(upbeat music) This podcast is brought to you by Free Buddhist Audio, the Dharma for your life. Our work is funded entirely by donations from our generous listeners. If you would like to help us keep this free, make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. Thank you and happy listening. - The first thing really I want to say is just how glad I am to be here, not just glad, but actually honoured and in some ways humbled out to be here to play my little part in celebrating the 25th anniversary of this extraordinary facility, this project, Aria Loca Buddhist Retreat Centre and Meditation Centre. I've been coming for a long time. As Dailocha just said, I first came in 1987 and I think I've come every year since. And sometimes, just a couple of times, I think I've come twice in a year. So I've really seen the ups, downs, trumps and near disasters. I've seen extraordinary heroism, persistent sacrifice and joy and miracles. So I know perhaps more than many, just how much you have to celebrate, how much we have to celebrate and the fact that Aria Loca is here and going so well and that it is celebrated in 25 years of increasing substance, civility, viability and the teaching and spreading and sharing of the Buddha Dama. Now, 25 years can seem like a long time. I guess to some of you who've been here for most of those 25 years working on it, it could seem like a very long time. A big part of your life and a big and sometimes arduous project. But it's worth remembering that 25 years is just 1% of Buddhist history. The Buddha lived 2,500 years ago. So I think that to appreciate the achievement of Aria Loca, to appreciate the significance of this moment in the history of Aria Loca, we have to kind of go back at it. And so we have to go back a long way. We have to go back not just 25 years but 2,500 years and go back to the young man who started it all. I think it's important to try and enter in our imagination into the mind of this extraordinary young man. We know so little about him. A lot of what we do know is legend. But whether it's legend, fact, history, who knows? But somewhere at the beginning of all this 2,500 years, a young man was tortured by questions, tortured by problems. It had sort of hit him, and I won't go into all the traditional stories as to how and why and when, but it had hit him that we have to grow old. It had hit him that we get sick. It had hit him that we have to die. And in the state he was in, of seeing that, of feeling, of experiencing it for as if for the first time, it sort of seemed that life was a bit pointless. Yeah, we might have all had those moments when you just have a glimpse of your mortality or the mortality of your loved ones or whatever. And you kind of sometimes wonder, what's the point? Why go on? Why achieve anything? What's it for? I remember my father when he was just a few weeks away from death talking with me about his life. At a fun point, he kind of threw his arms out and shrugged and he said, "For what?" You know, we can have those moments when we wonder why. Well, these moments had a hit impacted on this young man, Sidata, with tremendous force, so much so, that after wrestling with the problem for a while, he realized that he couldn't put himself into life. He couldn't engage with life unless he could sort out that problem, unless he could answer that question. And he was willing to give up absolutely everything. His family, his wealth, his prospects, in order to try and find out whether there was any kind of answer, any place in life, any place in reality, where there was a safe haven, a refuge, a meaning, a purpose, a point, so this otherwise rather ridiculous phenomenon called life. So when we celebrate Hallelukah's history, it's kind of good to have that in mind, you know, that kind of passion, that kind of earnestness, that kind of burning desire for truth, because that's where Hallelukah's history began. This young man went on to find teachers and all the teachers around, you know, who were very, very experienced meditators and who could teach them all kinds of stuff, took him to some extraordinarily powerful states of mind, mystical states of merging into the totality of reality and all the rest of it, these very highly refined subjective psychological states. But again and again, he realized, you have to come down from those states. It wasn't an answer, it wasn't safe, it wasn't substantial. In the end, purely from his own exploration, his own experimentation, his own persistence, he hit it, he hit on the answer. It wasn't particularly in the development of higher and higher magical meditative states, it was in a kind of direct penetration through insight. An insight that was strongly rooted ill and founded on meditation practice, but it wasn't just another high, it was seeing things as they actually are. It was, and the traditions often use this analogy, it was like waking up. It wasn't just having a better dream or a clearer dream or a nicer dream, it was actually waking up out of the dream of the particular relationship that he was in with reality. He saw things in a completely new way, he kind of found a foothold in this new level of experience, this new awakening, and in that, he found the absolute liberation that he'd been looking for, an absolute liberation, maybe from the sort of narrow, self-centered, delusory dream in which he, like all of us, had been trapped. Whatever it was that happened to him, and Buddhist texts don't even know how to talk about what it was that happened to him. We do know it was absolutely radical, it was something completely new and unprecedented, it was something that no one within recorded history had ever experienced