Amida: training, practice, vision and engagement - Dharmavidya writes:
We have been discussing the foundations of critical and socially
engaged Buddhism. This has been partly a new look at the principles set
out in my book The New Buddhism and partly a review of how practice has
evolved within the Amida sangha over the past fourteen years. These
discussions will continue. In this blog post I would like to record
some things that came out of last weekend's discussion.
The Amida sangha has a distinctive approach to Buddhist practice
and training. I wrote about practice and training in another recent
post. Practice refers to the expression of love, compassion, sympathy
and equanimity through wise actions and skilful means. In our case,
this is often taken to indicate collective rather than individual
action. It is not so much that we train people in order that they
individually will later use what they have learnt in order to be errant
bodhisattvas following a path of their own as that we collectively
shall engage in actions to resist affliction, assist the afflicted and
demonstrate an alternative.
In our socially engaged work it has often been our approach to
co-operate with other groups. The other groups may be such that our
alliance with them is limited to one or two points of agreement, but
even such alliances can bear fruit. Sometimes we also form
relationships with groups that we have a lot in common with or that are
guided by people who have a close affinity for the Amida approach. Our
experience of working in partnership has generally been that it does
not lead to the actualisation of what any of the partners originally
envisaged, but it does always lead to something valuable, including a
good deal of learning by all involved and, frequently, completely new
developments that nobody could have foreseen.
The Amida approach is not that of importing and extending an Asian
way of doing things. Rather it is about applying basic Buddhist
principles of ethics, faith and wisdom in a diversity of ways in
society. The results are various. We do not replicate projects or
services. We respond to particular concrete situations and develop
something appropriate. Whatever has already been developed is seen as a
potential spring board for something new. Thus the India project has
gone through numberous transformations and will no doubt go through
more in the future. If we were to start a second project in India,
however, there is no reason why it should necessarily look anything
like the existing one. It would be a new response to a new situation.
For sure we would use what we have learnt from work in a wide range of
settings, but there is no sense of having a final formula.
The matter of practice and training and the matter of developing
an alternative society are complementary. Our idea of practice involves
work to create an alternative - a society based on love and compassion.
Our idea of training involves placing trainees in social situations
where they will be challenged, will learn to relate to all manner of
people, will acquire the ability to lead, to follow, to take individual
initiative, to co-operate, to be imaginative and constructively
critical, and always to have a sense of the greater good.
On the one hand, the alternative society needs such trainees and
on the other hand such training needs the projects that are part of the
alternative. This also means that a variety of different initiatives
can all form elements within the alternative - can be part of the
emergent Republic of Sukhavati. The Dharmic society does not just
consist of Dharma practice centres and retreat houses. It also needs
arts, health, education, food production, care for the dependent,
production and distribution. It needs new forms of economic
organisation. It needs groups that co-operate. It needs all kinds of
synergism.
The synergistic principle is one key to this approach. We are
unlikely to embark upon a new venture unless it has a synergistic
effect. That means, unless it contributes in more than one way to
things that are already happening. Assisting an alternative health
project, say, may help the users of that project AND provide an
application of practice and training AND create a placement opportunity
for people learning counselling skills AND bring on-stream new
educational possibilities including courses in alternative forms of
care AND bring users of the project to an interest in other activities
of the sangha, and so on. It is these kinds of synergism and feedback
that make it possible for the Amida sangha to do so much with so few
resources, that cultive co-operation, and that enable an organic
approach to flourish.
The organicist idea is another important principle. The model for
the alternative society is not social engineering, it is more that of
jungle. By jungle we mean areas where a fully mature organic culture
has developed. In tropical rain forest there are a vast number of
different species all living together in an ever changing dynamic
balance. In a jungle there is such a depth of fertility that every
possible niche is quickly filled by some new life form, whereas when
such forest is cleared and some kind of farming or monoculture is
substituted 99% of the richness is lost. Much modern thinking about
society is of this forest clearing type and, unfortunately, even many
Buddhist groups are a kind of monoculture.
We shall go on discussing and applying these ideas n experimenting
and we hope thereby to increase the richness of spiritual life for
individuals who choose to train and practise at the same time as we
create at least pockets of the organic, synergistic, dharmic
alternative - pockets that influence the ambient society and that
provide seedbeds for a revolution of values and the emergence of peace,
co-operation and compassion as organising principles in society as a
whole.
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