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sangha is deep spiritual practice

:: The Practice of Sangha

Thich Nhat Hanh explains that sangha is more than a community, it’s a deep spiritual practice.

Photo by Paul Davis.

A sangha is a community of friends practicing the dharma together in order to bring about and to maintain awareness. The essence of a sangha is awareness, understanding, acceptance, harmony and love. When you do not see these in a community, it is not a true sangha, and you should have the courage to say so. But when you find these elements are present in a community, you know that you have the happiness and fortune of being in a real sangha.

In Matthew 5:13 in the New Testament of the Christian Bible, we find this statement: “Ye are the salt of the earth; but if the salt hath lost its savor, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for nothing but to be cast out and to be trodden underfoot of men.” In this passage, Jesus describes his followers as salt. Food needs salt in order to be tasty. Life needs understanding, compassion and harmony in order to be livable. This is the most important contribution to life that the followers of Jesus can bring to the world. It means that the Kingdom of Heaven has to be realized here, not somewhere else, and that Christians need to practice in a way that they are the salt of life and a true community of Christians.

Salt is also an important image in the Buddhist canon, and this Christian teaching is equivalent to the Buddha’s teaching about sangha. The Buddha said that the water in the four oceans has only one taste, the taste of salt, just as his teaching has only one taste, the taste of liberation. Therefore the elements of sangha are the taste of life, the taste of liberation, and we have to practice in order to become the salt. When we say, “I take refuge in the sangha,” it is not a statement, it is a practice.

The trees, water, air, birds, and so on can all be members of our sangha. A beautiful walking path may be part of our sangha. A good cushion can be also.

In the Buddhist scriptures it is said that there are four communities: monks, nuns, laymen and laywomen. But I also include elements that are not human in the sangha. The trees, water, air, birds, and so on can all be members of our sangha. A beautiful walking path may be part of our sangha. A good cushion can be also. We can make many things into supportive elements of our sangha. This idea is not entirely new; it can be found throughout the sutras and in the Abhidharma, too. A pebble, a leaf and a dahlia are mentioned in the Saddharmapundarika Sutra in this respect. It is said in the Pure Land Sutra that if you are mindful, then when the wind blows through the trees, you will hear the teaching of the Four Establishments of Mindfulness, the Eightfold Path, and so on. The whole cosmos is preaching the buddhadharma and practicing the buddhadharma. If you are attentive, you will get in touch with that sangha.

Sangha as our roots

I don’t think the Buddha wanted us to abandon our society, our culture or our roots in order to practice. The practice of Buddhism should help people go back to their families. It should help people re-enter society in order to rediscover and accept the good things that are there in their culture and to rebuild those that are not.

Body, Speech and Mind ~ Dharmavidya

Commentary upon Summary of Faith and Practice (part 6)

TEXT
with body, speech and mind

COMMENTARY
This phrase occurs a great many times in Buddhist texts. Clearly it means “in all ways”. “Body” refers to behaviour. The body exists in the material world and moves about doing things. It is with the body that we enact the Dharma. “Speech”, here, includes thought: all conceptual activity. When we do things we hold a conception of what we are doing and why. We have a sense of the context that makes our action make sense. “Mind”, here, is, perhaps, a somewhat unfortunate rendering of the Indian word chitta. “Heart”, “soul” or “spirit” might all have been better, but the rendering “body, speech and mind” has become so universal that I think we have to live with it. So, although we say “body, speech and mind”, “spirit, sense and action” might better convey the meaning of the original expression as Buddha spoke it.

Everything we do is done in a certain spirit, makes sense in a particular way and manifests in some form of action. If we wish to understand another person it is not sufficient to observe his or her actions. We need to know what the sense of those actions is and in what spirit they are performed, otherwise we can easily misunderstand.

