Our FBA Dharmabyte today is from one of the founders of the San Francisco Buddhist Center. In this excerpt from and#8220;The Individual, the Group and the Spiritual Communityand#8221; Karunadevi explores the dangers and benefits of practicing within a sangha using the Buddhaand#8217;s teaching on the mental fetters and various commentaries by Sangahrakshita.
Dharmabytes from free buddhist audio
The Spiritual Community
[music] Dharma Bites 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. Bhai Banti, where he was outlining one of the lectures, where he was outlining the individual and the group. And it was at a very pivotal time in my spiritual life. I had been an unaffiliated Buddhist for eight years before I found the FWABO. And I had several friends who were spiritual friends and mentors. And I looked to them for guidance and pointers on the path. We were all inspired by the writings of Lama Gavinda. And a couple of those friends had personal contact with him before he died. He was living in California at that time in Mill Valley. But he was German, and he started up a group in Germany years before. But in the late '70s, '80s, when he was living here in California, he felt that his followers really weren't ready for a group. They weren't ready to have an organized group. And his feeling was that being a part of a group would not be helpful and would hinder the spiritual progress of his followers. My friends agreed with that. And when I told them about the FWABO after I had found out about it, they were pretty skeptical and discouraging. One of them said, actually, that the last thing the Bay Area needs is another so-called spiritual McDonald's franchise. That's a strong way they felt about it, too. Because I'd already started a little small meditation group found in Palo Alto. So anyway, I went to New Hampshire in August of 1988 to check out the FWABO close up. I went to Ari Loca Retreat Center there, and I was there for three weeks. One of the first few days I was there, there was another visiting order member there who was leading facilitating the study on Bontese lectures, taped lectures. And so this was one of the first tapes, probably the first tape, I think, that we studied that morning. And I was just blown away by it because here was a teacher who had taken the risk of starting up a group and was warning his followers that it was dangerous. And that we had to stay awake and keep it new and fresh and dynamic. So I was very impressed with this idea of a group as a practice, and obviously I'm still here to tell them to. 19 years later. So the Buddha's teaching is concerned with the individual alone and the individual association with others. His Dharma shows individuals how to grow, how to develop awareness, how to develop emotional positivity, and to live spontaneously and creatively, and how to be responsible. The Buddha, of course, was a true individual in the highest sense and enlightened individual. And the Buddha realized that he had to go forth from the group. He realized that he had to go forth from his family and material pleasures that he was experiencing in the palace where he was living because he saw that people were suffering. And he felt compelled to find the solution to this problem of perpetual human suffering. So he became a spiritual seeker, a wanderer, and he was eventually able to see the truth. Sangharakshita says that from that moment when the Buddha saw the truth, we may say that the power of the group was diminished and the power of the gravitational pull of conditioned existence was diminished. He has the Buddha saw the cycle of birth and death, and he saw the conditioned stages of suffering, and he saw a way out. Sangharakshita says there is only a spiritual solution to the problem of the imbalance between the individual and the group. It is the philosophy, the perspective, and the actions of the individual that must change. And then the spiritual community can be possible. So what is the spiritual community and how is it different from the group? So the spiritual community is not a group in that same sense. It is not an organization, it has no center. It is a gathering of friends who are individuals. The purposes of the spiritual community are very different from those of the group. They are twofold. Its members help one another to develop spiritually, and they help others outside the community to develop their individuality. They have individuals in this community have regular personal contact with one another. They have a common spiritual ideal and a common means of realizing that aim. They are walking in the same direction on the same path. So this is what going for refuge is about, going for refuge to the three jewels, which is the Buddha or the ideal of enlightenment. The Dharma, the path of the Buddhist teaching, or the truth we could say. And then the spiritual community itself is the third jewel. So the spiritual community cannot be a group because we cannot go for refuge to a group. The individuals within the community are friends in the sense that they are all going for refuge. And they may also like each other, but they especially, and they definitely like what the others in the community like. And that is the Dharma, they are drawn to the Dharma. So without friendship of this kind, the spiritual community would not exist. Spiritual friendship is the whole of the spiritual life, said the Buddha. But I am not going to say anything more about friendship because our next series, in a few weeks, will be spending six weeks on looking at what spiritual friendship is. So when the spiritual community becomes too large, some direction to says it starts to feel the gravitational pull of the group and it tends to take on those characteristics. As it does, it degenerates. And we've seen this in religious groups, time and time again, with the degeneration, institutionalization of what started out as a small collection of gathering of people. So he says that you can't have a worldwide spiritual community. It's interesting because we have a worldwide order called the Western Buddhist Order. But there's no centralization to this worldwide community. It consists of small communities around the world. It has no central core or organization to it really. It's a network of friends whose center is wherever a group of order members gathers. Okay, now coming to the end here, I want to look just a moment at our relationship to this positive group that we're involved with to a greater or lesser extent right here, the San Francisco Buddhist Center, is a positive group, which is moving in the direction of a spiritual community. We hope you enjoyed today's Dharma Bite. Please help us keep this free. Make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donny. And thank you. 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