(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. - I'm not sure if everybody knows that Vantee's joined us. So just before I start, can I just greet Vantee on everybody's behalf and say, thank you so much for coming along this morning. Although Damirati explained a nightmare, he has sometimes Vantee, which is that he's going to give a Dharma talk and you're sitting there in the order and he forgets what, he hasn't any notes and he can't remember what he's supposed to be talking about. Well, I am now having Damirati's nightmare. (audience laughing) So Vantee, fellow Chromian arts. (audience laughing) Comrades, siblings, et cetera, et cetera. I've been asked to talk about Sangha in contemporary Buddhism, I think. And I've been asked to talk about it from an external point of view. That is from the point of view of other Buddhist communities and movements. I'm not terribly clear what the brief is exactly, so I'm just going to talk. And I hope that in the process of the next 20 minutes or so I will say something of interest and stimulation. So last week I spent an afternoon with my very old friend of mine who had come along to Tara Loughan retreat. Now she's somebody that I lived with when she was a mittcher. I was quite involved in her ordination process and I heard from her when she was at the point of and then subsequently resigned from the order to take refuge with a Tibetan Lama and become a nun. And it's a bit in tradition. Anyway, she came along to Tara Loughan last week for her retreat partly because she was missing being on women's retreats. Because the movement that she's part of, all of their retreats are mixed. And partly because she just likes Tara Loughan 'cause it is beautiful. And anyway, we spent a fantastic afternoon and we chatted and we caught up and talked about practice and all sorts of things. I know she was leaving, she gave me a big hug in the car park as you do. And she said, "Nobody does Sanger like the F.W.B.O." So when I was thinking about this talk, I had that very much resonate in my mind that she'd said this to me. And she's not the first person that said this to me, "Nobody does Sanger like the F.W.B.O." So I remembered four particular people who've said it to me over the last few years. So two of them were also ex F.W.B.O. people. No, they hadn't gone as far as joining the order and then leave, but they had been mitters, both of them, both women. And one of them I saw, I was given a public talk, a talk in one of her centers and she lives close to that center and had come to hear me given the talk, although she's no longer associated with the F.W.B.O. Partly through geographical isolation, she had drifted away from, she'd been a mitcher at the L.B.C. many years ago. Anyway, she said that she came and talked to me after the talk and said how much she'd loved listening to me given the talk and how it really taken her back. And that while she didn't regret the choices that she'd made and the practice choices that she'd made, she did stay all in her heart, think, and she said exactly in the same words, "Nobody does Sanger like the F.W.B.O." And she said that she now meditates where a non-denominational sitting group, but that people said to her that when she joined the group, she'd brought a sense of community that had never been there before. And she said to me that, "As well as being very grateful for her basis in meditation, "having learned those two basic meditation practices "of mindfulness in matter," which she felt helped her in really good stead for other and more complicated practices that she'd later taken. She also felt she'd been given a grounding in knowing what spiritual community was that she'd taken into other aspects of her life. Now the other ex-mitcher also said to me, "Nobody does Sanger like the F.W.B.O." But the tone was very different. She went, "God, nobody does Sanger like the F.W.B.O." (audience laughing) "Thank God I go out." Was the kind of sub-message. Well, it wasn't a sub-message. She talked to me a bit about her experience. And I think what she had experienced was what you might call the dark underbelly of community. I think she'd had quite bad experiences. And I think sometimes, of course, we don't always manage to reach our aspiration to be a spiritual community. And sometimes, we fall into group practices. And I think particularly where we've had residential communities of people walking together, where we still have those situations. Unless we're very conscious and aware and vigilant, we can quite easily fall into patterns of, well, what she described as all her family patterns being replayed in her spiritual community. Now, obviously, that was something that she herself had brought to it. She brought her own family patterns, of course. But somewhere, she got a lot of hooks to put those family patterns on. Anyway, it just made me think how interesting that you can see the same sentence and how it could have quite different connotations for people. And probably both be true. Now, the other people that said that to me were slightly different. They were both teachers, other Buddhist teachers, who have not been part of the movement, but have known and do know and are associated with members of our community and have been for a long time. So the first one was when I was at a meeting a few years ago of a, it's a meeting called Buddhist Teachers of Europe, which is associated with the European Buddhist Union. And all the people in this meeting have been teaching Buddhism in the West for at least 10 years. They're all, we're all white, western Buddhists, practising them within different traditions. But there's, in that particular meeting, the ones that I've attended, there have been no Asian Buddhists or Buddhists above their ethnic backgrounds. Anyway, we were sitting in a small, I was in a small group meeting in many of these things. And we were talking, I can't remember what the topic was, but somebody there who's been at these meetings for a very long time said how the whole ambiance and atmosphere had changed over the years. And she said that one of the things that was really an obvious change was that there was not such a big division between the monks and the lay practitioners yet this meeting in quite practical ways like we eat together. And the monastics don't, you know, just eat in the morning and stay apart, which she said that some of the very early meetings that have been the case. And she said she thought that that was largely due to