for the purposes of this talk I want to just talk about the implications for the self -- the notion of self -- which dictates so much of our thoughts and actions.

Because everything arises in dependence upon conditions -- everything that we are, everything that we experience also arises in dependence upon conditions. The implication for us is that everything that we do, say and think is a condition in dependence upon which future experience will arise. So not only are we a process, an ever-changing flow of thoughts, emotions, actions and words -- we are also participating in the creation of this process. To put it another way -- the self that we are is a self that we are constantly creating. This fluidity of self and self-creation confronts us with a huge opportunity -- the opportunity to create the best of all possible selves -- the possibility of actively intervening in the evolution, the creation of our consciousness; the possibility of expanding our consciousness, or, more rightly of becoming aware of the expansive nature of consciousness. And the implication of conditioned co-production -- everything arising in dependence upon conditions -- is that we are part of the conditions that give rise to the rest of the world, to the social, ecological, political, economic environments, we find ourselves in. We are part of the conditions that create and mould the consciousness of a whole society, a whole community.

A further unfolding of the Buddhist teaching of conditioned co arising is spoken of as the law of karma. Karma means action. The law of karma applies conditioned co arising to the ethical dimension of life. When we act, we and others experience consequences. An action can be by body, speech or mind. Thoughts and ideas are actions that can have powerful consequences. Words are extremely potent forces for good or ill, and of course deeds can easily be seen to have consequences that ripple out in all directions. The law of karma simply states that skilful or positive actions of body, speech and mind will have positive consequences for ourselves and others and unskilful or negative actions will have negative consequences for ourselves and others. So it is not just an ordered universe, but you could even say a benign universe.

So to come back to the topic of happiness, from a Buddhist perspective, the happiness of an individual is a condition for a deeper insight into the nature of reality and the nature of self and it is also a result of any such Insight. When one sees deeply into the profound and far reaching implications of patticca samutpada -- when one realises in the depths of ones being that our self is a flow of conditions, many of which we create and that we are connected to all other selves by an intricate web of interweaving and interpenetrating conditions -- out of this realisation there grows a compassionate, imperative.

The imaginary isolated cocoon of the self that we had previously believed in and operated from gives way to a fluid sense of a changing and connected flow of self, which requires no egotistical defending or protecting. With this realisation we function more freely and fearlessly in the world, with a cosmic perspective and a natural kindness that requires no effort. And happiness is never far away, because the conditions that give rise to happiness are never far away. So we could say that happiness is important because it helps us to focus our minds in such a way as to lead to a realisation of something much greater than happiness -- liberation. Happiness is not an end in itself and not something that can be acquired for oneself in the way you can acquire a new coat or a new television or mobile phone. From a Buddhist perspective, what is really important and really worth giving time and energy to are the conditions that give rise to liberation of the mind, of which happiness is one.

What gives rise to happiness? I’ll have a look at this first of all from the perspectives of Barry Schwartz and Richard Layard and then see what Buddhism has to say.

In his book --' the Paradox of choice', Barry Schwartz comes to a number of conclusions about how to avoid the dissatisfaction brought about by having too much choice. Some of these conclusions are relevant to the topic of how to create the conditions for more happiness.

For instance, he suggests that it is better not to take up every opportunity to make a choice that presents itself to us. Some choices are not worth making. The time and energy expended is likely to cause more dissatisfaction than it's worth. A silly example would be if you were to spend an hour in the supermarket trying to choose which packet of biscuits to buy from the 300 choices that are usually available. Happiness and satisfaction are subjective feelings and the more objective we try to be about our choices the less likely we are to be satisfied. Another suggestion he makes is to deliberately restrict our choices -- if you are buying a coat or shoes -- just go to two shops, rather than five or six.

He also suggests that it is far better for your own well-being to just accept what is good enough rather than always wanting the best. Another way to achieve greater satisfaction is to make our choices or decisions irreversible-he gives the example of marriage -- he says, " finding a life partner is not a matter of comparison shopping and trading up. The only way to find happiness and stability in the presence of seemingly attractive and tempting options is to say," I'm simply not going there. I've made my decision about a life partner, so this person's empathy of that person's looks really have nothing to do with me. I am not in the market -- end of story". Agonising over whether your love is the real thing or your sexual relationship above or below par, and wondering whether you could have done better is a prescription for misery. Knowing that you've made a choice that you will not reverse allows you to pour your energy into improving the relationship that you have, rather than constantly second-guessing it." The point he is making is that accepting what is good enough and making a commitment to that is better for happiness.

Even in the Buddhist community we often encounter people who seem incapable of committing to a particular course of practice or a particular school of Buddhism. This is no doubt the influence of our consumer culture of unlimited choice.

Another suggestion Barry Schwartz makes is to practise an "attitude of gratitude" by giving attention to what is good and satisfying and pleasing in your life -- even quite small things or things we normally take for granted -- like being able to see, walk or hear. The idea is to help yourself to feel better about your life as it is and less driven to find all the supposedly new and improved products, activities, and people that will somehow enhance it. In Buddhism we have the Katannuta Bhavana, which literally translates as development of gratitude. This gratitude meditation has the effect of making us happier and more content with our lives.

Another important point made by Barry Schwartz is that we should anticipate a tendency to adapt to the new quite quickly -- he says. " as the number of choices we face increases, freedom of choice eventually becomes a tyranny of choice. Routine decisions take so much time and attention that it becomes difficult to get through the day. In circumstances like this, we should learn to view limits on the possibilities we face as liberating not constraining. Society provides rules, standards, and norms for making choices, and individual experience creates habits. By deciding to follow a rule (for example, always wear a seat belt: never drink more than two glasses of wine in one evening), we avoid having to make a deliberate decision again and again. This kind of rule following frees up time and attention that can be devoted to thinking about choices and decisions to which rules don't apply."

This is what is behind much of the monastic tradition. It is the counter intuitive wisdom that freedom is found through discipline and restraint of appetites rather than through unlimited choice and unlimited individualism.

I think the message of Barry Schwartz's book is an important one for our time in history and an interesting contribution to the debate about the efficacy of the consumerist social engineering experiment which we have all been taking part in for the past few generations.

Richard Layard -- who is an economist -- writes about the sources of happiness in terms of externals -- public policy and the organisation of society. However, he is also keenly aware of the internal dimension to happiness and recommends Buddhist meditation among other things.

Many studies have shown that human relationships are what make people happiest -- friendship, marriage, and family. In Britain and the United States in particular -- economic policies that have encouraged mobility have been very effective in generating more wealth, but have also had the unfortunate effect of destroying communities and dispersing families, thus undermining one of the primary sources of happiness. Many of the things which are lauded as beneficial to us, such as choice, flexibility, change are actually not that helpful in creating a stable society where people trust each other. When the level of trust drops in a society, the level of happiness and well-being also drops and this is what has happened in Britain and the United States -- since the 1950s -- the percentage of adults who think most people can be trusted is half that of 60 years ago. The upshot of this is that for the general well-being of society there are huge advantages to inflexibility and predictability -- in short stability.
Richard Layard also makes some interesting points about the role of taxation in creating a happy society, but I won’t go into that here.

Turning to the inner dimension of happiness, he thinks that it should be a major goal of education to develop an inner strength of character, which allows people to accept themselves better, and to feel more for others. He goes on to say " for adults there is a range of spiritual practices that help to bring peace of mind from Buddhist meditation to positive psychology. For those who are struggling, cognitive therapy has a good record of success. For those in the extremes of misery, psychiatric drugs and cognitive therapy have probably helped more than any other changes in the last 50 years, and we can expect further major advances."

His recommendations for a happier society could be summarised as follows:
monitor the development of happiness
* re-think our attitudes to taxation
* re-think our attitudes to performance related pay and bonuses
* re-think our attitudes to mobility
* spend more on helping the poor, especially in Third World countries
* Spend more on tackling the problem of mental illness
* introduce more family friendly practices at work
* eliminate high unemployment
* in schools teach the principles of morality as established truths, rather than as interesting points for discussion
* prohibit commercial advertising to children, as in Sweden

I found this last point interesting. I had not given it any thought before -- probably because I don't have children -- but thinking about it I could see his point very clearly. We are conditioning children from an early age to be consumers. I suspect that in 150 years time people will look back at the practice of advertising junk food etc to children in the same way that we now look back to 150 years ago at the practice of sending small children up chimneys. They may very well wonder why we considered it okay to abuse the minds of young children with advertising in this way.

Those are some of the thoughts of Professor Layard on the happiness of society and whether we agree with him and not, his arguments are well worth considering and discussing.

What about the Buddhist perspective on the conditions for happiness? Not long before his death, the Buddha spoke to his followers about the conditions for the stability of society and the conditions for the stability of the community of his followers. This is in the Parinibbana Sutta of the Digha Nikaya. The Buddha outlined seven conditions for the stability of society and seven conditions for the stability of the spiritual community. The first four are the same for both.

The first condition for a stable society and a stable spiritual community according to the Buddha is that the people meet together in assemblies regularly and frequently. This is acknowledging that a society or community is based on relationships of trust and meeting together is a way to build those relationships and foster that trust.

The second condition is that people meet in harmony -- the text says -- "meet in harmony, break-up in harmony and carry on their business in harmony." I take harmony here to mean that there is genuine communication -- listening to the views and opinions of others as well as proffering our own.

The third condition for the stability of society and the spiritual community is respect for tradition or not introducing change just for the sake of change.

The fourth condition is the honouring of the elders. The text says honour, respect, revere and salute the elders and consider them worth listening to. This is of course quite the opposite to the cult of youth that often pervades our society. The elders are repositories of the values and the story of society and therefore worth listening to.

The fifth condition for a stable society is that there should be no abduction of women. I think we could broaden this out and say that the exploitation of people for sexual purposes -- whether women, men or children -- causes great distress and undermines the stability and happiness of society.

The sixth condition is to honour, respect and revere shrines at home and abroad and continue to give proper support to them. This is a call to respect the diversity of religious belief.

And the last condition for the stability of society is to support those who are trying to live a spiritual life full-time -- support here means material support, guaranteeing their safety and allowing them to establish temples or other appropriate buildings.

These are the seven conditions for the stability of society, according to the Buddha and of course that stability is the condition that gives rise to both prosperity and well-being. Some of these overlap with Richard Layard's suggestions about the sources of happiness in a society -- for instance -- promoting community life and having established moral principles.

Turning now to the individual -- what does Buddhism have to say about the conditions that give rise to the happiness and well-being of the individual. Well in a sense the whole of Buddhism is about the happiness and well-being of the individual, because individuals are the building blocks of community, of society, of a nation or world. To have a happy society, we need happy individuals. What Buddhism says is quite simple really -- all our suffering is caused by clinging on to the idea of a self -- a fixed and separate self -- and it is only by letting go of that idea of a fixed and separate self that true happiness and liberation are found. To use more psychological language -- ego or ego identity is the problem -- going beyond the limitations of ego is the solution or rather realising that ego is only a constructed idea and not a reality is the solution to the problem.

We don't just have ego-identity or self-centredness as individuals but also as groups. For example, nationalism in relation to a nation state is a kind of group egotism -- a limiting and separating idea. A nation state is an abstract idea that we give reality to by a complex system of symbols and rules. An individual ego-identity is an abstract idea that we give reality to by a complex system of desires and habits.

Although what Buddhism has to say about happiness, liberation and suffering is quite simple, nevertheless, it is difficult to achieve this state of egolessness. It is easy to think it, but not to live by it or from it. And so the whole of Buddhism is essentially a pragmatic system of practices that help us go beyond the habitual, narrow, limited state of consciousness.

Buddhist practices, such as meditation, ethics, reflection and ritual, aim to help us to integrate our personalities, so that we can focus our energies and develop positive emotions -- gradually transforming greed into generosity, hatred into love and delusion into wisdom. This process of practising meditation, ethics, reflection and ritual leads us to the stage of what we might call positive egotism, having a notion of self, but a healthy positive self, imbued with the aspiration to expand beyond the narrow confines of family or national conditioning, the confines of habit and assumptions. This is the level of what we could call mundane happiness. From here the practices are all about what is often referred to as spiritual death -- followed by spiritual rebirth.

Spiritual death refers to the experience of egolessness -- letting go of the notion of a fixed, separate self. It manifests in a total lack of selfishness, of self-centredness and in a spontaneous response of goodwill towards all living things, spontaneous compassion. This spontaneous flow of energy towards others is the spiritual rebirth.

I have been a Buddhist for 28 years and I'd like to talk a bit about what that has done for me. It's always a tricky thing to talk about oneself in a way that is objective and observational rather than subjective and either inflated of deflated, but I'll have a go and I'm sure you'll make allowances for any lapses into bad taste. I grew up within the world of Irish Catholicism in the 1960s, and what I gained from that was a non-materialist outlook, an emphasis on the importance of the spiritual dimension of life -- I'm not sure if that is what I was meant to get from it but I did. I left home at 18 and went to London where I drifted into a career in accountancy. There a combination of what I observed in the people around me and what I felt in myself led me to a sense of meaninglessness -- a sense that I was living a meaningless life and sometimes I felt quite despairing and wondered whether there was any point to being alive or was it all just a cruel joke. When I was 22, this came to such a pitch for me that it led me to give up my career before completing my training. I decided that I must discover the meaning of life -- I just couldn't bear to live for the sake of money, possessions, family and a cosy retirement. For whatever reason, none of these conventional life purposes satisfied the yearning in my heart.

For the next six years, I did odd jobs and spent a lot of time undertaking symbolic journeys, either on foot in the British Isles or by bicycle around continental Europe. I just travelled around, camping out in the woods, because it was the cheapest way to live and all the time I had in my mind that really my travelling was symbolic of an inner journey. But I didn't really have any idea of what I was looking for. Eventually, in January 1981, I settled in West Berlin. I had many adventures, and it was there I discovered Buddhism or perhaps Buddhism found me. I met a monk from Sri Lanka, who taught me the meditation for developing loving kindness and told me about the five ethical precepts of Buddhism. This was a big turning point in my life -- I knew immediately that I had found what I was looking for and that I was a Buddhist. I felt very happy -- even ecstatic. That was in August 1983 -- I have been a Buddhist ever since, but I didn't remain happy. Happiness was not so easily attained -- happiness proved very elusive.

My first task as a Buddhist was to change my ethical practice, which I found fairly easy. I was already a vegetarian, and I had given up alcohol too. I just had to stop some activities that contravened the second precept. Meditation proved to be much more difficult for me -- I was a very restless and active young man and I found sitting still for more than 10 minutes very difficult. Sometimes I would prepare my place to sit, light incense and sit down with great anticipation of the wonderful experience about to unfold -- and then 10 minutes later I was in the kitchen making toast and I had no recollection of getting up and going to the kitchen. It was as if I lived in a restless daydream.

In spite of the difficulties I had with meditation it did begin to have an effect on me, and as I became more aware I discovered that my personality was quite dispersed and even in conflict. This is quite common. When people take up meditation and gain greater awareness it can seem to them that they are experiencing more difficulties than before. This is because what we first become aware of is the aspects of our psyche which were previously unconscious. When what was unconscious comes into consciousness, it can seem as if our sense of who we are is disintegrating. This was my experience. But gradually through communication with people more experienced than myself, through meditation and reflection, I began to integrate all the seemingly disparate parts of my psyche into something more coherent. This probably sounds simpler and more straightforward than it was. The actual experience for me was painful and messy, sometimes leading me into despair and depression and was characterised by almost violent internal conflict. It was a period of great unhappiness in my life. But the most intense part of this experience only lasted for about one year.

However, there was still further to go before I could be happy. There are habits of thought and emotion which are deeply ingrained. We are conditioned by our families and our societies -- by school, religion and even politics, and this conditioning can leave a residue of patterns in our mind which dictates how we think and feel, how we perceive and experience life around us. In my case, I regularly fell into a sense of isolation and loneliness, and I rationalised this to myself as being to do with other people not caring about me. I tried to explain my experience of myself in terms of the imagined thoughts and actions of others. This is another surprisingly common phenomenon. Eventually after another couple of years, I saw through this. I realised that what I was experiencing had nothing to do with others and was a habitual reflex of my own mind -- which led me to dislike myself and project that dislike onto others.
Often it was through communication with a good friend over many months and intensive reflection by writing that I broke through into greater awareness and freed myself from some destructive mental and emotional habits. Sometimes I used a stream of consciousness style of writing which seemed to enable me to objectify some intensely subjective states.

When I broke through this habit of feeling very isolated and lonely -- I started to experience a genuine happiness for the first time. I can even date that to April 1989. I mean, I experienced very positive emotions without an undertow of worry and anxiety that they were about to disappear. And the consequence of this was that I felt able to consider the needs of others in a clearer and cleaner way than before. I had always been helpful and wanted to help others, but I now realised that often that had had an unconscious motivation of wanting to feel good about myself or even of wanting to feel superior to others. Now, it felt different.

So after about five years as a Buddhist, I had finally reached a point of happiness, but from a Buddhist perspective, this was just the beginning. I won't go into what has happened for me in the intervening 23 years -- except to say that I'm deeply contented.

The point I am making here and perhaps the main point I want to make in this talk is that happiness is important, and for some people like me, it is quite an achievement, but nevertheless it is not an end in itself and there is much more to life, there is much more to being human -- meaning is beyond happiness, not just a means to happiness. And what we ought to be aiming at is complete liberation from all delusion of self, so that the fountains of compassion can flow freely. This higher evolution of consciousness beyond happiness, beyond psychological integration, to the heights represented by the Buddha -- the perfection of wisdom and compassion -- this is what makes life worth living -- we should not settle for less.

There are levels of happiness -- from the fleeting happiness we experience when we buy something new, to the deep happiness found in friendship and other personal relationships, to the happiness of a healthy and integrated psyche and all these levels of happiness prepare the ground for the possibility of something even greater -- the happiness of liberation from the confines and limitations of ego-centredness -- even from subtle ego-identity. This liberation -- this awakening from the delusion of self -- leads to an awareness of the expansive nature of consciousness and a spontaneous response of loving kindness to all other living beings. This is what is hinted at by Shantideva in that quote with which I began this talk and which seems as good a place as any to end: "all those who suffer in the world do so because of their desire for their own happiness. All those happy in the world are so because of their desire for the happiness of others."

Spiritual Community

2011-06-24T04:27:00.000-07:00

A talk given at the UK Men's National Order weekend March 2008

‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.’ This is how Charles Dickens begins the Tale of Two Cities and he is referring to how the French Revolution was seen from Britain depending on the political views of the people speaking.

We could perhaps adapt this to looking at the Order and Movement at this time of our 40th anniversary. For some people it is closer to being the best of times and for others unfortunately the worst of times. Some of us think this is the best of Buddhist Movements and the best of Orders and Bhante is the best of teachers and the best of Kalyana mitras, Others, who are probably no longer with us, see us as the worst of Movements the worst of Orders and Bhante as the worst of teachers.

This is probably the subjective experience of almost everything in this world of ours – it is always the best of times and the worst of times, depending on where we are looking from.

For me it has been the best of times, our Movement and Order have been the best of Movements and Orders and Bhante has been the best of teachers. I have of course encountered difficulties- personal difficulties because of my own psychology and conditioning and difficulties with other people – which I have of course seen as being because of their psychology and conditioning.

Nevertheless it has been the best of times for me and that will inevitably colour whatever I say about spiritual community.

My conversion to Buddhism happened in 1983 as the result of meeting a Sri Lankan monk call the Ven. Maha Dhammanisanthi. I met him at the Buddhistisches Haus in Frohnau, West Berlin.

I had some previous knowledge of Buddhism from reading but it had not had a strong or life changing impact. So it was this encounter with a practising Buddhist that made all the difference to me. In meeting the Ven. Dhammanisanthi I experienced the congruency of words and a way of life. That is what he represented for me and after an hours conversation with him I knew that I was a Buddhist That I had found what I had been searching for.

So it was meeting with the spiritual community in the form of that Sri Lankan monk that was the crucial turning point for me.
When I cam across the FWBO about a year later through Subhuti’s book Buddhism for Today, it was the the fact that people were living and working together and trying to create the seeds of a new society that inspired me and drew me in. I interpreted this as a congruency between words and actions and I think anything less than this sort of active idealism would have just seemed like ordinary religious hypocrisy to me – something I was very familiar with from my upbringing in catholic Ireland.

All through my involvement with the Order and Movement what has been of most help to me is the other people around me. I have a depth of gratitude to people like Atula, Danavira, Dhammarati, Jayamati, Sumangala, Tejamati, Subhuti and many many more, who were so kind and patient with me in my first tottering steps on the spiritual path and who have helped me so much by befriending me, listening to me, exhorting me, drawing me out, and being examples to me.

And as I have learned to walk the path under my own steam, I have found that extending a helping hand to others has been a strong and transformative practice – which puts flesh on the bones of the Dharma.

The example of the lives of practitioners around me was important to me from the beginning – it strengthened my faith in the Dharma.

I had a strong faith in what was taught to me by Bhante and Subhuti, through their writings, about the importance of Spiritual Friendship, about the need to co-create the best conditions in which to experience friendship and transcend self-centredness, about the value of living and working together as a context for friendship and transcendence of egotism. I began with faith without very much experience, and now I can honestly say that after twenty four years of steady application, I have no doubts whatsoever about the truth of what Bhante has always asserted- spiritual friendship is of central importance to spiritual life and that communities and working situations provide excellent opportunities for working on dissolving the tight knot of egotism that is the motivating force for so much that we think, say and do.

Some of the institutions of the FWBO such as communities and right livelihood businesses have gone through difficult times during the past ten years and I think a lot of order members have lost faith in the spiritual efficacy of these contexts for practice. I would not try to persuade anyone from this view although I don’t share it – for me what is paramount is the spiritual friendship which is enabled by these situations rather than the institutions as ends in themselves. So what I would want to encourage is spiritual friendship and I would hope that if sufficient numbers of Order Members really took to heart the importance of spiritual friendship and the dependence of such friendship on conditions – conditions which involve spending time with other people, getting to know them intimately in different situations, engaging with them in many different ways- if as I say this was taken seriously then I feel sure that in time other contexts will develop that will enable and encourage spiritual friendship to flourish. In the Anguttara Nikaya the Buddha says that to really know another person you need to live with them, have dealings with them, see them cope with misfortune and have conversation with them – So – a bit more than a weekly chat over a cup of coffee. If we focus on building friendships between us then the institutions which support those friendships will grow up naturally as they did in the past, because they will grow out of our need and our enthusiasm.

Something else which I learned from my teachers early on was that the Buddha insisted during the last weeks of his life that the health and well-being of the Spiritual community depended on coming together frequently and in large numbers. I have tried to practice this and I have found that it has become a great source of happiness in my life. By resisting my natural introverted tendency to steer clear of large numbers of people as frequently as possible, I feel I have come to a better understanding of what the Buddha was talking about and it seems to me to go to the heart of spiritual community.

Until we meet a person and experience their presence as a living consciousness, our experience of them is necessarily subjective – we relate to them in the privacy of our own mind as an idea of a person, even a fixed idea of a person, rather than as a real multi dimensional person in all their complexity and mysteriousness.

It is essential to meet people and to become more intensely aware of them – of their uniqueness and similarity- it is essential if we are to get any grasp on the notion of interconnectedness. It is essential to meet people and interact with them on as deep a level as possible if we are really to establish insight into the fluid, non-fixed, non-separate, interconnected nature of consciousness.

Bhante talks about this as ‘vital mutual responsiveness’ and the’ third order of consciousness’. I don’t believe the third order of consciousness can be experienced without very frequent personal face-to-face interactions. Communication via the internet won’t do it – it lacks too many dimensions, and communication via shabda is also not enough. What we need is face-to-face interaction. We need to spend time with some people on a daily or weekly basis and establish trust, understanding, friendship and mutual helpfulness. This forms a group which is an atom of the larger spiritual community and when all these atoms of friendship and mutual helpfulness come together the result can be very uplifting – approaching that third order consciousness – an inspiring spiritual community in which we are collectively our own teacher, our own guru – an embodiment of the Dharma that inspires us to more wholeheartedness. We become our own teacher and inspiration.

As I said, this fact of meeting other Order Members face to face and communicating with them and listening to them, being mutually aware is at the heart of what spiritual community is about. It is the meeting place of wisdom and compassion – where at best we can see through our own fixed self-view and it’s expression in selfishness and isolation and we can also see into the world of others and begin to erode barriers as we act on our natural impulses of generosity and kindness.

Within this ‘vital mutual responsiveness’, this ‘third order of consciousness’ the problems of spiritual hierarchy, of authority and autonomy are not problems. Spiritual hierarchy is only a problem if the spiritual community has degenerated into something less or is only a problem for those who perceive the spiritual community as having degenerated, as being a group. If we are aware of people as people, of order members as spiritual beings and if we come into contact with them personally, rather than relate to an idea of them which is simply a product of our imagination- then we can rely on spiritual hierarchy to manifest naturally in the course of our interactions. It is not something fixed or static and who will be in the position of learning and who will be in the position of being receptive to new or higher perspectives is not something that can be established by titles or badges or kesas or roles – it is fluid and changing as everything is. And to be paradoxical we could say that those who are likely to be higher in the spiritual hierarchy are those who are most receptive to learning.

Autonomy is an issue for some people. They experience their autonomy to make decisions about how they live as being under threat when they encounter someone speaking with confidence and authority.

This seems to me to be a psychological problem – the problem of lack of confidence or lack of self-esteem which can manifest as feeling inferior to others and sometimes manifests as compensating for those feelings of inferiority by acting in a superior way and being very critical of others.

It can also be an existential issue – in that our ego identity is threatened by our own idealistic response to the Dharma.

As far as life in the Triratna Community (FWBO) is concerned I always felt – from my earliest involvement that the FWBO and it’s institutions were something that we were creating together and therefore something I could have an influence on and an input into. It seemed to be a simple matter of being involved and engaged – like playing a game – you can’t score a goal unless you’re on the pitch.

From the first week of my involvement I threw myself into the collective work – I painted the windows of the LBC reception room, then I helped out with transcribing a seminar and within about 3 months I was working full time at the LBC. This all seemed very natural to me and still is. I have not found any reason to curtail my involvement and I still feel that the Movement and it’s institutions are in the process of being created and probably always will be. That is the nature of reality. Being involved is for me just a logical extension of what I have decided to do with my life – committing myself to the practice and sharing of the Dharma.

Although spiritual hierarchy is not a fixed and final thing – what is more an established fact is that some people have helped us and are helping us and when we see this, when we recognise that we are receiving something from others it is natural that we should experience gratitude and loyalty. Even if the situation changes and they fall from grace in our eyes – nevertheless the fact remains that we have been helped by them, we have benefited and it would be ungracious and dishonest for us to dismiss or denigrate what was given to us. Loyalty to our teachers, preceptors and Kalyana mitras is a matter of personal integrity and natural gratitude, not to mention good manners and propriety.

However, it is unfortunately a well established fact of human nature to be ungrateful and to denigrate those who have helped us. It is one of the ways in which egotism works. That is why Langritampa’s verses on mind training include one which says

Even if someone I have helped
And in whom I have placed my hopes
Does great wrong by harming me
May I see them as an excellent spiritual friend.

And of course the Buddha had to put up with this kind of thing too – his disciple Sunnakkhatta left the Order because the Buddha would not perform miracles for him and then he went around criticising the Buddha to others.

So although loyalty and gratitude to teachers is something quite natural it is also quite natural for some people to be ungrateful and critical and there is no need for us to be particularly surprised or even unhappy when it happens.

This Order of ours – this order of men and women who have made a commitment to live by the Dharma and to share the fruits of that life with others is a precious and fragile thing. It is not an organisation or corporation – it has no legal existence, it has no literal existence – it is a current of spiritual energy manifesting through the lives of individuals but given form and force by the power of collective practice and the power of imagination – as in the image of the 100 armed Avolokiteshvara.

It is fragile and precious – like a dream – and it’s survival and strength depends on our individual efforts:

It’s survival and strength depends on our efforts to come together frequently in large numbers

It’s survival and strength depends on our efforts to be aware – mutually aware

It’s survival and strength depends on our efforts to move from selfish self-interest to true self-interest

It’s survival and strength depends on the frequent expression of kindness and gratitude among ourselves and beyond

Above all the survival and strength of this precious and fragile order depends on the arising of knowledge and vision of things as they really are in a substantial number of Order members.

We could be well organised, we could have good ordination courses, we could come together frequently, we could be an exemplary body of people in all sorts of ways, but to really ensure our spiritual survival we need insight – we need the Bodhi heart to be manifest in our midst – then we will be able to withstand ‘the slings and arrows of misfortune’ and the constant blowing of the winds of materialism that would otherwise chill our hearts.

I was asked to say something about the order after Bhante’s death. However, I think that what applies to the order after Bhante’s death applies equally to the order now – namely that we need to give rise to insight, Bodhicitta, Knowledge and vision of things as they are – whatever phrase we want to use – we need to transcend any sense of fixed separate selves. The order is a means to that and in essence is the realisation of that transcendence.

Bhante is a great teacher and a man of profound insights, but as the Vimalakirti Nirdesa tells us a Buddhaland is built from living beings. A spiritual community is built from living beings and in creating the Order Bhante has needed willing, cooperative, energetic and capable beings – and if we are to continue to build our Buddhaland, continue to create the Order we need to be willing, cooperative, energetic and capable and we need to be welcoming to all those willing, cooperative energetic and capable beings who will want to be part of our Order as the years and generations come and go.

Bhante has already given us a legacy of teachings which is vast and deep. Buried within all those teachings are many treasures, termas to be unearthed by future generations and given life and form. We as an Order and Movement are very young, a mere speck on the radar of time. There is scope for developments beyond our current achievements and even beyond our current imagination.

But to come back to the present I will leave the last word to Bhante – at the end of the first chapter of ‘what is the sangha’ he says:

“There is no future for Buddhism without a truly united and committed spiritual community, dedicated to practising together. And when Buddhists do come together in the true spirit of sangha, there is then the possibility of inhabiting, for a while at least, the dharmadhatu, the realm of the Dharma. In this realm, all we do is practise the Dharma, all we talk about is the Dharma, and when we are still and silent, we enjoy the Dharma in stillness and silence together. The clouds of stress and anxiety that so often hang over mundane life are dispersed, and the fountains of inspiration within our hearts are renewed.”

Listening: the essence of communication

2011-06-24T03:57:00.000-07:00

This was a short talk given at Cambridge Buddhist Centre in May 2011.

I have been asked to talk about Sangha and connect it with Wesak. I could just say that without the Buddha there would be no Sangha and leave it at that. But I think more is expected.

We are all part of the Mahasangha of Buddhist practitioners worldwide and we are also I assume part of the Triratna Sangha. The Triratna community is the community or sangha of all those who choose to live and practise the Dharma in accordance with the elucidation and recommendations of Bhante Sangharakshita. So those of us who make this choice – the choice to live and practice the Dharma according to the elucidation and recommendations of Bhante – we collectively make up the Triratna Community and the Triratna Order is at the heart of this community and is made up of all those who have made a specific commitment to observe the ten precepts and go for refuge in the context of Bhante’s teaching.

We are the Triratna Community. Community implies communication. Communication is what creates and maintains community. Mutually supportive communication is the essence of Sangha.

There can be no communication without listening. Occasionally I have done mediation work for people who have come into conflict and it is very noticeable in those situations that the missing ingredient is listening. Because one or both people are not listening there is no communication and when the ingredient of listening is brought back into the mix very often the problems diminish quite quickly. Ironically the only time when I’ve seen this fail completely was when one of the parties was someone who spent a lot of their time facilitating communication workshops.
There is no Communication without listening. There is no listening without interest. You have to be interested in the other person – in their life, in their point of view – if you are going to listen to them. If you are not interested in them or if your primary interest is in yourself and getting your opinion heard, then you won’t be able to listen.

Listening requires interest. There is no interest without awareness. In order to be interested in a person or in anything you have to be aware of that person or that thing. If you are not aware you can’t be interested and therefore can’t listen and therefore will not be in communication.

There is no awareness without silence. Silence, stillness, solitude, and reflection are what we need from time to time in order to allow our awareness to grow and expand and deepen. See Crossing the Stream by Sangharakshita –chapter on ‘Pauses’ and ‘Empty Spaces’. Sometimes people think of meditation in terms of getting into blissful states of mind, but what is really important about meditation is that it enables awareness to grow and expand and deepen. Regardless of whether we are able to get into the dhyanas or not, meditation is important because it allows us to sit still, be silent and experience the solitude of our own minds at least for a short time. And it is also important because it creates the conditions that allow us to reflect more deeply and continuously

Communication, paradoxically enough, is dependant on silence. You have to develop the ability to be silent if you want to communicate.

If you can be silent you can become aware of yourself and of others, if you become aware you can become interested, if you become interested you can listen and if you can listen you can communicate.