There is a story about a Buddhist temple in China where deer would come onto the land and the monks, feeling kindly disposed to the deer, would feed them. When the abbot heard about this he came out, forbade the feeding of deer and attacked the animals with his staff. The animals became frightened and ran away. The disciples were perplexed. “Aren’t we supposed to be kind and compassionate? What sort of an example are you - coming out and attacking defenceless animals?” The abbot said, “There are hunters in these mountains. The only defence these animals have is their fear. As long as they run away as soon as they see a human, they have a good chance of survival. If you take that away from them by taming them, they will soon all be caught and killed.”

What looks like compassion is not always the best kind. Action, concept and spirit must harmonise. Intelligence is needed. The “speech” element is an important link between spirit and action. There is always a danger that one take religious precepts in an overly simplistic manner and this then leads to pretense rather than the genuine thing.

The things we do have consequences. We can make this world better or worse; we can act in ways that are constructive or destructive, but many acts are both constructive and destructive at the same time, so this is not a simple matter. At the moment I am laying a path in the garden. To construct the path I have to dig up some of the lawn. One thing is constructed as another is destroyed. I judge that the overall effect will be an improvement, but there is no way to live that is completely free from the destructive side of all creative activity.

Furthermore, this all forms into a feedback loop. As we act we see what we have done and the sense of it transmutes. We are not omniscient, so we never see the whole project all at once. Only as it becomes reality do we see what we have done more fully and as we do so we are learning, changing and growing.

Buddhist training is a cultivation of body, speech and mind - of spirit, sense and action - and it never stops, never ends. It is not a matter of arrival, it is a matter of endless travel. At the beginning of our journey in Buddhism we take refuge, but do we know what refuge means - do we understand the sense of it, the real spirit of it, the enacting of it? Only vaguely. As we go on we are finding out. Amitabha may be at our elbow from the very beginning, but we do not know it. I do not mean “know” just in an intellectual sense - I mean in the sense that a person who walks a path every day knows that path. Yet even the person who walks the same path every day may still notice new things along the way.

“With body, speech and mind” designates the spirit of Buddhism: the self-entrustment to a wholehearted engagement with the practice, open to everything it brings.

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Shan Tao's Dream ~ Dharmavidya

Summary of Faith and Practice commentary, continued:

TEXT:

Saving grace, as was made clear by Shan Tao's dream and advice to Tao Cho, only comes through the sange-mon.

COMMENTARY:

Sange means confession or contrition. The sange mon is, literally, the “gate of contrition”. 

According to the story, toward the end of his life, Tao Cho was worried about his own karma. The thing that worried him was that during his time as a great teacher he had caused quite a number of monasteries and Buddhist centres to be built and in the course of building it is almost invariably and unavoidably the case that many small creatures get killed and their habitat destroyed. Tao Cho was worried that all this destruction would have created bad karma for him. After he had talked about this, sharing his concern, his disciple Shan Tao had a dream. In the dream Shan Tao saw that Tao Cho had to make a confession to the community. Shan Tao told Tao Cho about the dream. Tao Cho did as the dream instructed and soon afterwards Tao Cho died peacefully.

Tao Cho was able to receive the saving grace of Amida because he had opened his heart.

It is good to reflect upon the degree of sensitivity here. Where I live I am continually engaged in gardening and in building work. Inevitably worms and insects and occasionally larger creatures get damaged or die as a result of my actions. What about in the building of motorways or cities? The “modern” utilitarian way of thinking is insensitive to all this destruction of life. 

We see here the functioning of the master-disciple relationship in an interesting light. In this instance it is the master who receives advice via the dream of the disciple. Here again there is a great sensitivity at work. Because of the deep love between them, this is possible. Here there is no competition in cleverness or achievement, only two humble souls in deep communion.

When such fine sensitivity exists, then there is saving grace. By sensitivity, here, I do not mean pursuing principles to an extreme. What I am trying to find words for is a kind of tenderness in which the glory and tragedy of human existence - the fact that you cannot build even a temple without crushing beetles - yields a poignancy to all our being, both in ourselves and in relation to one another. This is why we take refuge.

