Spiritual Community

 This talk was given to an audience of members of the Triratna Order in 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 Triratna Order and Community 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 Communities and the best of Orders and Bhante Sangharakshita 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 Communities 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 Community and Order have been the best of Communities 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, been inclined to see 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 called 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. 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 and that I had found what I had been searching for.

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 came across Triratna 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 Community what has been of most help to me is the other people around me. I have a depth of gratitude to people who were so kind and patient with me in my first tottering steps on the spiritual path and who 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 many 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 residential communities and working situations provide excellent opportunities for 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 Triratna such as residential communities and right livelihood businesses have gone through difficult times in the past 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. 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. 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 Sangharakshita 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 written communication 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 is concerned I always felt – from my earliest involvement that Triratna 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 London Buddhist Centre reception room, then I helped out with transcribing a seminar and within about three 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 Community 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.

(Eight Verses for Training the Mind, Geshe Sonam Rinchen,p.86)

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. (Majjhima Nikaya, Sutta12) 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. 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, on our efforts to be aware, mutually aware, on our efforts to move from selfish self-interest to true self-interest and 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' (yathabhutajnanadarshana) 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.

Bhante Sangharakshita was 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 needed willing, cooperative, energetic and capable beings. 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 Community 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.” (Complete Works, Vol.3,p.402)