As well as being able to listen you have to learn to reflect. Reflecting on your experience in the light of the Dharma means being able to ask yourself questions and give frank, honest answers. It means seeing clearly how egotism operates in your thoughts and emotions, how it gets expressed in your words and actions. If you can see clearly how egotism operates in you and how you give expression to it, then you have greater self-knowledge. Greater self-knowledge opens up the possibility of greater empathy with others and therefore the possibility of deeper and more satisfying communication.
In this context then, meditating means taking the listening and the reflecting deeper so that you get more and more glimpses of the freedom that comes from going beyond ego-identity and self-concern.

I have been talking about community and communication in terms of listening, reflecting and meditating.

When through our reflections and meditation we experience letting go of the burden of self-centredness, when we experience laying down the burden of ego, even for a moment, there is a sense of relief, a sense of freedom and a feeling of release from confinement.

From silence we can learn awareness, from awareness interest can grow; from interest we find listening becomes easier. When we listen we gain food for reflection and our reflections can lead us deeper into contemplations that loosen our attachment to self-defending. This improves communication enormously and creates and develops sangha.

All these are elements of spiritual community – sangha.

Spiritual community can be experienced on different levels – all of which are important and essential. There are the four levels of social interaction, personal friendship, kalyana mitrata and the third order of consciousness.

Social interaction is a very important foundation and building block for spiritual community. In social interaction we experience the delights of human communication and the clash of egos and temperaments. The Buddha recommended that any society or sangha should come together frequently and in large numbers. There is something about seeing people, hearing them, touching them and being in the same physical space that cannot be in any way replicated by telephone, emails, facebook or online forums. If we don’t come into contact with people in this way we can only relate to the image of them we carry in our minds and that image can never adequately represent the person in all their complexity and changeability. This first level of social interaction is very important in creating any community.

The next level is the level of Personal friendships. We sometimes define the Order as a network of friendships and I think it is a very good definition. It is the personal friendships that give depth and life to our community. It is also personal friendships that make the spiritual life such a rich and pleasant experience. Nowadays there are many people in the Order who have close friendships, which have lasted for 20, 30 years or more. The health of our community depends on this tradition of deep personal friendships continuing and growing. When we develop a friendship we are doing something that is crucial to the effectiveness of our individual spiritual practice and also something that is crucial to the vitality and strength of the community as a whole.

The third level of spiritual community is kalyana mitrata or spiritual friendship. This obviously overlaps with personal friendship, but it is not the same thing. For instance I do not have a personal friendship with Bhante, but I have very much experienced him being a kalyana mitra to me. Usually, but not always, kalyana mitrata is about those who are more experienced on the spiritual path sharing that experience with those who are less experienced and those who are less experienced being receptive to what is being communicated. You do not have to have a personal friendship with someone in order to benefit from their experience or to share your experience with them. Kalayana mitrata has been spoken of as a flow – something that flows through the sangha. It flows down through the generations and it flows within a particular spiritual community. In order for it to flow it needs the receptivity of those who wish to learn and the generosity of those who have something to impart. The ultimate source from which all kalyana mitrata flows is the Buddha and his experience of Awakening, which he communicated to others as soon as he could. Kondanna was the first to understand. Kondanna’s receptivity to the Buddha’s message is in a sense the first instance of effective Kalyana mitrata in the wider Buddhist community. [See Gautama by Vishavapani Blomfield p.116] That example of kalyana mitrata and the communication that flowed between them was the beginning of the river of spiritual friendship that has continued to flow ever since and continues to flow today within our own Triratna Community.

The fourth level of spiritual community is what Bhante has called the ‘third order of consciousness’. The third order of consciousness is what happens when there is what Bhante calls a ‘coincidence of wills’ between those who are spiritually developed. This coincidence of wills leads to a very great harmony and fellowship within the spiritual community. It is this great harmony and fellowship which is the third order of consciousness. Bhante has used the image of the 1000-armed Avalokitesvara as a symbol of this where each hand holding it’s particular implement represents each individual Order member making their unique contribution in harmony with all the others. This is the level of communication you would expect of the Aryasangha – the noble sangha of Stream Entrants and beyond. This is an aspiration and sometimes a reality for our own Triratna Community.

I have talked about communication being essential to spiritual community and I have looked at some of the elements that go to make for good communication; saying that in the end silence and reflection were essential for communication and therefore for the creation and development of Spiritual Community. I have talked about four levels of spiritual community each of which is important and essential. For our Triratna Community to be a truly spiritual community it needs to embody all four levels of Sangha, gathering together in large numbers, a network of personal friendships, the constant flow of kalyana mitrata, and the deep and satisfying harmony of the ‘third order of consciousness’. I believe our Triratna community does embody all of these to some degree.

But all of this originates with the Buddha’s Awakening and his communication of his insight to others who in turn had their own experience of insight into the nature of Reality which they communicated and so on down to the present day. This phenomenon of communication giving rise to spiritual experience and spiritual experience being communicated is the flow of kalyana mitrata and is central to the Buddha’s experience of Awakening and his subsequent teaching. Within a very short time he was telling his disciples that they should go forth and wander and teach for the good of the many, for the welfare of the many. This is the essential activity of sangha, this is the flow of kalyana mitrata at work and this is what animates the whole Buddhist tradition and what has led to the creation of the Triratna community and what will lead to it’s continuation as a Sangha and an important spiritual tradition in the modern world.

If we continue to meet in friendly social gatherings, if we create among us deep and lasting friendships, if we have a flow of spiritual friendship and a deep and harmonious meeting of minds then we will thrive as a community.

And for that to happen we need to deepen our understanding of ourselves and our awareness of others through reflection, solitude and silence, we need to develop interest in others and listen to them. If we do this we will have Sangha, we will have Spiritual Community and we will be following the footsteps of the Buddha and Kondanna. Because the Buddha communicated his insight and because Kondanna listened the whole of Buddhism was possible. We will always benefit if, as well as trying to be Buddhists, we also do our best to be Kondannists.

The Five Principles of Windhorse:Evolution

2010-10-20T07:04:00.000-07:00

I gave this talk to the teams at Windhorse in Cambridge a few years ago and the five principles outlined in it are still referred to when recruiting new people or training people in the ethos of the business.

Ever since I was a teenager I have been motivated by idealism. One of the reasons I left Ireland when I was seventeen was because I was worried that my idealism might lead me into extremist politics, which in that time and place would have been very dangerous.
That idealism led me to search for meaning in life and eventually to taking up Buddhist practice. That idealism has also led me to join Windhorse:Evolution. I am very keen to give my energy to trying to create a business with heart, a business that definitely makes money. But a business that makes money not to provide personal wealth, not to pay big salaries or give a big fortune to shareholders but rather a business that makes money to give away. The idealism of working for the purpose of generosity appeals very much to me, in fact it gives me a sense of purpose and meaning that I never could get from an ordinary career. I think I may be something of an extremist in this regard and I don’t really expect many people to share my passion for an idealistic life. If a few people share it, that’s enough for me.

So is Windhorse:Evolution (W:E) satisfying my need for idealistic work?

I have been here at W:E for just over one year now and sometimes when people ask me what I do here, what my role is, it is quite difficult to tell them clearly. This is because I have been learning as I proceed and my role has evolved over the year.

Initially I came here at the request of the Management Forum (MF) to help them reduce the level of stress they were under. There were all sorts of reasons why the senior managers felt burdened – recruitment issues, changes in the ethos of the business, inadequate structures to allow for delegation, inadequate provision of training, a difficult trading environment and of course a shortage of time to give attention to any of these issues.

One of the first things I did was to take on chairing the Management Forum meetings to help make the meetings more effective.
I also began reviewing the business to try to discover what people working here felt about the business; what they valued and what they wanted to change.

In the course of that review I met about 150 people, which is a good percentage of the total workforce. I am still engaged in following through the findings from that review.

One of the more immediate things I did was to enlist the help of Tejasvini and Dhiramitra to produce a magazine – because that was one obvious need that could be met relatively easily.

Then at the request of the managers I instituted a review of training in the business. That review, which involved several other people doing quite a bit of work, took six months and the report and recommendations that came out of it will be discussed by the MF soon.

The MF also asked me to look into how to develop a new management structure for the business. I spent time looking into this and creating models which looked good on paper – but in the end I concluded that it was going to have to be an organic process and a new structure would emerge out of the present structure if we could enable more people to take responsibility and free up some of the senior managers to have a more strategic overview rather than being involved so much in the day to day details. So with the help of Shakyakumara we have been enabling more delegation of responsibility. I have organised some of those who are taking up new responsibility to meet together to share experience and get a sense of the business beyond their own area. I help by chairing these meetings.

I have also organised and facilitated some strategy meetings to begin to formulate a longer-term strategy for both the wholesale and retail sides of the businesses.

This whole area of management structure and delegation is very much work in progress and has some way to go.

Another task I was requested to carry out was to look into the issues that gave rise to some people leaving the business unhappily in the past. I gathered together some people to help me with this and I met up with some of those who had left unhappily. I have now produced a report with some recommendations, which are either being implemented or discussed further.

More recently I have been supporting Beth in carrying out a review of the personnel function in the business. Beth did all the work really and produced a report and recommendations, which has led to some changes in the Personnel work. The main change is that a definite distinction has been drawn between Staff Welfare work and Personnel work, with Saddharaja now managing Staff Welfare and Dharmasiddhi managing Personnel.

I have also been taking a closer look at the accounts of the business and the Trust to familiarise myself with more of the financial details.

The main thing I am involved with now is working even more closely with Vajraketu and taking some of the weight off his shoulders so that he can concentrate more of his time and energy on buying and selling.

But to come back to where I began – with idealism. Underlying and underpinning everything here is our values as a business inspired by the Buddhist vision of life. This is of primary importance to me and I know to many others here.

Being here connects me with what is most important to me and I would very much like that to be the case for most people. It seems to me that if we can connect to what is most important to us in terms of values when we are at work then our lives will be greatly enriched.

I would like all of us to experience a real sense of community, of friendliness and mutual care. I would very much like this to be a business where like-minded people work together to create a really excellent working environment and an efficient and profitable business. I would like to see all our efforts resulting in something we could be proud of – something special as a workplace and as a business.

This is a kind of dream – a dream of working with people who want to work together for the benefit of others as well as themselves, a dream of a business that exists to give away money rather than accumulate wealth for shareholders or directors or workers, a dream of a community of like-minded people willing to work hard to achieve something greater than any one individual could achieve.

I would like to work in an environment where the spirit of generosity is pervasive – generosity towards each other and the generosity of generating profits to give away.

I would like to work in an environment where we treat each other with care and kindness and where we treat our suppliers and customers and anybody else we encounter, with kindness and care too.

However, I am well aware that none of us is perfect and that whatever ideals or values we have we will often fall short. I am also well aware that not everyone is able to respond to ideals in the same way or to the same degree. So we will always have a diversity of responses to deal with but I guess the minimum we can expect of each other is that no one will be actively undermining of what the business is about.

I see my current role here as one of trying to provide a focus for the values that underpin the business as an altruistic project and at the same time helping where I can to bring more efficiency and strategic thinking to bear on the money making aspect of what we do.

Currently we are looking into formulating strategies for retail and wholesale to meet the challenges of a more competitive market and shrinking profits. This also entails a lot of detailed work and research so that decisions are based on the strongest possible foundations. It is very clear that in future everybody in the business will have to have a clearer sense of how they are contributing to profitability and the impact of their teams’ activity on sales and profits.

Alongside this we are looking very closely at the way we have put our values into practice in the past and considering whether some definite changes need to be made. We are looking at the issue of support and wages and considering whether the principles that underpin the business are being served by the current practices. We are also looking at recruitment policy and Right livelihood training. This kind of review entails going back to first principles and seeing what is needed to serve the ethical and spiritual values of the business.

Here is how I would outline the first principles or fundamental principles of the business as a business and as a Buddhist organisation.

1. Being a business is the context in which we operate and therefore as a business our first principle has to be to make money. This may seem obvious but I have encountered people who feel we should not focus on making money.
However there is a difference between being a charity and being a business and although this business is owned by a charity it is not itself a charity. A charity can raise funds from donations, but a business has to create wealth. A business is in business to make money and if it doesn’t make money it will not survive for long. So making money has to be a fundamental principle of this business.

This puts the customer at the centre of the business. Everything else depends upon the customer. When you have plenty of customers and they are buying in sufficient quantities then you make money and then you can do other things.

So we have to remember in our daily work that the customer is central to what we do, to our existence and survival as a business and we need to be aware of our customers and treat them well. We need to serve our customers. Anyone in business who feels that the customer is a nuisance or can be ignored is really deluding themselves. If we are a mandala to use a Buddhist image then the customer is in the centre and everything else is in relationship to the customer.

The fundamental need to make money also implies that we need to give due appreciation to those who are directly involved in selling. We need to appreciate fully the sales team, the regional sales reps who take the vans out to our customers, the Retail team and the shop teams. They are at the front line communicating with customers, selling products and conveying the ethos of our business – so they are really the most important people in the business.
Appreciating them means understanding what a key role they play in business and supporting them fully. What they need to do their work effectively should take priority over things.

Perhaps each team should have a brief update on the profitability of the business every couple of months, if you don’t already have one, as a way of staying in touch with this fundamental principle.

So the first thing we are about as a business is making money.

2. Now we come on to the second fundamental principle of Windhorse. What distinguishes us from most other businesses is what we do with our profits. We make money in order to give it away. This is what the business was established for and this continues to be one of its main reasons for existing. This principle is very much in line with the Buddhist values that permeate the company.
We do not want to make any individual rich. We are not capitalist in the strict sense of providing dividends to shareholders in return for the provision of capital. We are not in business to provide large salaries for directors or to enable anyone to grow rich.

Primarily we are in business to generate wealth in order to give it away.

So generosity is our second fundamental principle. It has to be second because you cannot give away what you don’t have. As I said before we need to make money before we can give it away. I am emphasising this because some very good idealistic people really love generosity as a practice and love the fact that we help people in Kenya and Guatemala but sometimes feel that making money or even wanting to make money is somehow a bit dirty – not pure enough. But we need to be equally wholehearted about making money and generosity or we become a bicycle with only one wheel – going nowhere.

3. The third fundamental principle of Windhorse is ethics. We want a strong ethical practice to be part of our business ethos and also to pervade the working environment.

Ethical practice generates an atmosphere of trust, which is something we want to foster.

Put simply, the main elements of ethical practice for us are kindness, honesty and awareness.

I’ll just say something briefly about each of these.

Kindness here means trying to develop and maintain an attitude of goodwill and care towards each other in the workplace and also towards our customers, suppliers and anyone we encounter in the course of the working day. Kindness is an attitude that recognises and empathises with the humanity of others. This is the kind of atmosphere we want to create – one of recognising and empathising with the humanity of others.

Honesty is crucial to developing trust, both between ourselves and in relation to our customers and suppliers. This is honesty in the sense of not stealing or taking things without permission and also honesty in the sense of telling the truth. As a business we should try not to tell lies for the sake of advantage or profit and as individuals the same applies. What we say and how we speak to each other plays a large part in creating our working atmosphere. An atmosphere of trust needs honesty and truthful speech.

Awareness as an ethical principle is concerned with being aware of other people. If we are to be kind or honest in relation to others we need to be aware of them. This means being aware of them as a person with feelings and thoughts, needs and qualities. This kind of awareness of people as fellow human beings is actually not so common in the world as you notice if you pay any attention to the news media. But even those of us who are relatively polite and well mannered are sometimes only aware of others to the extent that they either help or hinder us. In other words we often relate to other people as objects that to some degree cause us either pleasure or pain. So as an ethical principle, awareness means going beyond that kind of relating to others and trying to glimpse the humanity beyond our own likes and dislikes. If we can do this we create an atmosphere of trust and care which makes our working lives a pleasure.

Another aspect of ethics is our relation to the natural world and this is also an area that we as a business should pay attention to.

So ethics is about enhancing our relations with each other, with customers, suppliers and others and with the natural environment and it is the third fundamental principle of Windhorse.

4. The fourth fundamental principle is personal development.

From a Buddhist perspective the whole purpose of life is to develop and grow from a state of relative egotism and separateness to a state of egolessness and compassion. Here at Windhorse, this idea that people can change and grow and unfold their potential is one of our underlying principles.

We can unfold our potential in all sorts of ways. For instance by developing skills we gain confidence and as we gain confidence we become more secure and happy to be who we are, which means there is less of a tendency to be self-centred. Developing new skills could mean just developing the ability to speak up in a group, or the ability to articulate our thoughts clearly. Or it might mean developing the ability to listen carefully – or the ability to make presentations – or simply the ability to engage with our work. For some it might mean learning leadership skills or management skills.

Personal development also means knowing ourselves and knowing how we limit ourselves through habitual ways of thinking and habitual ways of acting and speaking. The more we come to know ourselves in detail the more we can change ourselves for the better and become bigger people.
Meditation is one of the methods for learning to know ourselves. This is quite widely recognised these days and is being used in business more and more. The author and business consultant Danah Zohar recommends meditation to top executives, for instance. A friend of mine is just beginning to teach meditation to the employees of a large pharmaceutical company in the south of England and another friend used to teach meditation to staff at the London headquarters of Marks and Spencer.

Perhaps as a business inspired by Buddhism we should give more attention to meditation too. How about each team beginning or ending the working day with fifteen minutes of quiet time?

Personal development from the basic level of developing new skills right up to the spiritual heights of embodying Wisdom and Compassion is the fourth fundamental principle of Windhorse.

5. The fifth and last principle I want to outline is the principle of collectivity and community.
You could say this is the spirit in which all the other principles are carried out.
The first stage of this collectivity is working in a team – co-operating and collaborating with others as creatively as we can to achieve the goals of the team.

We enhance the ability to work collectively by creating a sense of community between us and we create a sense of community by getting to know each other better and developing empathy and care between us.

So the first building block of a collective endeavour is to get to know our fellow team members and develop trust and kindness in the team. This is what some of our team meetings are about.

Beyond that we can get a sense of the larger collective effort by reading the magazine and by interacting with people from other teams either formally through meetings or informally over lunch or at social gatherings. This is obviously more difficult for the shop teams.

I think Arthasiddhi’s singing workshops are very good in this respect and we could do with many more social events and opportunities for spending time together outside the working environment. Perhaps we should initiate an annual one-day festival for everybody from here and the shops and perhaps even some of our customers, as a way of building a stronger sense of community. I think this is an area that is wide open for anyone to take initiative and there is a theatre available as a venue, which we could easily make more use of.

However we go about it the principle we want to give life to is that of collectivity and community – a sense that we are doing something worthwhile together and that we are part of a community of like-minded people supporting and encouraging each other in our personal development, ethical practice and so on.

So these in brief are the five fundamental principles of Windhorse: making money, generosity, ethics, personal development and community.

We are already putting them all into practice to some degree – some more than others – and there is always more we can do. There is also room for creativity and innovation in how we put these principles into practice.

I have spoken about our fundamental principles. This is the foundation on which the whole organisation rests. From these principles we can build up something that we can all be proud of.

What I hope we can build is a successful business – with a heart, a successful business whose purpose is to be helpful, a business where we are all motivated to give our best and co-operate with each other in order to make money which we can give away and where we are motivated to create working environments that are pervaded by trust, kindness and awareness and where it is a pleasure to work in a collective spirit with our fellow team members.

The Tantric Guru - dead or alive?

2010-03-25T08:03:00.000-07:00

This a talk on the topic of Right Livelihood, given at Madhyamaloka, Birmingham, in April 2010.

A question that often arises for people when they study the Noble Eightfold Path is - why did the Buddha, or whoever compiled the list, include right livelihood. Surely all the considerations of ethics with regard to livelihood are already covered in the other sections of the eightfold path -- such as right speech and right action. Why does livelihood need its own stage? One answer to this is that it was a particular issue at the time of the Buddha - trade was expanding and this brought with it particular challenges. Another answer is that it was the only aspect of social life that needed to be addressed -- because citizenship was not meaningful then and domestic life was well regulated. Another possible explanation, one that I find very plausible indeed, is that the Buddha wanted to criticise the caste system. One of the things determined by caste is one's livelihood, but the Buddha is saying no - it is not caste but ethics that should determine your livelihood.

What strikes me about Right Livelihood as a stage of the Eightfold Path is that it is concerned primarily with activity and secondarily with mental states, whereas all the other seven stages seem to me to be primarily concerned with mental states and secondarily with activity - even the stage of Right Action. The implication of this for me is that from the beginning there was an ethics of intention and an ethics of consequences. In other words, it is important what mental state you are in before you act and what is skilful or unskillful is determined by that mental state. Greed, hatred and delusion give rise to unskilfullness and generosity, love and wisdom give rise to skillfulness. This is the ethics of intention, the mental state determines whether an action is skilful or not.

However there are certain actions which are always unskillful. This is what the stage of right livelihood is saying. This is ethics determined by consequences. In other words, some actions have such disastrous consequences that it doesn't matter what the mental state of the perpetrator is -- they are just unskillful or to put it another way, some actions imply negative mental states. Under the heading of right livelihood the Buddha mentions trading in living beings, trading in poisons, trading in meat, intoxicants and weapons. These are to be avoided. And further to that, monks are to refrain from using divination and fortune-telling as a means of livelihood. So the implication here is that all of these activities are wrong in themselves. They are harmful to living beings and there is no way to perform these activities from a positive mental state. They can never be an expression of Metta or generosity or wisdom.

This is important because sometimes Buddhists are in danger of elevating the subjective and ignoring the objective. Sometimes we can talk and act as if meditation or mindfulness is the whole of Buddhism. But this limb of the eightfold path is reminding us that however mindful we are, however much bliss and rapture we experience in meditation, there are some things which are just plain wrong and cannot be purified from the inside out, so to speak.

The Noble Eightfold Path is a specific application of the more fundamental principle of pratitya samutpada (variously translated as dependent arising, conditioned co-production, the law of conditionality) - everything arises in dependence upon conditions. The Eightfold Path is pointing to the conditions which give rise to Insight and the mental states and ways of life which give expression to Insight, when it has arisen. The mundane Eightfold Path is indicating the conditions that give rise to knowledge and vision of things as they really are (yathabhutajnanadarshan) and the transcendental Eightfold Path gives expression to that Knowledge and Vision.

So right livelihood is part of the conditions for making spiritual progress. I think we could make the definition of right livelihood very wide indeed. The division that we take for granted between work as an activity separate from other activities is an artificial division that has grown up in money-based economies. We have come to see some of our activities as concerned with acquiring money and other activities as concerned with leisure etc. This division is not inherent in the nature of reality -- it is socially conditioned.

The notion that we have an economic life or a work life that is somehow separate from the rest of our life is a delusion. Just as the notion that we have a spiritual life is a delusion. Everything we do in our life has economic implications. When we have a shower in the morning - the shower gel, the shampoo, the water, the shower hose, all have economic implications. The toothpaste, the toothbrush, the towel, the hair dryer, the light bulb, the electricity - all of these are being consumed by us and produced and delivered by others. This web of activity has vast implications - economic, as well as environmental, political, spiritual, domestic and so on. Our livelihood involves us in earning and consuming.

Work came to be seen as separate from the rest of life when some members of a society were able to gather a surplus of requisites for themselves and force others to work on their behalf. In primitive societies the main concern was with survival and everything was geared towards that, including religious ritual, the sculpting of fertility figures or the painting of animal images in caves. Interestingly when some of the first European settlers encountered the Native Americans they thought they were very idle because all they did was hunt and fish. "While Indian women generally gathered plants and tilled fields, native men "for the most part live idlely, they doe nothing but hunt and fish," observed one New England minister. William Byrd II, the scion of a wealthy Virginia family, added that Indian men "are quite idle or at most employ'd only in the Gentlemanly Diversions of Hunting and Fishing." As these quotes suggest, in England hunting and fishing were considered recreational and were generally reserved for members of the gentry. They were vital, however, to the subsistence of native peoples. (Taken from Internet article)

The ancient Hebrews viewed work as a "curse devised by God explicitly to punish the disobedience and ingratitude of Adam and Eve" (Rose, 1985, p. 28) The ancient Greeks considered all work with contempt and saw it as a hindrance to the cultivation of the mind. The Greek word for work was 'ponos' which comes for the same root as 'pain'. The Romans carried on the attitudes of the Greeks and this was also an influence on early Christian monasticism. It wasn't until Martin Luther and the Reformation that attitudes to work began to change. Calvinism brought about the greatest change and gave birth to what has come to be known as the 'Protestant work ethic'. The Calvinists believed that only a select few - the Elect - were destined to be saved and one of the few ways of telling who was favoured by God was to note who was prosperous. If you were prosperous it was because God favoured you and therefore you were probably one of the Elect. To become prosperous you had to work hard.

By the 20th century work had become a commodity under the influence of industrialisation. There were some, from the 18th century onwards, who hearkened back to some Golden age when there was no separation between work and leisure and sought to recreate their fantasy of a primitive paradise. The majority had to head for the factories, mills and mines. Nowadays we are likely to hear people talk about the importance of the work/life balance. Work is one thing, life is another and the two must be balanced. This is an idea which seems to undermine itself.

I think we as Buddhists need to take a more holistic approach than the ancient Greeks and Romans with their dependence on slaves or the modern work/life balance gurus with their dependence on a dichotomy which is strengthened by any attempts to balance it.

Work is an activity that constitutes part of the economic aspect of life and no part of life is without an economic aspect. Whether we are earning or consuming, economics is involved. Economics is basically about energy. We are either expending our energy, saving our energy or using other people’s energy and all of that has a value, a monetary value.

So, for instance if I visit an Art Gallery here in Birmingham, it doesn't cost me anything. No monetary transaction takes place. But it would be foolish to think that my visit to the gallery somehow falls outside the economic realm. It all costs a lot of money, a huge expenditure of energy and it is my presence there that justifies that expenditure. Or, to take another example, if I sit down to meditate - the place where I am sitting, the cushions and mats I am sitting on, the shrine, the candles, the heating and so on, all represent a vast expenditure of energy. The fact that I am not too hungry or sick to meditate also has huge economic implications.

Our life is an economic activity from cradle to grave, from morning to night and indeed all through the night. And it has always been so. The Buddha and his followers were not engaged in earning, but they did consume and were dependent on others for their subsistence. Their lives were not divorced from economics because economics is about energy and every life involves the expenditure and consumption of energy in one form or other.

Coming back to livelihood and Right livelihood. Livelihood focuses on the expenditure of energy in the production and delivery of goods and services. Right Livelihood is a use of energy in this way that causes no harm to oneself or others. But, of course, the production and delivery of goods and services cannot be divorced from the consumption of goods and services. So, I would like to extend the meaning of Right Livelihood to cover both sides of this equation - production and delivery on one side and consumption on the other. So Right Livelihood then becomes the production, delivery and consumption of goods and services in such a manner that no harm is caused to oneself or others. The Pali term for Right Livelihood is Samyak Ajiva. The dictionary translates ajiva as 'livelihood' and also as 'mode of living'. So Samyak ajiva could be translated as Right Mode of Living or perhaps even Right Lifestyle. One could take this further and say that Right Livelihood as a stage of the Noble eightfold Path represents all altruistic activity or at least the attempt to make all activity altruistic and as such it is the beginnings of the Bodhisattva ideal. This is why I think Right Livelihood is part of the Eightfold Path. It is there because the Dharma is inherently compassionate and that compassion extends into all areas of life. Right Livelihood makes explicit the need for compassion in all our dealings with others and especially in this area of life that involves the production, delivery and consumption of goods and services. This area of life isn't really an area at all. It permeates into every detail of every moment of our lives. As we sit here we are consuming and therefore creating a demand for production. We are affecting the lives of people all over the world - the people who make our clothes, or the dye in those clothes, the washing powder we use, people who service buildings, work on oil platforms, in carpet factories and furniture factories and so on.

I am saying all this to make it obvious why Livelihood has to be included in spiritual practice and also to indicate that it is perhaps not as simple as it could at first seem from a glance at the Pali canon. A spiritual practice that ignores livelihood is like a mathematician ignoring equations.

The Buddha and his followers didn't work in the ordinary sense of the word. They expended their energy in meditation, Dharma discussion and teaching and they kept their needs to a minimum. They were valued by the society around them and given support to meet their basic needs for food, shelter, clothing and medicine. In 1968 when Bhante gave his lectures on the Eightfold Path, he encouraged his disciples to work as little as possible and to live simple lives with few needs. This was in keeping with the Buddhist tradition. It is worth noting that the consumption side of the equation was not ignored by the Buddha or Bhante. Having few needs or living a simple life means consuming less and this is an intrinsic part of any discussion about Right Livelihood.

Fourteen years later in 1982, Bhante said he would encourage those working in Team Based Right Livelihood situations to ‘work as much as possible or at least ‘as well as possible’. This is because with the development of co-ops, which later became Team Based Right Livelihood businesses, what was being developed was a new way of putting Buddhism into practice very fully, on a daily and hourly basis, in our western context. This was part of a new vision of what it meant to be a full time practitioner of the Dharma, which superseded the traditional Bhikkhu / laity split, which in much of the Buddhist world was no longer of much genuine spiritual benefit to either the Bhikkhus or the laity. It was also a development that gave women an equal opportunity to practice fully and engage in creating the conditions for the spiritual development of as many people as possible.

Team Based Right Livelihood businesses were to be ‘Right’ in the traditional sense of avoiding activities that caused harm. They were to be ‘businesses’ so that they could generate a surplus which was then used to make the Dharma available. They were to be ‘Team Based’ in the sense that the people in them would see themselves co-operating on a common project for the benefit of themselves and others.They were 'livelihood' in the sense of meeting the basic needs of those working in them.

So in principle a Team Based Right Livelihood venture was seen as a practice of exemplifying Metta, generosity and spiritual community. Each of these could be taken further. The ethics of Right Livelihood could be looked into more thoroughly and updated for our modern age. The aspect of generosity could be furthered by individuals deciding to take only enough money to meet their basic needs, leaving the rest to be given away. The spiritual community aspect, which is encompassed by the phrase ‘Team Based’, could be taken further through practices such as spiritual friendship, confession, telling life stories, taking on personal precepts and endeavouring to co-operate. In a sense their is no limit to the practice, because if taken seriously it continuously confronts egotism and encourages self-transcendence and selfless activity. Team Based right Livelihood has the potential to bring about the transformation of the individual practitioner and, by a process of exemplification and influence, to contribute to the transformation of the wider society.

That is the vision and the theory. What about the practice? What has happened in our Movement? Team Based Right Livelihood is listed by Bhante as one of the six distinctive emphases of the Movement. How have we got on with it? Do we practice it?

The short answer, at first glance, is that we haven’t got on very well and that not many of us do practise it. The longer answer is perhaps more complex. My own view at present is that Team Based Right Livelihood businesses may not survive in our Movement. As far as I can judge the evidence seems to be saying that Team Based Right Livelihood businesses are unlikely to survive. It may be that this particular practice, as recommended by Bhante, will have to be revived by a later generation or in a different culture. I think there may be more hope for Team based Right Livelihood to survive in the non-profit making sector ( i.e. Buddhist Centres, Retreat centres etc.,) although even here I think the practice in it’s purest form, of being on ‘support’ and living a simple life, rather than taking a wage or salary may have declined too. Although I am not currently optimistic about the survival of the practice of Team Based Right Livelihood businesses in our Movement, I am committed to the practice, because I believe it to be of crucial importance to the embedding of the Dharma in our western industrialised cultures, as well as being a very effective context to help individuals to progress spiritually.

Some years ago Subhuti gave a talk entitled Bodhisattvas in the Market Place, in which he takes a very thorough look at the whole topic of Right Livelihood. That talk was published in 2003 in a booklet entitled Roads to Freedom. I would recommend it to anyone interested in this topic. In his talk Subhuti, very skillfully and clearly draws out six different ways of practising Right Livelihood, from simply engaging in ethical work at one end of the spectrum to the Team Based Right Livelihood enterprise at the other end. I think Subhuti’s approach is very helpful and I hope many more people will read and study his lecture, which shines a light on this important area of practice.

I am making a different distinction here, a distinction between two different kinds of Team Based Right Livelihood. That is the distinction between a profit making enterprise and a non- profit making enterprise, or more simply the distinction between a business and a charity. I think we have sometimes failed to be clear about this distinction in the Movement – or at least some people have been unclear about it. I have heard of the twin absurdities of some people thinking that a business should not be trying to make a profit and others thinking that a charity should be trying to make a profit. This kind of unclarity can only be detrimental. It can lead to confusion about the nature of the practice and how to practice. If you don’t have a commonly held view of what you are trying to achieve, then it is not possible to co-operate in achieving it.

This is just one issue that has been problematic in our attempts to practice Team Based Right Livelihood. There are I think a number of other issues which I will just touch on, before finishing with a few thoughts about what I think would need to happen if the practice of Team Based Right Livelihood business is to be rescued and developed in our Movement.