the influence of the western Buddhist daughter. That because we have, I think she mentioned Kulinanda, if I'm correctly remember how he had gone to early meetings. And at every meeting, at every opportunity he had said, she said that everybody would join and it was a refrain by the end. The western Buddhist daughter does not a lay organization. So then something else would happen and the monks would be going to sit somewhere in the lay, somewhere else in Kulinanda would say, we're not a lay organization. And again and again, when things would be organized, he would insist and other older members who went would insist we're not a lay organization. And slowly that had had an effect, she thought. She also thought other things had changed, particularly the monastics who were attending were different from some of the earlier monastics. But she did think that the fact that we hammered it out, is it where that we were not lay practitioners, had had quite a big effect on this divide between the lay and monastic singers. In this same small group, another occasion, somebody was saying she considers herself to be a lay practitioner. She's somebody who practices were a Zen group in France. And she was saying she feels quite confused sometimes because although she's a lay practitioner, she feels full time and that she dedicates her entire life to her practice of dharma. And in fact, she teaches dharma. She maintains a particular center. And she said sometimes they have visiting teachers and inverted commas. And she talks to them and she thinks, actually, they don't seem so full time. And she felt quite confused by this division. And this other teacher previously mentioned said, well, that's what Sangha Rachita's been getting at for all these years. So that was quite interesting to hear that reflected back. She said, I wonder sometimes if the Western Buddhist order realize how radical a move Sangha Rachita made when he formed an order that was neither the lay nor monastic. So I just share that thought with you because I do sometimes wonder myself. And Vamirati mentioned that in his talk. Do we really know how radical we are in some ways that we have the centrality of going for refuge? We've all of us said this and known this for so many years. We've had 40 years of knowing that we have the centrality of going for refuge and that the famous statement of Vamti, commitment as primary lifestyle as secondary. I think he did modify it at some point and was a bit worried that we might think that meant lifestyle was unimportant, which, of course, it doesn't mean. It means a lifestyle support in our practice, support in our commitment. But that we have actually done something quite radical. I think Vamti, his audacity, is sometimes, perhaps, not quite recognized by us because we're used to it, in a way. So that was when Pearson reflected in that back. And then somebody else, a different Buddhist teacher, who I have some connection with. The first time I met her, I was in a workshop. She was leading not a Buddhist workshop. And it was in Spain. And for second sciences, I ended up doing some translation, so I actually got to know her quite well. And she invited me to sub her head and her husband. And she was explaining who I was to her husband. And she said, Pyram is part of the Western Buddhist order. She said a few things. And he couldn't quite get us. And she said, the ones that do sangha-- [LAUGHTER] That was very interesting. That's what you mean by that. She said, well, the ones that have-- you have such a fantastic infrastructure. And I thought, that makes it sound very organizational. She said, no, no, you've got this amazing network. She said, I don't think there's anywhere else in the Buddhist world that's quite goat that network in the way you do. So they always think of you as the ones that do sangha. Right to be of something else, I had one switch. I don't even know where this came from, but somebody know a member of our community said, the Tibetan Buddhists are really good on ritual. And the Zen Buddhist are really good on meditation. And the WBO have meetings. [LAUGHTER] Now, at first, when I heard that I blissed and got, well, we do meditation, and we do ritual. And I thought, after this, actually, it's quite a savvy comment, really. And sometimes, I think, we overdo meetings. But we do do them for a reason. And just very briefly, I'd like to say that consensus, I think, is a higher spiritual practice, something that I think we're still struggling to really learn. But actually, we do have meetings for a purpose. And we do come together. And we really do try and work together in a very particular way. And that's something I'm quite interested in, is that how we do do that as we get bigger, how we stay coherent in our decision-making kind of processes in order. Anyway, so we are the ones that do sangha. And this particular person said that the original teacher, sorry, back to the meeting, I'm jumping a little bit. But I forgot to say that she also said that she thought sangha dachshta's vision of a Western Buddhist, a dhamma chari or dhamma chari, cut through much of the confusion that had gathered as Buddhism reached the West. So OK, so I'd like to talk a little bit about this meeting, the Buddhist teachers of Europe meeting. So last September, Kamala Sheila and I attended another meeting of this. And the theme this time was building sangha, building community. So there's all sorts of different sanghas present. I think there are about fair to visit this meeting. All of us, as I say, white, Western practitioners, in fact, actually, as I looked around, I realised probably all baby boomers, probably not a face under 45, probably not under 50. Well, maybe one or two, but not many. And they come from all sorts of traditions. So there's then practitioners, Chan, various Tibetan communities, the order of Buddhist contemplatives, the Amida Trust, the Awaeton Heart Sangha. So there's a whole range of sanghas there. And there were a number of presentations about how each of us in our own communities tried to build sangha and build community in what it meant. So it was very interesting, actually. I was very interested that there was quite a lot of similarities and, of course, quite a lot of differences between us and other sanghas, but also between all the different sanghas. Some live in residential communities, some don't. The ones that do live or have residential communities essential to their practice tend to be either monastic