before. There's a lovely story of him meeting somebody a few weeks afterwards. It was one of the first people he'd met as he went about his travels, and the persons who'd seen him realized it was something quite strange, new, unprecedented about him. And he said, "What are you?" He didn't say, "Who are you?" He said, "What are you?" "Are you a God, are you a God-boom?" "Are you a, you know, there are Indian words, like Gandhara, and Deva, you know, we sort of maybe have equivalents, like a sprite, or a ghost, or a, you know, he asked these questions, "Are you this, are you that, are the other?" And the Buddha kept saying, "No." And he said, "Well, any of those kind of "psychological conditions, according to which "you could call me a God, or a human being, "or a goblin, or whatever, they're gone. "They just don't exist anymore of me. "I'm a fully awakened being. "You have to call me a Buddha." So again, that's what, that's where the origin of Arielot for lies. It's, it's in something quite radical, something quite new, something quite other. It was so other, so new, so radical, that this man didn't really know whether it could be communicated. He wanted to communicate it, because having woken out of this bad dream, he felt free, and looking around himself, he saw everywhere people suffering. As he put it, the world was on fire, on fire with people's greed, on fire with people's hatred, on fire with the sort of mad delusions in which people fritted away their lives, and worse. But he honestly didn't know whether it was possible. How do you go into someone's dream? You know, they'll see you as part of their dreams. How do you wake them up? Maybe Leonardo DiCaprio has an answer, but... Most of us don't. And it really was a puzzle. What do you, what do we do? How do we wake another person up, if we are just, to them at least, just another figure in their dream? It was a real puzzle, a real poser. But he decided to have a go at it. You know, he met with people, he talked to them in various ways, he just tried to steer them in the direction of an awakening similar to his, and did it. Eventually, he managed to find ways of communicating it. And what's interesting is that once he had, as it helped a few other people to recapitulate his experience, to share and meet where he was, he asked them to go off rather than staying with him, rather than form your kind of cozy family of enlightened, awakened beings. But to go off, as he put it, no two people in the same direction, and spread this teaching for the happiness and the welfare of all beings. He felt this extraordinary sense of urgency, even though he knew it was an almost impossible challenge to go out and spread what he was calling the dharma, the truth, the way to come out of the nightmare of limited human consciousness, a limited human grasp on our reality, actually works into something freer, happier, more creative and meaningful. So that's how Buddhism was born. And again, that's how the history of Hariloga began. It was an awesome project, an impossible and almost impossible to challenge. But these people traveled, they met people, they communicated, and as the years went by, they went to other countries, they found new ways of talking, new ways of meeting with people, new ways of expressing these truths, so in Japan they used coams, or asked them to look at white walls, in Tibet, demons and all kinds of magical symbols appeared, and so on, and so on, all over the east, as this teachings, this attempt to wake people up, traveled, new forms, even new faces were devised. If you look at a Tibetan Buddha image, it'll look very different to a Thai Buddha image, which will look very different to a Japanese Buddha image, it's like, in so many ways. This attempt to communicate, this attempt to wake people up, found an expression, or tried to find an expression in a way that really suited the ten promoted conditioning and personalities of the people that it was addressing. Of course, it wasn't called Buddhism, and what people encountered when they encountered one of these teachers, one of these long distant disciples of the Buddha, was just maybe the local person in their area. If you lived in Thailand, you didn't meet a Tibetan Buddhist, if you lived in Burma, you didn't meet a Japanese Zen Buddhist, you possibly just met somebody who wandered through your village. So it was a very atomised, compartmentalised world, but somehow or other, it lasted, it persisted, it developed, and over the centuries, you know, threw up great enlightened teachers, great enlightened masters. Something worked, you know, again and again, there were probably bad experiments, false leads, but something worked, something survived. A tradition developed grew spread, which produced awakened people, right through the hundreds, even thousands of years, right up to the present. And here in the present, you know, what's been interesting about the last hundred years or so, since all this suddenly found an audience in the West, is that the walls were removed. And suddenly, instead of there just being a little man coming to your village, or your town, or your whatever, and telling you something about Buddhism, instead, suddenly, whether it was through books, or the internet, or whatever, it was possible for us Westerners, us modern Westerners, to see the whole thing, to know that there was Tibetan Buddhism, Japanese Buddhism, and Thai Buddhism, and Bernese Buddhism, and all these different Buddhisms. It was suddenly, we were suddenly confronted with this incredible, complex, contradictory world, an entire universe of Buddhist practices, Buddhist images, Buddhist symbols. In fact, it was so complex, so rich, so diverse, and