Another issue that comes to mind is to do with what I consider to be a certain amount of confusion about what a team is and how it should function. This confusion may stem from some things Bhante has said over the years about co-ops and co-operation. Here is an example from a Question and Answer session in Baker St., Buddhist centre in 1983.
“When you are working in a co-operative you are working together. As for ‘working’ everybody knows what that is, but ‘together’ is not me telling you what to do or you telling me what to do: in a co-operative you are all working together. To do anything together is very difficult indeed. Usually one person is the ‘leader’, the other the ‘follower’. One person takes the initiative and the other person allows them to take the initiative. One person is ‘active’, the other ‘passive’ – with or without unconscious, or semi-conscious or semi-unconscious, resentment or resistance. Whether between two people. Or three, four or a larger number of people, this is the usual situation. You very rarely get actual co-operation.
Co-operation means you all put your cards on the table. You consider what is to be done, and what is the best way of doing it. You consider this person’s suggestion and that person’s suggestion, and having discussed the matter in this way and agreed on a certain line of action you all pool your energies and your ideas, your abilities and your skills and, because you have a common objective, you all work together. No-one is trying to order anyone around. No-one is shirking his or her share of responsibility. No-one is having to take more responsibility than they really should. This is a co-operative situation. In such a situation you are very aware of other people. You make no attempt to impose yourself upon them. There is no question of ‘power’. A co-operative of any kind functions entirely in accordance with the love mode – and that isn’t easy. In a genuine co-op situation you abdicate the power mode absolutely. Only the love mode is ‘allowed’ to operate, or to have effect. If you are working in this way, or relating to others in this way, there is a sort of abnegation of your individualism, your egoism. “

This seems to me to be a strong statement of the ideal at which we are aiming, with everybody equally committed and continuously effectively Going for Refuge to the Three Jewels. It’s a statement about the self-transcendence that can come from confronting egotism and co-operating to achieve an objective goal. I don’t take it to be a statement about business management techniques or the best way to distribute responsibility and tasks.

However this kind of statement from Bhante has sometimes been taken to mean that everybody must be involved in making every decision and in discussing every aspect of a business. It has sometimes been taken to mean that no-one should manage a business. At it’s worst this can lead to endless discussions about trivialities and the stultifying of initiative or entrepreneurial flair. That is a recipe for failure in the world of business, which is pretty unforgiving of inefficiency. I have seen some of our businesses limp from week to week under this kind of levelling ideology.

Another misunderstanding that has arisen over the years arises from one of the aims of Team Based Right Livelihood being described as “ to provide a situation within which the workers can experience spiritual friendship in a way that will conduce to their spiritual growth” or Team Based Right Livelihood being spoken of as a “supportive context” for spiritual practice. Some people have interpreted this to mean that they will and should receive a certain amount of spiritual friendship, in the way that the chick in the nest receives food from it’s mother. In other words a certain amount of passivity entered into Team Based right Livelihood businesses with some people joining in the expectation that something spiritual would be given to them, provided for them, without them having to do anything. This often led to the phenomenon of someone not pulling their weight and being shocked and disappointed when it became clear that others had expectations of them.

Another issue that has arisen over the years is that people have been recruited into Team Based Right Livelihood on the basis that they identified themselves as Buddhists and regardless of whether they had any aptitude or ability for the work. This was identified as an issue by Bhante back in 1980. Here is a quote from a seminar he did with some women on the Ethics and manners section of the Jewel Ornament of Liberation :
“One of the biggest lessons of the last year or so is that, in order to establish the New Society, though you cannot do it without individuals, you cannot do it simply with individuals who are lacking in competence in certain areas. That is, in a way, quite a sobering thought. Individuality is indispensible: that is the foundation of the whole thing; but, by itself, in certain respects in isn’t enough. It is enough to take a meditation class. It’s enough for the sake of your own spiritual practice. But it’s not enough when it comes to setting up something which must function objectively and successfully in the world. You have got to have, then, in addition to individuality, know how, and practical experience, and certain abilities and capacities. This has become more evident to us than it was before.” However, although this was evident to Bhante and others thirty years ago, for various reasons it wasn’t possible to fully act on it. I think it was only about five or six years ago that this problem was fully recognised in Windhorse and I think it probably hasn’t been recognised yet in some situations. This led to many unfortunate situations, with some people taking on more responsibility than they were capable of and becoming very stressed as a result, and some teams becoming very dysfunctional.

Related to this is another issue, also probably the result of a misunderstanding – a misunderstanding of Metta and compassion. This is the issue of allowing untenable situations to carry on for far too long. Asking someone to leave a situation would be seen as unkind or exercising the power mode or risking conflict. I have known of communities where everybody else would rather leave than ask the difficult person to go.

Another problem that has sometimes arisen in Team Based Right Livelihood is a tension between work relationships and spiritual relationships. A Kalyana Mitra might feel the need to say something as Kalyana Mitra which might have a detrimental effect on a working relationship or they might feel the need to say something as a work colleague that might have a bad effect on the friendship. This kind of issue can be amplified when a management structure is in place.

Another issue that has dogged Team Based Right Livelihood businesses over the years is a lack of entrepreneurial spirit or business sense – sometimes leading to lacklustre businesses or poor decision making and an inability to look outwards to see trends and opportunities.

Then there has been the issue of not enough Order Members engaging with the practice of Team Based right Livelihood, with the result that too much was expected of relatively new people. The complete practice of Team Based Right Livelihood and community living – give what you can take what you need, co-operation, idealism etc., demands high levels of inspiration and committment.

Another drawback has been that people would frequently have a positive response to working with other Buddhists but no feeling of interest in the particular business. Allied to this is the perennial difficulty of staying in touch with the bigger vision and the spiritual aspirations that are the motivating force.

And sometimes the semi-monastic lifestyle was given a bad reputation by a certain harshness and regimentation that crept into some situations.

The phrase ‘give what you can, take what what you need’, has also been very problematic at times. The little word ‘need’ can cause all sorts of difficulties and be interpreted in wide variety of ways.

Given all these issues and problems ( and there may be others I haven’t thought of) it is a wonder that we have managed to create any Team Based Right Livelihood enterprises at all.

I think we have been more successful with the non-profit making enterprises such as Buddhist Centres and Retreat Centres, than with businesses - the notable exception being Windhorse:Evolution.

Three reasons for this that come to mind are:
In running a Buddhist Centre it is probably easier to stay in touch with the spiritual aspiration and spiritual vision that motivates the work. Secondly, Order Members and especially senior and experienced Order Members are more likely to be involved in Centres and thirdly, you can probably get by with less business acumen – indeed, business acumen might even be a hindrance at times.

It could be, then, that the future of Team Based Right Livelihood is more likely to evolve in non-profit making enterprises; Buddhist Centres, Retreat Centres and other charities. The main problem that I see with this is that it would be in danger of perpetuating the traditional split between full-timers who can’t make a living without the financial support of a wider community and that wider community who rely on the full-timers to do too much on their behalf. Team Based Right Livelihood businesses overcome that split because Buddhists are both practising together and generating wealth.

If we are to rescue and develop the practice of Team Based Right Livelihood businesses, then I think we have a lot of work to do as a Movement.

Here is what I think needs to happen:
Firstly, Many more Order Members, who are effectively Going for Refuge, would need to be motivated to practice within the semi-monastic framework recommended by Bhante, i.e. working in Team Based Right Livelihood on a ‘give what you can, take what you need’ basis, living a simple life in terms of comsumption of resources and living in single-sex communities. This is the bedrock on which the practice of team Based Right Livelihood rests. There is of course plenty of room for others to live alone or with partners or families, but the foundation of the semi-monastic lifestyle is essential. The emphasis here is on simplicity of lifestyle.

Secondly, the practices of semi-monasticism and Team Based Right Livelihood would need to be valued within the Order and Movement as a valid Insight practice. They would need to be valued in the same way that other practices are valued – such as Dharma teaching, going on retreat, meditating, studying or doing rituals. As Bhante puts it “ Insight can arise if you are working in the right sort of way. If you function, patiently and persistently, in accordance with the love mode, - if you refuse to invoke the power mode- if you are continually transcending your narrow individualism - if you really are co-operating, - if you’re sensitive to the other person’s needs and abilities, - if you really have a common aim, - if you really see through your individualistic narrowness.”

Thirdly, I think it needs to be widely recognised that the quality of our Order is dependent on the quality of relationships between people. The depth of those relationships is influenced by how much time people spend together and how many different situations they experience each other in. If our knowledge of each other comes from a weekly meeting for a chat that will lead to a particular experience. If we always meet someone on retreat that will lead to another very particular experience of them. If we generally meet someone at a class at the Centre that is another very defined experience. If we live with someone we see much more of them and we see them at their best and their worst – we get a fuller picture of them and they get a fuller picture of us. If we not only live with someone but also work with them, we get an even more complete view of them. We experience not only how they relate to us but also how they relate to others. We experience not only their conversation but also their actions. My experience is that working with others is a more intense and demanding practice than community living and consequently, for those who engage with it fully a very rewarding practice. It concerns me that we are increasingly accepting people into the Order who have never lived or worked with their Kalyana Mitras or Preceptors. It is my view that at least some experience of the semi-monastic life should be part of everyone’s preparation for ordination and part of everyone’s Order life, in the same way that going on retreat is. Even it was only for a few months or a year.

Fourthly, I believe that the practice of Team Based Right Livelihood business needs to be elucidated in more detail by those with the ability to communicate. One issue here is that often those doing it don’t have the time to talk about it. There is a body of knowledge and practice that is not being fully shared in the Movement. In recent years we have had some very articulate expositions of the practices of meditation and mindfulness coming out of the Order. We need an equally lucid and attractive exposition of the semi-monastic life and of team Based Right Livelihood in particular. Some of the areas that need more detailed elucidation are: what is meant by a team in this context? What is the role of leadership? What is the place of consensus decision making? How does a Team Based Right Livelihood business interact with legal and commercial requirements? What does ‘give what you can, take what you need’ really mean in practice? and so on. I tried to address some of these issues myself in a talk I gave in 1998, entitled The Spiritual Significance of Team Based Right Livelihood, which was published in a booklet and which is now available on the Internet (http://www.angelfire.com/wizard/ratnaghosa/index.html ) (http://ratnaghosha.blogspot.com/ )

In his book Living Ethically, Bhante says Right Livelihood is “ work you would do regardless of how much or how little you were paid for it”. (p. 56) This is to set a very high standard. It is a standard that has been seriously challenged as people in the Order have grown older and become more concerned about issues of financial security and well-being. It has also been seriously challenged by the consumerist values of the wider society, which are so all pervasive and so persuasive. However the Order is still in it’s infancy, historically speaking, and there will inevitably be major changes in the wider society over the coming century, which may make the the practice of semi-monasticism – communal living and ethical working – seem much more normal and sensible and obvious than is currently the case.

Our Movement is unique in it’s teachings on the New Society. As Robert Bluck says in his book British Buddhism “No other [British Buddhist] tradition, has developed such a distinctive social organisation, with its single-sex communities, Right Livelihood businesses and a new Buddhist Order which is neither monastic nor lay”
I believe the practice of semi-monasticism and Team Based Right Livelihood is of obvious benefit to individuals and to society. I believe these practices do constitute a sensible norm and other more conventional frameworks are deeply flawed. I believe that the practice of Team Based Right livelihood in the context of a business is particularly helpful in avoiding any split between full-time and part-time Buddhists and in embedding the Dharma in industrialised cultures. It is because I believe this that I have willingly dedicated my life to this vision.

So I have talked about Right livelihood in a general way and said that Samyak Ajiva could be seen to include both the production and consumption of goods and services. This could be supported by the secondary translation of ajiva as ‘mode of living’. I outlined what I think have been various issues and problems for Team Based Right Livelihood businesses and I have mentioned four things I think will need to be in place if the practice of Team Based Right Livelihood in business is to be rescued and developed.

Finally, I have not said anything about The Tantric Guru, which was the title Dhammaloka gave me. I will finish with a quote from Bhante, from a seminar he gave in 1979 on Advice to the Three Fortunate Women. I’ll leave you to draw your own conclusions about how it relates to Team Based Right Livelihood and why Bhante on another occasion referred to work in team based right livelihood businesses as the Tantric Guru.

“ mental, philosophical, ethical, rational teaching, doesn’t really penetrate down to quite deep levels of the psyche where there are very powerful energies which can be represented or symbolised in terms of gods and demons and so on. That mode of teaching just doesn’t penetrate deeply enough. So Padmasambhava (the Tantric Guru)has to be called in. His kind of teaching, his approach is able to do this. The Four Noble Truths, Noble Eightfold Path – that is all very good, it’s all very beautiful, it certainly has a great effect. People follow it. But on a broader front, even though individuals may gain liberation through following that teaching, in the world all sorts of deeper forces and energies are churned up and come into opposition. It’s as though the initial promulgation of a teaching, in the course of it’s very success, stirs up or churns up very basic energies in human beings, not just indibidfually but perhaps socially speaking, which later on have to be brought under control by some more radical presentation of the teaching. Padmasambhava, (the Tantric Guru,) represents that. “

Is the Tantric Guru, as Bhante uses the term in relation to team based Right Livelihood, dead or alive? Will the Tantric Guru live or die in our Movement? It depends on us. I don't believe it depends on what we think, I don't believe it depends on what we feel, I don't believe it depends on what we want, I believe it depends on what we do.

Spiritual Significance of Right Livelihood

2010-02-27T02:39:00.000-08:00

I have often been asked if I have any material on Team Based Right Livelihood, so here is the text of a talk given at a Team Based Right Livelihood day in London in July 1998

Right livelihood in Buddhism
Right livelihood has been part of Buddhism from the very beginning according to the tradition recorded in the Pali. One of the first discourses of the Buddha concerns the Four Noble Truths of which the Eightfold Path is the fourth. And of course right livelihood is one of the stages of the Eightfold Path. Three stages are concerned with ethics - right action, right speech and right livelihood and at first glance it seems peculiar that livelihood should get mentioned separately. After all, the stages of right action and right speech deal with the ethical issues concerned - i e non-violence in respect of people and property. My own view is that the Buddha refers to livelihood separately as a direct challenge and contradiction to the system of caste which was prevalent in India. According to the caste system your livelihood was determined by your birth, each caste had its own professions, but the Buddha is saying, no it is not caste that should determine your livelihood but ethical concerns. This would have been a socially radical step that would have distinguished the Buddha's followers from the followers of other sects.

In other words the element of social transformation is there in Buddhism from the very beginning, and right livelihood as well as being about ethical behaviour which involves self transformation, is also about applying spiritual and ethical criteria to work and is therefore about the transformation of society and has always been concerned with the transformation of society.

We do not have a caste system and careers are chosen on different grounds. However it is not the ethical principles of non-violence, generosity, truthfulness and so on which are uppermost in most people's minds when choosing a career. Their concerns are more likely to be money and, for some, status. So the theme of right livelihood still needs to be emphasised both for reasons of personal ethics and for social reasons.
Sangharakshita has emphasised from the start the social aspect of right livelihood. Out of this emphasis there grew the phenomenon of the team based Right livelihood business. It is possible to practice right livelihood without team-based right livelihood businesses, but the team based right livelihood is a particularly intense and effective form of the practice.

So in the FWBO we have developed our own situations in which we can practise and fully explore the Buddha's teaching of right livelihood. The development of these situations has been a long and at times painful process of learning and experimentation. And there is still plenty to do to make our businesses more total right livelihood situations and then of course, beyond right livelihood is perfect livelihood - the transcendental level of practice.

The development of team-based right livelihood has involved the simultaneous development of all the elements that go to create a work environment and context where people can effectively go for Refuge to the three jewels. The elements I would like to look at more closely are: Ethics, Dana, Work as Practice and Sangha.

Ethics
The ethical element of team-based right livelihood applies to what kind of business we carry on, it applies to our relationships with our customers and suppliers, and of course to our relationships with each other in teams. The basic principle of Buddhist ethics is non-violence or Metta and that is the basic principle we need to apply to our businesses. They must not cause any violence to people, animals or the natural environment and where possible they should encourage positive emotion towards people, animals and the natural environment.

We also need to be honest and friendly and kind with our customers, suppliers, auditors etc. This is a very important aspect of the practice of team-based right livelihood, exemplifying the Dharma in the world. Sangharakshita has said that we can't always be happy but at least we can be friendly and this is worth bearing in mind. If you are unhappy, you don't have to be grumpy or taciturn with the customers.

And of course we need to observe the principles of non-violence, generosity, kindly speech and so on in relation to our fellow team members. This is extremely important. Sometimes we may be tempted to indulge our negative emotions at the expense of our fellow workers and if we do we need to apologise immediately. But better would be to be so constantly aware of the ethical dimension of our interaction, that we take responsibility for our own unskilful mental states and work on ourselves to change them, with the help of other team members.

So the ethical element of team-based right livelihood runs through every aspect of what we do and is very basic. Sometimes people think of the ethical aspects of team-based right livelihood purely in terms of what we sell and who our suppliers are and so on. But I want to emphasise that it also applies to our interactions with our customers and others and even more importantly to our interaction with fellow team members. Ethical responsibility should work from the centre out so to speak. You need to have a skilful response to yourself first, then to those you are most in contact with and so on just like the stages of the Metta Bhavana. If you practise like this then your principles and values will become firmly based in your character and your ethical response to wider issues will become quite natural.

Dana
Now I'd like to move on to the Dana element of team-based right livelihood. A big part of the original reason for setting up our businesses was to generate funds for the Centre. Because we don't have a large pool of ethnic Buddhists willing to support the full-timers and because we don't even want to encourage that split between full-timer and nominal Buddhist or monk and lay, it is essential that we can generate income for our Centre through our businesses.

However this is not the only reason why Dana is a major element of team-based right livelihood. There is also the fact that from a spiritual perspective it is necessary to develop the altruistic dimension of practice all the time and, in every area of our lives, because eventually as we progress and gain greater insight there is really no other dimension. All spiritual practice leads to compassion and generosity is the beginnings of compassion. By practising generosity we are exercising the muscles of compassion and by giving away money generated by your business you're going beyond any tendency to narrow down into self interest and are moving towards compassionate activity.

So this is how we usually speak of the Dana element of team-based right livelihood, in terms of giving away part of the profits to support the Centre. But there is also the whole area of give what you can take what you need. To give what you can is to operate in the spirit of generosity. Sometimes especially when people are new to team-based right livelihood, they tend to see themselves as employees who must assert their rights, which in the case of team-based right livelihood means their needs. So they're very keen that their financial needs are known and satisfied. This is as one would expect. It takes time to identify with the business as your business and to be able to give freely and generously of yourself without thinking of reward, it also takes time to form friendships and while our emotional needs are not met we tend to experience greater financial or material needs. So people sometimes think in terms of their financial needs being met as a reward for their hard work. But this is not how it works at all. There is no financial reward for labour in our businesses, there is no financial reward for taking responsibility. The principle is generosity not exchange. You need to practise team-based right livelihood in the spirit of giving what you can to the project, to your workmates, to the customers - this is the spirit of generosity. And it is this spirit that takes us beyond egotism, beyond self-centredness and prepares us for an insight into reality. If you work with the attitude that your needs are the main thing and you must remind the rest of the team and even fight for your needs to be met, you will find team-based right livelihood an unpleasant experience which never really rewards your efforts. If you work with an attitude of generosity and developing trust, then team-based right livelihood will be a very satisfying and inspiring experience. A basic principle in Buddhism is that of Going Forth. Going Forth means giving up attachment to and dependence on everything except the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. This is something that usually happens gradually. Joining a team based right livelihood business is a form of Going Forth because the principle of generosity and living a simple life is so much at the heart of it. Non-attachment or Going Forth is another way of talking about generosity. So the Dana element of team-based right livelihood can be seen in terms of the whole team generating profits and giving away some of those profits and it can also be seen in terms of each individual having an attitude of generosity towards the whole project and towards the rest of the team ; it's a case of mutual generosity - a better phrase perhaps than the Marxist 'give what you can, take what you need'.

Work as practice
The next element of team-based right livelihood we can look at is work as practice. So what do we mean by work as practice? Well what I mean is using the actual task in front of you as a method for spiritual development, i.e. development beyond your current sense of personal limitation and beyond self-centredness and also development of greater awareness.

So obviously with any work or task we can practise Mindfulness. To practice Mindfulness is to be fully engaged, fully with yourself and with the task in hand. Just as in meditation you need to have broad awareness and focus, so also with the task. As Sangharakshita put it "if your work is not your meditation then you meditation is not your meditation". Also as with meditation, when we work we can experience mental hindrances - anxiety, resentment, pride, impatience and so on and we need to endeavour to transform these hindrances as we work, so that we can work from mental states of goodwill and good humour. In some of the businesses people take on personal precepts and make an effort to work on their particular hindrance with the help of the rest of the team. I think this is an excellent practice. Another aspect of work as practice is taking responsibility and contributing rather than complaining and going along with this is allowing others to take responsibility.

Another very important aspect of work as practice is reflection. Every day as we work we have a great many experiences both internal and external, some more significant than others, and we need to develop the habit of reflecting on our experience. Initially we will reflect on our experience after the event - for instance we could spend some time each night before we go to sleep, bringing to mind events of the day and reflecting on their meaning. You may have had an argument with someone and been upset and now in a quieter moment you can try to see the deeper significance of that, generalising out from the specific to gain some understanding of the meaning of quarrels and even perhaps looking into what conditions give rise to such situations and perhaps relating it to the Buddha's words in the Dhammapada, "people forget that their lives will soon end. For those who remember, quarrels soon come to an end". So you can reflect in this way on all sorts of events and mental states and gradually you will become able to reflect as the event is actually happening, so that your experience more and more takes place in the larger context of the Dharma. This sort of reflection makes team-based right livelihood an insight practice.

So these are some aspects of work as practices - mindfulness, working on mental hindrances, taking responsibility and reflecting on our experience.

Sangha
Now we can look at the Sangha element of team-based right livelihood. Personally, I give most importance to this element because it is so fundamental and also because it has within it the potential for unveiling reality to us. So I would say that the primary purpose of team-based right livelihood is to build Sangha - in other words to create the conditions in which we can develop friendship. This cannot of course be divorced from the other elements of team-based right livelihood, you cannot cultivate spiritual friendships without a spirit of generosity, a willingness to transform yourself and the motivation of a common spiritual aspiration. Working together in a team gives us the opportunity to get to know each other very fully. You can live with someone for years without encountering them fully, but in the work situation, where we are so dependent on each other and co-operation is essential, there is no hiding from each other.

So team work provides the ideal conditions for developing friendships. The first thing that becomes obvious in a team situation is how different we all are and then we become aware of how those differences can be allowed to be a hindrance to co-operation and friendship or how they can become the very means of co-operation. Each of us carries within our own hearts and minds conflicts and contradictions, elements that are not integrated into our overall purpose and tendencies which we are unaware of as yet. A team is similar and the task of Sangha building has to include firstly, rejoicing in merits, secondly, awareness of difficulties, thirdly ,conscious effort to change and fourthly, constantly bearing in mind the spiritual context. If we miss out on any of these four we will have problems. For instance, I have seen situations where there is a greater awareness of the difficulties and even efforts to change but the spiritual context is somewhat forgotten, which means a loss of perspective occurs or the ethical dimension of relationships is forgotten. Or you can have a situation where everyone is so focused on spiritual attainment and being good Buddhists that they avoid looking at the conflicts and contradictions, the messy bits.

Rejoicing in merits or positive feedback or praising what is praiseworthy, in short telling people that we appreciate their qualities and their actions is an extremely important aspect of Sangha. It creates the right atmosphere for all other communication and it is beneficial to both giver and receiver. Rejoicing in merits is a verbal form of generosity. It benefits the person who is praised or appreciated because feeling appreciated is a basic emotional need and it benefits the person doing the rejoicing because any generous act, whether of body, speech or mind, raises our state of consciousness.

As Dhardo Rimpoche put it, if you can't think of what to do, do something for somebody else. The solution to many of our mental or emotional difficulties lies in generosity, because the practice of generosity is expansive. So rejoicing in merits is beneficial to everyone. We can rejoice in someone by telling him or her what we appreciate or we can rejoice by telling others. The first is kindly speech, the second is harmonising speech and both are essential to Sangha building.

After rejoicing in merits we come to acknowledging difficulties. Building Sangha can be difficult, to be generous can be difficult, but these things are the essence of team-based right livelihood and they are also the reward of team-based right livelihood. If we apply ourselves courageously we can experience the happiness, joy and ease of Sangha, of deeply satisfying friendship based on mutual trust and respect. This is the reward of team work in this context. The reason why it is difficult for us to co-operate, to be generous and to trust is because we are spiritually ignorant, we do not see clearly. We cannot see ourselves or others as we really are. The tendency of our minds is to fix ourselves and to fix others with a static identity, personality and habits and this fixed view has consequences for us individually and for our relationships. You could say, that usually when we look at someone what we see is a fiction, a fiction of our own making. The more of a true individual we become the less fictional other people become, because we are less fixed and we have less need to fix them.

Three Fetters
In traditional terms then, our problem and therefore the problem of team-based right livelihood, is that we are still under the domination of the first three Fetters. So we need to undertake as a team to work at breaking through these Fetters or at least weakening them. The first three Fetters are self-view, doubt and reliance on rites and rituals as ends in themselves or as Sangharakshita puts it - habit, vagueness, and superficiality. So how can we use the work situation to breakdown these fetters and hindrances?

Self-view or habit or personality view manifests as an experience of personal limitation, often accompanied by fear or anxiety. It also manifests as difficulties in communication and as a reluctance to take responsibility for one's own mental states or for the project you are involved in.

I mentioned earlier that in some teams each individual takes on a precept, in consultation with the rest of the team, and this seems to be a good way to work on these issues. Broadly speaking we could say that people fall into two types - those who emphasise the need for harmony and those who emphasise the need for autonomy. These types have different work to do on themselves, different limitations to overcome and therefore different kinds of precept to take on. Of course there are different degrees of these tendencies and as we work to go beyond our basic tendency we gradually become more truly individual. Those who emphasise the need for autonomy fear that their sense of individuality could be swamped by the group and that they will lose their freedom of choice. As a result, sometimes they cut off from human relationships and maintain an unreasonable independence. This means that they are so busy defending this independence and self-sufficiency that they don't really connect with others and don't really come into contact with others. So those who emphasise the need for autonomy need to take on precepts that bring them into contact with others, even precepts that make them dependent on others to some degree, they need to work on developing trust. Those who emphasise the need for harmony, on the other hand, may want to belong to a group because that is seen as bringing security and a sense of identity. So they are more likely to get totally absorbed in the group to the extent of denying aspects of themselves which don't seem to conform to group norms. They tend to feel that they have no power and it is up to others, the authorities, to sort out problems and tell them what to do. So those with this tendency may need to work on taking responsibility for themselves and making their voice heard. They need to risk disapproval and they need to ask questions of themselves such as, why am I doing this? What should I do now? Do I believe what I am saying or doing? Most of us will probably recognise some elements of these tendencies in ourselves or our team-mates.

What we are aiming at his individuality which is based on confidence in ourselves and goodwill towards ourselves. Lack of confidence and self hatred affect our relationships with others and leave us distrustful and suspicious, because basically we are distrustful of ourselves.

So in working with the fetter of self-view we need to strive for self knowledge and be prepared to acknowledge our weaknesses and our strengths, our personality tendencies and our aspirations and then by bringing this self knowledge into relationship with our friends we start to go beyond the limitations imposed by our conditioning and enter into spiritual friendship.

We can gain self knowledge in the work situation by noticing our responses, to the work, to our team-mates, to the customers and reflecting on these responses, reflecting on what they tell us about ourselves. If we were irritable, for instance, we can try to probe ourselves for the real underlying causes - what is it about me that causes me to get irritable when such and such happens? Am I anxious? Do I feel unloved? Why? How can I take responsibility here? What initiative can I take to become more positive? And so on. Insight is born of such reflections. If you're satisfied with saying that I am irritable because he or she did such-and-such then you are satisfied with a state of ignorance, from the perspective of Going for Refuge.

The next Fetter is doubt or as Sangharakshita puts it vagueness. In terms of team-based right livelihood this is forgetting why you are there. It is very important to work at maintaining a bigger perspective, a higher perspective - relating your work to going for Refuge, seeing the mythic context of your work. Different teams try to do this by having rituals at the beginning and end of each day, having study groups, retreats and so on. This is excellent and works well. As well as this each individual needs to make their own connection between the day-to-day, hour to hour work and their spiritual aspirations. I mentioned mindfulness and reflection earlier in this respect. Also you can chant a mantra silently or repeat some verses which inspire you or just have a phrase or sentence to turn over in your mind. For instance when you're irritable you could say to yourself, all things are impermanent, and allow your mind to dwell on the connection between that and your irritability. Anyway the main point is to find as many ways as possible to connect your work situation with the vision of the Dharma.

The third fetter is reliance on rites and rituals as ends in themselves or superficiality. Putting yourself in a community and a team-based right livelihood situation does not ensure spiritual progress. To use Sangharakshita's phrase from the talk on community living, 'it's an opportunity not an achievement'.

So we need to be on our guard against complacency. You can have all the right conditions and still not go for Refuge. Going for Refuge involves making an effort to transform yourself. Team-based right livelihood provides an opportunity for you to do this because you are in close contact with others who also want to transform themselves. If you are in team-based right livelihood because of the money or time off or because you can't cope with the world and are looking for security, you will probably find it unsatisfactory and it certainly won't help you much to make spiritual progress. Spiritual progress comes about as a result of a conscious effort to progress spiritually, and there is no other valid reason for working in team-based right livelihood except the aspiration to spiritual development. Going for Refuge to the Three Jewels is the beginning, middle and end of team-based right livelihood. The kind of work, the profits, the routines, the difficulties are all related to Going for Refuge or should be.

Leadership and management
There is one other issue I'd like to look at before closing, even though I've probably covered it indirectly already. That is the issue of leadership and management. Some people have the notion that working in a team means that everyone is equal and everyone should have a voice in every decision. In an ideal world this might be true, but our world and our teams are far from ideal. We have a wide range of abilities, and people are also at different stages of spiritual development. This means in effect that some people will be better than others at fulfilling different tasks. One person may be good at serving customers, another at dealing with suppliers etc. But some will have a broader spread of qualities and abilities and will quite naturally take a lead. Leadership is important because it provides spiritual direction and vision and leadership of this kind should be taken by the more spiritually experienced. Effective going for Refuge needs to be at heart of our businesses. This is the essential ingredient for a successful team based right livelihood. There can only be leadership where someone is prepared to take a lead and where others are willing to co-operate. For example, I am the leader of this mandala to the extent that I am willing to fulfill that role and to the extent that others are willing to co-operate. If either my willingness or the co-operation of others were missing it wouldn't work. So I think it is useful to acknowledge the leadership in our businesses, remembering as I said that leadership is a matter of effective Going for Refuge.

Management is a different thing and is concerned with the efficient running of the business. It is best I feel if the leadership and management are combined in one person but this may not always be possible. When it's not possible then it is of the utmost importance that there is harmony between whoever has the managerial overview and whoever is spiritual leader. And the spiritual dimension has to be taken into account in all managerial decisions. The spiritual always takes precedence.

Conclusion
Most difficulties in team-based right livelihood are to do with communication. Difficulties in communication are an opportunity for spiritual growth. They are an opportunity for confession, apology, forgiveness and generosity.

Team-based right livelihood is a spiritual practice. You can attain insight into the nature of reality through you're wholehearted engagement with your team and work and through reflecting on your responses to that engagement.

We are seeking to transcend egotism, to go beyond self-centredness, to overcome personal limitations and to dissolve wrong views. By working with others who are similarly striving we have a precious opportunity to transform ourselves and to create ideal conditions for living a spiritual life. We can go beyond conformity and individualism to individuality. Individuality begins with making the decision to change and it is carried forward by the practices of metta and mindfulness. In team-based right livelihood these manifest particularly as generosity, co-operation and reflection. If we understand this we will have understood the spiritual significance of team-based right livelihood and if we practice generosity, co-operation and reflection we will experience for ourselves the spiritual significance of team-based right livelihood.

Triratna Buddhist Order

2010-01-16T11:08:00.000-08:00

I am very happy with the change of name from Western Buddhist Order to Triratna Buddhist Order. The Order can now be united by the name Triratna and by the centrality of Going for Refuge to the Triratna.
The FWBO will now be called the Triratna Buddhist Community or whatever the appropriate equivalent is in other languages. This means that we are more likely to use the actual name rather than an acronym, which is a good thing I believe.

The Greatest Gift

2009-11-02T08:04:00.000-08:00

National Order Weekend November 2009

“This Dhamma that I have attained is deep, hard to see, hard to realize, peaceful, refined, beyond the scope of conjecture, subtle, to-be-experienced by the wise. But this generation delights in attachment, is excited by attachment, enjoys attachment. For a generation delighting in attachment, excited by attachment, enjoying attachment, conditionality & dependent co-arising are hard to see. This state, too, is hard to see: the resolution of all fabrications, the relinquishment of all acquisitions, the ending of craving; dispassion; cessation; Nibbana. If I were to teach the Dhamma, others would not understand me, and that would be tiresome for me, troublesome for me.'
"Just then these verses, unspoken in the past, unheard before, occurred to me:
'Enough now with teaching what only with difficulty I reached. This Dhamma is not easily realized by those overcome with aversion & passion. What is abstruse, subtle, deep, hard to see, going against the flow — those delighting in passion, cloaked in the mass of darkness, won't see.'
"As I reflected thus, my mind inclined to inaction rather than to teaching the Dhamma.” MN 26, p.260.