or a mixture of monastic and lean. For many people, as they spoke, what was very obvious was the importance of lineage and authority in their creation of sangha. And there was a very strong emphasis on vertical sangha in most of the communities that people had taught, and very different definitions of sangha, different parameters around what people called sangha and how broad or how narrow they would define that. But the most interesting thing for me was a meeting that we had, which was an optional-- we divided into smaller groups to discuss some things. And there was a group where we looked at mistakes that we've made, learnings and questions. And, in fact, more than half of the attendance went to that particular watch, including Kamala Sheila and I. It was very lively. We went on for hours longer than we should have done, and it got really quite sort of-- actually, it was very moving at points. Quite a few people were in tears at points, and people got a bit angry. And there were a lot of things in it. I just wanted to share a couple of things that seemed to me very interesting that came up in that group. So there's a whole series of different communities there. Everybody there had been practicing for around or over 30 years. So there were kind of some of the stories we had last night, Buddha Dasa, Vajadhaka's generation, Dhamma Dina, that generation of practitioners, coming down to Maui in generation, which is a bit behind that, of course. And so it was quite interesting that there were a lot of similarities in how we'd started things. So although there were different traditions, these are the first generation and second generation Westerners trying to pick up and run with Adama. And we did run sometimes. And one of the questions that came up was, how do you keep saying it alive after the pioneering phase is over? So that was very interesting. And in that, what was that was on pipe two is a very strong discussion of how idealistic many of those early practitioners were. Mad was another one that came up quite often. Crazy, enthusiastic. And most of us had come into Adama practice, unfettered in many ways, in the sense of a lot of us didn't have jobs. Or if we did, we were kind of willing to give them up, as we had from Buddha Dasa the other night. And lots of people didn't have families, didn't have responsibilities in a certain way. They were able to, we were able to kind of throw ourselves in. But I don't think that was the only thing. I think we also really were hungry for Dharma. And we were hungry for radical change. I think that was true of that generation. And we were hungry for radical change that would change the world, not just change ourselves. And that seemed to be a common factor in everybody who spoke. And also that that phase is over. It would seem that something different has come in. Different kind of needs seem to be there. Different demographics in the people who are currently coming along to their movements. And one thing that came up was a number of people talked about how, in their particular movements, a lot of people were leaving the monastic sanger to get married. I thought it was very interesting. And I wonder what that is about-- what is it about the baby boomers as we get on? What is it? I don't know. It's just a question. Because, of course, we have seen a similar move. No, I mean, we obviously aren't a monastic order. It's not that kind of move. But a bit of a move of people perhaps looking for something that they felt they've lacked in previous bits of their practice. So that was one thing. Another similarity or thing that struck me as very interesting was people saying that the senior teachers and their movements were overstretched and didn't know how to bring the next generation along. So that was very interesting. How to encourage younger people-- I'll say all the members for us-- younger practitioners who kind of have this sense of the earlier practitioners, know it all, or they've done it, or they've been doing it for a long time and take no lead from them, and not quite finding the initiative to sort of step into those places. And we talked about this from the point of view of how, as more senior practitioners, we could really create in our different communities an ambience where new and younger generations could step up. Actually, I think we don't do too badly with that. Compared to some of the communities that I had talked, I thought we do have a lot of people. We're a lot of initiative. And I really hope we can find ways of really that happening and keeping alive. OK, one thing that was perhaps maybe a little bit different, maybe-- maybe this is just my personal experience, but there are a number of people who said that they had seen meditation as the real thing and everything else as just kind of a bit secondary, and that as time went on, they realized that, actually, that wasn't the case. And they were now seeing community building as a practice itself, and what as a practice. And somebody quoted-- no, the camera, she wrote I, but somebody quoted sang it actually, saying, what is the tantric guru? I thought, that's good. One person from a Tibetan tradition said that he felt that great emphasis had been put on the task and not on the people. I thought it was quite interesting by which he meant-- he said he had a Tibetan teacher who had actually said to them in the '80s. People come and go, they live and die. The long term views to keep the Dharma alive. Now, he doesn't think the Tibetan teacher meant quite how some of the disciples picked up, which was that they really pushed themselves to create certain institutions and to keep those institutions running, regardless of the health and welfare of the practitioners. But it did make me think-- and he said this particular person said he was wondering as he looked back just how many casualties there had been in that approach. So again, I felt, well, maybe we've had elements of that at times. And maybe it's almost inevitable as a new religious movement, a new organization, a new community, tries to form and tries to put down routes that will last beyond the practitioners trying to set them down. But maybe there's also something in there about just really being very careful of how we are with each other. And yeah, it makes sure that we don't leave too many casualties by the side. Another area which was of great interest to me was around something to do with being Western practitioners and the kind of seemingly unhappy