so contradictory, that I think there was a real danger, that it couldn't be used, that it was just too much, too soon, too quickly, and we simply wouldn't know how to make any use of it. So in a way, there was various options. I mean, the kind of option that probably a lot of us have begun our involvement with Buddhism, is through just encountering lots of it, and taking a little bit here, a little bit there, from this book, that book, maybe a book of Zen-Coans, maybe a book of Theravada stories from the Pali Canon, and so on, maybe the life of Miller Rapper. Maybe we've been to different teachers who've taught us different meditations. Now, that is one way of getting involved in this extraordinary tradition. I mean, it can be very interesting, very titillating, I think, in my sort of very first sort of years of involvement with the Dharma, it's what I did, and I would just seek out titillating metaphysical moments, and experiences, and it was kind of fun, and it was good, but it wasn't a way of going very deep, it wasn't a way of staying very focused. Another way of going about things is to just decide to choose one teacher who represents one of the established Eastern traditions. It's something that quite a few people do, they will choose somebody who represents and teaches, totally within the Burmese tradition, or they get a little part Tibetan tradition, or the Rinsai Zen tradition, and so on, and you can kind of put yourself into that and go maybe quite a lot further, because you're then working with a discipline and within a clear tradition. But there can be a problem with that. A few years ago, or quite a few years ago, I met a Tibetan lama, who I'm going to be giving a talk about in about three weeks' time. Dada Rinpoche, one of our founders, one of Sankarachita's teachers, and he was a really interesting man, an incredibly deep and sincere and lovely man. We spent about 12 hours locked in conversation over the course of two days in Kanempong, in the sort of northeast of India. And as we spoke, it became more and more obvious that he was completely immersed in his Tibetan world. All his imagery, all his examples were drawn from a very pure Tibetan standpoint. One thing that I found a bit unnerving was just how much he talked about hell, which is a very Tibetan occupation, which I'll tell you about in three weeks' time. (audience laughing) But as we spoke, it was obvious that he was very excited to be meeting, not just me, but to be meeting other Western Buddhists. He was excited by this development and confessed to me that he would love to come to the West to help spread the Dharma, spread the Buddhist teaching in the West. And I said, well, do you think that your form of Buddhism is going to work in the West, 'cause there are lots of Tibetan teachers. And he laughed and said, well, no, of course not. (audience laughing) The great thing about Tibet, this is all through a translator, so I don't know how he actually spoke, but the great thing about Tibetan, Tibetan Buddhism is that it is so completely integrated into Tibetan culture that it's actually impossible to tell where culture ends and Buddhism begins, whether it's music, dance, the way we speak, our alphabet. It's all totally rooted and bound up and folded into Buddhism, into the Buddha Dharma. He said, for Tibetans, that's wonderful. But for you guys, it's not gonna work because you're not born in this world, you're not Tibetan. You are gonna have to do it all yourself. You're going to have to get involved in the process of practicing the Dharma and trying to develop bit by bit over hundreds of years as we have, a Buddhist culture so that in your country, to read a newspaper in some way puts you in touch with a Buddhist teaching or a Buddhist truth or the symbols that you bump into all the time in some way remind you of the deeper truths of the Dharma. You know, and so that's when he said, well, if I was younger, I would love to come and play a part in that. But instead, one of his disciples, one of his students, Sagarachita took up that challenge and decided to come to the West to play his part in waking up Westerners, play his part in what, you know, arguably, you know, has to be one of the most exciting cultural adventures that anyone could be involved with at this moment in time. The birth of a Buddhist culture in the West. And here's a, you know, a religion that is a world religion that's been going for two and a half thousand years that has had millions, if not billions, of adherence over time. And, you know, here we are at the absolute beginning of this adventure of seeing how to make it work in the West. You know, this is the challenge accepted by Sagarachita again. This is the challenge, implicit in the history of Aria Loca. Sagarachita was, was, he is an extraordinary man. At the age of whatever it was, about 38, 40, when he came back from India, his English, by the way, for those who've not heard him before, he's an Englishman who spent about 20 years practicing, studying, living in India. He came back to England. In India, he had had quite a different background than most Buddhists. He had become ordained, because I think he's saying this country, he ordained as a Buddhist monk into the Taravada tradition. But when he lived in Kalimpong, at the urging of his Taravada teacher, he got to know a lot of Tibetans and took initiations and another ordination from then. And while in Kalimpong, he also got to know very well a Chinese charm Buddhist. And generally, through his meetings and through his study and his reflection and his writings, he developed an overview of the Buddhist tradition, which, probably in his time, was completely unique. He was unique