We are all familiar with the story of how the newly enlightened Buddha was disinclined to teach the Dharma, because others would be unlikely to understand and because it would be vexatious to him, wearying and troublesome as it says here. In this, many of us can probably empathise with him. Fortunately for us he did communicate his experience, and here we are over 2500 years later still benefiting from and engaging with that communication -- which tells us something about the significance of the experience he had for humanity and something about the significance of communication itself. When we communicate universal ideas, we are entering a conversation that carries on over centuries and millennia. The Buddha communicated his insights, others have responded by practising as he recommended and by further elucidating his message. This practice and elucidation then becomes another expression, another communication of the Buddha's message, which others then respond to, and so on down the centuries, across cultures and nationalities and via many languages. The conversation initiated by the Buddha continues. We have joined in that conversation by responding to Bhante Sangharakshita's elucidation and so the wheel of the dharma continues to roll on.

The Buddha encouraged his followers to spread the dharma from the beginning. He urged his first 61 disciples to " go now and wander for the welfare and happiness of many, out of compassion for the world, for the benefit, welfare and happiness of gods and men. Teach the dharma, that is good in the beginning, good in the middle and good in the end, with the meaning and the letter." Nanamoli, Life of the Buddha, p.52.

Those disciples did as they were asked and the Sangha grew rapidly. There are some verses in the Samyutta Nikaya which are a conversation between the Buddha and Mara, some seven years after the Enlightenment in which Mara tries to discourage the Buddha from teaching. He says "if you have truly found a path that leads in safety to the deathless, depart. But go by it alone, what need to let another know?" And the Buddha responds. "People who seek to cross beyond asked me where death cannot prevail: thus asked, I tell the end of all, where is no substance for rebirth". Nanamoli, p.61.

In the Majjhima Nikaya, Sutta 49, there is another conversation between the Buddha and Mara. Mara is trying to convince him that if he teaches the Dharma he will suffer an inferior rebirth. Mara follows up his argument by saying "So, bhikkhu, I tell you this: be sure good sir to abide inactive, devoted to a pleasant abiding here and now , this is better left undeclared, and so, good sir, inform no one else".

I suppose there are many ways to interpret a conversation between the Buddha and Mara -- especially after the Enlightenment. But one way of seeing it is that there are always opposing forces to the dharma. Whether these manifest in the external world or within our own minds, they are powerful forces, which are constantly encouraging us to think of our own comfort and to avoid what may be inconvenient, to look after number one, in short to be self-centred.

Bhante says in Wisdom Beyond Words. "Every advertisement that you see is in effect an advertisement against Buddhism, because it promotes greed, hatred,or delusion or all three", and it's not just advertisements. There are lots of things which are easy, stimulating, interesting and which keep us distracted from the dharma; watching TV or BBC iplayer, surfing the Internet, playing computer games, facebook, twitter, e-mail, iPod and much more. Mara doesn't have to try very hard to persuade us to give a lot of time to personal pursuits and even to see our Dharma practice as another personal pursuit among many. But the Buddha is quite explicit about what we need to do -- "go now and wander for the welfare and happiness of many, out of compassion for the world, for the benefit, welfare and happiness of gods and men. Teach the dharma, that is good in the beginning, good in the middle and good in the end, with the meaning and the letter."

Later in the Mahayana sutras, you get what seems at first a strange and annoying refrain -- any son or daughter of good family who takes just one verse or four lines of this sutra and bears it in mind, recites and studies it and illuminates it in detail for others -- will beget incalculable, immeasurable merit. You find this refrain in the Diamond Sutra and something similar in the Sutra of Golden Light. And sometimes you feel like saying "all right, but where is the sutra.". It's as if the compiler of the sutra is so concerned that you take it up and teach it that he forgets to tell you what the message of the sutra is. But of course, the importance of sharing the dharma is precisely the message. The Diamond Sutra, is for instance, a perfection of wisdom text and pretty abstruse and paradoxical, but you get this refrain about illuminating it in detail for others about eight times, I think. And of course the message is that there is no Perfection of Wisdom without compassion -- Sunyata is nothing unless it is compassion. And compassion is not just about responding to people who are suffering in some obvious way like physical or emotional distress. Compassion is primarily a response to spiritual ignorance, it is pointing out the path for those who want a path, it is the finger pointing at the moon of the Dharma As Bhante puts it in his commentary on the Diamond Sutra, " any amount of giving of material things in the ordinary worldly sense, however appropriate, necessary, and beneficial it may be on its own level, or however meritorious in a traditional Buddhist sense, is completely incomparable with even the smallest amount of giving of the Dharma, and especially with the gift of the perfection of wisdom. The Buddha is the effectively saying that if you go and give just one talk on the Dharma to an audience of people who have never heard the dharma before, disclosing to them perspectives which have never been disclosed to them before, the amount of merit, you thereby generate is far greater than if you had spent, say, 10,000 lifetimes as a social worker in 10,000 different worlds. It is almost impossible to overestimate just how meritorious, teaching the dharma is." (Wisdom Beyond Words, p.115.)

In the Vimalakirti Nirdesa there is a passage about how Bodhisattva's harm themselves which re-inforces this message about sharing the Dharma with others -

"Maitreya, there are two reasons the beginner bodhisattvas hurt themselves and do not concentrate on the profound Dharma. What are they? Hearing this profound teaching never before heard, they are terrified and doubtful, do not rejoice, and reject it, thinking, 'Whence comes this teaching never before heard?' They then behold other noble sons accepting, becoming vessels for, and teaching this profound teaching, and they do not attend upon them, do not befriend them, do not respect them, and do not honor them, and eventually they go so far as to criticize them. These are the two reasons the beginner bodhisattvas hurt themselves and do not penetrate the profound Dharma."

So this about not being receptive to the dharma and being disrespectful and dismissive of those who are committed and practising.

"There are two reasons the bodhisattvas who do aspire to the profound Dharma hurt themselves and do not attain the tolerance of the ultimate birthlessness of things. What are these two? These bodhisattvas despise and reproach the beginner bodhisattvas, who have not been practicing for a long time, and they do not initiate them or instruct them in the profound teaching. Having no great respect for this profound teaching, they are not careful about its rules. They help living beings by means of material gifts and do not help them by means of the gift of the Dharma. Such, Maitreya, are the two reasons the bodhisattvas who aspire to the profound Dharma hurt themselves and will not quickly attain the tolerance of the ultimate birthlessness of all things." Page 101, Thurman.

"They help living beings by means of material gifts and do not help them by means of the gift of the Dharma." This brings us back to the earlier tradition of the Pali Canon.

In the Itivutakka the Buddha says "there are two kinds of gifts: the gift of material things and the gift of Dhamma: the greater of these is the gift of the Dhamma." (Nanamoli, p. 200.) In recent years, I've noticed that Bhante has reiterated again and again the importance of spreading the dharma. He has mentioned it in question and answer sessions many times, and in his recent message to the order he says, quite emphatically that if an order member is not actively working to spread the dharma, then they are not going for refuge as effectively as they might be. Indeed, the archetype of the order is the 1000 armed Avalokitesvara, which implies that every order member is engaged in the bodhisattva activity of dispelling ignorance with the light of the dharma.

The Buddha of the Pali Canon says teach the dharma, share the Dharma , spread the dharma. The Mahayana sutras say share the Dharma, spread the Dharma, teach the Dharma and Bhante repeats over and over spread the Dharma, share the Dharma, teach the Dharma. So what is this Dharma that we should spread and share and given that we are not all spiritual geniuses or gifted communicators, how can we teach the Dharma?

From one perspective the Dharma is the Truth, it is Reality, the way things are. The Dharma is also the teachings and practices which lead to the Truth. In other words the Dharma is the Path, the spiritual path. It is difficult if not impossible to give the Dharma as Truth. First of all you have to realise the truth for yourself, embody it and then there is really no question of giving anything – everything you say and do is a sharing of the Dharma. For most of us, however, giving the Dharma is a matter of telling others about the teachings of the Buddha and helping others to do the practices outlined by the Buddha. Even that is not easy. The teachings and practices have been added to and filtered through two and a half thousand years of history, diverse cultures and many great teachers and masters. So we are faced with a huge and complex myriad of teachings and practices, some of which contradict each other and some of which don’t seem to bear any relationship to the Buddha’s original thoughts in so far as we know them from the early scriptures of the Pali canon. What are we to do? How are we to make sense of it all – Theravada, zen, tantra. Hua yen, yogachara, tien tai, shingon, madhyamika, the forty meditations, the pantheon of tantric deities, koans, mantras, prayer wheels, the alms round, and so on. We need a teacher. Each tradition has it’s own teachers, elders, gurus, and masters who elucidate a path and a set of coherent views for their followers and disciples. In our own tradition, our teacher is Urgyen Sangharakshita. He has elucidated a coherent path and view, which manifests in all sorts of ways. He did this by taking aspects of the dharma and drawing out their significance by giving talks – often a series of talks on one topic, such as eight talks on the Bodhisattva Ideal and eight talks on the Tantra or five talks on Zen and so on – about 200 talks in total. He also took various texts- either scriptures or commentaries and elucidated their deeper meaning in seminars which were recorded, transcribed and often published in edited form. In this way we have been given a clear set of teachings and a clear path – we have been guided through the jungle of complex teachings and practices and given what we need in order to progress towards realisation of the Truth.

The key view or teaching at the heart of all this is Pratitya Samutpada – conditioned co-production and the central practice is Going for Refuge to the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. Both of these can be unfolded to reveal more and more depth and profundity and both overlap and interconnect.

Pratitya Samutpada is the seemingly simple concept that everything arises is dependence upon conditions. Or to put it another way nothing has an essential nature that is apart from conditions. Further to this – not only does everything arise in dependence on conditions, but all of those conditions are similarly interfused, interconnected and inter-penetrating. Everything arises in dependence upon a multiplicity of conditions all of which are inter-related. This is an idea that we can grasp intellectually, but we need to go further than that. This idea is a symbol of a deeper reality that has to be realised on the deepest possible level. When any individual realises this Truth in all it’s depth and significance it has the effect of total transformation. Nothing is as it was before. What we think of as ‘me’ or ‘I’ can no longer be related to in the same way and what we think of as ‘other’, as ‘him’ or ‘her’ or ‘them’ can no longer be related to in the same way either. Conditioned co-production is not just an idea, it is not an attempt to give a scientific description of our world, it is , rather, a profound spiritual Truth that has to be intuited, imagined, embodied, felt , has to become the way we experience everything, everywhere, all the time.

Going for Refuge to the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha is the practice we commit ourselves to in order to bring about this realisation. Going for Refuge implies a commitment to having the Three Jewels at the heart of our life. The more intensely and wholeheartedly we Go for Refuge to the Buddha, dharma and Sangha the more sure we are to realise the Truth of Pratitya Samutpada. We go for refuge to the Buddha by taking him as our Ideal. We see the Buddha as the embodiment of the highest possible spiritual ideals. We aim our lives at emulating him and becoming Buddha’s ourselves. We aim at Awakening to ‘knowledge and vision of things as they really are’ as the Pali canon puts it. We go for refuge to the Dharma by putting into practice the ethical guidelines and the meditation practices we have been taught and by reflecting often and long and deeply on the concepts of the Dharma and on our own experience in the light of our understanding of the Dharma. We go for refuge to the sangha by venerating and revering our teachers and all those who have realised the Truth and by giving full rein to our heartfelt gratitude for all that we have received from the Buddha and the generations who have kept the light of the dharma shining down the centuries and into our present time and our individual lives.

These two teachings, Conditioned Co-production, sometimes called Dependent Arising ( in Sanskrit – Pratitya Samutpada) and Going for Refuge, are at the heart of Sangharakshita’s elucidation of the Dharma. This is what he sees as the unifying principle and practice of Buddhism and all other teachings serve and relate to these. Everything else is an unfolding of the view of conditioned co-production and an intensifying of the centrality of Going for refuge to the Buddha Dharma and Sangha.

So this is the Dharma that we want to practice and to share.

But why should we share the Dharma? If people want the Dharma can’t they find it for them selves just like we did? I hope it’s obvious that this is spurious reasoning. We share the Dharma because it is in the nature of the Dharma to be shared. Or to put it simply – the practise of the Dharma means sharing the Dharma. There is no such thing as a self-centred practice of the Dharma. To the extent that it is self-centred it is not the dharma. We didn’t just find the Dharma for ourselves – others, many others, went to the trouble of making it available to us in many different forms, in different places and so on. They did that because that is what it means to be a Buddhist. Of course not all of us can teach the Dharma – as in giving talks or leading study or retreats. But we can help in many, many ways to make the Dharma widely available. I’ll come back to that later.

If we have some idea of what the Dharma is, if we have responded with faith and enthusiasm to the ideas and practices and if we have the guidance of a teacher we trust, then we are indeed very fortunate. And if we have all that we probably also have a desire to see others benefit from the Dharma too – we quite naturally want to share our good fortune.

So the questions that arise are- who should we share the Dharma with, when should we share the Dharma, where should we share the Dharma and all importantly how should we share the Dharma.

When I first became a Buddhist I was extremely enthusiastic about the Dharma and I couldn’t help talking about it all the time and recommending it to my friends. I was a Buddhist bore and I actually alienated people by an insensitive over-enthusiasm. I think the best policy really is to only share the Dharma with those who really want it. In the Tiratana Vandana the Dharma is said to be of the nature of an invitation. So the people to share the Dharma with are those who accept the invitation. There is no question of trying to convert or persuade people that they should be Buddhists or that they should meditate. Freedom is of the essence in Buddhism and only those who feel free not to be Buddhists can really be Buddhists. Only those who feel free not to be part of a Sangha can really be part of a Sangha. So when we talk about sharing the Dharma or giving the Dharma, what we mean is making it available for whoever may be interested.

There is really no limit to when and where to share the Dharma. However, there are some parts of the world where you would not be allowed to openly teach meditation or Buddhism, without risking very severe punishment. The best time to share the Dharma is when we are inspired and energised by the practices – ethics, meditation, reflection, puja, retreat and sangha. And of course the best place is where there is receptivity and interest.

The question of how to share the Dharma is an interesting one. We talk about Dharma teachers and about teaching the Dharma – but in a way, we can only teach about the Dharma. Sharing the Dharma is not really a matter of talking about the Dharma, that may be a part of it, but essentially it is a matter of practising the Dharma as fully as we can and embodying it’s principles to at least some degree. Unless we practice and what we say comes from a lived Dharma, it will only be empty words, at best the foamy bubbles on the surface of the river of the Dharma. In the Dhammapada the Buddha says “First establish yourself in what is suitable, then advise others”.(Verse 158).

So the first thing to say about how to share the Dharma is that it is not just about teaching or giving talks or leading study groups or leading retreats. Any practising Buddhist is a living , walking, talking Dharma teaching. Your mindfulness, your kindness, your ability to listen and empathise, your friendliness, your honesty and openness, your generosity, your energy, your co-operativeness are all qualities and behaviours that communicate very strongly the spirit of the Dharma. Often when people go on retreat for the first time or come to a Buddhist centre for the first time they will report that what struck them most was the way the retreat team related to each other or the attentive way someone listened to them or just the atmosphere of friendliness. These things often have a greater impact than what is said. So anyone can communicate the Dharma in this way – by putting it into practise wholeheartedly.

However we do also need those who can explain and elucidate texts and commentaries. We need those who can give talks and lead study – although, it is still necessary that the basic foundation of wholehearted practise is there too. There needs to be a degree of congruency between what we say and how we behave and our mental states.

I think Bhante Sangharakshita is a very good example of how to share the Dharma. He has been practising intensively for nearly seventy years. As a young man he studied and meditated constantly and as young monk he practised mindfulness all the time – adopting the traditional practise of looking at the ground ahead of him whenever he had to go out, as a way of avoiding distraction. On the basis of his insight into the Diamond sutra and his assiduous practice, he was able to communicate from a great depth of understanding and elucidate even very difficult texts out of his experience. He gave lots of talks, wrote articles and books and published magazines and he created sangha. He even did a stint lecturing at Yale University. In 1970 I think. He has been interviewed and filmed and now he uses the internet. He has made connections between the Dharma and western culture and philosophy and he has of course led retreats and study seminars. He has in short used all available means to communicate his understanding and experience of the Dharma.

It is possible for us to engage with all of these ways of making the dharma available – we may not be ready or able to communicate the Dharma directly to others, but we can support those who do and we can intensify our own practise of ethics, meditation and reflection so that our life is an example and a communication in itself.

It cannot be emphasised too much that the primary way to communicate and share the Dharma is by practising, by Going for refuge to the three jewels. Going for Refuge to the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha is dependant on conditions – this is the truth of Pratitya Samutpada in the area of spiritual life. A major part of Going for refuge is creating the conditions that enable us to GFR effectively and of course engaging with and making use of the conditions that are available to us. Often people feel they are not making much progress on the spiritual path, and often if they look honestly at their lives they will see that the reason is that they have put themselves in conditions that make progress difficult or put themselves outside conditions that are helpful. For most of us most of the time the primary condition we need to have in our lives in order to make spiritual progress is other people who are also enthusiastically treading the Path. Without the presence of others and communication around the pleasures and pitfalls on the path – we are at a great disadvantage. Perhaps even more basic than open, honest and friendly communication is psychological health and integration. If we have unresolved psychological issues they will often obstruct our ability to be effectively engaged with the sangha and cause us to blame and complain and feel hurt and offended to such a degree that we become isolated and alienated and what seemed to be a solution to our problems becomes an even bigger problem. So, I believe it is essential that those who need to should see psychological work as part of the necessary conditions for going for refuge effectively. If we expect too much from others we will be sorely disappointed and we could tragically send ourselves on a downward spiral into illness and loneliness.

So we can communicate something of the value of the Dharma by making efforts to sort out any psychological difficulties we have that cause us to experience irrational fear of others or put us in conflict with them, and we can also communicate the value and spirit of the Dharma by setting up and engaging with the best possible conditions for practise – which may not be in accordance with our mundane preferences. Just by the way, I would say one condition that is absolutely essential if any progress is to be made is going on retreat. I am not at all sure it is possible to effectively go for refuge without the benefit of retreats which take us away from our usual routine for a time. To put it a bit more strongly- I am not sure you can really be a serious Buddhist unless you go on retreat – at least for a couple of weeks a year. This is my personal view based on experience and observation.

If we are working on our psychological issues and doing our best to involve ourselves in good conditions for practise, then we will be communicating the Dharma to some extent.

We cannot all give talks but we can listen and try to be receptive, we can tell others about any especially inspiring talk and we can read transcripts if there are any or we can even make transcripts if we feel so moved. A Dharma talk is not an entertainment – it is an attempt to communicate something of value – different speakers have different abilities, but as listeners we need to try to hear the message and not be overly concerned with the speakers nervousness or habits of speech or whatever. Every Dharma talk probably has something to teach us if we only listen.

I say we can’t all give talks – but is that right. If we can talk then we can give a Dharma talk or at least talk about the Dharma as we understand and practice it. When I first got involved I was very shy and didn’t like to speak in groups, even the mitra study group and when I was given the letter in Guhyaloka in 1988 saying that I was going to be ordained my immediate response was that I couldn’t possibly become an Order Member because I couldn’t lead study or give talks, which was what I considered central to the life of an OM. I did take on leading study fairly soon after ordination but I didn’t begin giving Dharma talks until six years after ordination, when I became chairman at the LBC. I still found it difficult to be in front of an audience but by dint of practice that has ceased to be a problem. However, whenever I am asked to give a talk or lead a retreat or lead anything my immediate instinctive response is to recoil – an aspect of me just does not want to lead or be the focus of other peoples attention – but that can be overcome and I do manage to overcome it most times. I am saying all this, for the benefit of anyone who thinks that for some reason they cannot give Dharma talks or lead study - you may be right but maybe you can do a lot more than you think.

Bhante says something which I find encouraging in this regard. In Wisdom Beyond Words he says, “ The verbal formulation of the Enlightened point of view can actually create an impression on the hearer that is more profound than the impression it makes on the person speaking. Even in the context of a poor lecture the teaching can mean more to the listener than it does to the speaker. In other words, a teacher can allow for some kind of inherent power, not just in the Dharma, but in the Dharma as formulated”.. P. 216.

Or to put it another way you may be able to communicate the Dharma even if you don’t really know what you are talking about !!!!!!

Similarly with Dharma classes or study groups – perhaps we can’t all be leaders or facilitators, but we can be supportive of those who do take on that task. We can give practical support- make the tea, arrange the cushions or whatever is needed. We can give our friendliness and extend hospitality and a welcome to whoever turns up. These things are not insignificant, indeed as I said earlier they often make a deeper impression on people than what is said in the course of the study or class. So your friendliness and ability to listen could be communicating much more than the leader of the class does, because it is very human to respond strongly to friendliness and attention and sincerity.

When I lead study, what I find most supportive is the engagement of those in the group. There are some people who seem to feel that thinking for themselves means being in opposition to almost everything they hear. But the first thing required for genuine engagement is understanding. You must understand what is being said first. It is then very necessary to get a sense of how we feel about it and what we think about it – two different things and whether we can see any relevance to our life and to spiritual practice. Here is a quote from Sangharakshita, which gives us some tips about how to reflect on Dharma texts “ many years ago, I constantly asked myself: ‘ how does this teaching relate to one’s actual spiritual experience, spiritual life, spiritual development? Why did the Buddha say this? Why was the Buddha concerned with this? Where does it connect up with the spiritual life?’ “

This kind of reflection and enquiry is part of the practise of wisdom. If we can reflect on the Dharma and on our own experience in this way, we will become teachers of the Dharma by example and by reason of a new depth of understanding.

Many of us will have made our first contact with the Dharma through books, and this is still a major way of communicating and making the Dharma available . We can’t all write books perhaps. Although it is sometimes said that there is at least one book in everybody. If we can’t write books, we can buy them and in that way support the authors and the small publishers. We can read books and tell others about them, thus giving more support to the author. And of course we can learn from books, be inspired by books and books can change our lives. So even if we don’t write a book we can try to be aware of what it means for someone to write a book and give them a s much support as possible if we feel that what they have to say is important or is a good communication of the Dharma.

Today we live in an increasingly multi-media world and therefore the Dharma can be and needs to be communicated using video and internet. There are two FWBO charities, Clear Vision and FWBO Dharmachakra, which do this very well,as well as Suryaprabha’s Lights in the Sky, but unfortunately all struggle to survive because of lack of financial support. Clear Vision, makes excellent videos. In particular they communicate Buddhism to teachers and classes in schools throughout the UK and even further afield. They also video all of Bhante’s talks for posterity and they keep an archive of film and photos. All of this is a lot of work and their small charity finds it very hard to make ends meet. So if you want to help to communicate the Dharma via film then think about helping Clear Vision. And of course Lights in the Sky.

The internet is an amazing resource with it’s almost world wide reach and it’s web-like networking ability. Free Buddhist Audio is a website which makes available to anyone with access to the internet all of Sangharakshita’s talks in audio format and seminars in transcript. It also makes available talks by other Order Members and has a community section which links to Buddhist centres around the world. There is a section for Mitra Study and many more features. It is an outstanding achievement and an invaluable resource. It is especially precious to those who do not live near other Buddhists or a Buddhist centre. Via Free Buddhist Audio they can access teachings on every aspect of the Dharma and get a sense of connection with other like-minded people. Before Free Buddhist Audio there were cd’s or tapes and these were not cheap for many people. Free Buddhist Audio is as it says – free. It is not paid for by advertising, it is not sponsored by any corporation – it relies on donations. Unfortunately only about 4% of people who use it actually make a donation, as yet. Thousands of people all over the world use Free Buddhist Audio every month. A huge number in the US for instance but also people from every other continent. It is a fantastic resource and ongoing project and needs the support of all of us.

The Buddha lived in a less complex world than we do. It was also a world in which the geographical scope of any communication was very limited, when compared to the possibilities of today. So in order to spread his message he had to exhort his followers to " go now and wander for the welfare and happiness of many, out of compassion for the world, for the benefit, welfare and happiness of gods and men. Teach the dharma, that is good in the beginning, good in the middle and good in the end, with the meaning and the letter."

That was the best way to reach the largest number and variety of people. Bhante is still encouraging us to go now and wander for the welfare and happiness of many, out of compassion for the world, for the benefit, welfare and happiness of gods and men. In his recent message, he said, “I wish more Order Members would go and pioneer. Why should dozens of Order Members cluster around a single urban centre when they could be spreading the Dharma somewhere else?”

Bhante expresses it as a wish because he obviously doesn't feel he can just tell us to “ go now and wander for the welfare and happiness of many, out of compassion for the world, for the benefit, welfare and happiness of gods and men.” as the Buddha could do with his disciples. But perhaps we should take it as something stronger than a wish. The voice of Mara is loud and clamorous, insidious, and ever present, saying "be sure good sir to abide inactive, devoted to a pleasant abiding here and now, this is better left undeclared, and so, good sir, inform no one else".

So, we have Bhante’s wish and the Buddha’s exhortation against Mara's seductive plea. Let's not remain inactive. If we cannot “go now and wander for the welfare and happiness of many, out of compassion for the world,” then let's do what we can do to share and spread the Dharma. If we can give talks and lead retreats and study let's do that. If we can support those who work to spread the Dharma, by listening to them, by working for them, by giving them money, let's do that. If we can support activities and institutions to spread the Dharma through books, videos and the Internet by giving them money or other help, let's do that.

Above all, let’s spread the Dharma by going for refuge more effectively and by paying close attention to setting up, establishing and maintaining the conditions that are most helpful to effective going for refuge both for ourselves and others. As the Buddha said, “there are two kinds of gift: the gift of material things and the gift of the Dhamma, the greatest of these is the gift of the Dharma”. It is the greatest gift.

Ratnasambhava Forever Giving

2009-08-10T09:27:00.000-07:00

Ratnasambhava - Forever Giving

This is the text of a talk given at Windhorse on 15th August 2009.

I have been asked to talk about Ratnasambhava. I assume the reason I have been asked to speak about RS is because I have been meditating on Ratnasambhava for the last 21 years. Ratnasambhava is part of the very rich symbolism of Vajrayana Buddhism and the reason why someone ends up meditating on a particular form of Tantric symbolism is quite mysterious. It is quite mysterious to me why I have come to have this association or relationship with RS. It began very simply with something I read about Mamaki who is the female consort of RS and represents the Wisdom aspect. However beyond that it seemed to be a spontaneous arising of images in meditation that sealed the bond with RS. As with any Tantric image the symbolism is rich and intricate and has all sorts of connections with the whole system of symbolism which is the language of the Tantra. It is as if our minds have a deep pattern of wholeness which is not expressible in words and concepts but which images and symbols are able to embody and communicate at deeper and deeper levels of integration and awareness. And the images of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas give expression to the most awakened states of consciousness possible. Each Buddha and Bodhisattva expresses in symbolic form the whole of the Enlightened experience and each emphasises some particular aspect at the same time. So each figure speaks to us individually in different ways and is also a complete symbolic communication and embodiment of Enlightenment.

Ratnasambhava is one of the Buddhas in the mandala of the five Buddhas or five Jinas. The whole Mandala is a symbol of Enlightened consciousness and each of the five Buddhas is also a complete symbol of Enlightenment, but each one emphasises a particular aspect. Akshobya, the blue Buddha, emphasises patience, imperturbability and objectivity. Amitabha, the red Buddha, emphasises tranquillity, depth, love and the wisdom that sees uniqueness. Amoghasiddhi, the green Buddha, emphasises courage, confidence and compassionate action. Vairocana, the white Buddha, emphasises communication of the Dharma. Ratnasambhava, who is yellow or golden yellow, emphasises generosity, beauty and the wisdom that sees how all beings are the same.

So the image of RS is of a Buddha seated in full lotus posture on a white moon disc which is in the centre of a yellow lotus. The lotus throne is supported on the backs of four golden yellow horses. Ratnasambhava’s body is made of golden yellow light and he is wearing richly embroidered yellow robes. His right hand is resting on his right knee with the open hand facing outwards – this is the gesture of supreme giving, the varada mudra. His left hand is resting in his lap with the palm facing upwards and resting on the open palm is a shining jewel. His hair is blue/black in colour and he is smiling compassionately. Around his head is an aura of green light and around his body is an aura of blue light. Ratnasambhava is associated with the qualities of giving, richness and abundance, expansiveness, beauty, creativity and the Wisdom of Equality.

I want to go into some of this symbolism in more detail and draw out it’s significance for the life of spiritual commitment.

I will begin with the horses. Horses were a symbol of wealth. Anyone who possessed horses was wealthy – a bit like owning a BMW or SUV. So because Ratnasambhava is associated with spiritual richness and the attitude of abundance and generosity, the horses became the symbol of that. More psychologically the horse symbolises the natural animal energies which are gathered together, integrated and focussed so that they come to be supportive of spiritual endeavour and spiritual experience. Energies which would be expended in craving or aversion are sublimated and channelled until they are no longer a hindrance but rather a help to spiritual efforts. Or to put it more simply rather than illwill, resentment, arrogance, pride, greed, and so on we transform our energies into something more positive and this transformation is symbolised by the horses steadily supporting the lotus throne of Ratnasambhava.

Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet, evokes something of this energy in his poem called Horses (Caballos).

I saw horses from the window

I was in Berlin, in winter.

The light was without light,

the sky without sky.

The air, white like soaked bread.

And from my window I saw a desolate arena

bitten by the teeth of winter.

Suddenly, conducted by one man

ten horses stepped out of the fog.

Gently wavering, they emerged like flames,

yet for my eyes, they filled the whole world,

empty until this hour.

Perfect, burning, they were like ten gods

on large, chaste hooves with manes like the dream of salt.

Their rumps were worlds and oranges.

Their colour was honey, amber, blazing.

Their necks were towers

cut from the stone of pride,

and energy, like a prisoner,

rose up in their furious eyes.

And there in silence, in the middle of the day,

in a dirty and dishevelled winter,

the intense horses were the blood,

the rhythm, the inciting treasure of life.

I looked and looked and so returned to life:

not knowing there was the fountain,

the dance of gold, the sky,

the fire that lives in Beauty.

I shall not forget the winter of that dark Berlin.

I shall not forget the light of those horses.

Beneath the lotus is the mundane mind and above the lotus is transcendental consciousness, so the lotus symbolises the transition from the mundane to the transcendental. The transition from the selfish in all it’s subtlety to the selfless in all it’s sublimity.

The horses represent the highest of mundane consciousness – a great concentration of energies which is sufficient to enable a breakthrough into an altogether different level of consciousness – an altogether different perspective on life and it’s experiences.

The mundane experience of life, whether gross or subtle, is an experience that is filtered through a narrow sense of self, a sense of ‘I’ and ‘mine’, a sense of possessiveness, defensiveness, fear, insecurity, pride, status seeking and so on. The fully Awakened consciousness on the other hand, is free of insecurity and status seeking, free of any sense of possessiveness or defensiveness, free of all sense of ‘I’ or ‘mine’.

In between these two – the mundane and the fully awakened consciousness – there is a whole spectrum of relatively more awakened, more transcendent states. In the various Buddhist traditions these are referred to in many ways. For instance there is the sequence of Stream Entrant, Once returner, Non-Returner and Arahant. There is the Bodhisattva Path and the bhumis. There are the levels of Going for refuge.

Practically speaking it is probably best that we see this as a continuum from a relatively self-centred state of consciousness or awareness to a more and more expansive state of awareness. The more expansive state of awareness is equally concerned with self and others and able more and more to relate to the spiritual potential of others rather than to their personalities or their usefulness.

The lotus can be seen to represent this continuum of awareness which is what the spiritual path really is. The metaphor of the spiritual path is an image for the growth in awareness and compassion that gradually becomes an awakening into Reality. We are the path to the extent that we are growing, changing and expanding in awareness.

In the middle of the lotus there is a moon mat of brilliant white light. This represents the purity at the heart of the awakening mind. Perfect morality or purity is associated with the non-returner of the Pali Canon. So we could see the horses as representing dhyanic states, the lotus representing insight or stream entry and the moon mat is the stage of the non-returner or perfect purity. This is a spiral path in symbolic form.

By making an effort to observe the ethical principles in all aspects of our lives and in more and more subtle ways, we pursue a process of purification and this process can continue for a long time, burning up more and more of the scattered debris of our previous unskilfulness.