marriage times between authority and democracy. So again, I think is something that maybe we've had times of looking at, and we've had to question. And we talked about why there's been an overemphasis on one or other of what you might call vertical or horizontal influences. And again, I think we don't have a lack of emphasis on horizontal influence. But I wonder how clearly happy we are sometimes with vertical influence. Most of the other movements said they felt there had been an overemphasis on vertical. And one person-- this was one of the movement moments that was actually very tearful and quite moving-- was one man saying he felt that the horizontal level of friendship was completely missing from his 30 years of practice. I just find very sad, actually. And a lovely man, actually, who-- I found it quite hard to understand. But then thinking about the particular structure of his movement, his community, it is very vertical. So he has many relationships. But they're either towards his teacher or towards his disciples. And really not very much an appear level. Another thing that I thought was interesting-- I thought probably we also could say we've perhaps experienced over the years-- was a mixing of spiritual and administrative capacities. And people talked about how the people who seemed most spiritually advanced, i.e. had been at it longer, ended up holding the most responsible administrative posts or organizational posts, and often were frankly unserted to them, which did no good for the practitioner and was no in the long run very helpful for the organization. And I think we have at times maybe suffered a bit from that. I believe that the hierarchical-- that the spiritual hierarchy and the responsibility hierarchy has to be the same. And how do we work with that? Where, obviously, we need to have some verticality in our organization as well as in-- but how do we do that in a way that doesn't put people into extremely round pegs and square holes? And I think that has happened to some extent for some of the-- yeah, in the past. Somebody else talked about the lack of ongoing training for older, more senior members. And I thought that was quite funny. And Damirati touched maybe a bit in his talk this morning. You know, the people that are running the kind of courses to redeem people never had that training. Which doesn't mean that we are not capable of doing that. We've had to form that and step up to the plate, in a way. But actually, a lot of it's been done in the hoof. And it comes from practical and personal experience. And it comes from relationship with a wise, as somebody said. We've had Banti very much present for us and others. But it just seemed that that was something that was quite common to quite a lot of these communities. That some of the people who were doing the most teaching were the people who had less training. They'd had to just kind of do it. So-- and that also a lot of people felt that the senior teachers got over a busy and therefore were not much of an inspiration to some of the younger teachers. I'm sure that's not the case for us. [LAUGHTER] OK, that's just a bit of a panorama. I just wanted to share some of those reflections and that meeting, I hope, that of interest. And before I finish, I want to just say something about my own-- I don't know quite how to put this. But OK, I'll just come out. I have at times thought I'd like to be a Tibetan nun. OK, I've said that. Now, don't worry. If I are a danger, don't worry. I'm not about to leave the order and become a Tibetan nun. But I have often felt, over the years, a very strong pool towards something which is really more of an archetypal to be a Tibetan nun, actually. In fact, it's even a bit Catholic nun, to be really honest. This might come as a surprise to some of you that only know my most public persona. I actually do have a contemplative side. I do. [LAUGHTER] And I have occasionally, over the years, had a bit of a heart pang for something a bit other. And this came to a bit of a head for me in-- I think it's 2004. I was attending a watch shop, not Buddhist, but a watch shop out of Buddhist scent in California, the land of the medicine Buddha. And it was a more secular watch shop, so there wasn't a particular spiritual practice around it. But the community, the resident community, very kindly invited me to join them for practice. So I was getting up at five or five there, something. And I was walking up to the Golden Park Hill and doing a morning sit with them. And then I was attending a medicine Buddha Pudja, of which I understood nothing, because it wasn't Tibetan. But I quite enjoyed it. And they very generously invited me to sit with a sangha, and the monastic sangha, in that case, and join in this Pudja. I managed to get the mantras, but that was a bit of it. But there was something about it that actually I found deeply moving. And at one point, we had a day off in the middle of this watch shop, where we just went off and out on and had some solitary kind of reflection, kind of. I was meditating in this amazing kind of deck that had a huge quanyin on it, in one side, and a huge shittigarb on the other. And I was just sitting there meditating, and I just had this fan to say about becoming a Tibetan nun. And when I came back, I mentioned it on a retreat. I was in a heat dammer, he was a bit worried about me. But anyway, he helped me unpack, in fact, what this was. And it was quite interesting for me to unpack, because it was archetypal. It wasn't that I was interested in being a Tibetan nun. And actually, a lot of my experience with people who are practicing within Tibetan traditions is that they don't get it. It's not even that it's reality for them, what I was feeling joined towards, if you see what I mean. So it was archetypal. But anyway, what it was was robes. That is one thing. (audience laughing) I don't know why that's funny. (audience laughing) Actually, I do know why it's funny. But I couldn't saw myself swishing about. (audience laughing) And there's lovely maroon colors. But it was also something more serious. It was simplicity. That was one thing. It was something to do with not having to worry about why the Maclos had been, you know, made by young kids in a Chinese factory or something. There was an element of that. But it was also something to do, not just with the simplicity of having a robe, but the ritual aspect of that. And what it said to me was something about keeping your Buddhist practice very obvious