Such tenderness existed between Tao Cho and his disciple and it is that spirit that is still being transmitted to us more than a millennia later.

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Not Monotheism ~ Dharmavidya

The way that Pureland Buddhism is sometimes presented, it starts to sound like monotheism. This is not surprising given that the conventional speech forms of monotheism are known to us all and, however much we might think we have rejected or moved away from traditional religion, our culture is saturated with ideas developed over two millennia in which monotheism dominated. Before that Europe was polytheistic, but that was a long time ago.

The Buddhist concept, however, is of trillions of trillions myriads of worlds, vast numbers of Buddhas, infinite possibilities and diversity, with no one central "lord" or judge, yet, within all of this, certain fundamental truths that persist throughout.

Why then choose one Buddha as a focus of practice? The answer lies in our own limitation. It is much simpler! In any case, to worship one Buddha or one Dharma is to revere them all, so it does not matter. It you prefer to bow to a thouysand different Buddhas each morning, there is nothing wrong with that. There can be no real conflict between a devotee of Amitabha, Manjushri, Akshobhaya,.... Only in the deluded minds of bombu human beings do such spurious conflicts take shape. All such are delusion. 

Why "worship" at all? Well, if you can immediately demolish all your ego-centred delusion at a stroke, then, of course, there is no need. But in practice, to diminish the self means to take a humble stance and to realise that there are beings who are more advanced than oneself, more benign than oneself, simply more than oneself, and to bow before them is natural and right. As Bodhidharma, generally slated as the founder of Zen, said, When bowing ceases, Buddhism ceases. Buddhism is a practical pathway for deluded beings and all Buddha's teachings are practical advice.

The true body of the true bodhisattva is infinitely multidimensional and does indeed bow to a myriad Buddhas every time it bows to any one, in a spiritual sense, they all interpenetrate. The dharma world (dharmadhatu) is not the physical world where things occupy individual concrete places. It is, therefore, good practice to expand one's imagination and one's sense of the vastness, spaciousness and plenitude of the limitless Buddhist conception of things.

 

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Suicide ~ Dharmavidya

QUESTION: This may seem a bizarre question but one I would like a Buddhist view on. Is suicide a sin,in Christianity to commit suicide is a total sin considered evil and completely against all it teaches but in Japanese culture from the past a way of proving total loyalty to ones sovereign lord the ultimate of duty giri. Has a human being diagnosed with incurable cancer facing death anyway the right to end their life on their terms. Does this send ripples in their karma. I know this is a weird question, but as someone who has had a heart attack and a stroke and has been told I face the onset of early dementia do I have the right to choose when I leave this world.

SHORT ANSWER: Not an absolute matter in Buddhism – it all depends upon motive and intention.

LONGER ANSWER: In Buddhism, one has neither “rights” nor “sins”, only consequences. One certainly has karma and if an act is intentionally committed in a self-serving manner it will create karmic seeds. Generally speaking, Buddhism cherishes all life and is opposed to suicide. There are instances in the sutras where the Buddha says that there was no fault in a particular suicide because the motive had been purely altruistic. This altruism could be that of saving others from being burdened by the care of one’s person when one’s medical condition was completely hopeless, but this does not refer to a situation where it is merely the case that, on the balance of probabilities, one is going to get worse and not recover. When a person does commit suicide, the “correct” Buddhist attitude toward them – except in these very rare completely altruistic cases – is compassion (not disapproval), both for what they did suffer and for the karma they have created. The idea of proving loyalty by katagiri is not Buddhist, it is a samurai custom deriving, I imagine, from Shintoism (if it has religious roots at all). When we say things like “the right to end their life on their terms” – this is an idea and a form of thinking very much grounded in the Western individualistic paradigm and is not really in the Buddhist mode.