The practice of purification involves confession of our faults and rejoicing in our merits and aspirations. In order to purify our minds we try to become aware of when we are indulging in unskilful mental states. Meditation enables us to slow down enough to notice the tendency of our mind. When we become aware that our mind is tending towards the unskilful or is completely immersed in unskilful attitudes, then we have to remind ourselves of our higher aspirations and the attitudes and awareness that characterise a purified and skilful mind. Sometimes we may need to look deeper into the roots of our unskilful mental states before we can develop a more positive awareness. For example, we may find that we are angry and going over and over in our mind some situation that has given rise to anger. We may need to look deeper into why our response is one of anger. Perhaps we are anxious or frightened about something and anger is a kind of defence or perhaps we had expectations of love and attention that we didn’t get. Then we can look deeper still and gradually uncover the existential insecurity and constructed ego identity that lie behind our response to the world, our responses to other people.

By reflecting deeply in this way our ethical practice becomes insight practice and we move from developing skilful sates to experiencing a state of purity, a state of pure awareness. This state of pure awareness is what the moon disc in the middle of the yellow lotus represents. This clear pure skilful state is the basis for the awakened mind represented by Ratnasambhava. Ratnasambhava sits on the moon disc in full lotus posture. His body is made of golden yellow light.

Golden yellow is a very rich vibrant colour. This continues the theme of richness and abundance associated with Ratnasambhava. Golden yellow is the colour of ripeness, of harvest, the fruits of the earth, and the rewards of labour. It is the colour most associated with the sun at it’s brightest, so it is the colour of life, aliveness. Ratnasambhava is intensely alive; the Awakened consciousness is here shown as the most vibrantly alive that we can be, bursting with the light of wisdom and drawing out the life and light of others, causing growth and ripening.

If we want to talk about this in terms of practice, then golden yellow represents the practice of encouraging – seeing the seeds of wisdom and compassion in ourselves and others and encouraging them to grow and ripen. Ratnasambhava is the great Encourager. The whole symbolism of richness, abundance and generosity is encouraging – coaxing the best out of us – encouraging the little seedlings of goodwill and affection and awareness to germinate and grow into fully blossoming loving kindness and wisdom and bear fruit in compassionate activity.

This is where the colour yellow evokes the Wisdom of Equality which is the particular aspect of wisdom associated with Ratnasambhava. The Wisdom of Equality is a very heightened awareness of the spiritual potential of all living beings. If you have a heightened awareness of the spiritual potential of others then you regard them all as equally important, equally valuable and you treat them with equal kindness and consideration. As with all the five Wisdoms associated with the Buddhas of the mandala, when you look closely you see that wisdom is compassion. Compassion in the sense of Maha Karuna –the Great Compassion – is the response of a Buddha to deluded beings.

Sometimes we think of compassion as a response to suffering, a kindly and helpful response to the physical and emotional pains of others. The Great Compassion is a response to the existential pain of deluded beings, it’s a response to the suffering caused by spiritual ignorance. The Buddha’s compassion goes towards all unenlightened beings regardless of whether they themselves realise that they are suffering. For example in the images of the Tibetan wheel of life the Buddha is depicted as playing the music of impermanence in the realm of the gods. This is Maha Karuna in action – the god’s do not know they are suffering but from the perspective of a Buddha they are. Perhaps they don’t even want to be reminded of impermanence!

Ratnasambhava’s Wisdom – the Wisdom of Equality, Samatajnana, is also the Wisdom that sees clearly the sameness of all beings in that all beings live within the Reality of Pratitya Samutpada. Pratitya Samutpada is the reality that everything in the entire universe arises in dependence upon conditions and therefore all beings, physically and mentally, arise in dependence upon conditions and all of the conditions are interlinked. All beings are part of the conditions in dependence upon which all beings arise. There are no beings who do not arise in dependence upon conditions and there are no beings who are not conditions for the arising of other phenomena. Because we inhabit a world of beings we are totally inter-connected and inter-dependent and therefore we are fundamentally, essentially, the same. The Wisdom of equality sees and experiences this so deeply that the only possible response to others is compassion.

The right hand of Ratnasambhava is extended in the mudra or gesture of supreme giving. This symbolises the continuous flow of generosity or compassion towards all beings. This continuous flow is the visible manifestation of the Awakened mind that has seen deeply into the truth of conditioned co-production, or dependent arising, as pratitya samutpada is sometimes translated.

The left hand of Ratnasambhava rests in his lap and a radiant jewel rests on the palm of his hand. The jewel is yet another symbol for the enlightened mind. It is precious, invaluable and it radiates light in all directions. Sometimes it is spoken of as the wish-fulfilling jewel, the jewel that grants all skilful wishes.

The two hands of Ratnasambhava taken together form a symbolism of the internal and the external, stillness and activity, the fullness of being overflowing into the fullness of giving. This is a unification of opposites or at least what can seem to be opposites from an unawakened perspective.

We tend to swing between withdrawal into stillness, followed by activity or a focus on inner life, the inner world followed by a focus on the external world, a concern with self followed by a concern with others – but this symbolism – which is repeated again and again in different ways in the images of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas – this symbolism is telling us that these seeming opposites can be united, need to be united and will be united if we continue to progress spiritually.

We learn to be still in the midst of activity, to be aware of others and the external world without losing awareness of self. We come to experience for ourselves the sense of abundance and richness that is not depleted but rather enriched by giving. The two hands of Ratnasambhava form a kind of circle, an endless flow of energy, an endless flow of compassion – a mind purified and manifesting in compassionate activity and compassionate activity enhancing the purity of the Awakened mind.

Taken all together the symbolism of Ratnasambhava is all about expanding awareness in every direction. It is about including everything in awareness, or to put that a bit more mystically it is about expanding the mind, expanding consciousness until mind and the universe coincide, become synonymous.

What that means on a more everyday, down to earth, level is mindfulness. Mindfulness is the key practice in Buddhism. In the teaching of the five spiritual faculties there are two pairs of opposites – Wisdom and Faith and Meditation and energy – and the balancing faculty is mindfulness. It is the practice of mindfulness that brings everything else together.

What we are aiming for is an inter-connected mindfulness. We need to be aware of ourselves; our thoughts, emotions, words and actions. We need to be aware of other people in the same way. We need to be aware of our environment, the objects, space, light and colour around us. We need to be aware of reality; of impermanence, of the unsatisfactoriness of worldly things, of the higher truth represented by the Buddha. But our awareness in all these areas, all these dimensions, needs to be interconnected. We need to be aware of how everything affects everything else, how everything is always part of the conditions for something else. How does our environment affect us? How do we affect our environment? What effect do other people have on us and, even more importantly, what effect do we have on other people? In what way does Reality impact on us, on our environment, on other people? What is the effect of the potential for Awakening on our lives? Asking ourselves questions and reflecting in this way we can develop an inter-connected awareness, which is an essential basis for Awakening.

The symbolism of Ratnasambhava is encouraging this kind of interconnected awareness. When we take our awareness deeper into ourselves and further out in to the world around us, the promise is that we will experience great beauty and access to energy that is always flowing out into generous activity. This interconnected awareness is alive, rich and abundant. In symbolic terms it is golden yellow, a sun that gives warmth and nourishment everywhere equally and encourages us to grow and to emerge from the solid resistant earth of our mundane egoistic selves.

Ratnasambhava is known as the Buddha of Generosity and also as the Buddha of Beauty. What is Beauty as an aspect of the awakened Mind? The beautiful mind or the mind of beauty is the mind which sees and experiences everything from a non-utilitarian perspective. It is an aesthetic appreciation rather than a consideration of usefulness. Bhante talks about this in his latest book, Living Ethically. He says ‘ The Buddha remarks more than once in the Pali scriptures that a sign or characteristic of metta is that you see things as beautiful, subha. This is because the key element of both subha and metta, which raises them above ordinary human emotion, is disinterested awareness. …. a pure delight in the object for it’s own sake’. (page 86) He goes on to say, ‘ The aesthetic attitude is one that sees everything, including other people, with a warm and clear awareness, and appreciates things just as they are, without thinking how they could be improved or put to some use.’ (page 92)Our unawakened perspective is often materialistic and utilitarian in relation to the rest of the world. We tend to want to possess or accumulate that which enhances our sense of self and we want to exclude that which threatens our ego identity. The attitude of Beauty excludes nothing. This brings us back to Ratnasambhava’s Wisdom of Equality as represented by his consort Mamaki. Mamaki is known as the ‘my’ or ‘mine’ maker, in the sense that she makes everything her own, nothing is excluded and there is no grasping and no aversion.

What does this mean for us? We are engaged in this project of awakening to reality, the spiritual life, and one way of thinking about that is that we are trying to become bigger – we are trying to expand and develop an awareness that misses nothing, that denies nothing. We are trying to develop an attitude that does not condemn or praise what arises in our own minds too quickly. We accept what arises, reflect deeply on it and rely on the transforming power of awareness in alliance with our spiritual aspirations. Our spiritual aspiration is the context of all our practice. We usually talk about this as faith, (Sraddha in Sanskrit). Because of our spiritual aspirations we are able to distinguish between skilful and unskilful mental states and our task is to bring awareness to all mental states equally, so that they can all be transformed towards the more skilful, towards wisdom and compassion.

The auras around the head and body of Ratnasambhava symbolise the effects of the process of the accumulation of merit and wisdom. When we are skilful in our actions, speech and thoughts it is as if we create a field of influence around us, an aura, which has an affect on others. The green aura around the head of Ratnasambhava represents the accumulation of wisdom and the blue aura around his body represents the accumulation of merit. This word ‘accumulation’ indicates that this is a process – the arising of insight into the nature of Reality is a process, Awakening is a process and the building up of purity of mind and merit, which enables us to be compassionate, is also a process. Our spiritual life is a process of unfolding like the leaves of the lotus unfold or growing like the lotus grows from the mud in the depths of the lake. As the Dhammapada says, using a different image, “Do not underestimate the good, thinking ‘it will not approach me’. A water pot becomes full by the constant falling of drops of water. Similarly the wise man little by little fills himself with good”. (verse 122)

I hope I have managed to convey something of the meaning of Ratnasambhava. I would like to finish off with a poem by the English poet Philip Larkin, which is called Solar and could almost be about Ratnasambhava.

Suspended lion face

Spilling at the centre

Of an unfurnished sky

How still you stand,

And how unaided

Single stalkless flower

You pour unrecompensed.

The eye sees you

Simplified by distance

Into an origin,

Your petalled head of flames

continouously exploding.

Heat is the echo of your

Gold.

Coined there among

Lonely horizontals

You exist openly.

Our needs hourly

Climb and return like angels.

Unclosing like a hand,

You give for ever.

2008-11-29T02:54:00.000-08:00

Imagine a Sangha

2008-11-29T02:48:00.000-08:00

This is the text of a talk I gave at the London Buddhist Centre on Sangha day 2008, which was part of the LBC's 30th anniversary celebrations.

It is a privilege to be invited to speak on this occasion of the 30th anniversary of the opening of the Centre. Thirty years ago, (3rd December 1978) the shrine room here was dedicated to Dharma practice and the following day Bhante gave a talk here. In that talk, he spoke about the vision of what he called Sukhavati. The LBC was seen as part of a bigger project called Sukhavati. Sukhavati, traditionally is a Pure Land, it is the pure land of Amitabha, Buddha of infinite light and Buddha of the West -- that is why there is a rupa of Amitabha here. A Pure Land is a place where the Dharma is being constantly expounded and practiced. There are no obstacles whatsoever to Dharma practice in the Pure Land -- everything assists Dharma practice, everything is conducive to attaining higher states of consciousness.

This project called Sukhavati of which the LBC was part, was envisaged as an attempt to create an environment where everything assisted spiritual practice, everything conduced to positive mental states. As Bhante put it at the time: "Sukhavati is that society and environment, that social and spiritual context, that context of fellowship with one another, which makes it easier for us to evolve, so that instead of frittering away our energies in resisting the effects Society has upon us we can put them into the process of our development as human beings. At present so much of our energy is spent just trying to keep society at bay! So much of it is spent trying to resist society’s ever present, coercive, crushing influence and preserve ourselves a little bit of space within which we can grow and develop! So much of our energy is spent trying to resist the counter - evolutionary forces! In an ideal environment, like that represented by Sukhavati, we will not have to resist all the time, or be on the defensive all the time, and the greater part of our energy will be available for our own individual development in free association with other, like minded people."

These like-minded people are the Sangha -- the spiritual community. The vision for Sukhavati was that these like-minded people would form communities to live together, create businesses or other work situations where they would work together and come together at the Buddhist centre to study, meditate, discuss, teach and relax.

The principle behind all this was that in order for Buddhism to flourish it needed to be practised intensively and for that to happen there was a need to transform conditions not helpful to spiritual development into conditions which are helpful. To put it another way -conditions are important for practice and the work of the Sangha and of each individual Buddhist is to create the best possible conditions for Dharma practice.

What has happened to the vision that Bhante outlined 30 years ago -- which, of course, was not just a vision for here, but for the whole F. W. B. O. Many people have lived together in communities over the years and many people have benefited from working together in teams and the Centre itself has been a place of study, meditation, discussion, relaxation and teaching. So in many ways, what Bhante outlined then did happen. However, in more recent years, it seems that there is less interest in residential communities, and it seems that less people are interested in working together in teams. The centre itself is fully used in many ways and has the additional facility of a retreat centre and will soon have even more facilities downstairs.

Has the vision of Sukhavati been a success? Well, the name didn't stick -- nobody thinks of Sukhavati as an umbrella project of which the centre is a part. As for the rest: well I think it is probably too soon to tell.

A vision of a new Buddhist movement and Sangha is an historic vision. It is a vision on a very large scale, and it takes much longer than 30 years to achieve fruition. This kind of vision cannot by its nature account for every practicality. It needs to be based on a broad principle -- that can find new forms, new manifestations, as the generations roll on. Each generation needs to envision afresh, each generation needs to articulate its own dream, its own vision -- based on the fundamental principles -- but taking account of contemporary conditions and issues.

For a Sangha to come into being -- we need like-minded individuals -- we need individuals who have an intuition and a conviction that the purpose of life is to evolve spiritually -- to evolve higher states of consciousness -- characterised by compassion, wisdom and energy. This intuition and conviction leads to a commitment -- it leads us to dedicate our lives to what Bhante calls the Higher Evolution of Consciousness. In more traditional Buddhist terms, it leads us to go for refuge to the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. Sangha is the fellowship, co-operation and activity of those who dedicate their lives to going for refuge to the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha.

Sangha requires imagination. Going for refuge requires imagination. Spiritual life requires imagination -- perhaps all life requires imagination. Sangha happens, where there is imagination and the courage, ability and determination to act from the imagined. Sangha is a vision of an Ideal Human Community -- imagined as interactions and relationships between people based in love, imagined in terms of institutions, art, architecture, music, interaction with the natural environment and so on.

It is a vision of an ideal human community imagined as a fellowship of individuals who are altruistically motivated and who will work together co-operatively to help each other and all those they come into contact with to awaken spiritually -- to awaken to the true meaning and purpose of life.

Sangha is a vision of an ideal human community where everybody is dedicated to awakening from ignorance, awakening into enlightenment -- into wisdom -- and this provides the primary orientation for people's lives.

Sangha is a vision of an ideal human community, imagined as a fellowship of individuals who want to expand beyond any narrow sense of self in as many ways as possible.

Sangha is a vision of an ideal human community, and Sangha is the practice of joining together with like-minded others to bring that ideal human community into being. Sangha is about creating Sangha. The ideal human community creates itself and to do that it needs dedicated and imaginative people.

As Jacob Bronowski said, speaking of imagination: "of all the distinctions between man and animal, the characteristic gift, which makes us human is the power to work with symbolic images: the gift of imagination. The power man has over nature and himself lies in his command of imaginal experience. Almost everything we do, that is worth doing is done first in the mind's eye. The richness of human life is that we have many lives. We live the events that do not happen (and some that cannot) as vividly as those that do. If thereby we die a thousand deaths, that is the price we pay for living a thousand lives. To imagine is the characteristic act not of the poet's mind, or the painters or the scientists, but the mind of man. Imagination is a specifically human gift."

Aloka in his talk, The Life and Death of Imagination, speaks about imagination as follows: "by definition the imagination is a liberating faculty, it liberates you from the moment. Without it we would be stuck with whatever our present experience was in this particular moment, we would be stuck with that, we would have no way of projecting into the future and no way of really assimilating the past."

Just as we need imagination to create sangha, the ideal human community -- we need imagination for all the different elements that are involved in the creation of Sangha. These elements are broadly speaking, commitment, interaction, and altruism.

Commitment or going for refuge to the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha is very succinctly defined by Bhante in his book, What Is the Sangha:

" going for refuge to the Buddha means accepting the Buddha and no other as one's ultimate spiritual guide and exemplar. Going for refuge to the Dharma means doing one's utmost to understand, practise, and realise the fundamental import of the Buddha's teaching. And going for refuge to the Sangha means looking for inspiration and guidance to those followers of the Buddha, both past and present, who are spiritually more advanced than oneself."

We don't know what enlightenment is, we have had no personal contact with the Buddha -- so, to make the Buddha and all that he represents central to our lives, requires imagination -- we find ourselves responding very strongly to the Buddha's teaching, and his life and the lives and teachings of his followers down the ages -- we find ourselves responding, being attracted and imagination and intuition enables us to envisage a future in which we too can attain to great wisdom and compassion. That response and that intuition are sufficient to motivate us to dedicate our lives to spiritual awakening.

When we encounter a spiritual ideal and spiritual practices that attract us so strongly and from so deep a level of our being -- we embark on a process of integration -- gradually more and more of our energy, more and more of our thoughts, emotions and activities, begin to focus and orientate in the same direction. Gradually our psychology becomes more integrated -- we experience less conflict between different aspects of our personality. We begin to become more whole as a person, more aware of who we are and what life is about. As this happens, we become more able to make a commitment to the spiritual path. We become more able to place the ideal of evolving to higher states of consciousness at the centre of our lives.

When we are able to make this kind of commitment, when we are able to allow the principles embodied in the Buddha, Dharma & Sangha to be central in our lives, then we will begin to organise our lives around them. The more committed we are to spiritual growth -- the more it will be the primary consideration in every decision we make about our lives --. We will be always asking ourselves is this going to help me to evolve spiritually or will it hinder me. We will be asking this kind of question when we make decisions about where to live, what work to do, how many children to have, what to spend money on, what to do with our leisure time, even how to decorate the house or flat.

Ideally, when we are spiritually committed all our actions and decisions will be supportive of that commitment. Because we are often weak and unintegrated, we inevitably fall short of this and do things that undermine our attempts to live the spiritual life and make decisions that take us off the spiritual path. But of course, if the vision is still there, if the deep response to the spiritual ideal is there, then we may be lost for a while, but all is not lost.

Paradoxically, one of the things that will enable us to stay on the path is if we are honest and realistic enough to acknowledge to ourselves and others when we make choices or do things that hinder our spiritual growth, or take us in the wrong direction. If we rationalise our behaviour and insist that it is really for spiritual reasons, when it obviously isn't -- then we are indeed on a difficult journey.

Commitment to the Buddha involves using our imagination to grasp the sublime and un-graspable spiritual ideal and then working that out in our lives. Commitment to the Dharma requires study, reflection and discussion. And of course it means putting into practice what we learn from our discussion, reflection and study. It means actually applying the Dharma to our lives. If we don't make the attempt to practice, to apply the principles of the Dharma to our lives -- then we will be in danger of being in a fantasy world -- rather than the world of imagination. As the Buddha says we will be like a donkey who thinks he is a cow:

"Suppose, monks, an ass follows close behind a herd of cows thinking: I'm a cow too! I'm a cow too! But he is not like cows in colour, voice or hoof. He just follows close behind a herd of cows thinking: I'm a cow too! I'm a cow too! Just in the same way, monks, we have some monk who follows close behind the order of monks thinking: I'm a monk too! I'm a monk too! But he has not the desire to undertake the training in the higher morality which the other monks possess, nor in the higher thought, nor in that higher insight which other monks possess. He just follows close behind thinking: I'm a monk too! I'm a monk too!" Hopefully, we don't have anyone in this state here saying I'm a Buddhist too! I'm a Buddhist too!, but not really practising.

Commitment to the Sangha as one of the three refuges means looking to the Arya Sangha for inspiration and exemplification. The Arya Sangha or noble Sangha is the Sangha of all those who have gained transcendental insight -- it is a Sangha that traverses and transcends space and time and embodies the ideal of spiritual realisation, in actual people in different times, different places and different cultures. They are united by the attainment of insight into the nature of Reality. We can be inspired by the existence of the Arya Sangha, because it shows that it is not just one person, the Buddha, who awakened to the true nature of things, but many people over the last two and a half thousand years have evolved and awakened. And this means that we too can evolve and awaken -- we too can become part of the Arya Sangha -- this is what we are committing ourselves to. In more general terms going for refuge to the Arya Sangha also means recognizing the principle of spiritual hierarchy -- recognizing that some people may be more spiritually evolved than we are and some less spiritually evolved than we are. We can learn from those more spiritually developed and we can help those less spiritually developed. But of course, commitment to the Arya Sangha is put into practice in the actual Sangha that we come into contact with.

The insight which characterises the Arya Sangha is a matter of seeing clearly with a direct vision what it means to be a human being, it means discovering that constantly creative consciousness that is always latently potential in us and from the perspective of that consciousness we then see the world around -- we see what is real. One of the things that is seen at that level of insight is that there is no fixed unchanging self separate from a lot of other fixed unchanging selves. Rather, there is a flowing, intermeshed, constantly changing ocean of selves. Each one of us is a sea of changing thoughts, emotions, physical sensations, perceptions and responses and all together we are an interconnected dynamic matrix of consciousness. As the poet Shelley said:
"nothing in the world is single,
all things by a law Divine
in one another's being mingle...".

To live with constant perception of this mingleing is to live without emphasis on a personal distinct and fixed self. It is to live in fluid creativity with other conscious beings, according them equal value with our own consciousness of self.

When it comes to the practice of Sangha; creating a Sangha of like-minded people, who eventually evolve into an Arya Sangha, a transcendental sangha -- an Ideal Human Community -- then we need to work at trying to accord others equal value with ourselves and for both ourselves and others that should be a very high value. We need to work at seeing the potentially creative consciousness in everybody -- that consciousness, which is awake to Reality. In other words, we try our best to relate to the highest and best in each other. We create a Sangha or we engage in the practice of Sangha by interacting with each other, by relating to each other. What this means in practice is observing the ethical training principles and especially the speech precepts. Truthful, kindly, helpful and harmonising speech is what we are aiming for in the Sangha and it is what helps to create the Sangha.

When we create a Sangha we are endeavouring to create the best possible conditions for spiritual practice. The Ideal Human Community is one where everything is conducive to spiritual practice, everything is helpful. When conditions are helpful, then we have more energy available for practice because we are not always struggling against the tide of difficult conditions in the world around us. There are many conditions which are not helpful to spiritual practice: there are many conditions that are even antithetical to the spiritual life and we use up energy struggling against those things.

For instance, the predominant world view around us is that sufficient wealth and material well-being is the road to happiness and contentment. It is a materialistic view. Buddhism acknowledges the need for material well-being, as a starting point but not something to chase after or be attached to as an end in itself. But we live in this world of rampant consumerism and we inevitably get caught up in it, often in ways we don't even notice. We buy what we want rather than what we need. We replace because a replacement is available rather than because we need to replace. We become addicted to the shops as a quick route to satisfaction and remain dissatisfied.

To sevice our high levels of consumption modern life makes many demands on us and is very stressful for many people. Commuting to work each day can be stressful. The work environment itself can be stressful. Family life in our atomised society can be stressful. Bringing up children can be stressful -- with a thousand and one pitfalls and dangers. Even leisure can be stressful, if it involves a lot of TV, Internet both of which tend to sap energy. With all the demands and potential stresses of life, it makes sense to try to create better conditions, if we want to make spiritual progress. This brings us back to imagination.

To create better conditions for ourselves and others we need to be able to analyse and imagine what those better conditions might look like.

One of the conditions we need in order to make spiritual progress his communication with people who share our aspiration and commitment. Communication here means more than the usual exchange of information or chatting about where you've been, what you've seen and who is making up, taking up or breaking up with whom.

In the dedication ceremony, it says "may our communication with one another be Sangha".

This kind of communication goes deeper -- it is a communication of what is most meaningful for us, it is a communication that acknowledges and confesses faults and failings, it is a communication that involves listening, empathising and learning. It is a communication, above all, that leads to greater awareness -- we become more aware of ourselves -- we gain self-knowledge -- and we become more aware of our friends through this friendly, deep, sometimes moving, sometimes playful, sometimes painful, sometimes ordinary, but always worthwhile communication.

So in terms of improving conditions for spiritual life, one of the questions is, what kind of conditions will invite and encourage this kind deeper, more aware communication to happen. This kind of communication requires spending time with someone -- it requires seeing people in lots of different kinds of situations -- seeing them relaxed, seeing them busy, seeing them relating to others, seeing them angry, tired, upset, happy and so on. Meeting in a cafe once a week doesn't really do it.

Now the answer to this that Bhante outlined as he spoke 30 years ago, was for people to live and work together in residential spiritual communities and team-based right livelihood businesses, and to have their social interactions focused around the Buddhist centre. Is that the end of it? I said earlier that we need to imagine more -- we need to dream -- and we need to articulate our dreams. The basic need for conditions that enable and encourage deeper communication can perhaps be fulfilled in other ways. 30 years on, the vision of the project that was then called Sukhavati -- needs to be looked at afresh -- needs to be imagined, dreamed, envisioned afresh. It has gone through changes -- the overall set of conditions around here is sometimes referred to as the Mandala, sometimes as the Buddhist village. Some people like the imagery of building the Buddhaland. Whatever we call it, and names can be important, I believe it will be helpful if we imagine on the grandest scale, dream big dreams and then see whether we can move towards our dreams.

For instance, a number of Buddhists now live in flats around this area. Imagine if they all lived in the same block of flats, perhaps in Sugarloaf walk, imagine they all owned that block of flats and then they could make changes, could make decisions about doing some things communally, to save money, to help the environment and to deepen their communication. Imagine bigger than that. Imagine a whole tower block, like the one just across the road, owned and occupied by Buddhists, with many shared facilities -- shrine room, meeting room, library, laundry room, perhaps even a dining room, cold store and so on. This would have spiritual and environmental benefits.

Imagine bigger than that. Some years back the old town Hall in Patriot Square was for sale and another time it looked like the hospital on the Approach road might be for sale -- imagine a big complex like that -- with residential space for individuals, couples, families, small communities, large communities and space for a natural health Centre, an arts centre, a Buddhist Centre, a home for the elderly, study facilities, a library, studios, small businesses, -- a thriving Buddhist community in the heart of London.

Okay, not many Buddhists may want to live in large single sex communities these days, but we can imagine co-housing situations on a large scale that can include space fo communites and other types of accommodation for singles couples, families etc.

Not many Buddhists may want to work in shops or restaurants these days, but we can imagine other types of enterprise, in the caring professions, perhaps in education, architecture, building, technology. It may even be that initially people from similar professions just get together to share their experience and talk about how to practice spiritually in the workplace -- how to remain ethical, how to avoid the character assassinations and politics of the workplace, how to have a positive influence. It may be that some people want to look at the altruistic side of work and look into how to generate money for Dharma work. There are ways in which a pooling of resources could occur. For instance at windhorse I've been amazed at how much good can be done with relatively small amounts of money like £5000 or £10,000. If a group of people involved with the centre set up a fund and put a little in every month -- the combined value would be greater than any one person could achieve and a substantial donation could be made to the centre each year similar to what businesses have done in the past. There are other ways in which people can have an intensive experience of communication and working together through teams for retreats, classes and other projects. I don't know how many social events happen around the centre these days, but I think social events are a very good sangha activity and the work that goes into organising them can be a very good way of building spiritual community.

The main point I want to make here is that we need to imagine, we need to inspire ourselves with the dream of what could be, what the future could look like. It could be different from any of what I have just mentioned. Perhaps, rather than a big complex, there could be hundreds of small cells of Buddhists around London.

There was a song that said, "the future is not ours to see, que sera sera, whatever will be will be." This is not completely true; the future is not ours to see, that's true enough, although we can imagine it. But it is not a case of "whatever will be will be", it is more a case of whatever we will to be will be. The future is not ours to see, but we can begin to create it, we can begin to set the train of activities in motion that move in the direction of our future vision. The future is not ours to see, the future is ours to make.

The vision needs to be there, the dream, the imagined future and it needs to be articulated. The more we talk about something, the more likely it is to happen. Talking sets up the conditions that begin to attract the right resources. The practicalities can follow. It may take years, generations even, before a vision is realised. And then it may even look quite different from what was originally envisaged, but the important thing is to begin, to dream and talk.

Sometimes the money or the people or other resources are just not available, but you can still make a start. For instance, when we thought of getting a new retreat centre from the LBC over 10 years ago, we didn't have the money, we didn't have the people, we didn't have a place in mind, all we had was the idea, the vision and enthusiasm, determination and courage. Everything else manifested in time and now Vajrasana is there. At the time some of us had a very big vision of what we wanted; for example, there was going to be a shrine room with large murals painted on panels all-round, and there was going to be a library. It has not happened, maybe it will never happen, but a start has been made. The place is there and the potential is there. The will and the vision and the resources to transform it will emerge over time, and what eventually happens will be something we could never have envisaged 10 years ago.

This centre is of course is another vision that began over 30 years ago, with the shell of a burnt out building and a lot of energy and enthusiasm and very little money. It is still emerging, and being created, almost as I speak.

So the point here is about the importance of vision, a vision of an Ideal Human Community, based in the values and ethics of Buddhism and manifesting in the world in buildings, in institutions, in people living together, in people working together -- a Buddhist village, a Buddhist town, a Buddhist Borough, a Buddhist city -- libraries, stupas, shrines, workplaces, temples, streets, shops, all imbued with the spirit of the Dharma. Dreams can be as big as we can imagine, and we should articulate our dreams, talk about them, so that they become seeds of a possible future among all the possible futures. Architects can articulate architectural dreams. Doctors can talk about medical dreams. Teachers can have educational dreams, and so on: funeral directors, street cleaners, train drivers, traffic wardens, whatever your profession, whatever your interests, whatever your talents, dream your dreams and give voice to them.

All the dreams can be woven together and articulated as our Buddhist vision of a truly human community, an ideal human community, a sangha, permeated by the vision, the wisdom and compassion of the Buddha’s great insights into the nature of reality and permeated by Bhante's clarity and the radical immediacy of his vision for Buddhism in the West.

Going for refuge to the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha is essentially an altruistic activity. Our spiritual commitment is essentially a commitment to going beyond egotism and selfishness. This involves an outward expansion of consciousness, outwards to include and integrate all of ourselves, outwards to greater awareness of our self and others, an expansion of consciousness outwards in loving kindness towards our self and others. When all those individuals who are committed to expanding consciousness in this way, come together co-operatively in a Sangha, that Sangha will also be characterised by expansion, expanding outwards to include more people, always open, always encouraging.

A Sangha of individuals like this, all working consciously to expand outwards in awareness and loving kindness and co-operating together for the benefit of all, this sangha is the ground from which the Bodhicitta flowers. The Bodhicitta, the awakening heart of the Bodhisattva, is not a personal possession. By its nature, by it's altruistic transcendent nature, it must be shared and as Subhuti put it "if it is to be conceptualised then you can see it as what arises among a fellowship of friends, working closely together for their ideals". The practices that give expression to the Bodhicitta are the six perfections -- generosity, ethics, forbearance, energy, meditation and wisdom. Of these generosity is the most important and appropriate for most of us.

We could think of generosity as being in essence, an attitude, it is that expansive attitude that moves out towards others in giving and in kindness.

Before you can give you need to know what is yours, what belongs to you. And in this context, the primary thing you own, which belongs totally to you, is your mental states. This may seem obvious, but the major stumbling block for many of us on the spiritual path is that we fail to recognize and acknowledge that our mental states are our own, that they belong to us and not to others. What has this got to do with generosity? Well the basic attitude we need to cultivate in the Sangha, the most generous and expansive attitude is the attitude of Metta. So when we discover that our attitude towards a fellow Sangha member is not one of Metta, which often happens, then we need to ask ourselves why not?, why is our attitude, not one of Metta? And in answering this we should not be content with an answer that blames them. We should also not be content with an answer that just blames ourself. We need to go deeper than that, we need to seek a perspective of wisdom. If we acknowledge and recognize that our mental states are our own, our very own responses to people and situations, then we have an opportunity to go deeper, to transform, to gain awareness and even insight and if we do that we become more and more capable of generosity - the movement of expansion in consciousness, ever outwards.

We need to be trying to expand and move outwards from our habitual states as part of our spiritual practice. We need to move from being an habitual critic to being an encourager. We need to move from being an habitual consumer to being a giver. That applies to how we use the Buddhist centre as well. We need to move from a habit of exclusivity and cliqueishness to openness and hospitality. We need to move from a habit of being a commentator to being a participant. We need to move from the habit of being a spectator to being a player. We need to move from a habit of complaining to taking responsibility. There are probably many more. You could come up with your own personal list.