in establishing a fihara kind of training, a Buddhist training situation, that was open to all the major traditions of Buddhism. Even in India, he sort of refused to be put in a box. Even in India, he decided that the future of Buddhism lay in our recognition that we modern people are heirs to the entire tradition. We can't pretend that we are just one thing or the other. We might choose to focus in. But we are inevitably going to be influenced by the entire tradition. So he said about the business, the itself, his own benefits, and subsequently for others, of looking at that tradition and trying to make some kind of sense of it, trying to find a synthesis that would bring it to life that would make it accessible to people who otherwise would just be faced with a bewildering mass of contradictory elements. Notably, he did it in a book, which we still publish and reprint every few years, called a survey of Buddhism, which I imagine you'll find out there in the bookstore. But it was more than that. It was in the way he taught. And the way, once he moved to England initially, that he chose to teach Buddhism by introducing us to practices drawn from varying traditions, introducing people to texts from both the Mahayana, the Hinyana, Theravada, world, and so on. He, I suppose, because he initiated a creative period in his life, where he devised systems of meditation, systems of ethical practice, where he selected texts, even rituals, that he thought would be most effective in the West, drawing from the wider tradition in order to see if it was possible to communicate to people in the West, something that was coherent and that worked and was viable within a Western context. Right from the outset, he wanted to create a community. And at the heart of the community, he envisaged an order which would be neither monastic nor lay. In other words, as he saw it and he wanted to present it from the very outset, Buddhism is something that has to be practiced. You can maybe be a follower of various religions, go to church once a week, or go to church once a year, a Christmas, or go to the synagogue on Friday or whatever, and otherwise live a fairly ordinary life. In his view, you couldn't do that as a Buddhist. As a Buddhist, you were either following in the footsteps of that earnest young man burning with an almost painful desire to get out of, a limited, ignorant, deluded human state, or you weren't. So whether you were a monk or a layman, in a sense, made no difference. It was up to everyone if they wanted to follow the Buddha's example and teaching to really get on with it, whatever their context, and to turn any context they found themselves into a spiritual practice. It all began in a room that I think had room for about eight or nine people. I missed that phase, unfortunately. I'm really sad. I got asked to go along. I'd met another Buddhist at work who wanted me to come and meet his teachers. Sanger, actually, from those days, I didn't believe in teachers or groups. I don't should have stayed here. And he kept saying, you must come to a beginner's class. You must meet this man. And even the very word beginner's class offended me. So I didn't go, and I'm really sad, because I never went to that first center. I never sat in that room with him. There's just a few other people. I got involved just a tiny bit later, after that place had had a fire. And the FWBO, as it was called, the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order, didn't have a center at all. In those days, the FWBO was about 30 of us who met in a hired room once a week, and meditated and listened to Sanger, actually, give a talk. But we were young. We were idealistic, and we were naive. And we just went for it, hook, line, and sinker. Those of us who did. And we thought Sanger actually was the answer, that we found the answer, that we were the answer. After a few years, we were doing some teaching ourselves. We were open centers ourselves. Some of us were forming into residential communities and living together. Some of us were starting businesses. And in a very short time, we were creating a kind of world within a world in which we saw ourselves living a complete Buddhist life within the Western context. So under the inspired guidance of this man who was able to offer us a kind of coherent path of practice drawn on the whole tradition. It was a fantastic feeling. And, you know, it was not our mix with a certain arrogance who caught joy in this, but there it was. You know, we were really doing it. And that, you know, to bring things right here, was the kind of mindset of the first pilgrims who came to America. (audience laughing) Mandu Vadra, Punea, Vadra Dharkan, the three guys who came over here, first of all to Boston, and then to establish, I think it came out of that really, really young, maybe really naive, really arrogant little world. You know, a bunch of people who believe we were the answer, not just to Buddhism in the West, but to the whole of Buddhism, by the way. (audience laughing) And, and actually to the whole problem of what was wrong with the world, nuclear war, economic, whatever, we were the answer. And if only we could get enough people to listen to us and do what we were doing, the world would be sorted out. I think we honestly believe that. I don't think, if we hadn't believed that, we wouldn't have done the things we did. I wouldn't have been setting up publishing houses and doing, and public centers, Mandu Vadra and Vadra Dharkan, Punea, wouldn't have had the nerve to come to the United States of America, to start a Buddhist movement. No robes, you know, just three rather strange, ill-assorted Englishmen. (audience laughing) What