throughout the whole day in everything that you do. And I sometimes don't know quite how we do that. I mean, we have to do it by doing it, of course. But there's something about the externalizing of that, which I can see is often just form rather than content. But the form did seem to me to say something. You know, and one of the nuns, who actually was from stiddling, up the road from Danakosha, but lived in California, she was explaining to me how they put the robe on and how every fold represents something. And how every morning as she does it, she has a particular prayer that she says as she's doing it. I want that. So now I thought that was quite interesting. I thought maybe lose something in that that I could, you know, just bring into my own life anyway. A sense of the ritual of being a Buddhist, being a, you know, a Dharma practitioner through everything, every moment in my life. Actually, I gave a talk. It's me, it's got a title called Sadhana as a way of life, where I was trying to kind of look at that a bit, how we can live as I would test through the whole day or, you know, whoever. Anyway, but the other thing that this, being a Tibetan nun said to me, was something to do with having a clearly defined body of practice. So it was in 2004. It felt quite turbulent at that point. And there was a lot of talk about practices and different kind of practices. And I'm delighted in the talk that Dhammaty's just given. And I think that was very helpful. And it wasn't that I felt particularly confused about practices. It was more that I felt there was quite a lot of confusion. And I spent a lot of time talking to people about it, which was good as Dhammaty said, 'cause it brings meditation into the fore. But I also felt a bit concerned. Well, not even concerned. I felt I just meant to a clearly defined body of practices. And I was very specific about what this clearly defined body of practices should be. It was bodhicitta. I just meant to be part of a community that cared about nothing, except the arising of the bodhicitta. That's what I wanted. Now, of course, I know that no automated practitioners cared about nothing except the arising of the bodhicitta. But for me, it was something about the fact that all of the practices that people were doing seemed to have that so very central. And even the putting on of the robe was about that. And the dedications and the prayers and everything that was done was about keeping alive every moment, every breathing moment, how to keep the bodhicitta alive. And I thought, that's what I want. So when somebody says to me, nobody does anger like the F.W.BO. I think there's truth in that. I think we have gained a lot over those 40 years. We've learned a lot, we've made mistakes. And also, we've done some really fantastic things. We've had some experiments, some have worked, some haven't worked. But we've always kept community very much to the four. And I think we gained by that. And I really hope that for the next 40 years, we keep community very much to the four. And the 40 years beyond that, and on and on and on. I really hope we do. But I would like to just really, I'd love it if what we meant by that was that we kept to the four. How do we create the conditions for the horizon of the bodhicitta? And how do we do that in every minute of our life? That's what I'd really loved to see us doing as a community. And I do believe that that is the heart of our community. I think sometimes we forget and we don't make it quite explicit enough. So nobody does anger like the F.W.BO. I don't want to move on into Rat Negosh's brief about talking about the F.W.BO. But I just went to end by saying, I wondered if we really do appreciate how radical we are. And just reminding us that radicalness, that radicality, whatever the world is, is there to help us bring the bodhicitta into the world and that that is so much what the world needs. And I'd like to end with an image, which is a redwood forest. I read some years ago about an experiment done. Apparently, you probably know this. I'm not horticultural by nature. But redwoods roots don't grow deep. They grow broad and they intertwine and they support each other. And an experiment was done in California, strangely enough, in which some vegetable dye was injected into an end of a redwood forest, huge redwood forest. And I can't remember the acreage and I can't remember how long it took. It was huge acreage in a very short time. Every tree in the forest had that vegetable dye in its roots. We like that. Things spread like poison, ivy, or spread like bushfire, or spread like redwoods. So we need to be careful in a way of what we inject into the community. On the other hand, when we do inject some good and some positive and when we inject the bodhicitta, it will rush through the community like dye through redwoods. So thank you very much. Thank you, Banti, for 40 years and many more, I hope. And I'd like to extend by dedicating any merits gained by the given of this talk to the well-being of each and every one of us as practitioners, especially Banti's health and welfare, to the harmony and unity of our community and to the well-being of the world. Thank you. [APPLAUSE] First of all, it feels like a great privilege to be asked to address this gathering of order members on this occasion of the fourth year anniversary of our founding. And it feels like a great blessing to have the founder of the order here with us today. I noticed that some of the other speakers had thought about the title for their talk. And I hadn't thought about it, but I thought about it yesterday. And I thought what I would call my talk is I'd borrow from the Christian tradition and call it a confession of faith. So I became a Buddhist in 1983. And I became a Buddhist as a result of meeting Sri Lankan monk in West Berlin. His name was the venerable Maha Damanisanti. So he was my first Buddhist teacher. And I had a very brief meeting with him. I think it was about an hour. And in the course of that meeting, he taught me the metabhavana. And he taught me about five precepts. And that was enough. That was what made me realize that I was a Buddhist. And from then on, I have been a Buddhist. And I think what I experienced from that monk was a congruency between what he was saying to me and the person, if you like, the man himself and the way he lived his life. So there was a congruency there which he represented and which was what attracted me to Buddhism. So it was meeting with, you