Where there are faults and weaknesses and flaws, there is all the more need for Metta. Metta is realistic, it is not an attitude that is blind to faults and blemishes in oneself or others, but it is an attitude that sees these faults as occasion for kindness, for an expansive, generous attitude. And that expansive, generous attitude manifests in words and actions, in friendliness, in kindness, in hospitality, in harmonising speech and so on.

The attitude of generosity is also an attitude of contentment. It is content with a simple life, not overly focused on accumulating and consuming money or possessions or people or ideas. It is an attitude of being content with less and of finding joy in less. It is an attitude that realises the burdensome nature of possessions, and the tiresomeness of being forever restless, restless for the next meal, the next gadget, the next news bulletin, the next sexual encounter, the next episode of Big Brother and so on.

So the imagination and vision which we apply to the external dimension of Sangha can also be applied to this more internal dimension. We can imagine ourself more developed, more expansive, kinder, more generous and try to get a sense of what that feels like, what does it look like, how would we behave, what does it sound like and so on. Imagination is the first step to realization of the vision of an ideal human community, so also with our self, we can imagine as a first step to realisation and we can articulate to ourselves what we see and experience in imagination. This is why images of archetypal Buddhas and Bodhisattvas can be so spiritually helpful to us.

On December the fourth 1978, when Bhante gave his talk, the day after the centre opened, among other things, he said this: "all of us, surely, at least sometimes, are dissatisfied: we feel dissatisfied with the world as it is and aspire to a higher, better, brighter, more beautiful world than that which we at present experience, or in which we seem to live -- a world where it will be easier for us to grow and develop. Surely, at least sometimes, we aspire in this way."

If we do aspire in this way, then we can imagine all the ways we could possibly create a future Sangha, that is large, harmonious, mutually helpful and an example to the world of how life can be lived both joyfully and meaningfully, an example of an ideal human community. Many others have attempted to create ideal human communities with varying degrees of success, like for example, the Fairfield Moravian Settlement in Manchester or the Whiteway Colony following the teachings of Tolstoy, or communities of the 1960s like the UFA Fabrik in Berlin, and so on. We can create our own dynamic Buddhist community here in Bethnal Green, we can dream big dreams, imagine great institutions, architecture, parks, libraries, paintings, schools and so on. We can act together, generously, in a spirit of metta and encouragement and allow the Bodhicitta to arise in our midst. The Bodhicitta, that Awakened consciousness that cannot be the possession of any one person, but is the flowering of the altruistic, compassionate activity of a large group of people, working together, awakening together in harmony and friendly fellowship.

We can be a Sangha of visions and dreams, a Sangha that dreams and visions itself into being -- here, even here in this corner of this city, at this time in history. This is a great work and it needs individuals who are committed, hard-working, determined, courageous and generous. Some of those individuals are probably sitting here today. If so, I wish you every success in what is a most worthwhile endeavour, the most worthwhile endeavour -- the creation of an ideal human community -- an effective Sangha.

Work

2008-09-06T13:07:00.000-07:00

Some might be interested in a talk I gave recently to the warehouse workers in windhorse on the theme of efficiency and spiritual practice at work. It was posted to FWBO News by Lokabandhu on August 15th.
Find it at http://fwbo-news.org/ or my own site at http://www.angelfire.com/wizard2/ratnaghosha/

My websites

2008-08-30T12:32:00.000-07:00

These are my websites. Two of them consist of talks I gave to various audiences during the 90's and 00's and the other has some odds and ends about my life and views:

http://www.angelfire.com/wizard2/ratnaghosha/
http://www.angelfire.com/wizard/ratnaghosa/index.html
http://ratnaghosa.fwbo.net/

No Choice

2008-08-30T12:21:00.000-07:00

Perhaps the greatest issue facing us in the world today is how to stop destroying the planet and how to begin to reverse some of the damage we have already done. One of the reasons we have done this to ourselves and to our home, the planet Earth, is because we, the human race, have been and continue to be ignorant of the connections between things, ignorant of how all life is interconnected and interdependent. We have been ignorant of the very existence of an ecosystem. And it would be a great mistake for us to continue this ignorance into our search for solutions. It would be a mistake for us to think of environmentalism as concerned with a particular aspect of life. It would be a mistake to think that environmental issues were separate from issues of war or poverty or economics or politics or leisure or work or spiritual life. To think of environmental issues as separate in that way would be to continue the ignorance that has brought us into this plight in the first place. The social, the spiritual and the ecological are not separate spheres of knowledge and activity, they are intimately and irrevocably interconnected and it is ignorance of this that leads us to behave in ways that are destructive to the planet and therefore destructive to ourselves. This ignorance comes about because human beings have developed self-reflexive consciousness. We are aware and we are aware that we are aware.

This consciousness, which is what distinguishes us from the animals, is our greatest asset, and our greatest gift and perhaps our greatest curse. Because of this consciousness of self there is a consciousness of other and a consciousness of insecurity in relation to other. The consciousness of self is crude, rudimentary even, and is closely identified with the body, with things, with people as things and with a rigid world view. This self is constantly buffeted by the winds of change externally and internally by the primitive forces of survival and reproduction. So a sense of insecurity is an inevitable accompaniment of emerging self-consciousness. As Subhuti says in The Buddhist Vision "the rudimentary self or immature ego tries to find security by using the same instincts as those by which the animal preserves itself. Just as the animal hunts for the food which will nourish its organism, so the ego tries to possess those things it considers as securing its identity. And as the animal will attack and destroy whatever threatens its survival, so the ego seeks to destroy whatever undermines its integrity. Aided and amplified by the human power of imagination, these reactions can reach the monstrous proportions of ruthless empire-building and of mass destruction through war." So the immature ego is ignorant of interconnection and experiences itself as separate, and as fixed and unchanging. This according to Buddhism is the basic spiritual ignorance, experiencing ourselves as separate and as fixed and unchanging. It is this basic spiritual ignorance that gives rise to the greed for possessions and people to give us a sense of security and it is this basic spiritual ignorance which gives rise to hatred and a violent rejection of anything that appears to threaten this separate fixed and unchanging self. Here we can see the source of all human conflict, the source of consumerism, the source of overpopulation, the source of our blind destruction of our own environment.

This is what is depicted at the centre of the Tibetan Wheel of Life. There are three animals, a cock, a snake and a pig biting each other's tails and going round and round in circles. The cock symbolises greed, the snake hatred and the pig ignorance. They symbolise the animal within us which is covered over with a thin veneer of civilisation. Animals of course are not destructive; it is only the animal in conjunction with self-consciousness that is destructive. So this picture is not saying anything about animals, it is a mirror for us to look into and if we are honest we will recognise, perhaps with the shock, that what we see is our own inner self, motivated by greed for possessions, for sex, for status, motivated by aversion to discomfort or criticism and motivated by the yearning for security. This is what the first circle on the Wheel of Life shows. It is directly confronting us with our spiritual ignorance and spiritual immaturity. Because we are dealing with symbolism here it is perhaps better not to or over conceptualise. Concepts can become a barrier between us and the truth. It is better just to look in the mirror and see what we see; a cock, a snake and a pig; pecking, strutting, crawling, hissing, rooting, snuffling animals. However we are self conscious, we are human beings and that spark of consciousness is what can save us from the excesses of ignorance. We have the choice to eat from the fruit of the tree of knowledge, to borrow an image from elsewhere. We have the choice to do something with our awareness. What we can do with our awareness is develop it. We can evolve further. We can make the choice to evolve our awareness and dissolve the fetters of ignorance, neurotic greed and hatred. We can embark on what has been called the path of the higher evolution, that is the evolution of consciousness or awareness. This is what the spiritual life is about, you could say this is what the truly human life is about and this is the long term and fundamental solution to the problem of human destructiveness. This is the radical solution in that it goes to the roots of the problem.

The second circle on the Wheel of Life is about this choice we have. A choice we make whether we want to or not because even doing nothing is a choice. This circle of the Wheel is divided into two segments, one white and one black. In the black segment, naked and anguished men and women tumble downwards tormented by demons, in the white segment men and women wearing bright garments and performing various benign activities are ascending. The message of this section of the Wheel of Life is that we experience the consequences of our actions. This is what is known in Buddhism as the law of Karma, a much used and often misunderstood term. To understand what Karma is we need to understand a very fundamental Buddhist teaching, the teaching of conditionality. After the Buddha's Enlightenment experience he tried to communicate what he had seen and understood in many different ways. One of the ways he used to explain his insight is formulated as the law of conditionality, which very simply states that everything arises in dependence upon conditions. In the texts it says "this being that becomes, from the arising of this that arises. This not being that does not become, from the ceasing of this that ceases." so everything comes into being in dependence upon preceding conditions. This applies to everything: a thought, a giraffe, a mountain, a war, a planet, a universe. So this would appear to be a very obvious and simple assertion, that everything arises in dependence upon conditions. However, simple and obvious as it may seem, it is the most fundamental teaching of Buddhism and it has vast implications. Karma is just one kind of conditionality. There are five kinds; there is conditionality on the inorganic level, the level covered more or less by the laws of physics. There is conditionality on the organic level, the level of biology. There is conditionality on the lower mental level involving such things as perceptions and instincts. Then there is conditionality on the level of intentional action which is the Karmic level and above that is the transcendental, Dharmic level of conditionality. The reason I have enumerated this rather technical list is simply to make the point that Karma does not explain everything that happens to us. There are a multitude of conditions at work all the time and it is impossible to separate out what results from our own intentional actions and what results from other kinds of conditionality. So we need to beware of simplistic understandings of Karma. It is not a model of linear cause and effect and it is not an exhaustive explanation of everything that happens to everyone. Everything arises in dependence upon conditions but not all conditions are Karmic.

Put simply Karma is intentional action. Buddhism teaches an ethics of intention. Traditional ethical systems in the West speak in terms of 'good' and 'bad'. Buddhism doesn't think in terms of good and bad actions. It focuses instead on the intention behind the action. Indeed the terms good and bad are alien to Buddhist ethical teaching, instead we use the terms skilful and unskilful. A skilful or ethical action is one that arises out of a mind that is loving, generous and wise and an unskilful or unethical action is one that arises out of a mind that is selfish, hateful and ignorant. Actions are understood to be of thought, speech and body. So the law of Karma states that unskilful actions have negative consequences and skilful actions have benign and positive consequences. Difficulties, suffering and unhappiness which we experience may be due to our unskilfulness in the past i.e. may be due to our past Karma, or may be due to other conditions. Happiness and good fortune may be due to our skillfulness in the past, i.e. may be due to our past Karma, or to other conditions. But the importance of the law of Karma is not that it may explain our present circumstances or help us to analyse the past. The importance of the law of Karma is that it allows us to shape the future and, because all things are interconnected, how we shape our own future inevitably affects others and even the whole planet.

Skilful or ethical action of thought, word and deed is the best way to create a happy and satisfying life. Skilful action is based in mental states of kindness, generosity and wisdom which are by nature expansive, outgoing and compassionate. This has a beneficial effect on everybody we encounter and on all the creatures and plant life. When we are experiencing kindness, love, generosity and wisdom we do not harm the world around us, we enjoy and protect it.

So the choice we have to make is whether to embark on the difficult task of overcoming our natural instinct to seek security for our fragile ego sense or go beyond that natural instinct by deliberately evolving consciousness that is expansive and self-less. It would seem that the obvious answer would be to say yes, lets go for it. However that is not a choice that the majority of people make. Most people decide to stay within the confines of their narrow self interest and seek as much security as they can from the world around them. This is because the spiritual path, the path of the higher evolution of consciousness, is truly difficult. It is not the work of a day or a week or year but of twenty, thirty, or more years and even then the fruits are gathered slowly. The truly spiritual life goes against the whole trend and logic of ordinary life. I have to make the effort, I have to change, I have to be transformed even, but ultimately it is not about any acquisition for me, not even the acquisition of wisdom. Certainly we must use our natural self interest to get started. We can be legitimately motivated by a desire for happiness and well-being. But ultimately all self-centredness is transcended, and our sense of self and other is radically transformed, so that to act in the interests of others is no different from acting in the interests of self. This is something that can be understood intellectually, but intellectual understanding is not sufficient to sustain consistent effort over many years. We need to have a heart response to the possibilities open to us, the possibilities of great wisdom and compassion that transcend all hankering after security all desire for personal gain, status, happiness even. We need to have a heart response to the ideal of becoming more truly human so that we come to value co-operation above competition, to value simplicity above wealth, value harmony above gain, value peace above revenge, and the welfare of all beings above our own life. We need to have a heart response because the heart or the emotions are where our energy is where our motivation is and we will need energy and motivation to make progress on the spiritual path. Because if we are not motivated strongly enough we will not be able to overcome the many obstacles and struggles that we will inevitably meet along the way.

For instance we will want to meditate but may get discouraged when we experience nothing but distraction for weeks or months on end. We will want to be loving and kind but may get discouraged when we meet people, especially Buddhists, were not nice kind people and who perhaps don't even like us. We will want to be wise but may get discouraged when nobody wants to listen to our wisdom and they even laugh of us. We will want to be ethical but may get discouraged when others take advantage of us. We will want to be more aware but may get discouraged when we become more aware and realise that we are not as good and truthful and kind as we liked to believe. We will want to transcend selfishness but may get discouraged by the tenacity of our egotism.

Spiritual life is not easy, it is not for the faint-hearted. It is a tough choice but it is worthwhile and it works. The alternative is to continue to seek security and happiness in ways that cannot ever deliver happiness and security. It may be difficult to make progress on a spiritual path but wisdom, happiness and compassion do arise in dependence upon the effort made. The mundane path of material success and status may appear easier but it is an illusion from top to bottom and it only brings sorrow and pain. This doesn't need any great elucidation, it is plain to see all around us and it is evident in the history of the human race down through all the generations. The great difference that has occurred over the last couple of centuries is that the world has become smaller due to the advances in technology and the human race is capable of massive destructiveness also due to the advances in technology. So our choice to pursue the life of material gain, power and status has greater implications now than ever before. And those implications are becoming more visible in such things as climate change, radioactive waste, weapons of mass destruction, large scale poverty and starvation and overpopulation. The implications of choosing a life of awareness, simplicity, ethical behaviour and compassion for all sentient life are also greater than ever before because of the possibilities of global communication and because of the spiritual vacuum at the heart of the world.

When we choose a life of spiritual quest within a Buddhist context, we undertake to live by five specific principles. These are the principle of non-violence, principal of generosity, the principle of contentment, the principle of truthfulness and the principle of awareness. The practice of meditation helps us to live by these principles.

The first principle underlies all the other principles and is the cornerstone of the whole edifice of Buddhist philosophy and practice. This is the principle of non-violence or to put it more positively, the principle of love. This love is what we call Metta, a love that is sustained, consistent, spontaneous and seeks no reward. This principle has implications for every aspect of our lives; most obviously it implies cooperative, forgiving and kindly relations with other people, even those we disagree with or dislike. So it rules out revenge, it rules out prejudice, it rules out persecution, it rules out discrimination, it rules out character assassination, it rules out slander, it rules out doing anything to others that they don't wish us to do. It rules out all kinds of manipulation and exploitation. All of these things appear in gross forms in the world around us, but as we become more ethically sensitive we will discover their more subtle forms in our own hearts and minds. We will begin to notice the edge of competitiveness or malice in our humour, we will begin to notice the subtle emotional blackmail between lovers, we will notice all the little ways we have of undermining the achievement of others and so on. Here we find our working ground and it is here in our everyday relations with others that we can begin the process of cultivating a compassionate mind.

The principle of non-violence has implications beyond our relations with other people. It applies to our relations with all living things: animals, birds, insects, trees, flowers etc. Before the Chinese invasion in 1950, Tibet was a safe haven for wildlife, and vast herds of antelope and musk deer roamed the plains together with bears, wolves, foxes and wild sheep. But all that has changed now. The American photographer and author Galen Rowell in his essay" The Agony of Tibet", writes, "the invaders made a sport of shooting indiscriminately at wildlife. In 1973, Dhondub Choedon, a Tibetan now in exile in India, reported that "Chinese soldiers go on organised hunts using machine guns. They carry away the meat in lorries and export the musk and furs to China". Important habitat for vast herds of animals was soon over grazed as the Chinese forced nomadic families into communes to raise livestock for export instead of their own subsistence. Tibetans, including the children, were forced to kill 'unnecessary animals' such as moles and marmots that vied with humans for grain and dug up valuable grazing land. Children were given a qouta for small animals to kill that, if not met, resulted in beatings and other forms of punishment." It is so sad to think of the children being conditioned to kill animals. A stark illustration of how totally different a materialistic outlook is from a spiritual and non-violent outlook.

The principle of non-violence or love extends also to our attitude to the natural world. The Thai monk Prayudh Payutto has said that it is best to avoid using the word 'environment' in our concerns for ecology. He feels the word 'environment' betrays its origins in Western attitudes that separate human beings from the rest of nature. Nature includes us. Ecology includes us. When we really begin to understand and see this then we see that the effort we make to transform ourselves is ecological work and that all our activities have ecological implications. If a river dries up it is relatively easy to see the ecological implications. If human hearts dry up the ecological implications are far greater. We must keep our hearts moist with the life-giving waters of love.

Prayudh Payutto has written an essay entitled "Buddhist solutions for the 21st century". In it he states that modern human civilisation is in the grip of three harmful and tenaciously held views, these are:
"1. The perception that mankind is separate from nature, that mankind must control, conquer, or manipulate nature according to his desires.
2. The perception that fellow human beings are not fellow human beings. Rather than perceiving the common situations or experiences shared among all people, human beings have tended to focus on the differences between themselves.
3. The perception that happiness is dependent on an abundance of material possessions.

The first perception is an attitude toward nature; the second perception is an attitude toward fellow human beings; the third perception is an understanding of the objective of life."
He goes on to say that for a human beings to live happily there must be freedom on three levels: physical freedom, social freedom, and inner freedom. Inner freedom is the ability to live happily and contentedly within ourselves without needing to manipulate and exploit the world around us. Without inner freedom human happiness is totally dependent on manipulation of the external environment and social exploitation. So this inner freedom, which is freedom from neurotic craving, freedom from hatred and freedom from spiritual ignorance is essential to the ecology of our planet. Without this inner freedom we are at the mercy of forces which push us into over-consumption and violent competition and a search for happiness and security where happiness and security cannot be found.

These are some of the implications of this first principle of Buddhism, the principle of non-violence. The other four principles are, as I said, based on this one. The principle of generosity extends the principle of love into our relationship to property and possessions. Generosity is basically an attitude to possessions, property and money which sees sharing and giving as more important than acquiring and owning. It is an attitude that holds things lightly, regarding ourselves as only temporary owners of whatever we have. In fact it is even better if we can see ourselves not as owners but as stewards, we are simply looking after something until it passes on to someone else. The Buddha said that a strong possessiveness about things or people lead to suffering; all things are impermanent and the stronger we hold on to them the more painful is the inevitable letting go. This applies to everything including our own body and sense of identity.

The principle of generosity runs completely counter to what has been called the 'religion of consumerism', with its scriptures and liturgies dedicated to exciting greed and its places of worship designed to entice us to acquire things we neither need nor want. Consumerism could be said to be the dominant ethic in the developed world today and this makes the principle of generosity all the more radical. Generosity as a practice in a society and world which is dedicated to its opposite is not an easy practice. To develop a truly generous attitude, an attitude of non-ownership, non-possession, non-acquiring, an attitude of sharing, stewardship and giving requires a big effort to overcome the constant conditioning and brainwashing that we are subjected to and have been subjected to since childhood.

Another Thai monk, Sulak Sivaraksa, writes "consumerism supports those who have economic and political power by rewarding their hatred, aggression, and anger. And consumerism works hand-in-hand with the modern educational system to encourage cleverness without wisdom. We create delusion in ourselves and call it knowledge. Until the schools reinvest their energy into teaching wholesome, spiritual values instead of reinforcing the delusion that satisfaction and meaning in life can be found by finding a higher-paying job, the schools are just cheerleaders for the advertising agencies, and we believe that consuming more, going faster, and living in greater convenience will bring us happiness. We don't look at the tremendous cost to ourselves, to our environment, and to our souls. Until more people are willing to look at the negative aspects of consumerism, we will not be able to change the situation for the better. Until we understand the roots of greed, hatred, and delusion within ourselves, we will not be free from the temptations of the religion of consumerism, and we will remain stuck in this illusory search for happiness.”

The third principle is the principle of contentment and this is traditionally related to our sexual activity. On the one hand we are enjoined to refrain from any form of exploitation or manipulation to satisfy our sexual desires and on the other hand we are encouraged to practise contentment with our current sexual status, instead of constant neurotic seeking after new experiences. Ultimately this principle aims at what is referred to as a state of stillness, simplicity and contentment which frees us to a large extent from any neurotic dependence on sex. For most of us this principle will in practice mean trying not to use subtle, or even not so subtle, manipulation or emotional blackmail to get others to behave as we want them to and it will also mean meditating to attain to more tranquil and contented states of mind.

The fourth principle of Buddhist ethics is truthfulness. Truthfulness is essential to the functioning of any society. Without truthfulness there can be no trust and without trust human relations fall apart and we are left with an atmosphere of suspicion and hatred. Truthfulness as an ethical principle has to be based on loving kindness and not used as a weapon to hurt others. And truthfulness, like all these ethical principles, begins with ourselves. We need to be honest with ourselves about what we think, what we feel, what we do and what we say. To be honest with oneself is not necessarily an easy matter, it may entail facing up to unpleasant aspects of our character and it may seriously dent our pride and even possibly put us in the position of needing to apologise to others.

Truthfulness means, firstly, being factual in what we say or write. It also means steering clear of exaggeration for effect. Exaggeration is one of the great building bricks of egotism. Truthfulness means not understating things and it means not deliberately omitting relevant information. Omissions can distort a narrative to the point of falsehood. And of course, truthfulness means not deliberately lying. When we tamper with the truth it is usually because we want to be seen in a particular light or we want to gain some advantage: we want to be liked, we want to be popular and bending the truth can seem to be an easy way to get attention and approval or get whatever we want. Of course if we do that habitually the person who gets attention and approval will be a fiction and in our hearts we will be lonelier than ever. For friendship to exist, for any loving human relationships to exist, there has to be honesty, otherwise we only have fictions relating to fictions, facades relating to facades, which is, to say the least, unsatisfactory.

The fifth principle of Buddhist ethics is the principle of awareness or mindfulness. You could say that awareness is just as fundamental as love. We need awareness that is saturated with love and compassion and our love and compassion needs to be as aware as possible. Love and compassion without awareness can degenerate into sentimentality and pity and awareness without love can be cold and alienated. So these two qualities, love and awareness, need to be developed in tandem. That is why we teach the two meditation practices, Mindfulness of Breathing and the Metta Bhavana. The Mindfulness of Breathing cultivates awareness and the Metta Bhavana practice develops loving kindness. Awareness begins with ourselves. We need to become more aware of our bodies and our actions, we need to become aware of our thoughts and of our emotions. This forms the basis for awareness of other people, awareness of the world around us and ultimately awareness of reality.

Sangharakshita has said ''awareness is revolutionary. It is revolutionary in that it brings about change of a far reaching and profound nature. Awareness is naturally expansive. As we become more and more aware become more expansive and full of life. Our energy becomes more focused and more available to us and we become more capable of taking responsibility for our lives. Our normal state is not really one of being aware, we don't really know what we're thinking, feeling, doing or saying and other people are just projections of our unconscious needs, desires and aversions. We think we're being original when all our views and opinions are received. We think we are independent of influence when our whole life is a constant swinging from one influence to the next.

Awareness gives us the possibility of a genuine individuality and more real relationships with other people. It is revolutionary in that it throws the light of truth onto our lives and wakes us up to what is really going on. Awareness transforms us. The greater the awareness the more far reaching the transformation and there is no limit to how aware we can become. Buddhahood or Enlightenment could be said to be a state of perfected awareness. Awareness of other people and awareness of the world around us shows us that we are one with humanity and one with nature. It shows us that there is beauty everywhere. Lack of awareness, which is self-centredness, is narrow in perception and sees threat and ugliness everywhere. Awareness sees beauty and optimism even in the most unlikely places.

Awareness of reality is a constant immersion in the reality that all life is process, all life is flux and change, all life is interconnected and interdependent. To be constantly immersed in this vision, to experience this all the time is to be free from all ill-will and possessiveness. This awareness gives life a quality of lightness and a vast prospective that turns all personal fears and anxieties into absurdities and makes much of what seems important in the world around us look ridiculous. Perhaps that is why the Dalai Lama is always laughing so heartily! However because of the presence of compassion there is no arrogance or impatience in this awareness. There is rather a tender regard for the suffering of the world which is one's own suffering too when one ceases to separate oneself from others and the world.

These then are the five principles that we undertake to live by when we embark on the spiritual path: non-violence, generosity, contentment, truthfulness and awareness. These are the principles that we train ourselves in over and over again in order to transcend the poisons of neurotic greed, ill-will and spiritual ignorance, which are the cause of human suffering, both on the personal level and the global level. By training ourselves to live by these principles we contribute to our own well-being and to the well-being of the whole world.

Perhaps all this gives some little explanation of the symbolism of the inner two circles of the Wheel of Life. The Wheel of Life is an ancient symbol over two thousand years old. In one Buddhist text, which dates from 100 years BC, the Buddha is depicted as telling his followers to paint the Wheel of Life at the entrance to every monastery and to have a monk on standby to explain the imagery to visitors and novices. In this essay then we are taking part in an age-old ritual. Buddhism was wiped out in India, so that only one ancient image of the wheel of life survives in India, at the caves of Ajanta. But Tibet inherited the riches of Indian Buddhism and the Wheel of Life is still very much used in Tibetan temples. It is the nature of symbolism that it cannot be tied down to concepts and that there is always more to say. The Wheel of Life is a mirror of truthfulness and in it we see ourselves, warts and all. We also see the seeds of our happiness, the seeds of our Enlightenment even. Sometimes our vanity leads us to the mirror and sometimes our vanity keeps us away from a mirror, but this mirror shatters our vanity so that we can begin to see things as they are really are and so that we can make the choice to embark on the path of the higher evolution of consciousness, which is in reality no choice, because we cannot live by choosing death, we can only live by choosing life.

To conclude here is a little story from 'The Snow Leopard' by Peter Matheson which perhaps illustrates this point quite well, "the Lama of the Crystal monastery appears to be a very happy man, and yet I wonder how he feels about his isolation in the silences of Tsakang, which he has not left in eight years now and, because he's crippled may never leave again. Since Jang-bu, the interpreter, seems uncomfortable with the Lama or with himself or perhaps with us, I tell him not to inquire on this point if it seems to him impertinent, but after a moment Jang-bu does so. And this holy man of great directness and simplicity, big white teeth shining, laughs out loud in an infectious way at Jang- bu's question. Indicating his twisted legs without a trace of self-pity or bitterness - they belong to all of us - he casts his arms wide to the sky and the snow mountains, the high sun and the dancing sheep, and cries, "Of course I am happy here! It's wonderful! Especially when I have no choice!"

Constant Change

2008-08-30T12:19:00.000-07:00

Impermanence is central to Buddhism, this fact, this truth, that everything at every level is changing, from galaxies to thoughts, from personal emotions to planets, in fact everything is change.
Change is constant.

You can treat this talk as a reflection; one of my points will be the importance of reflecting particularly using your imagination, reflecting imaginatively.

I'm going to look at the life of the Buddha before he was the Buddha because that's possibly more relevant to us, Siddharta before he was the Buddha struggling to follow the path. I'm going to use this part of the Buddha's life as a kind of symbol, a representation of the life of any human being.

Buddhism consists of the Path and teaching which enable all human consciousness to unfold and evolve into the awakened state - awakened to the true nature of Reality.

In this talk I want to look at that Path as it is illustrated by the life of Siddhartha. The story of the life of Siddhartha is a universal story and the significant episodes in that life indicate truths relevant to the spiritual life of any practitioner.

I’m going to look at some of these episodes - from the Four Sights up to the four archetypal images associated with the Enlightenment experience and I want to draw out the universal significance of each episode and perhaps a few points that could be of specific significance to us here today.

So first I’ll begin with the episode known as the Four Sights.

I believe this episode prefigures the later story of the appearance of Mara, the Earth Goddess, Brahma Sahampati and Mucalinda at the time of the Awakening - we’ll look at these parallels later. The story of the four sights tells us that Siddhartha had led a very sheltered life, protected by his father from all suffering, but as a restless young man he found a way to get out and some wider experience. What he experienced was seeing a sick person, an old person, and a corpse for the first time in his life and also a wandering holy man. These sights, we are told, had a profound effect on him and led to him giving up his life of luxury and going forth into the world in search of truth and a solution to the problem of human suffering.

You could take this story literally - that he had never encountered sickness, old age and death before - or you could understand it as meaning that he saw these things as if for the first time, in other words, he saw the significance of sickness, aging and death. He saw that it was what happened to everyone and what would happen to him. He saw it clearly, with the full force of a shock - he saw it in such a way that he couldn’t deny it, he couldn’t ignore it, couldn’t just carry on living as if everything was the same as before. No, now death was a reality for him, illness and old age were realties and they had to be faced up to. He couldn’t go back to a superficial life in the face of these existential facts which had shocked him into waking up to the naked insecurity of life. This was a process of insight for Siddhartha and it is a process that happens for many people, perhaps it has happened to some of us here. For some people this sort of awakening has a profound life-changing effect and they set out on the journey of spiritual searching and spiritual discovery - as Siddhartha did.

For others the experience gradually fades and old habits take over so that they manage to ignore their deeper experiences. Some people deliberately bury their insight into life’s insecurity, beneath a life of hedonism or even addiction. And some people embark on the spiritual quest, but get lost along the way or begin to use their spiritual practice as a way of avoiding the raw truths of sickness, old age and death rather than as a way of facing and transcending them.

But many of us, hopefully all of us here, are inspired by the image of the wandering holy man - the image of someone who gives up everything for the sake of truth, someone whose life is a wholehearted quest for truth.

Seeing these four sights is not an easy matter and I don’t believe it is usually a one-off event. Seeing these four sights is a process of deepening insight, a process of dawning clarity, a process of emotional, intellectual and spiritual adjustment to the fact that life is change. Sickness, old age and death are inevitable because change is the nature of life. The more deeply we see and understand this, the more acceptable it becomes and therefore the less we suffer by trying to resist change. This process of seeing the four sights - seeing them deeply, being affected by them, understanding and being moved by the significance of them - this process can go on throughout our life and it is worth our while reflecting on these four sights again and again.

We can ask ourselves questions. What is my attitude to illness? Do I see any deeper significance in it? Is my attitude to illness different when it affects me and when it affects others? Why is it different? Similarly with old age and death. What are my attitudes to old age and death? Am I aware of old age and death around me? Am I aware of myself as someone subject to old age and death? And what does the wandering holy man mean to me? Is there an equivalent of the wandering holy man in my life? Is there something which reminds me of the deeper significance of life? How often am I aware of that dimension represented by the wandering holy man? Am I moved to action by the image of the wandering holy man and the spiritual dimension of life? Perhaps for some of us the question will be - Have I really seen the four sights and if I have, am I still aware of them?

Because I've been healthy all my life it comes as a shock to me when I get sick, it’s something I don't normally experience or reflect upon. As I get older I am having to take it on board more. Sangharakshita some years ago when he was experiencing the effects of old age, including the loss of some of his eyesight, said that he had reflected deeply on death but he hadn't reflected deeply enough on old age and it's affects. It's not easy to be aware of these things.

Siddhartha did see the four sights. He saw them very deeply. He saw the significance of sickness, old age and death and the wandering holy man and it shook him to the core of his being. He could not be the same again; he had to change his life. He left home and set out in quest of the truth, in quest of the answer to the problem of human suffering. This episode in his life is known as the Going Forth. Going forth doesn't just apply to the Buddha it can apply to anyone of us and in different ways. Some of us may go forth in the traditional way and undertake something like a journey. Sangharakshita talks about going forth in terms of getting rid of his papers, passport and all those things and journeying around India on foot. When I was 22 I gave up my career and possessions to go in search of meaning. That was the result of seeing an older person in the work place retiring and seeing how empty their life was after spending 50 years in that job, it just shook me and I gave up everything. I did find Buddhism 6 years later.

The Going Forth represents a reorientation of one’s whole life - it involves actively moving away from the mundane, self-interested values of the world around us and moving towards values that are compassionate and based in a deeper awareness of the nature of life.

Sometimes it is quite difficult to see what the values of the world are because we are so much in the world and so much influenced by what we read and hear, a bit like fish swimming in water we can't see the water, - the newspapers, internet, TV and so on. If we are not sufficiently aware, we may not even notice that certain values are being promulgated all the time by the media, by politicians and so on.