were they thinking? (audience laughing) There they were, and here you are. Mandu Vadra will be here in a couple of days and, you know, come to his talk, and I'm not gonna steal his thunder. You know, I imagine he'll have a lot of stories and anecdotes from those days. I'm just gonna mention a couple. Now, these young men, you know, with their naivety and their arrogance and their readiness for an adventure, had to hit a few reality checks. And the one I remember, Mandu Vadra, telling me about was how they decided that probably Boston was the best place to start, because it was maybe a little bit more English. (audience laughing) They might not stick out so much. (audience laughing) That's what they said. (audience laughing) And so, you know, they choose Boston and they managed to find a place to rent. And I think Mandu Vadra was cycling to, you know, they obviously had to get work and, you know, to just pay the rent. I think Mandu Vadra was cycling to work after being there a day, maybe two days, and someone stopped him on the street and said, "What are you doing?" "Yeah, this is a dangerous area, don't you know?" (audience laughing) And it just hadn't occurred to them that there were places where you don't buy rent a place to start a Buddhist center, 'cause no one's gonna go there at night. (audience laughing) So, yeah, this was kind of one of the first reality checks that they hit, that they were in a different world, you know, a different country, a different land, and the rules were different, and the norms were different, and they were going to have to work with that. And, you know, I, again, I'll leave it to Mandu Vadra to tell you the story, but, you know, the outcome was, after a while they decided it, they weren't ready, or they weren't able to deal with the city, and, you know, this idea emerged, this possibility emerged of buying this extraordinary place in the middle of nowhere, forgive me. (audience laughing) A kind of old hippie's dream, you know, geodesic deesic dunes in the middle of the forest. (audience laughing) And, you know, Mandu Vadra had this vision, you know, that here was a place where, well, maybe trying to start a center in the city, I mean, what we did in England usually was find somewhere to rent, and you'd be in a city, and you'd know what you were doing, and you'd know the kind of people you were talking to, and, you know, you'd get a few friends, and a few more, and then in time, some of them might live together, and then there'd be some fundraising, and so it goes, but it clearly wasn't working that way here. But instead, maybe, you know, if they got this place, this place, they'd be able to create a kind of showcase, a total situation where they could live, a demonstrate community life, where they could teach the Dharma, run some classes, where they could run retreats, there was a woodshop, which direction it might be pointing in, thank you. (audience laughing) It shows how much I know. You know, where they could maybe start a business to earn a living, and demonstrate, you know, team-based, a Buddhist approach to economics, team-based, right-life, you know, they could sort of show that the whole thing, show off the whole thing, it would be a showcase for what we've learned so far in our movement, and people would come, they'd appreciate it, they'd realise that we were the answer, and they would join in. (audience laughing) Well, one of the first people to join in, he even came over to England and visited us and stayed in the community above London, but he's sent her for a little while. You know, a young man who was very taken by talk, came to England, the next hand direction had met us, came back, got involved, I think he moved into the community, started working in the wood shop, and as manager of Edward tells the story, one day something happened to him, and it wasn't the same thing as what happened to Siddhata or the Buddha to be, in the shower. He obviously had some realisation that this isn't what he wanted to do with his life, and apparently walked out of the shower, pausing only to put his clothes on before leaving, and never being seen again. (audience laughing) So another reality check. You know, it wasn't gonna happen that quickly, it wasn't gonna be that easy. I came on the scene not long after that, I had my first visit in 1987, so I think that, well, you know, they'd been in this place, you know, Madhya Vantra Punea, by then Ratnapani Dyer, Ratnaviris, English people, English Scottish people, you know, were the community making, you know, doing what they could with the place. And I came over because at that time, I was strongly involved in a fundraising organisation in the UK that raised money to help with social projects in India. One branch of our work is a total movement, and there was a conference in an article called World Buddhism in North America, which Madhya Vadranai were gonna go to, and I was going to promote a fundraising tour for a tour of our workers in the United States, for the following year. So I was there to schmooze Buddhists, you know, and get a fundraising tour set up, and Madhya Vadra was there representing, well, we were both there representing our movement and Madhya Vadra in particular, the FWBO, and I think it's fair to say that, you know, that's Serenati and Dyermatian here, you know, I can make up any story. But now, in some ways, in a small way, we were the stun laws of that conference. It was a really good conference, organized by a Korean teacher, Samu Sunim, who still has his place in Annabala, I think he's now in Chicago. It was a really well conceived conference with representatives from the whole Buddhist world who were now working in