could say, the spiritual community in the form of that Sri Lankan monk. That was the crucial turning point for me. And when I came across the F.W.B.O., about a year later, I came across the F.W.B.O. in the form of Sibouti's book Buddhism for today. And what struck me about that book was the fact that people were living and working together and trying to create the seeds of a new society. That's what inspired me and that's what drew me in. And I interpreted this yet again as a congruency between words and actions. And I think for me, at least, anything less than this sort of act of idealism would have just seemed like hypocrisy, ordinary religious hypocrisy, something that I was very familiar with from my upbringing in Catholic Ireland. So all through my involvement with the order and movement, what has been of most help to me has been the people around me. I have a great depth of gratitude to people, particularly those people who helped me and were so kind and patient with me in my first stumbling, tottering steps on the spiritual path. The first order members I met were Vajracitta and Dhanavira. And both of them befriended me right from the start and made a huge difference to me, a huge difference to my life at that time. Then there was Atala. Atala, to me, was a kind of savior, as it were. He saved me from my own failings, my own psychological problems. So Atala, I have a great depth of gratitude to you. There were many others. There was Damarati, whom I was living in community with. There was Jaya Mati, who was a Mitra convener at the LBC, who was very kind and helpful to me. Summangala, who was a very close friend from many, many years. Teja Mati, whom I worked with, and again, who was very kind to me. Teja Mati arranged my first meeting with Bante. He knew that I was very shy and wouldn't go and see Bante myself. So he arranged to go and see Bante and took me with him. So that's how my first meeting with Bante happened. So yes, many people who made a huge difference to me. There are many more than those I've mentioned. And so the Sanga, the spiritual community, in the form of those people befriending me, listening to me, exhorting me, drawing me out, being examples to me. That's what made a huge difference to me. It wasn't really, in a sense, my own practice, my own power. It was other power. It was what was coming from the Sanga. And as I have learned to walk the path under my own steam, at least to some extent, I've found that extending a helping hand to others has been a strong and transformative practice. As it were, it puts flesh on the bones of the Dharma for me. It's one of my main practices. I've never been a great meditator, but I do feel I've been able to at least help others a little bit. So the example of the lives of practitioners around me was important to me from the beginning, and it strengthened my faith in the Dharma. I had a strong faith in what was taught to me by Bante and by Sabouti through their writings, particularly about the importance of spiritual friendship, about the need to co-create the best conditions in which to experience friendship and transcend self-centredness. What was taught to me about the value of living and working together as a context for friendship and the transcendence of egotism. So I began with faith, as I say, without very much experience. But now I can honestly say, after 24 years of pretty steady application, that I have no doubts whatsoever about the truth of what Bante has always asserted, that spiritual friendship is of central importance to spiritual life, and that communities and working situations provide excellent opportunities for working on dissolving the tight knot of egotism that's often such a motivating force in so much of what we think, say, and do. So some of the institutions of the FWBO, such as communities and right livelihood businesses, have gone through difficult times probably during the past 10 years or so. And I think a lot of order members may have lost faith in the spiritual efficacy of these contexts for practice. Now, I would not want to try to persuade anyone to be involved in communities or team-based right livelihood. For me, what is paramount is what those contexts are trying to achieve. What's paramount is the spiritual friendship and the simplicity of life that those situations are trying to achieve. So the spiritual friendship I see in two senses. There's the sense of the intimate friendships between people and the sense of giving support to others outside the situation through the giving of dance, or the giving of money. So what I would want to encourage is spiritual friendship in both the sense of something quite personal and in the broader, more altruistic sense. And I think, or at least I would hope, that if sufficient numbers of order members really talk to heart the importance of spiritual friendship, the importance of spiritual friendship both, as I say, is something quite personal as an altruistic activity towards the rest of the Sangha. If sufficient numbers of order members and mitterers and so on really took to heart the importance of spiritual friendship and the dependence of such friendship on conditions, conditions which involve spending time with other people, getting to know them intimately in different situations, engaging with them in many different ways. If this is taken seriously, then I feel sure that in time, other contexts will develop that will enable and encourage spiritual friendship to flourish. In the Angutra Nikaya, the Buddha says that to really know another person, you need to live with them, you need to have dealings with them, which might be business. You need to see them cope with misfortune, and you need to have conversation with them. So that's a bit more than a weekly chat over a cup of coffee. If we really value friendship and focus on building friendships between us, then the institutions which support those friendships will grow up naturally, as they did in the past. Because they will grow out of our need and our enthusiasm. So something else which I learned quite early on from my teachers was that the Buddha insisted during the last weeks of his life that the health and well-being of the spiritual community depended on coming together frequently and in large numbers. And I've tried to practice this, or at least be part of this practice. I've found that it's become a source of great happiness, very joy to me, to engage in this practice of coming together with other members of the