Some of the more obvious values today are: that choice is a good thing, that economic growth is a good thing, that nation states have a real existence, that quality of life can be measured by the ability to buy things and so on. And some of the values will be so much a part of the air that we breathe that we will apply them to our spiritual practice without even noticing. For instance I have noticed that the notion of choice has become more and more prevalent over the past 5 to 10 years. Politicians tell us that what people want is choice and on the Internet, on TV, in the shopping centres, we are inundated with offers of choice. And of course, we often believe it, we believe that we are being offered genuine choices and that having these choices gives us greater freedom. We become enthralled to the idea that choice means freedom and we start to look for choice in our spiritual life, a choice of practices, a choice of lifestyles, a choice of teachings, a choice of teachers and so on. And of course the choice is there, a whole spiritual supermarket of choices, a whole shopping mall of choices - even within Buddhism and then of course there are all the tasty morsels from elsewhere - from various therapies and other disciplines - a whole smorgasbord of choices. So this one value of the world we live in could potentially cause us a great deal of confusion and lead us astray on all sorts of interesting sidetracks, especially if we haven’t quite seen the four sights yet away from depth of experience. I am not saying it is wrong to investigate other practices - just that we should go for depth in what we do.

Going Forth then, is a re-orientation of our life towards the spiritual values of awareness and compassion, the value of awakening more and more to reality and we need to examine other values in the light of this - does the multiplication of choices lead to greater awareness and compassion? Does nationalism or consumerism lead to greater awareness and compassion? What values do we have? What values are promoting greater awareness and compassion in our lives? What values are hindering our awakening to reality? What values are obscuring our vision of the four sights?

The questions mean reflecting, and the importance of reflecting on life and experience. It’s not such a good idea to expect immediate answers from yourself or anybody else the important thing is the question not the answer, the best answers come from the depth of your own experience. If you have an attitude of question, of reflecting then in your ordinary life as experience happens you will be reflecting because you will be bringing that attitude to what ever happens. You will be seeing the significance.

For Siddhartha going Forth meant a complete change in his life - internally and externally - for each of us it may mean that or it may mean something else. Whatever it means I think that it is also best seen as an ongoing process rather than a one-off event. As we will see it was an on-going event for Siddhartha too. The event symbolises the process - a process that carries on until awakening dawns. It is the process of letting go of everything that holds us back from seeing clearly the truth of constant change and living our lives by the truth of constant change.

The truth of constant change applies to our bodies, our thoughts, our emotions, it applies to other people, it applies to everything in this world, it applies to the whole universe. The truth of constant change transcends death because death is only a moment in the vast interplay of energies we call life. So we go forth from limitations, limiting views, limiting values, towards an open road, an open dimension where we can live in harmony with the reality of constant change.

(Joyful theme evoked by Walt Whitman)

Here is how the Sutta Nipata puts it

“Now I will tell the going Forth. How he, the Mighty Seer, went forth. How he was questioned and described the reason for his going forth. The crowded life lived in a house exhales an atmosphere of dust; but life gone forth is open wide: he saw this, and he chose the going forth.” (Nanamoli p. 11)

Let’s hope that given all the choices we have, we too choose the Going forth again and again.

The next episode in the life of Siddhartha that I would like to look at briefly is his attainment of Dhyana.

Siddhartha became the disciple of Alara Kalama first and later of Uddaka Ramaputta and under these teachers he became adept at entering dhyanic states of consciousness - right up to the highest formless dhyanas. He was such a good disciple that Alara asked him to become co-leader of his community of followers and Uddaka Ramaputta asked him to take over complete leadership of his community. However Siddhartha was not satisfied and was well aware that he was still within the realm of egotism and had not solved the problem of suffering. So he left these teachers and went forth yet again - this time to a life of great austerities. I think many of us would love to be able to get into dhyanic states at will. Indeed many of us probably feel that not being able to attain to the dhyanas means that we cannot meditate and we may even become despondent about meditation and perhaps give up. But Dhyana is not the aim of spiritual practice - it is a pleasant side-effect. I some Tibetan traditions the student is warned against Dhyana and told to come out of it as quickly a possible - it is regarded as a dangerous distraction. In the Brahmajala Sutta the Buddha outlines the 62 wrong views to be avoided if one is to make spiritual progress. Now the interesting thing about these wrong views is that most of them arise out of some kind of higher experience and quite a few arise from misinterpretation of higher Dhyanic experience. As Kamalashila put it in a talk on the subject, “It seems that if one practices within a framework of self-view, ten every attainment in meditation will simply confirm that view.”

So the danger of dhyanic experience is that it may lead into a cul-de-sac of wrong views, which block any further spiritual progress.

Siddhartha saw this and went forth from Dhyana. Perhaps we need to reflect on the significance of this. If we are regularly in Dhyana - we may need to let go of it and go forth into deeper insight and if we are regularly yearning to experience Dhyana perhaps we need to go forth from that yearning and start to see our meditation practice as being concerned with truth seeking rather than pleasure seeking. The pleasure will arise of its’ own accord. (David Smith p.118)

So, then, Siddhartha undertakes severe austerities, in line with practices current at the time. It was felt that the demands of the body, for food, sex, warmth and so on, were a major hindrance to spiritual insights and therefore the body had to be subdued. It is said that he took this to an extreme too, but in the end he realised that was not helping and he went forth from the life of austerities too - his third major Going Forth. I don‘t think there are very many people in the FWBO who undertake austerities - I’m not aware of any really but perhaps there are still some lessons to be learned here.

So Siddhartha moved from blissful practices to painful practices, hoping that what he didn’t gain through bliss he would gain through pain. And it is true for many people in the FWBO that there can be an over-emphasis on pain. We can give a lot of attention to painful emotional experiences and value them perhaps more than we need to, even considering them to be somehow more authentic or real, than pleasurable experience.

The American psychotherapist and mystic, Suzanne Segal, talks about this from her experience as a therapist (quoted in my talk “The Five Wisdoms”)

So for some of us at least there may be a sense in which we could helpfully go forth form an over-emphasis on the painful aspects of experience. We could deliberately affirm what is positive in our lives, some people have a practice of thinking at the end of the day what did I enjoy today, think of 5 or 10 things that I enjoyed today and it can give you quite a different perspective on life if you deliberately do that, just very small things like the light through the trees or the clouds in the sky. What you find if you do that is that you start to notice thoughts enjoyable things and you start to have more enjoyment in your life. It’s good to do a practice like that as it affirms what's positive and what's enjoyable in your day-to-day life.

Sometimes it is said that Siddhartha was making an unbalanced effort in practising austerities and he needed to find a middle was of more balanced effort. This is not borne out by the texts, which represent him as making a strong, even forceful effort, when he sat beneath the Bodhi tree. What was wrong about his effort in austerity was that it was effort in the wrong direction, effort leading nowhere.

So what we have to consider about our spiritual efforts is not so much a matter of quantity, but rather a matter of quality. We don’t need to worry too much that our efforts might be too strong, what we really need to pay attention to is whether our efforts are effective, spiritually speaking. Whether they are leading in the direction of truth. The direction of more Compassion, more Metta.

So Siddhartha went forth again, in the process losing his reputation, and being criticised by his former companions. Going Forth can bring unpopularity it seems. Your friends and family might think you're being foolish or a failure if you turn your back on material values.

So he took some nourishment and sat down beneath a peepul tree, thereafter known as the Bodhi tree. This tree prefigures the image of Mucalinda - naga and youthful hero. The tree represents a uniting of the heights and depths. Its’ roots go deep down in to the rock and its’ branches soar heavenwards. It is generating energy in the hidden depths and manifesting beauty and protectiveness in the world. This uniting of opposites - depths and heights, inner and outer - symbolises the enlightened state - a state of completeness uniting Wisdom and Compassion, uniting energy and stillness. This is something worth reflecting on - do we have a sense of heights and depths on our lives? What do we mean by heights? and depths? In what way are our heights and depths not united? In what ways are they united? How could we bring about more unity of our heights and depths? Or to put it another way, do our ideals, aspirations, dreams and imaginings have a strong connection with our on-going awareness of ourselves, physically, emotionally and mentally? Are the branches connected to the roots by a trunk of awareness and metta?

Siddhartha was sheltered by the tree or put symbolically, his aspiration and faith gave him protection.

And he needed protection because now he is assailed by Mara. Mara is the personification to spiritual awaking.

Firstly he is attacked by Mara’s army, then tempted by Mara’s daughters and then Mara tries to undermine his confidence. So here we have very dynamic images for hatred, craving and ignorance.

Mara’s army attacks with arrows and spears but all the missiles hurled at Siddhartha turn into flowers, blossoms and settle gently at his feet. This attack of Mara’s army represents a massive internal conflict. Siddhartha’s unshakeable determination is coming up against all the forces of his psyche that resist the implications of spiritual death. This is an inevitable part of any spiritual endeavour. We are never 100% behind our spiritual aspirations and so we experience conflict and you could say that dealing with this conflict is the raw material of our spiritual practice. That's what we are working with our aspirations and our actual desires and experience. We can take that raw material of inner conflict and d o something creative with it. If we don’t deal with our inner conflict it will begin to manifest externally and we will end up blaming other people for our lack of spiritual progress and limitations. It can seem more reasonable and comfortable to blame others for our hindrances and settle down into a habit of rumbling resentment. On one level inner conflict is a manifestation of the integrated psyche and the disparate parts have to come into some sort of relationship - just as the Buddha’s awareness and faith comes into relationship with Mara’s armies and the conflict resolves into flower blossom - symbols of beauty and growth.

On another level inner conflict is a manifestation of the ego’s resistance to reality. It’s an existential thing this inner conflict. Experiencing inner conflict doesn't mean we are bad or un-spiritual or incapable of practice, it is what happens if you try to lead a spiritual life. If you haven't done so already you will.

Either way it is more creative to recognise inner conflict for what it is and take awareness into it. We have to become acutely aware of how we resist spiritual insight and how we cause ourselves suffering. If we manage to do this thoroughly then our resistances will subside. For instance, we have an ideal of spiritual community, an ideal of harmony and co-operation and goodwill. We value friendship and collective activities. But then we may find ourselves feeling lonely or isolated - our ideal is not working - and this leads to a conflict within us - a conflict between our personal experience and our ideal. So this could lead us to blame the other people around us. It is because they are selfish or because they are unfriendly or because they are English or whatever - that’s why your ideal of a harmonious spiritual community is not happening and that’s why you feel lonely. Or you might blame the circumstances - it’s because community life is unnatural - or because the Buddhist Centre is not being properly run or whatever. So we look outside ourselves for causes and we find lots of imperfections in the people and the world around us which seem plausible reasons for our dissatisfaction. But we could take a different approach. We could assume that our conflict was a manifestation of egotism in some form and once again I’m not saying that egotism is bad but we could investigate it from that standpoint. We could ask ourselves: in what way am I being selfish? How is my loneliness and isolation a manifestation of selfishness? And we might discover some things to make us sit up and take action. We might realise that the antidote to loneliness lies in our own hands - we need to think of others and go out to them, befriend them. It’s a kind of counter-intuitive response- loneliness doesn’t mean I need friends, it means I need to befriend others. In a way, what we discover if we look deeply into our dissatisfaction is that we are both victim and perpetrator, we are experiencing suffer and causing suffering and if we see that clearly enough we stop perpetrating our own suffering and the spears and arrows of inner conflict turn into benign blossoms.

Another aspect of Mara’s army is that they represent fear- our worst nightmares - all the fears that hold us back from living more fully. Fear is one of the most tangible experiences of ego that we can have. Where there is fear there is ego. Where there is fear there is self-centeredness. The tantric yogis go into the cremation grounds at night to encounter fear - to encounter ego in a very potent form - and by facing fear they break through to a new level of freedom - symbolised by the dakini.

Most of us have no need to find a cremation ground- we experience fears, large and small, all the time - sometimes it is just the fear of being with other people or the fear of being alone. We can try to notice our fears and make use of them in our spiritual practice - by taking little risks here and there we gain a little more freedom and develop the habit of freedom and confidence. On a little personal note here, at the time of my ordination one of my greatest fears was the fear of speaking in public, which I assumed every order member had to do. I was even on the verge of holding back from ordination, to avoid ever having to speak in public. It was only by doing it that I gradually discovered it wasn’t as bad as I had feared.

After Mara’s army we have Mara’s daughters - Siddhartha was a heterosexual man and so Mara’s daughters represent craving for sense pleasures. So Siddhartha is not having an easy time - it’s one distraction after another. Earlier we were told that he could get into dhyana at will and now he is enmeshed in conflict and distraction. From one point of view he is having a really bad meditation - anger, ill-will, fear and craving. I’m sure some of you are familiar with this kind of meditation, or at least you’ve heard about it. But Siddhartha knows what he is doing - he is deliberately facing all the resistance, all the egotistic forces of his own mind and transforming them into something positive. Mara’s daughters - the energy of craving, are transformed into inspiration - the energy of faith or shraddha - represented by the Earth Goddess. Mara’s armies, the energies of inner conflict, are transformed into compassion, represented by Brahma Sahampati. And Mara himself - the energy of ignorance is transformed into the great Wisdom represented by Mucalinda.

In the Vimalakirti Nirdesa - Mara tries to make a gift of his daughters to a monk - who refuses to accept them, but Vimalakirti does accept them and turns them into teachers of the Dharma. So Mara’s daughters are the energies of desire, which can move from being desire for sense pleasure to being desire for the Dharma - from kama chandha to dhamma chandha. In the symbolism associated with Siddhartha’s struggle, the Earth Goddess, Vasundhara, could be seen as his muse, his inspiration, his Dhamma chandha - she is the transformation of the energies represented by Mara’s daughters. The Earth Goddess is a witness to Siddhartha’s practice over lifetimes - she is an appeal to experience. In the context of transforming the energies of craving this means that if we bring awareness to our actual experience - we will see that our dissatisfaction has never been fully satisfied by succumbing to our sense craving - in fact our craving for sense pleasure is itself dissatisfaction, it is dukkha. Our experience is telling us the truth and if we listen often enough, eventually we will hear.
(Importance of reflecting on experience again.)

The earth Goddess is also an appeal to experience in the face of doubt and lack of confidence.

Mara suggests to Siddhartha that he is wasting his time - he could be having a good life - plenty of money, property, power - whatever he wanted - it’s all his for the taking - who does he think he is anyway trying to solve the problem of human suffering. He is assailed by doubts - doubting whether what he is doing makes sense and doubting whether he is capable of attaining to Wisdom. Any one on the spiritual path is going to experience doubt about whether what you are doing makes sense and if you are capable of it. And the Earth Goddess emerges and reassures him that she has witnessed all his efforts and he is indeed capable and worthy of gaining Enlightenment. The Earth Goddess has always been there - she represents something timeless, eternal - and she can attest that the pursuit of truth is worthy and worthwhile endeavour for human consciousness. Perhaps we could even say that the Earth goddess asserts that it is natural for human consciousness to want to evolve towards the truth. She is hinting at something that is made more explicit later in the White Lotus Sutra - that the dharma is eternal or timeless. Reality is always reality and has always been Reality and will always be Reality. So this is the answer to Mara’s attempts to sow the seeds of doubt.

When we experience doubt we may find it helpful to reflect on what spiritual experience we have had and what spiritual progress we have made. We may also find it helpful to reflect on the millions of people down the generation who have been inspired and uplifted by the Dharma - a concrete testimony to the power and efficacy of the Dharma. When we are beset by doubts, what we need is to appeal to experience and inspiration - our own experience and inspiration and the experience and inspiration of others -if we do that we will have the Earth Goddess on our side. If we are experiencing doubt we will need the help of others.

The next episode represents a big turning point - a kind of internal going forth. Brahma Sahampati appears. The story says that the Buddha was inclined to keep his realisation to himself because nobody would be able to understand it and Brahma Sahampati appeared before him, telling him there were some who would understand and pleading with him to teach what he had discovered.

Brahma Sahampati represents great compassion arising in the mind of Siddhartha. Previously he has been concerned with an internal struggle to overcome fear, hatred, craving and doubt but now he is turning outward - he is becoming concerned with the fear, hatred, craving and doubt of others. Having seen through the causes of suffering in himself - he now wants to help others to the same realisation.

This process is mirrored in our own lives. Often we take up the spiritual life for a mixture of selfish and idealistic reasons and as we practice we experience the conflict between our recalcitrant egotism and our altruistic aspirations. We necessarily become concerned with ourselves, with the workings of our own mind, the trajectory of our own habits and so on. However in time we should experience a quietening of the inner turmoil and a growing concern for the spiritual welfare of others and a willingness to help others through the mess of their inner conflicts.

As with all the other episodes in the life of Siddhartha, this episode also represents a process - the process of growing generosity and compassion. We all have our own version of Brahma Sahampati - a voice urging us to acts of generosity and kindness. As we progress spiritually we will find ourselves listening to that voice more and more. The more we hear that voice and pay heed to it, the more we can be sure we are developing spiritually.

The next episode is the appearance of the Serpent King - Mucalinda. He appears in order to protect Siddhartha from the rain. He wraps his coils around Siddhartha and spreads his hood over him. This image reminds us of the Bodhi tree shading Siddhartha from the sun. When the rain stops the serpent king transforms into a young man and salutes the Buddha. This young man, about sixteen yeas old, represents the prince of beauty and purity and is later seen in the forms of the archetypal Bodhisattvas - the great spiritual heroes. The serpent king - the king of the Nagas come from the depths of the ocean - Nagas are associated with wisdom, with depth of understanding. The great Buddhist sage Nagarjuna is said to have travelled to the depths of the ocean where the Naga kings transmitted to him the Prajnaparamita sutra. So the Naga king stands for Wisdom and the youth is the spiritual Hero, the Bodhisattva, acting compassionately in the world. The Serpent king and youth represent again the unity of heights and depths, as in the image of the Bodhi tree - but now at a higher level, wisdom/compassion, stillness/activity. The serpent is also an image of tremendous energy - the gathered energies of the Enlightened consciousness. Our spiritual life is fed and nourished by images and symbols and our imagination is the crucible in which our lives are transformed into energy streams of wisdom and Compassion. We need images and symbols of the life of Siddhartha - there are some I haven’t touched on. We need to allow our imagination time to engage with the whole rich panoply of images that Buddhism offers. It doesn’t do to reject some images as not suitable - all the images are interconnected - they are a huge pattern of psychic growth and if we reject some images we may be disrupting the pattern and making our psychic life more difficult. I mention this because in recent years some people have wanted to reject the image of the young hero - but here with Mucalinda we see that the young hero is integral to a complete image - a union of opposites. Usually when we want to reject symbols or images it's because we are taking them too literally, we are giving them a literal meaning, so we should reject literalism in the realm of symbols not the symbols themselves.

We began with the four sights - sickness - which mirrors Mara, the sickness of the mind, humanity’s illness. Then old age, which mirrors the appeal to experience and ageless wisdom of the Earth Goddess. Then death which mirrors the death of all the vestiges of ego or selfishness when Great Compassion arises as in the episode of Brahma Sahampati and finally the wandering holy man, the symbol of the pursuit of Reality mirrors Mucalinda, the Serpent king and young hero representing that reality at its height. The wandering holy man is also an image for the rest of the Buddha’s life. It's the archetype of spiritual life.

So we have been through a spiral of interweaving images, each with many meanings and each sparking off more and more imaginative reflection. This is the story of Siddhartha and this is our story, this is your story, because Siddhartha represents the individual human being - Siddhartha is everyman and every woman.
Siddhartha was born, as we are born
What Siddhartha attained, we too can attain
What Siddhartha overcame, we too can overcome
We reverence Siddhartha, and aspire to follow him.

This world of imagination and symbols, this world of heights and depths - intuited, imagined and experienced - this is the context in which we grow old, gain wisdom, suffer and experience pleasure. This is the rich tapestry of human existence. This is the context of constant change, constant letting go, constant growth and decay in which we live and die.

This vast context of flowing constant change gives us a perspective that can comfort our suffering and loss and can be a call to freedom for our exuberance and inspiration. We have only to engage with it - imaginatively and wholeheartedly - then death will be less important and life will be more full and meaningful.

I will conclude by giving the last word to a Christian monk and mystic, who was moved, inspired and awakened by Buddhist images. Thomas Merton, the American Trappist monk travelled widely in Asia and had many contacts with Buddhism.

At a place called Polunnaruwa in Sri Lanka there are some huge Buddha images carved from rock. There is a seated Buddha and a reclining Parinirvana Buddha and a standing figure of Ananda. When Thomas Merton visited there in 1968 these Buddha figures had a profound effect on him. Here is how he describes it in his journal. (By the way he died four days later in Thailand in an accident involving faulty electrics in his hotel). The reason why I’m doing this is the importance of images and the power of imagination. If we really want to attain spiritual insight you have to engage with the world imaginatively is where insight resides, the intuition, it is not something literal or intellectual.

“Polunnaruwa with its vast area under trees. Fences. Few people. No beggars. A dirt road. Lost. Then we find Gal Vihara and the other monastic complex stupas. Cells. Distant mountains, like Yucatan.
The path dips down to Gal Vihara; a wide, quiet hollow, surrounded by trees. A low outcrop of rock with a cave cut into it, and beside the cave a big-seated Buddha on the left, a reclining Buddha on the right, and Ananda, I guess, standing by the head of the reclining Buddha. In the cave, another seated Buddha. I am able to approach the Buddha barefoot and undisturbed, my feet in wet grass, wet sand. The silence of the extraordinary faces. The great smiles. Huge and yet subtle. Filled with every possibility, questioning nothing, knowing everything, rejecting nothing, the peace, not of emotional resignation but of Madhyamika, of sunyata, which has seen through every question without trying to discredit anyone or anything - without refutation - without establishing some other argument. For the doctrinaire, the mind that needs well-established positions, such peace, such silence, can be frightening. I was knocked over with a rush of relief and thankfulness at the obvious clarity and fluidity of shape and line, the design of the monumental bodies composed into rock shape and landscape, figure, rock, and tree. And the sweep of bare rock sloping away on the other side of the hollow, where you can go back and see different aspects of the figures.
Looking at these figures, I was suddenly, almost forcibly, jerked clean out of the habitual, half-tired vision of things, and an inner clearness, clarity, as if exploding from the rocks themselves, became evident and obvious. The sheer evidence of the reclining figure, the smile, the sad smile of Ananda standing with arms folded. The thing about all this is that there is no puzzle, no problem, no ‘mystery’. All problems are resolved, and everything is clear, simply because what matters is clear. The rock, all matter, all life, is charged with dharmakaya - everything is emptiness and everything is compassion. I don’t know when in my life I have ever had such a sense of beauty and spiritual vitality running together in one aesthetic illumination......
I mean, I know and have seen what I was obscurely looking for. I don’t know what else remains, but I have now seen and pierced through the surface and have got beyond the shadow and the disguise......
It is pure, complete. It says everything. It needs nothing. Because it needs nothing it can afford to be silent, unnoticed, undiscovered. It does not need to be discovered. It is we who need to discover it.” Thomas Merton, The Intimate Merton, Page 435.

A World of Possibilities

2008-08-30T12:18:00.000-07:00

A few months ago I watched a film DVD called “What the bleep do we know”. It is a kind of documentary about quantum physics, but looking at the spiritual implications of what quantum physics says about the nature of matter. I have no idea whether it was portraying a completely idiosyncratic view or whether views expressed are widely held by physicists. Anyway one of the points that came across quite strongly is that there is nothing fixed abut the material world and it changes by the mere fact of being observed - it is more of the nature of energy - constantly moving - not even energy but more like consciousness of thoughts - than of matter as we usually tend to think of it. Following on from that was the idea that the world, reality is completely malleable and therefore we can and do create our own worlds. Consciousness, thoughts and what we think of as matter are not that different - they are all equally ephemeral and impermanent - without any fixed essence or substance. So the result of all this is that anything is possible. We are only limited by habitual perceptions and a habitual conceptual framework which means we don’t see reality but our ideas about reality. Anyway this was in my mind when PV (Padmavajra?) asked me for a title for this talk about transforming the world - so we have “A World of Possibilities”.

I am going to make a few points by way of introduction and then I will approach this whole topic under three headings: education, ecology and economics.

The first point I want to make is that the whole universe is interconnected and that of course includes us. There is no such thing as an isolated individual. We may experience isolation on a social or psychological level - but real isolation from the rest of the living universe is not possible. We eat food which we buy in a shop where we are served by people and the food was put on the shelves by others and delivered by others and harvested and grown by others and the soil was prepared by others and the seeds provided by others and the plants grew because there was sufficient light and moisture and space. All of these things connect us to vast numbers of people and to the sun and the climate and the earth’s atmosphere and the solar system and galaxy and so on. We cannot be isolated from life. Even when we are dead our body returns to the earth and nourishes the plants and so on.

We are also connected to other people by virtue of influence and effect. The influence they have on us and the effect we have on them.

If we think about it - virtually everything we know, all our knowledge, comes from somebody else. We learn from books, from other people, parents, teachers etc and is a completely rare event for anyone to have an original thought and even when that does happen it is in relationship to all the thoughts others have had previously in a particular area - whether it is art or mathematics or science. We are made up of influences which we have imbibed since birth and which we continue to imbibe. It is good to try to become aware of this - what has influenced us, what is influencing us? What do we know? How have we come to know what we know? In our western culture a great emphasis is placed on freedom, independence, choice and so on and we are influenced by this emphasis to such a degree that we can become completely blind to how strongly connected to others we are and how strongly we are being influenced all the time. To a large degree we are made up of influences - whether from other people or the climate or the environment we live in. All these things form and shape our consciousness, affect our thoughts and emotions and are very much who we are. So in a sense all we are is interconnection - there is nothing solid or substantial or fixed that we can point to and say that’s me - completely unaffected by any influence from elsewhere.

The other side of this is that we are always having an effect - we are always influencing. Some people are referred to as influential people - well everybody is influential - it is not possible to have no effect on anybody or anything. By eating food you have bought in a shop, you have had an effect on the shop and those who work there and the whole chain of supply. I was reading an interview in a magazine recently with the CEO of Tesco’s. The point was put to him that a huge store like Tesco has a lot of power - too much power even. He said that from where he stood - all the power was with the consumer and he had to be constantly attentive and sensitive to what shoppers wanted or didn’t - otherwise even the biggest business could collapse quite quickly. There is obviously a lot of truth in that. But more immediately than that we have an effect on people we come into contact with. We can never know how much of an effect we are having. Sometimes we say or do something quite small and it has a big effect on someone. Perhaps a little act of generosity where it was not expected or a sharp word or a flippant remark.

I ordained someone a few years ago who in his early life had spent some time in prison. While he was there he was sent to solitary confinement for gross misbehaviour. He found solitary confinement extremely difficult and the prison warder noticed this and deliberately left the door of his cell ajar and sat in a place where he could be seen. My friend said this was a real act of kindness on the part of that warder and it had a huge effect on him - it was the turning point which led him away from a criminal life and towards a spiritual path.

Well we won’t always have a dramatic effect on others – we will have an influence. We could go further and say we are always becoming part of the consciousness of others and they are always becoming part of our consciousness. This is the case even with people that we just see in the street or the park or on the bus. They live in your mind – perhaps only momentarily or perhaps for longer. The more focussed and intense our awareness is the more impact we have on others and also the more impact they have on us.

So all this is by way of introduction - to say that we are interconnected with the whole of life and that we are always being influenced and influencing. We are a part of each other, part of the make-up of each other’s consciousness.

This is very much the outlook of Tibetan Buddhism: as Reginald Ray puts it in “Indestructible Truth” (page 47)

“..we humans are one part of a vast, interconnected web of relationships with all other inhabitants of the cosmos, both those still living and those who are awakened.

An awareness of these relationships is critical because, to a very large extent, who we are as humans is defined by this network of relations. To be able to know this fact, and to take responsibility for it, gives us a dignified and directed human life. Within Tibetan tradition, the isolated individual – the one who is unaware of the vast cosmos of beings within which we live and who attempts to live as if it did not exist – is lost. He is a dundro, an animal-realm being in human form, controlled by ignorance, with its nose to the ground.”

This view has also had enormous implications for our own modern world. The collapse of the Soviet empire at the end of the 1980s was at least in part due to a recognition of interconnectedness. Here is how Mr Gorbachov puts it …

“We had to create new relations together,” Gorbachov says, “but for that we needed to understand that the stake placed on confrontation has yielded nothing. It had only led to a situation where the world was divided into opposing camps. It was a policy of blocs, confrontation and the arms race. This policy had only led us to the edge of a precipice. And we found new paths only by realising that we were all part of one civilization and that we lived in one interconnected world. The new thinking was born, and out the new thinking came the new policy”

(Gabriel Partos “The world that came in from the cold” p.234)

So when we come to look at this world of possibilities and how it might be transformed for the better we need to bear in mind this fact of interconnection and its’ implication for the effect that all of us have, all the time.

Now I will move on to look at the three areas of education, ecology and economics and the bearing they have on transforming the world and making the best of the myriad of possibilities available.

When I say education I don’t intend to say anything about the British school system or how universities work. At least not directly. What I want to talk about is our responsibility to educate ourselves about the nature of the world and the reality that we inhabit.

I have just been talking about influence and the fact that we influence each other. One of the most obvious ways in which we influence others is through what we so and what we say. However what we do and what we say are based on what we think and feel. So it is important to educate our thoughts and emotions so that wee can have a beneficial influence through what we do and say.

As Buddhists we have already begun this process – by thinking about and engaging with questions of value and meaning. However, it has been said that laziness is the besetting sin of Buddhists and often we don’t take our investigation and exploration of values and meaning much further than the most basic stage. We might feel we’ve got a grasp of the five precepts and therefore we know enough about Buddhist ethics or we have been told about impermanence and insubstantiality and shunyata and conditionality and so we are familiar with all the most essential aspects of Buddhism.

But it doesn’t work like that. We need to be thoroughly familiar with the teaching of the Buddha and other great Buddhist teachers and in our own case we also need to be thoroughly familiar with Sangharakshita’s interpretation of Buddhist teachings. (By the way, the more I read Bhante the more impressed I am by his clarity and profundity). But this is just the beginning. It’s as if we have been given a box of tools and trained in what each is for and how to use it – but the next step is to actually use these tools.

As Buddhists – this means learning to understand our experience more and more in terms of the Dharma. We need to understand our experience of happiness, anger, loneliness and so on, in terms of the Dharma. We need to get a thorough grasp of the central task of Buddhism - which is to undermine and transcend all egotism, all self-centredness. We need to learn how to gradually stop building a fixed self for ourselves and others. This is what the tools are for. This is what all the Dharmic concepts and lists are for and this is a big task – one that we need to bring as many approaches to as we can and a task that we need to patiently pursue for many many years.

So our understanding and ability to use the ideas of the Dharma can fee dour meditation – so that our meditation is much more than a pleasant interlude in the day. Our meditation can become a slow unveiling of all that is positive in us, all the qualities that out spiritual aspirations point to until we are face to face with the Buddha nature – which is another way of talking about the complete absence of egotism.

Okay so if we educate ourselves by going deeper and deeper into the Buddha’s teaching and if we allow those teachings to really affect our lives then we will change and as we change we will become more and more of an influence for good in the world. To allow the teaching of the Buddha to really affect our lives we need to give them the prominence and priority in our lives, so that it becomes quite natural for us to contemplate and explore our experience via the Dharma, primarily.

I am not saying we should not use other ways of looking at our experience - just that as Buddhists we need to give pre-eminent position to the Dharma. Personally I have found many other disciplines - psychology, art – useful – especially when filtered through a Dharmic perspective.

So our education in values and meaning requires us to become as familiar with the teachings of the Buddha and Bhante as a carpenter is with his tools or as familiar as an astronomer is with the stars. That’s probably a better analogy, as the astronomer knows that there are always new discoveries to be made and new things to learn. That is how it is with the Dharma too.

???What is metta?

As well as educating ourselves in the Dharma I thin k it is important that we try to have a really broad knowledge of the world around us. We should try to know something of history, art, nature, science, economics, politics and so on. If we are able to communicate with different kinds of people and be an influence for the good – we need to know something of the different worlds people inhabit.

I don’t mean that we need to have apposition or opinion about everything but it is helpful to at least know some facts. For instance, in this country, there are issues about immigration, the education system, the health and welfare systems, that impact on the lives of millions of people and it’s good if we have at least a minimum of facts available to us. For instance we ought to know the difference between an immigrant, an illegal immigrant and an asylum seeker. Or if we have at least a vague idea of the history of the 20th century we may understand better some of the forces at work in the world – which influence us all.

It is said that a Bodhisattva should be able to communicate with everyone on the own ground, in their own language so to speak, and that is something for us to aspire to – so that we can use metaphors and examples relevant to people’s lives when we talk to them or try to explain Buddhism to them.

In the FWBO more and more people are working alongside non-Buddhists in all walks of life – this is a change from how things werw15/20 years ago when large numbers worked and lived in Buddhist environments. This means that there is an opportunity for many FWBO Buddhists to have a positive influence on the values and discourses of the world around us. And this influence is not necessarily a matter of telling people about Buddhism – it is more a matter of educating our own hearts and minds in the values and meaning of the Dharma so that all our communication is permeated by those values and then people will notice and be affected by it. People will be affected by honesty and generosity and awareness and kindness and that is one way of transforming the world and giving emphasis to one very beneficial possibility in this world of possibilities.