America, talking about what they did, but talking about their problems and the issues that they were working with in trying to teach the Dharma in this new Western environment. And as Madhya Vadranai contributed to the discussions and the question and answer sessions and gave our own talks, you know, it was really, you know, it was great, you know, how many people came up to us and said, God, you guys have really seemed to have, you know, you're light years ahead of us, you know, these things you're doing, what Samu Rachida has worked out. And it was great, it was incredibly flattering, you know, these 10 days of being terribly stimulated by everything we were hearing, but also, you know, feeling ourselves to be in a little way the darlings of this conference. And I remember driving back from Ann Arbor with Manju Vadra, and he was feeling really frustrated because, you know, it was such a contrast between being there representing Samu Rachida and our vision and our approach to the Dharma, you know, and getting such positive feedback and going back to the day-to-day grind of trying to make this place work, trying to get it to survive. And, you know, as we sort of talked it through, we said, yeah, but what makes, you know, it's only because we're doing it that we've got something to report. You know, it is the day-to-day grind that's kind of going to make this thing real, that's going to make it happen. And, well, it was a day-to-day grind. I mean, whether it was Manju Vadra or as chairman or Vijavati as chair or as dilocioner knows, as chair. And as many people in this room know, and as many people who aren't in this room know, it's been an extraordinary journey. You know, since 1987, to the present, well, since 1985, to the present. You know, the amount of work that's gone into this, the amount of, you know, struggles sometimes and difficulties and worries. I mean, it's a terrible thing to say, but my favorite story from the very earliest days involves Ratnapani, a member of an Englishman, one of the people who helped things along before it became an American run center. He had certain building skills and had quite a lot to do with the maintenance of the place. And as I'm sure most of you know, this place calls for huge amounts of maintenance and work. Now, I don't know if it's still there. Agival will let me know. But there used to be a basement underneath the entrance, for you, with a huge trapdoor. Ratnapani, I don't know what he was doing, but it involved a ladder that stood next to that trapdoor, which, for reasons of whatever it was he was doing, was open. (audience laughing) And something happened and he went tumbling head first down through the trapdoor, the open trapdoor, towards the ground and he said, as he fell, he had time to think not how much this is gonna hurt. He had time to think how much will this cost? (audience laughing) And it cost quite a lot, I believe, yeah. These guys didn't have insurance. You know, it was a real hand to mouth existence. When the day I arrived, Nino, as he was, Vikacha now, was... - Viscilla. - Viscilla. - Viscilla, who was a youngish man from Cleveland, who was living here. He was very proudly shown off his finger, off which he'd locked the top on that of the sword. Right from the outset, it was hard, it was a struggle. It was people just trying to make do. I mean, I hope, you know, at some point, if not in during this week, but, you know, in the future, the people, you know, who have given so fully, so heroically, often with such difficulty to make this place work, to keep it here, to make it survive. You know, it's been, you know, a hard slog, but what I've noticed is just how willingly people have given. You know, I've been amazed to see, you know, how tired people have been, and yet they've been happy to be organizing another retreat, or, you know, to be making things happen. I know it's not always like that, but my overriding impression has just been such devotion, such loyalty, you know, to each other, to the project, to the vision. You know, for these 25 years, you simply wouldn't be here. It wasn't just that one incident where I was able to help out by talking to some people who, you know, felt able and willing to help out with some money. I mean, there are so many times where, you know, whether it was dialogue, you know, or archival, or amalah, or, you know, any number of people, you know, I'd be here all night if I named them all. You know, who have given and given again, you know, to make this place harm, and to work, and to survive, and more than survive, to flourish. What we have, you know, as that work's been done, and as the center has, as I say, not only survived, but flourished, is something, I think, a bit different to what Manjivarja had in mind, you know, the original founder. I mean, it's not the showcase in the way that he expected. I mean, that the woodshop is silent. You know, there are some people from the Arialo Cosanga who found ways of working together in the center itself, obviously, but also, you know, with archivaly in teams. And there have been various attempts to create teams. And no doubt there'll be more in the future. There isn't a community anymore in that building over there, which is great because it means I get to choose which room I stay in when I come. (laughing) So in that sort of way, Arialoka isn't quite what Manjivarja thought it was going to be. I don't know whether he would be happy or disappointed, but what I want to say is that I think what you've got, at the moment you've got them as it were, not ended up with, but arrived at at this moment in time, is something absolutely groundbreaking. You've got a successful, lively, Sanga and Buddhist