dharmavidya: the republic of sukhavati

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.

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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