From education in the sense of educating our hearts and minds with a deep sense of values and meaning, it is a short step to ecology. It is a short step because there is a direct link between the state of human consciousness and the effect that consciousness has on its environment.

Having mentioned the environment I want to quickly make a distinction between environmentalism and ecology. Environmentalism can be and sometimes is understood to be concerned with the environment we live in, but in talking about the environment we may subtly or not so subtly exclude ourselves. But we are the environment too. That’s why ecology is a better term for because it involves a whole system and we are obviously a part of that system. I believe there is a phrase which “deep ecology” which I think takes into account factors like consciousness, which is what I would like to talk about.

Ecology includes us. Nature includes us. What we do to ourselves we do to nature. What we do to ourselves, we do to the ecology of the planet. This is again that question of influence or effect I spoke about earlier. It is not just other people that we influence – we influence the whole planet. Our state of mind as human beings is a major factor in the ecology of the world. Much working the sphere of ecology in recent years is about trying to get human beings to realise this. As Buddhists we have our part to play because as I mentioned earlier, we have available to us a whole toolkit to perform the work of transforming human consciousness. And transforming human consciousness is ecological work. Much of the damage we have caused to the delicate ecological balance has been due to lack of awareness. This lack of awareness was compounded by some ideologies which saw the natural world as separate from man and something that had been given to him to use a she wished.

This unawareness and these ideologies are n longer such a big factor, but there is till a great deal of unawareness around the issue of interconnectedness and interdependence and how each individual has an impact on the overall web of conditions.

This is where the Buddhist perspective can be very helpful. With a profound teaching like pratitya samutpada available to us we are well equipped to begin understanding and even explaining the reality of the universe. Pratitya samutpada says that everything arises in dependence on conditions which n turn arise in dependence on conditions and so on until all conditions everywhere and in every time are encompassed. In other words, what pratitya samutpada shows- when we penetrate deeply into it – is that everything throughout time and space is inter-related. This is an awe-inspiring vision, which has implications in the cosmic level, and on the personal level. On the universal level it has ecological, political and life or death implications. On the personal level, it is a way to understand and penetrate more deeply into our minds. We tend to thin k in linear cause and effect terms – e.g. He said something that upset me and made me angry. If we apply pratitya samutpada to a situation where we have become angry because of something someone has said, we will find that it is not so simple, straightforward and linear – there are a whole multiplicity of conditions which have led to us becoming angry – some of them to do with what’s happening immediately in our life, some to do with our conditioning, some to do with the other person’s conditioning and what’s happening in their life, some to do with spiritual ignorance and resistance to reality and so on – a whole myriad of conditions. If we can work with pratitya samutpada like this we may find a bigger perspective opens up for us and we gradually move away from the narrow linear cause/effect interpretation of reality and come to more and more to see everything in terms of interconnection – inter-relatedness. If we can do this kind of work on our own minds – our own emotional and mental states – then we will be doing ecological work at the deepest level – transforming the structure of consciousness. And it could be argued that a transformation in the structure of human consciousness is in the final analysis the only answer to the problem of a consciousness that blindly destroys it’s own nourishment. However, as well as that work on the mind, I believe, as Buddhists, we should also be trying as far as possible to put all the other ecology enhancing measures into action in our lives. I won’t go into them here because they are well documented. But we all know the sort of thing – energy saving, recycling, a simpler lifestyle, using public transport and so on.

As with many things it is the small things that often matter greatly and can also be influential. For instance we could just try to be aware of the electrical appliances we own and what state of energy consumption they are in. We probably have lights and lamps of various kinds and maybe computer, hi-fi, TV, DVD player, electric kettle, microwave and so on. Are we aware of all these things and are we aware of how we use them? Apart from the energy saving and money saving that could come form from a greater awareness, there is also the benefit of awareness itself.

So as Buddhists what we have to offer to the ecology of the planet is potentially enormous – awareness, conditioned co-production with its implications on interconnectedness and of course the image of Indra’s net as a graphic description of the dynamic nature of reality. We can offer these tools and perspectives primarily by putting them into practice in our own lives and transforming ourselves. As we do that we will begin to have a beneficial influence wherever we are and add some creative possibilities to the world of possibilities.

Now to move on to economics. I must say first that I am not an economist and don’t know much about the technicalities of economics although I do find the topic fascinating especially since so much of it seems to be totally sensitive to mental states – in particular confidence, fear and greed.

What I do know is that everybody’s life has some sort of economic aspect to it and this can be the source of pain, fear, confusion, joy, sadness and so on. So when it comes to the topic of transforming the world, what does Buddhism have to say about economics?

I think it is probably usual for Buddhists to have a go at consumerism when it comes to the topic of economics. The usual argument is that consumerism is blind to the damage it causes, it’s insatiable, it is based on the constant encouraging of greed and so on. I have made all these points myself in talks. But today I want to say something different about consumerism. But before that, let’s have one more blast of consumerism. Here is a quote from Thai monk and activist Sulak Swaraksha

Consumerism…down to …search for happiness.

By the way, I have just finished reading a book, “Paradox of choice” which refers to many studies(?) which show that too much choice does lead to unhappiness. So Sulak Swaraksha is not just engaging in polemic.

Okay so that’s a real kick in the teeth for consumerism. Now I want to say something a bit more positive about consumerism. One of the reasons I want to say something positive about consumerism is that barring catastrophe, it is going to be with us for a long time and those who have not had the opportunity to consume the so-called good things on life are going to want to.

So in the foreseeable future we are likely to have more consumerism rather than less with India, China, south America and eventually Africa stepping on to the train to go shopping with everybody else. So given that is what we have and are likely to have, what positive possibilities does consumerism hold for us?

It has been said that these days we are consumers rather than citizens. I was thinking about this and I came to the conclusion that it may not be such a bad thing if people were less identified with being citizens. Being a citizen implies belonging to a particular nation with all the characteristics of group mentality that that implies. As we saw from the Gorbachov quote earlier, it can lead to a sort of defensiveness and isolationism that is both oppressive and dangerous. Consumerism on the other hand crosses boundaries and cultures and o the level of international business it creates a world of connections and relationships that have the potential to defuse dangerous situations. On the personal level it gives a certain amount of power to the consumer. When you vote in an election you exercise some power, but also when you spend a pound you exercise power. You exercise power because just as with your vote you can make a choice. Your vote gives you a choice every four years or so to say who you want to govern or what policies you favour. The pond in your pocket gives you a choice every day to say which products and companies you want to support and which you would prefer not to. From my reading about business it is clear that businesses – even the biggest of them – are quite sensitive to what the consumer wants and doesn’t want. It has even been noted that sometimes business is ahead of government in its thinking on issues of an ethical or ecological nature. Anyway the point I am making is that since we are consumers, that means we are connected to a vast international web of trade which has a positive side to it and we can exercise some power in this network of trading by making informed choices about where to spend our money. Another point worth noting is that businesses are sensitive to criticism and if you see a business doing something you think is unethical, it is worth writing a letter to point it out. Every businessperson and politician knows that for every two people that complain there are probably another 20 who have the same complaint but stay silent.

It is not easy to make choices about our spending. To begin with there is so much conflicting information available and international trade is a complex network. But we can still make an effort – even seemingly small gestures do make a difference. You might need to support local produce for instance, or organic food or fair trade or ethical trading. You can always do a little research and make some small choices, without having to contemplate changing your whole way of life overnight. So this is about the power of the consumer to influence business and government by making spending choices.

But there is more to economics and its potential to transform than what we do with our money. If we go a bit deeper we can begin to look at our whole attitude to money. We could start by considering our conditioning in relation to money – what was the attitude of our parents to money? What part did money play in the family? Was it talked about? What was the emotional flavour of conversations about money? Fear? Anxiety? Freedom? Happiness? Joy? Anger? Insecurity? Did you rebel against family attitudes to money? Have they re-emerged as you have grown older? What is your own conscious attitude to money? What do you spend most of your money on? What does this tell you about yourself? And so on. It is a very good exercise in self-awareness to become more and more conscious of what money means to us. It is very easy to have consciously held superficial views and attitudes about money, which are not our real and deep attitudes.

But we can go further and ask what is money? Perhaps we know how we feel about money but do we really know what money is? Money is not pieces of paper. Those pieces of paper or the numbers on your bank statement represent something, but what do they represent? Do they represent bars of gold in the vaults of some bank? If they do, what sense does that make?

Mainly what money represents is energy. It is the energy of production and trade – and money is a convenient way of exchanging products and services without having to resort to barter every time. The money in your bank account or wallet in some way represents some of your energy. You have expended energy in some way and so much money has come to you. And it is lying there with unrealised potential – latent energy. What will you do with it is buy somebody else’s energy or if you save it in the bank, you in effect, give it to someone else to use and the interest in unearned income – unearned because you expend no energy for it.

So money is not a thing – it is a movement of energy, with potential for creation and destruction. Money is full of possibilities – that’s why we like it so much. So to go back to attitudes for a moment – our attitude to money can be seen as our attitude to energy and potential and possibility.

Another thing about money is that there is no security in it. It is a symbol of security and a very potent symbol but money itself is almost the opposite of secure. Security brings up an image of something fixed, safe, comfortable, but money is fluid, moving, never quite what it seems.

So I’m trying to take us deeper into the world of economics and its potential for transformation. And Buddhist economics has to be an economics of generosity. Buddhism tells us that we are not fixed separate entities and that al our ego building – protecting, defending, and enhancing our sense of self – is a gross delusion which brings us nothing but sorrow. Buddhism opens out a vision of a vast interconnected web of relations where consciousness is penetrated by consciousness, consciousness is influenced by consciousness, consciousness is in a dance with consciousness. And this is a dynamic vision of a constant interplay of energies. When we can enter into this vision, as a way of being, the expression of it is happiness, compassion, expansiveness and generosity. It becomes natural to give and receive because that is how things are, that is the nature of reality.

Egotistic vision wants to take and keep. Realistic vision wants to give and give. As ego-identified, self-centred beings who aspire to transcending this deluded state, one of the first and most effective practices to help us on our way is the practice of generosity. As PV said, when we talk about practice, it is good not to narrow it down to meditation. Ego will of course try to take over the practice and say “Look how generous I am. Look what a good Buddhist I am and I’m so humble about it all too. I must be making a lot of spiritual progress.” Well ego is tenacious but that is the territory we are travelling through – vistas of awareness, jungles of ego, and sometimes plodding, sometimes striding practice of generosity, ethics and meditation. As Buddhists then, to transform the world of economics, we can try to bring some awareness to it and be as generous as possible. The aim is not to be generous but to become generosity. If we become generosity, we will no longer have any sense of being generous.

Generosity of spirit has a very positive effect in the world and introduces a really moving and exuberant possibility into this world of possibilities.

What economics means to most of us is work. We work to get the money to pay the bills and enjoy our leisure. Quite a chunk of most people’s time is spent at work. It is worthwhile giving some thought to the area of work then and considering whether there are choices we can make in that area of our life which would give us a better basis for our spiritual practice. I don’t have any particular suggestions to make. It just seems necessary to seriously consider whether the thing you spend so much of your life doing is helpful to reaching your spiritual aspirations. Does it enable you to be generous? Does it allow you to be ethical, honest, kind? Does it leave enough time and energy for some meditation? And retreat? Subhuti gave a good talk about five years ago on this whole topic which it might be worth listening to (Reading – Roads to Freedom)

So I’ve been talking about transforming the world. I have looked at this under the headings of education, ecology and economics and I’ve made some points about each of these.

But really I have just been making one main point, namely: the reality is that all life is interconnected and following on from this is the point that we are all influenced and influencing all the time.

These points can be taken from the Buddhist teaching of pratitya samutpada - conditioned co-production and if we study, penetrate and try to practice with the implications of this profound teaching, we will transform ourselves and set in motion energies that will transform this world from a vale of tears to a world of possibilities.

Reflections for Wesak 2008

2008-08-30T12:15:00.000-07:00

Today we are celebrating Wesak. The word wesak is a Sinhalese version of the Indian Vaisakha, which is the full moon that corresponds to our month of May. It was under the full moon of Vaisakha that the Buddha gained enlightenment according to tradition. And so today, quite close to that full moon, we are celebrating the Buddha’s great achievement – his awakening, his enlightenment.

The first question that probably occurs to us when we hear this is – what is Enlightenment, what is awakening? And what is its relevance to us here in 21st century Britain.

Enlightenment is a deep profound insight into the nature of reality and a simultaneously arising profound compassion for all deluded beings.
It is the perfection of wisdom and compassion. It is the overcoming of all greed, hatred and delusion. It is Nirvana, the blowing out of the fires of negative selfish emotions.

There are many ways we could talk about enlightenment, but in the end we have to try to grasp what it is about intuitively and imaginatively and what we really need to get a feeling for is the direction of Enl. Because Enl. is not a thing, it is not something that can be possessed or gained or grasped. It is a process, it is a creative journey it is a direction to be intuited, experienced and internalised. When we are being kind, generous, wise, thoughtful, aware, loving, - then we are partaking of the direction of enlightenment – however imperfectly. Of course, when we are harsh and thoughtless and unaware etc., then we are heading in the opposite direction – we are heading in the direction of Dukkha, suffering.
So it is easy to see how this is relevant to our lives and to all human life.

The Buddha’s teaching highlights for us the fact that all our dissatisfaction comes from delusion. We suffer because we are ignorant.

If we can remove the delusion then the suffering, the dissatisfaction will also be removed.

It is possible to remove the delusion. We know that because the Buddha did it and all his enl. followers since have also done it.

The Buddha has given detailed instructions, teachings on how to achieve freedom from delusion and suffering.

So in order for us to progress in the direction of Enlightenment and away from ignorance we need, first of all, to notice and acknowledge our dissatisfaction, secondly we need the ability and willingness to change, thirdly we need external conditions that are helpful and fourthly we need to undertake the practices of generosity, the precepts, meditation and reflection.

Noticing and acknowledging our dissatisfaction involves being aware of what we are doing and why we do it, it involves being aware of the tendency of our mind and emotions, what are we thinking about and why, what do we want and why. Our practices of meditation, mindfulness and reflection help us to have a clearer and more objective view of ourselves and are therefore fundamental to any spiritual endeavour.

Our ability and willingness to change is something I’d like to go into a bit more. This is what we are talking about when we use the terminology of Going for refuge to the three jewels – we are talking about our ability and willingness to change – so if we have spiritual aspirations within the Buddhist tradition it is important that we pay close attention to our ability and willingness to change. Later I will say something about external conditions and the four practices of generosity, the precepts, meditation and reflection.

Our ability to change and our willingness to change could be seen as internal conditions that need to be established in our life to enable us to go for refuge to the Buddha, dharma and sangha. The external conditions, which I will say a little bit about later, are prior in the sense that good external conditions help us to establish the best internal conditions.

I am going to talk about ability to change and willingness to change as two separate things. They are my own categories and as with all categories are not to be taken too literally, they are just a convenient way of speaking about something, they have no ultimate validity, just as the eightfold path as a list has no ultimate validity – it could be the seven fold or six fold path.

So in order to have an effective spiritual life we need to be willing to follow the spiritual path as taught by the Buddha and all the great Buddhist teachers and especially as taught by our own teacher |Sangharakshita and we need to be capable of practising what we have been taught.

What do we need to do to be more capable of living the spiritual life? How can we increase and enhance our ability to live the spiritual life?

Perhaps you are already perfectly capable of living the spiritual life and practising the Buddha’s teachings – in which case you simply need to get on with it. However I know that some people do struggle and I have often struggled myself.

Our ability to practice the Dharma, that is our ability to meditate, to practice ethics, to communicate openly, honestly and with kindness, to befriend people, our ability to reflect, to be honest with ourselves, to take responsibility for our mental states, to access and express faith and devotion – our ability to engage in all of these is affected by our conditioning – the conditioning we have received since infancy within our family, and from the society around us – the conditioning that we are all the time subject to from all the ideas and behaviours we encounter. Our ability to practice the Dharma is also affected by our psychology and temperament and how we have responded to our conditioning. And how we continue to respond to our conditioning.

Also from the perspective of the Buddha and the whole Buddhist tradition to date we are also the product of our karma – our intentional actions over many lifetimes, and that too affects our ability to practise the Dharma.

So, in order to develop, enhance and build our ability to practice spiritual life we need to pay attention to our conditioning, our psychology and our intentional actions of body, speech and mind.

I had a very strong catholic conditioning and also a strong nationalistic conditioning from childhood until I left home at the age of 18. When I started meditating and committed myself to the Buddhist path back in 1983 I had to spend about five years understanding and dealing with the consequences of this conditioning, which undermined my ability to practice the Dharma in many ways. I also spent many more years discovering what was positive and helpful in that conditioning. And some aspects of the conditioning went so deep that I was still making discoveries about how my conditioning had affected me even 18 years after I had first started practising. For the past 7 or 8 years I have not made any major discoveries in this area so maybe I have got to the bottom of it or maybe there is something buried deeper than I have managed to dig.

Anyway the reason I mention this is just to emphasise that we need to take time and pay close attention to our conditioning in order to really know whom we are and in order to practise as fully as possible. I used writing, meditation, reflecting, discussion, dream analysis, conscious visualisation, auto hypnosis, painting, yoga, tai chi, dharma study, solitary retreats – all of these were ways in which I delved deeper and deeper into who I was and came to know myself and my abilities better. You may need to try different things, but I thing solitary retreats is one of the most effective ways of really getting to know yourself and of course in the context of a solitary retreat you can try different things out – such as dream analysis or drawing and painting.

Of course our conditioning in childhood goes very deep and can affect us for the rest of our lives, but conditioning doesn’t stop when we grow up – we are being conditioned by the world around us all the time and this is something that is in some ways even harder to recognise and do something about – it demands a lot of awareness. One way of noticing the affect something has on us is to remove it from our lives for a while. So, for instance if we don’t watch television for a few months, when we return to it we will have quite a different awareness of it’s impact, or similarly with newspapers or the internet or even just using technology. This is another reason why retreats of all kinds are so useful. They insert a gap, however short, into our lives. A period when we are not engaging with our usual conditioning factors. I have heard however that increasingly people bring their mobile phones on retreat and use them to stay in touch with people. There may be exceptional circumstances when this is necessary, but apart from that I would say it is, to be blunt, quite a stupid thing to do, and undermines the value of the retreat considerably.

We can of course experience a lot of resistance to dealing with our conditioning and our psychological traits, tendencies and attitudes. We are comfortable with what we have even if it’s a mess – it’s our mess and we can live with it. Anything beyond what we are accustomed to can be experienced as threatening and frightening.

There are three things we need to do in relation to our habitual ways of being in order to help ourselves to develop the ability to change radically.

Firstly we need to accept our habits and tendencies without condemnation. So if we feel insecure, for instance, we need to accept that we feel insecure and not condemn ourselves for having that feeling. Or if we often feel angry we need to accept that and not condemn ourselves. It is jus a fact – I often feel insecure or I often feel angry – we can say it to ourselves and just acknowledge it as a fact.

Secondly we need to become aware of how that habit or tendency manifests, how it gets expressed. So, for instance insecurity might manifest as a desire to please everybody or it might manifest as anger. Or anger might manifest passively in an unwillingness to listen or co-operate or it might manifest in harsh speech.

Thirdly we need to take responsibility for this mental tendency or habit. So we can say to ourselves – yes it is me, it is my mind, my mental states. It is not somebody else’s mind; it is not an inevitable consequence of any circumstances or any event. It is just my habit.

This taking responsibility for our mental states as fully as possible is an important element in gaining insight into how our minds work and in giving ourselves the ability to change. Until we are able to see and accept that our mental states are something we do rather than something that happens to us it is virtually impossible to change. When we do see deeply and clearly that our mental states are something we are doing rather than something that is happening to us, then it is as if habits dissolve in the light of that awareness. There are different levels to seeing into our own minds and we may find that we have to come back again and again to seeing the same habit or pattern at work before we finally see through it completely and it dissolves away. We also need to see deeply and clearly that our positive mental state are something we do and don’t just happen to us. In seeing this we learn that we can choose positive mental states, we learn that we can choose to see the world around us in different ways, we can choose to highlight the ugliness or the beauty, we can choose to see the suffering of others or see others as obstacles to our satisfaction, we can choose to be angry or understanding, we can choose to feel lonely or connected.
In order for all this to happen we need to accept our mental states without condemning ourselves if they are negative and without getting big headed if they are positive. We need to become aware of how we give expression to our mental states and we need to take responsibility for our own minds at deeper and deeper levels.

As well as working with our conditioning and our psychology, the Buddhist tradition asks us to look very closely at our intentional actions of body speech and mind- our karma in a word. If we pay close attention to whether our actions, our speech and our thoughts and emotions are skilful or unskilful, we can begin to develop the sensitivity to notice very quickly whether we are being skilful or unskilful. We can also develop the ability to create new attitudes, and a new experience by choosing to act in ways that are skilful. We can deliberately and intentionally be kind and generous in what we do, honest and harmonious in what we say and mettaful in our thoughts. This is the creation of new karma, which leads to the creation of a new person, a new experience, and a new identity – a major step out of dissatisfaction and into contentment.

When we try to develop our ability to live the spiritual life through looking deeply into our conditioning and psychology and by practising intentional positivity, we encounter resistance within our hearts and minds. Everybody I know who tries to live a spiritual life experiences internal conflict. If you have not yet experienced internal conflict of some kind you probably will if you continue to become more aware. There is a basic conflict between our aspiration to enlightenment and the strong attraction towards mundane life. Even when we get beyond the psychological conflicts we may experience conflicts about how best to give expression to our spiritual commitment. For instance Bhante experienced the conflict between the desire to be a poet and the desire to be a monk. Some people experience a conflict between wanting to help others and a desire to withdraw from the world. Many of us experience a conflict between the desire to lead a simple life and the constant craving engendered by this consumer society. Or we may experience a conflict between our aspiration and desire to be generous and our feelings of insecurity and attachment.

There is a conflict between being unenlightened, or deluded and our aspiration to enlightenment. This not something to worry about or criticise ourselves for. It is just the nature of samsara, the nature of unenlightened consciousness. There are two ways to avoid this sort of conflict – one is to become less and less aware so that you are so thoroughly deluded that that is all you know and experience and the other is to become more and more aware so that you see through the conflict completely or rather rise above it.

There is a Sutta in the Pali canon, which I think highlights in a very dramatic way this conflict between delusion and Reality. It is the Culasaccaka Sutta in the MN No 35. In this Sutta the main character Saccaka is a man who likes to debate philosophical questions and he has a very high opinion of his own abilities as a debater. He boasts “ I see no recluse or Brahmin, the head of an order, the head of a group, the teacher of a group, even one claiming to be accomplished and fully enlightened, who would not shake, shiver and tremble if he were to engage in debate with me, and sweat under the armpits if he were to engage in debate with me. Even if I were to engage a senseless post in debate, it would shake, shiver and tremble if it were to engage in debate with me, so what shall I say of a human being?” p.322
Then he hears that the Buddha is in the area and he goes to the local people, the Lichavis and he tells them he is going to have a debate with the Buddha which it will be worth their while hearing. He boasts again, “ Come forth, good Lichavis, come forth ! Today there will be some conversation between me and the recluse Gotama. If the recluse Gotama maintains before me what was maintained before me by one of his famous disciples, the bhikkhu named Assaji, then just as a strong man might seize a long-haired ram by the hair and drag him to and drag him fro and drag him round about, so in debate I will drag the recluse Gotama to and drag him fro and drag him round about.” P. 323. He goes on in this way, gining three more examples of how he will defeat and humiliate the recluse Gotama.

He meets the Buddha with a crowd of onlookers and he asks the Buddha some questions. However the Buddha asks him something return and he cannot answer without losing the argument so he remains silent and the text says, “ A second time the Blessed One asked the same question and a second time Saccaka the Nigantha’s son was silent. Then the Blessed One said to him: ‘ Aggivesana, answer now. Now is not the time to be silent. If anyone, when asked a reasonable question up to the third time by the Tathagata, still does not answer, his head splits into seven pieces there and then’. Now on that occasion a thunderbolt-wielding spirit holding an iron thunderbolt that burned, blazed and glowed, appeared in the air above Saccaka the Nigantha’s son, thinking: ‘ If this Saccaka the Nigantha’s son, when asked a reasonable question up to the third time by the Blessed One, still does not answer, I shall split his head in seven pieces here and now.’ The Blessed One saw the thunderbolt-wielding spirit and Saccaka the Nigantha’s son. Then Saccaka the Nigantha’s son was frightened, alarmed, and terrified. Seeking his shelter, asylum and refuge in the Blessed One he said: ‘ Ask me, Master Gotama, I will answer.”

I won’t tell you the rest of the story, except to say that Saccaka is thoroughly humiliated. But what strikes me about this image of the thunderbolt wielding spirit about to split Saccaka's head and the fact that both he and the Buddha are aware of it, is that it is a very graphic image of the conflict between Reality and delusion and the suffering that will follow if we deliberately ignore or deny Reality. And of course that is what most of us are doing most of the time. The Sutta portrays Saccaka as arrogant and proud and later we see the Buddha humiliating him in a way that seems almost cruel – until we understand the spiritual message that is being conveyed. Reality humiliates the ego-centred consciousness. In later Buddhism we see this in the Diamond sutra where the Buddha says: “ those sons and daughters of good family, who will take up these very Sutras, and will bear them in mind, recite and study them, they will be humbled, - well humbled will they be! And why? The impure deeds these beings have done in their former lives, and which are liable to lead them into the states of woe, - in this very life they will, by means of that humiliation, annul those impure deeds of their former lives, and they will reach the enlightenment of a Buddha.” P.157, Wisdom beyond words.

So internal conflict is part and parcel of spiritual practice and sometimes on the spiritual path we have to accept that we are not as clever or wise or compassionate as we think we are, but the humiliation of that is purifying and a symptom of progress on the Path.

So I have been talking about our ability to practice the Dharma. Now I would like to say a little about our willingness to live the spiritual life and there may be some overlap with what I have already said.

Our willingness to practice is hampered by our deluded sense of a fixed separate self. Having this deluded sense of a fixed separate self leads us to expend energy defending that self and continuing to construct and create that self. In order to escape this delusion of a fixed separate self we need acceptance, awareness, reflection and action.

So just going into each of these four things briefly:

We need acceptance in the sense that we need to accept that we are egotistical and self-centred – whether in a crude or subtle way. This is not any reason to feel bad about ourselves, it is simply a matter of accepting that we are as yet un-enlightened, un-awakened and therefore deluded and the delusion finds expression in an egotistical way through our actions, words and thoughts. This initial acceptance of our egotism is an acknowledgement that we need spiritual practice – that the spiritual path is essential for our well-being.

Then we need awareness of how this deluded view of a fixed separate self is expressed in our lives. In what ways are we egotistical? We can ask ourselves from time to time in what way am I being egotistical. Or even, when we find ourselves in some particular state, for example, anxiety; we could ask where is the egotism in this. If we are lonely we can ask where is the egotism in this. If we are gregarious we can ask where is the egotism in this. Even our positive qualities can be hijacked by our sense of self. For example when I first started meditating I realised that much of my generosity previously had been unconsciously giving me a sense of superiority and was a way of dealing with insecurity. Seeing through that allowed me to become a bit more genuinely generous.

As well as acceptance and awareness we need to reflect. In particular we need to study the Dharma so that our minds become permeated by the concepts of the Dharma – the law of conditionality, karma, the six perfections and so on. When our minds are permeated by the concepts of the dharma we can reflect on our own experience with the help of these concepts and gradually over time we gain greater insight into our own mind, our own experience and by extension into the minds of others and into the nature of reality. A natural consequence of this is to experience compassion.

If we experience compassion we will act on it. In fact compassion isn’t really a feeling or emotion, as we normally understand them, it is better thought of as an activity – ultimately it is the only activity of an enlightened mind.

So I have been talking about the internal conditions that we need to create in order to live an effective spiritual life. An effective spiritual life is one that is tending towards Insight and compassionate activity. These internal conditions will enhance our willingness and ability to follow the Buddha’s teaching.

In order to help ourselves to create these internal conditions for spiritual practice we need to have good external conditions. The main external condition we need is a Sangha, a spiritual community. We can only have a spiritual community if we engage in creating a spiritual community. A spiritual community is not something abstract and it is not simply a group of people or an organisation. A spiritual community is something dynamic and changing – it is the interactions - the open, honest, kindly communication between people who hold a common spiritual ideal and a common practice.

So to create the essential external condition for spiritual practice, spiritual community, we need to engage with others who share our ideals and our practices.

We need to gradually befriend some people and build trust and honest, open connections.

To do this we need to spend time with people. This is one of the reasons why retreats are so valuable; they allow an opportunity for deeper communication. Of course it is not enough just to see people on retreat, which is why the Buddhist centre with all its activities is such a great resource. Some people of course want to engage with each other even more deeply by living together in community and by working together. However we go about creating spiritual community we will need to befriend people by listening to them, empathising with them, thinking of them, rejoicing in them and being generous to them. If we do this we will create a growing network of kindness and goodwill, which is sangha.

If we can establish the internal conditions of being able and willing to live a spiritual live and the external condition of spiritual community, which supports us, then our practice will be enhanced enormously.

That practice is essentially the practice of generosity, ethics, meditation and reflection.

Generosity means thinking of other people, being aware of them and being willing to help them with time, energy, money, sharing knowledge, creating positive conditions and so on. It is about giving appropriately bearing in mind our own capacity and what is needed.

Ethics is all about metta and awareness. It means bringing metta and awareness into all our relationships, whether our relationship to our self, to other people, to the environment, to parents, mentors, children, politicians, animals, birds, teenagers, and so on – it is about becoming mettaful and aware so that everything and everybody we come into contact with is perceived through the eyes of metta and awareness.

Meditation is the means to opening into higher more refined states of consciousness, and it is important that it doesn’t just remain a technique that we use for an hour a day, but rather permeates our whole life. An effective meditator should be in a higher state of consciousness all the time and this is expressed in positive emotion, awareness of other people, awareness of the world around and a free flowing energy.

Reflection is what deepens spiritual practice into insight. We reflect in meditation, or by thinking about things, or we reflect by writing and by engaging in discussion and study.

Today is wesak. We are celebrating the occasion when Siddhartha became a Buddha – an awakened one. Before he became a Buddha he had to make an effort, he had to practice generosity, ethics, meditation and reflection just as we do.

In the Dvedhavitakka Sutta (MN 19) he says:

“Bhikkhus, before my enlightenment, while I was still an unenlightened Bodhisatta, it occurred to me: ‘ Suppose that I divide my thoughts into two classes.’ Then I set on one side thoughts of sensual desire, thoughts of ill-will, and thoughts of cruelty and I set on the other side thoughts of renunciation, thoughts of non- ill will and thoughts of non-cruelty.” P207.

He goes on to talk about how he would become aware of his state of mind and then he would deliberately reflect on the consequences of that mental state – in terms of the effect on himself, the effect on others and whether it would move him in the direction of Enlightenment. I find this Sutta quite helpful and encouraging. Although the basic idea is quite simple and it is a teaching to be found in various forms throughout the Buddhist scriptures – the teaching of right effort- there is something particularly encouraging about how the Buddha talks about himself having to make this effort – needing to reflect, needing to meditate. He says he also noticed that if he spent too much time thinking and reflecting he would get stressed and his antidote to mental stress and strain was to meditate.

So according to this Sutta, Siddhartha was not some kind of superman. He experienced negative mental states; he had to make an effort to be aware and an effort to change his state of mind. He had to be careful not to strain too much by thinking too much, so he would relax into meditation to refresh his mind and body.

Here we see Siddhartha practising awareness of mental states (which includes emotions), we see him bringing an ethical dimension into his reflections-reflecting on the consequences of his mental states and we see him meditating to refresh himself.

The practice not mentioned here is generosity – in the Sutta he speaks instead of renunciation.

However all Buddhist practice is done within an understood and implied context of generosity and compassion. The whole point of Buddhist practice is to alleviate the suffering of ourselves and others by transcending narrow egotism and going beyond the greed, the ill-will and the delusion which are all about bolstering up a sense of a fixed and separate self.

This going beyond greed, ill-will and delusion is the ultimate generosity – it is also the ultimate happiness – Nirvana- the blowing out of the flames of all negative emotions.

This is what the Buddha achieved sitting beneath the Bodhi tree. It is this triumph, this victory of all that is best in human consciousness over all that is worst – this is what we celebrate at Wesak. And the celebration is a reminder to us of what Buddhism is really about – namely, awakening to wisdom and compassion. It is also an encouragement to us because the Buddha was human and subject to the same mental conflict and struggles that we are subject to and he has shown that it is possible to go beyond these conflicts and struggles.

That is why the Buddha is a true refuge – he can be relied upon. That is why the Dharma, his teaching is a true refuge – it can be relied upon and that is also why the spiritual community of his enlightened followers are a true refuge.

To make progress we need to move ever closer to those refuges by practising generosity, ethics, meditation and reflection.

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2008-08-30T11:48:00.000-07:00

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