center, which runs a full program of activities and retreats in Newmarket, New Hampshire. (laughing) And yes, some of you are kind of young people with an alternative take on life. A lot of you are, you know, your people who, you know, you're worrying about having to put your kids through college or your health benefits are going to survive or whether you're a time that you're just going to receive forever or, you know, and yet here you are, you know, this is a real American center run by Americans. It's a fantastic achievement and it proves that it can be done anywhere. (laughing) I mean, Frank Snarker says, you know, if I can make it here, you know, I can make it anywhere. I'd say, if you can make it happen here in Newmarket, New Hampshire, you can make it happen anywhere. I was once having a joke with, we took that mission statement one day, you know, over dinner downstairs and I do remember thinking of, you know, a mission statement for R.E.L.O., which I just thought had a nice sort of tambour to it, which is bringing little miracles to the granite state. (laughing) But, you know, it's really something to reflect on, you know, that you have managed to do that, you know, and that, you know, you have got access to that, that here in this unlike Mr. Places, if I meant say so, you know, shoot me down if I'm wrong, you have access to the Buddha Dharma, to this extraordinary phenomenon that the Buddha set in motion two and a half thousand years ago, and you've got it in an accessible coherent form, you know, through a body of teachings that hang together and make sense, you know, where there is good, competent instruction in a variety of meditation practices that offer a comprehensive path of meditation practice and you know, we have a circle of friendship with like-minded people who can support, inspire, encourage and challenge and all this in a beautiful, peaceful, natural environment. It's fantastic, you know, and it's what the Buddhist scriptures could refer to, and it's a term you sometimes hear somebody say, this is a fine place for striving. You know, there's a story of a young monk who was one of the Buddha's companions who, on his way back from an arms round, sees a mango grove, you know, and it's a place it's just dreaming and it's shady and it's beautiful and, you know, he looks at it and he thinks to himself, oh, that would be a fine place for striving. 'Cause it is about striving, it's not just about enjoyment, it's not just about kind of woozing along, you know, and the pleasure of the companion and the pleasure of the meditations. It's about there is, you know, there is striving, you know, remember Siddhata, this young man, striving for enlightenment. You know, he'd given up his family, he'd given up his life, he was begging his food and yet according to at least one story from the tradition, even then, even before he found the truth, as he wandered from place to place, you know, working, practicing, meditating, looking perhaps, the teachers who might help him. The king saw him from the battlements of his castle, saw this young man, he was so impressed by his nobility, by his stature, I suppose, that he sent out his retains to stop this man and bring him to him, whereupon he offered him half his kingdom. You know, that was seen, that's what Siddhartha looked like when he was out there striving. So a fine place for striving and there's something, you know, in that, in this name of yours, Aria Loka. Sometimes I think it's translated as, or I hear it translated as the noble realm, Aria Loka, the noble realm. But the word Aria, you know, has quite a specific meaning within the Buddhist tradition. You know, it's telling Sangerakhta wants about a meeting I'd been to where, you know, some people were very, very angry with the speaker, somebody who'd just given a talk, because he talked about the importance of developing positive emotion, you know, happiness and friendship and human warmth. And, you know, these people were very, very angry. They said, "Well, you're the Buddhist, you know, "we're meant to keep aware of suffering. "You know, we shouldn't be trying to be happy and friendly. "You know, we should keep our minds locked on suffering. "This is true, this is true, this can happen." And Sangerakhta laughed and said, "But, you know, "this is the problem, they forget that the, you know, "that the fourth, you know, that the first noble truth "that the four noble truths, which I imagine you all heard of, "you know, the noble truth of suffering, "is the are in truth of suffering. "It's the transcendental truth of suffering. "It's a truth when seen from the point of view "of a transcendent state of mind. "In relation to that, you know, in relation to a transcendent state, "of a transcendental state of mind, you know, "the ordinary human state, you know, is one of suffering." So, Arya, you know, the Arya in Arya Loka implies something transcendental, something beyond, something other. You know, it's back to what it was that Siddhartha stumbled upon or discovered or broke through to. Now, Arya Loka is a fine place for striving after transcendental experience, experience that transcends the norm, transcends our conditioning, transcends our preferences, transcends our biases. So, Arya Loka is an extraordinary achievement. And from all accounts that I constantly bump into, it's a wonderful, welcoming, warm place. I don't think I've ever known a center, and I've been to a lot of them. I still go to a lot of them. I don't think I've been to any Buddhist center where people so love the place, so love their circle of friends. There is such loyalty, such devotion to the place and to the circle of friends. So, it's a welcoming