We can take responsibility to use whatever life we have in a noble way for the benefit of all. This is true whatever the extent or limitation of our faculties may be. It is, of course, no easy matter, and we often get it wrong, but the principle is clear enough, I think. It is, perhaps, better to think of life as something entrusted to us than as something that we have power over. We do not know what the future holds and we do not know what influence our mode of conducting life will have, but we can be broadly confident that living in a dignified manner is itself supportive to many beings, including those we are unaware of. In general, suicide tends to undermine the faith of others and cause them dismay and fear.

Currently, there is a certain amount of debate about euthanasia, which has gradually become more popular in Europe over recent years. Again, it is the motive and intention that is crucial and the effect upon others. This is a difficult matter because one does not know the extent of that effect. Different people are affected in different ways. One cannot control such things. So, I think we can say that the Buddhist position in such debate should, on the one hand, be that of great caution regarding policy and, on the other, great sympathy for those who do resort to it.

Impediments to Faith ~ Dharmavidya

Continuing the Commentary upon Summary of Faith and Practice

TEXT
Thus all obstacles become impediments to faith unless we experience contrition and letting go.

Path with a Goal
When we undertake a spiritual project, we are trying to achieve something. Buddhism is commonly presented as the attempt to achieve enlightenment. One then experiences many things as getting in the way. Many of these things are habitual characteristics of oneself. This can lead to a good deal of personal development as one tries to reform one’s life and to make oneself fit more closely to the ideal.

At the same time, this struggle inevitably gives rise to many doubts. One swings like a pendulum from enthusiasm to dejection and back again. It can also lead to a great deal of deception, both of others and of oneself. This kind of deception is generally not ill-intended, it is simply that one wants so much to fit into the expectation that any sign that one is doing so tends to be taken as confirmation and one then adopts that sign (lakshana) and turns it into a habit so that one artificially creates the appearance of a positive feedback loop. However, spiritual progress is not really about artificially conforming to a prescribed pattern, nor about being preoccupied with appearances. It is about liberation.

Old Habits Come Back to Haunt & Help Us
Also, when the old habit that one thought that one had overcome shows up again, one experiences a disappointment which crystalises into a doubt about one’s practice. One thinks, “I thought I had dealt with that issue and got rid of it - yet, here I go again.” This is a blow to one’s ego - one’s pride. The ego wants to present a tidied up picture of oneself to the world and even to itself. 

So when such an “obstacle” recurs there are two options. One is, as just stated, to feel knocked back and lose faith. The other is to accept that this evidence demonstrates one’s bombu nature. We can see that the difference between these two options is the difference between pride and humility. Pride is a kind of “hanging on”. When we hang on to an idea of ourselves, it manifests as pride. This is true even when the idea that we have of ourselves is negative. The negative pride involved in hanging onto the idea of oneself as a victim or a damaged person or no good can be every bit as rigid as that of thinking of oneself as superior. In fact, it is not at all uncommon for both positive and negative forms of pride to go together.

Buddhist Ideals
This whole matter is also related to different conceptions of the spiritual path. On the path of the arhat, the goal is purity. On this path, spiritual pride is the last fetter that one abandons. This is because it is a path of earnestly trying to achieve an ideal. This inevitably involves repression and later that has to be undone - pride is the driving force of repression. On the path of the myokonin the whole thing works the other way around. The spiritual task of renouncing pride through contrition is the foundation rather than the final step. One keeps coming back to it over and over again, which is why we place stress on the bombu paradigm. The bodhisattva path, which is the central theme of the Mahayana, can be entered upon from either perspective.

Complacency
Also, here, I need to unpack a little further what is meant by “obstacle”. A spiritual obstacle is, broadly speaking, whatever brings one’s spiritual life to a halt or hiatus. Thus, something that induces complacency is just as much of an obstacle as something like a moral defeat. In fact, more so. The moral defeat might seem like an obstacle, but, in fact, might inject a new dynamic into one’s spiritual life as one wrestles with motives, consequences and conceptions of oneself and the world, whereas complacency may maroon one for a long time without anything useful happening at all.