spiritual community. To do that, I had to resist my own natural, introverted tendency to steer clear of large numbers of people as frequently as possible. So I feel that I've come to a better understanding, I think, of what the Buddha was talking about, when he talked about coming together frequently in large numbers. And it seems to me that it goes to the heart of spiritual community. Until we meet a person and experience their presence as a living consciousness, our experience of them is necessarily subjective. We relate to them in the privacy of our own mind as an idea of a person, even a fixed idea of a person, rather than as a multi-dimensional person in all their complexity and mysteriousness. So it's essential to meet people to become more intensely aware of them, of their uniqueness and of their similarity. It's essential if we're to get any grasp on the notion of interconnectedness. It's essential to meet people and interact with them on as deep a level as possible if we're really to establish insight into the fluid, non-fixed, non-separate, interconnected nature of consciousness. Ante talks about this as vital mutual responsiveness and the third order of consciousness. I'm not sure that third order of consciousness can be experienced without frequent personal face-to-face interactions. I don't think communication via the internet would do it, or it lacks too many dimensions, I think. And even communication via Shabda is also not enough. What we need is face-to-face interaction. We need to spend time with some people on a very frequent basis, probably even on a daily or weekly basis, and establish trust, understanding, friendship, and mutual helpfulness. And then if we do that, this forms a small group, as it were, a small atom of the larger spiritual community. And when all these atoms of friendship and mutual helpfulness come together, the result can be very uplifting, approaching the third order of consciousness, an inspiring spiritual community in which we are collectively our own teacher, our own guru, an embodiment of the Dharma that inspires us to more whole-heartedness. You could say we become our own teacher, our own inspiration. I think something of this has been happening this weekend as we've listened to people recounting their experiences. Coming together and meeting people is not just about talking, either. Face-to-face interaction by that. Sometimes I mean just seeing people. Sometimes a person becomes more multidimensional to us just by the fact that we see them. We see them meditating. We see them making offerings. We see them doing prostrations. We see them just chatting with their friends. They become a more complete person to us when we see them in these contexts. We become more aware of them. And this being mutually aware is at the heart of what spiritual community is about. It's the meeting place of wisdom and compassion, where at best we can see through our own fixed self-view and its expression in selfishness and isolation. And we can also see into the world of others and begin to erode barriers as we act on our natural impulses of generosity and kindness. So the reason for attending order gatherings is to help create the order to contribute to the vital mutual responsiveness. It's an altruistic act towards each other and future generations. I say that because sometimes I've heard people saying talking about order weekends or order gatherings in terms of what they can get from it, whether it is some particular talk or teaching or something like that that they will get from it. But actually the reason for order gatherings is to create the order, is to give something, not necessarily to get anything. Of course, you do get what you give. So within this vital mutual responsiveness, this third order of consciousness, the problems of spiritual hierarchy of authority and autonomy are not problems. Spiritual hierarchy is only a problem if the spiritual community has degenerated into something less, or it's a problem for those who perceive the spiritual community as having degenerated as being a group. If we're aware of people, aware of other order members, as spiritual beings, and if we come into contact with them personally, rather than relate to an idea of them, which is simply a product of our own imagination, then we can rely on spiritual hierarchy to manifest quite naturally in the course of our interactions. It's not something fixed or static and who will be in the position of learning or who will be in the position of being receptive to new or higher perspectives, is not something that can be established by badges or labels or cases or roles. It's fluid and changing as everything is. Perhaps, to be a little paradoxical, we could say that those who are likely to be higher in the spiritual hierarchy are those who are most receptive to learning. Autonomy, autonomy, is an issue for some people. Some people experience their autonomy to make decisions about how they live as being under threat when they encounter someone speaking with confidence and authority. I know this seems to me to be often a psychological problem. It's a problem of lack of confidence or lack of self-esteem, which can manifest as feeling inferior to others. Sometimes manifest, of course, as compensating for those feelings of inferiority by acting in a superior way and being critical of others. When I say this is a psychological problem, I don't mean that in a pejorative sense, just a descriptive sense. Many of us have, at some time, a rather to overcome psychological difficulties. And this particular one, I think, is very common. It's certainly something that I've been intimately acquainted with myself. So feelings of lack of autonomy can also, I think, be an existential issue, in that our ego identity can feel threatened by our own idealistic response to the Dharma. As far as life in the F.W.B.O. is concerned, I've always felt, from my very earliest involvement, that the F.W.B.O. and its institutions were something that we were creating together, and therefore something that I could have an influence on and an input into. It seemed to meet me as a simple matter of being involved and engaged. Like playing a game, you have to be on the pitch in order to score a goal. So just being involved and engaged was enough in a way to feel that you had autonomy and you could have an effect. So from the very first week of my involvement, I threw myself into the collective work. I painted the windows of the LBC reception