place, a place of support, peace, inspiration and friendship. But I hope it will always be also a place of challenge, a place where, you know, we, and I include myself because I'm a visitor too, you know, are challenged in some way or another to keep breaking through, to keep waking up out of the sort of bad dream of a narrow, self-centered life bounded by the sort of murky, wants, fears and views that come with a narrow, distorted view of one's relationship with the universe. Buddhist practices, as I imagine most of you know, can have immediate benefits. Buddhist practices can, you know, very quickly. And if we do the mindfulness of breathing, the metavāra, or any number, the things that are done here, make us just feel better, happier, calmer and so on. The discovery through one of these practices that our experience of life, our experience of reality is constantly being mediated by our minds and by our state of minds and that we can do something about our minds and our state of mind is an extraordinary discovery. The discovery that we can and must take responsibility for our moods, for our states of mind and therefore for our experiences and actions, it represents an extraordinary breakthrough. But it's not the end, you know, to realize that, to see that, to grasp that marks the beginning of the path, the beginning of a journey, a journey in which, well, we might be called upon to transform all our habits, our hobbies, our priorities, our activities, even our relationships, our entire life, perhaps, and move towards a greater and deeper and fuller awakening. That's not for everyone. Not everyone wants that. Not everyone is going to feel up to that challenge. And Aria Loka, as I know it, is also here for people like that. If you do just want some help to sleep better or to deal with life a bit or come in clearly, this place is there for you as well. But if you do choose to make that journey, or if you're already on it, you know, my hope is that Aria Loka, this realm of transcendence, will always be there for you, will always be a truly radical Buddhist center. Its success, even its survival, is a tribute to its past, a tribute to the heroes and the dedication, the practice of the people who've come before. I hope its future is going to be one of increasing security. One day it might even meet code. Do you know? Do you know? I'm just going to digress. Somebody told me yesterday that to meet code, it would probably take $250,000 more. Now, isn't that interesting? Shush, don't spoil this. Just because you know more than me. $250,000, 25 years, the Buddha lived two and a half thousand years ago. Isn't this interesting, this strange alignment of the planet, this is the alignment of the figures. Maybe this is the year when the miracle will happen. I'm sure somewhere I think Tom is going to be having a word with some of you about this quite soon. And I wish him great luck, good fortune and strength as he goes about his business. So yes, I hope to see, I hope the future will bring a more secure, a more stable working environment fuel. I hope it's going to become a more vital and harmonious Sangha network, of course, more and more securely and with the kind of global community that is our tree raptner Buddhist community. I hope that it's going to meet all your needs, whether for support or inspiration or simple guidance or challenge, again, but again and again. And I hope in time it will provide some of you, maybe all of you, with a platform when you are ready to start teaching and sharing this extraordinary precious gift of the Dharma yourselves. It's a time to think about the past, but I think, and I feel more motivated in a way to think about the future. When I visit a Buddhist center or when I contemplate the possibility of somebody starting a Buddhist center or if I visit you at this moment in your history. Yes, I think about the heroism and the practice and the work and the people who pass through this place. But I also like to think of those people who have no idea yet that this place even exists, and yet whose lives are going to be radically transformed by their encounters with you and with whoever follows you in this place. And who knows what effect they will have on their friends and the world that they live in. There's an important Chinese text and sometimes translated as the hui men sutra. It's a series of recorded or transcribed talks by an important patriarch in the Chinese chance in tradition. Now he talks a lot about philosophy and metaphysics and the nature of reality and truth and so on. But what I find really lovely is the way he begins his talk. He says, "We've obviously acquired great merit to be here today. Just a simple fact of being present to hear a Dharma talk sitting in a Dharma center suggests that somewhere along the line in who knows which previous lives we've acquired great merit simply to be here today. And I rejoice in the merits of all of you in whatever it is that's brought you here tonight. I rejoice in the extraordinary merits of the people who've made this place possible and who brought it to life. But I also rejoice in the merits of all those who will come and whether here at Arialoka or someplace that perhaps succeeds Arialoka who knows what the future holds. Who will come and who will continue this tradition of ours long after we've played our part and left the stage and handed over Arialoka and our precious Sri Ramak community to coming generations. Not just for the next 25 years but for the next 2500. Thank you. [Applause] We hope you enjoyed this week's podcast. Please help us keep this free. Make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. And thank you. [Music] [Applause] You