We should be able to see, at least in principle, therefore, that many of the things that we think of as obstacles are not really so and that the real obstacles often go unnoticed. This, of course, is what the Buddha meant by avidya and this is why we talk about “awakening”. When we open our eyes to our actual spiritual condition, our complacency is shaken. 

:: link to original on La Ville au Roi (Eleusis)

Saying Nembutsu, Practicing Metta ~ Ananda

Reverend Ananda, of Amida Hawai'i, writes this on the Friends of Amida Shu Virtual Temple site:

Metta is the Pali term for love. In Buddhism, love is not the sentimental emotion we are so familiar with in the West. It is simply the heartfelt desire for the wellbeing of another. For Pureland Buddhists, metta is also the salvific working of Amida’s Primal Vow in each moment, in all places, on all beings throughout the vast universe(s).

Extending love or metta to those around us has a long history in Buddhism. It is said that the Metta Sutta (Discourse on Love) was given by the Buddha Shakyamuni to a group of monks that were on retreat in a particularly dismal forest filled with thugs and criminals as well as evil spirits, ghosts, and demons. Naturally, the monks were scared. They sought out the Buddha and asked for permission to go to a different forest retreat, preferably one that was not haunted.

The Buddha denied their request. Instead he gave them instruction on how to practice love. Admonished, the monks returned to the forest and practiced metta as instructed. Over time, the thugs either left the forest or converted to Buddhism. The demons and spirits were pacified and became protectors of the Dharma.

In the centuries after the historical Buddha’s death, the practice of metta was formalized and systematized. Today we encounter a simple practice in which love is methodically extended first towards oneself, then loved ones, then neutrals, then antagonists, and finally to all beings.

Having practiced metta in retreat and in daily life, I can report that the practice is transformative. Raised in a home and a religion that was “heavy on the guilt,” I initially found extending love towards myself the most difficult. It was also the most healing. However, now, as a more mature practitioner, I see how difficult it is to truly extend love toward “antagonists.” The mind clings to little hurts and grudges, despite my continued practice of metta.

I also understand that metta can be practiced in either a relative or an ultimate way. The relative practice of metta is aspirational. We, as unenlightened individuals who are caught up in the delusion of separateness, exert ourselves  to extend love towards others. This effort is dualistic in nature. It is me — in here — extending love to you — out there. This is fine. It does not diminish the benefits of this practice. However, this relative practice of love is still conditioned and limited. It is very human and often does not root out the deep hurts of human interactions.

Ultimate metta is unconditional. It does not flow from us to an other who is separate from ourselves. In ultimate metta there is neither me nor other. There is just love. This is the direct and immediate expression of Amida Buddha’s unconditional love and compassion — the Primal Vow.

For most of us ultimate metta, or unconditional love, is an exceptional experience. Amida breaks into our normal deluded thinking and overwhelms us. Love fills us and spills over into the people and situations around us. It is effortless. We are powerless against love in these moments. We cannot notlove.

For Pureland Buddhists, Nembutsu (Namo Amida Bu) is both a reminder and the working of Amida’s unconditional love, which is none other than the Primal Vow. To remember the Buddha is to open oneself to possibility of experiencing unconditional love and acceptance.

Nembutsu is the Pureland practice of metta in both the relative and ultimate forms. Through the Nembutsu we express our prayers that all beings find happiness, peace, and well-being. The Nembutsu may even inspire us to work to create a better world, one in which it is easier to do good and to love. However, in the Nembutsu we also recognize that it is not “we” who are the source of love. Rather it is Amida Buddha, the Measureless and Unconditioned Buddha, whose measureless light — love, compassion, and wisdom — reaches everywhere. The Buddha whose vow, simply stated, is to save all of us from suffering.

Our practice of metta, therefore, is  to remember Amida Buddha, rely upon Amida Buddha, and do what we can in this life to alleviate pain and suffering and offer hope to the world.

Namo Amida Bu!

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