room. Then I helped out transcribing a seminar. And within about three months, I was working full-time at the LBC. And this all seemed quite natural to me, and it still does. I've not found any reason to curtail my involvement with the movement and its institutions. I feel that the movement and its institutions are in the process of being created all the time, and they probably always will be. I think that's probably the nature of reality. And being involved for me is just a logical extension of what I've decided to do with my life, which is committing myself to the practice and sharing of the Dharma. Although spiritual hierarchy is not, as I said, a fixed and final thing, what is more of an established fact is that some people have helped us and are helping us. And when we see this, when we recognize that we're receiving something from others, it's natural that we should experience gratitude and loyalty. Even if the situation changes and they fall from grace in our eyes, nevertheless, the fact remains that we have been helped by them. We have benefited, and it would be ungracious and even dishonest for us to dismiss or denigrate what was given to us. So loyalty to our teachers, to our preceptors, to our caliana mittres is a matter of personal integrity and natural gratitude, perhaps it's even a matter of good manners and propriety. However, it is unfortunately a well-established fact of human nature to be ungrateful and to denigrate those who've helped us. It's one of the ways in which egotism works. And that's why language tempers versus on mind training include one which says, "Even if someone I have helped and in whom I have placed my hopes does great wrong by harming me, may I see them as an excellent spiritual friend." And in the, I think it's in the Majima Mikaya, there's also a story about how the Buddha had to put up with this kind of thing. His disciple, Sanakkata, left the order because the Buddha would not perform miracles for him. And then he went around criticizing the Buddha. So although loyalty and gratitude to teachers is something quite natural, it is also quite natural for some people to be ungrateful and critical. And there's no need for us to be particularly surprised or even unhappy when it happens. So this order of ours, this order of men and women who've made a commitment to live by the Dharma and to share the fruits of that life with others, this order is a precious and fragile thing. It's not an organization or a corporation, it has no legal existence, it has no literal existence. It's a current of spiritual energy manifesting through the lives of individuals but given form and given force by the power of collective practice and the power of imagination, as in the image of the thousand armed Avalokiteshwar. It's fragile and precious like a dream, and its survival and strength depends on our individual efforts. Its survival and strength depends on our efforts to come together frequently in large numbers. Its survival and strength depends on our efforts to be aware, to be mutually aware, mutually responsive. Its survival and strength depends on our efforts to move from selfish self-interest to true self-interest. Its survival and strength depends on the frequent expression of kindness and gratitude among ourselves and beyond. And above all I'd say the survival and strength of this precious and fragile order depends on the arising of knowledge and vision of things as they really are in a substantial number of order members. We could be well organized, we could have good ordination training courses, we could come together frequently, we could be an exemplary body of people in all sorts of ways, but to really ensure our spiritual survival we need insight, we need the body heart to manifest in our midst, and then we will be able to withstand the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. We'll be able to withstand the constant blowing of the winds of materialism that would otherwise chill our hearts. I was asked to say something about the order after Bante's death. However, I think that what applies to the order after Bante's applies equally to the order now. Namely that we need to give rise to insight, bodhicitta, knowledge and vision of things as they are, whatever phrase we want to use. We need to transcend any sense of fixed separate selves, transcend our selfishness, our egotism. The order is a means to that, and in essence, at its best, it is the realization of that transcendence. Bante is a great teacher and a man of profound insights, but as it says in the Vimalakirti in addition, a Buddha land is built from living beings. A spiritual community is built from living beings, and in creating the order Bante has needed willing, cooperative, energetic and capable beings. And if we are to continue to build our Buddha land, continue to create the order, we need to be willing, cooperative, energetic and capable. And we need to be welcoming all those willing, cooperative, energetic and capable beings who will want to be part of our order as the years and generations go by. Bante has already given us a legacy of teachings, which is vast and deep. And buried within those teachings, there are many treasures. We could call them termas to be unearthed by future generations and given life and form. We as an order and movement are very young, a speck on the radar of time. There is scope for developments beyond our current achievements and even beyond our current imagination. But to come back to the present, I'm going to leave the last word with Bante, which seems appropriate on this occasion of our 40th anniversary with Bante present. At the end of the first chapter of "What is the Sangha", Bante says this. "There is no future for Buddhism without a truly united and committed spiritual community dedicated to practicing together. And when Buddhists do come together in the true spirit of Sangha, there is then the possibility of inhabiting, for a while at least, the Dharma Datu, the realm of the Dharma. In this realm, all we do is practice the Dharma. All we talk about is the Dharma. And when we are still and silent, we enjoy the Dharma in stillness and silence together. The clouds of stress and anxiety that so often hang over mundane life are dispersed, and the fountains of inspiration within our hearts are renewed." Thank you. [Applause] We hope you enjoyed this week's podcast. Please help us keep this free. Make a contribution at FreeBuddhist.io.com/donate. And thank you. [Music] [Applause]
