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.
