In todayand#8217;s FBA Dharmabyte, Satyaraja beautifully describes the need for and#8220;Ksanti in Sangha.and#8221; Ksanti, translated as and#8216;patienceand#8217; and is especially called for when encountering differing views on living a spiritual life.
From the talk and#8220;Ksanti and#8211; Patienceand#8221; given on Sangha Night at Stockholms Buddhistcenter, 8 February 2010, the theme for the spring session being practicing the Dharma with concern for others.
[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. Okay, so in our Buddhist order and movement, there's this strong emphasis on sanga, and on working together to create sanga and to spread the Dharma. And when you work closely together, it's very testing. And the reason it's testing is not just that people have different views, but they care very deeply about what they're doing. Everybody in the sanga cares very deeply about the sanga, but very often they want to do things differently. And so there's a lot of emotion involved, a lot of energy involved. And as I said, when we get to know people, when we practice sanga together, we come more strongly into relationship with others. And when that happens, difficulties, differences of approach, personality clashes will arise. And in normal friendships, friendships outside the sanga, we probably just give up on them. And we'd walk away, we'd go and find some other friends. Trouble is in the sanga, they're not going to go away. The people in this room, some of you, you're going to be with each other for the rest of your lives. You're going to be coming to the center, you're going to be getting on retreat together. So we have to do something to actually change that, to come into harmony with them. That draws more out of us, so it's quite a potent practice creating sanga. So our ideals are touched as deeply. And if we stay with it, it tests our matter, tests our practice of shanty and forces us to take in other points of view, other ways of doing things, and broaden out, and not cling so tightly to our own separate selfhood, our own sense of ourself as isolated from others, our cramped little ego identity, which we've all got, which limits us and restricts us. So in the end, shanty, working closely with others to spread the dharma, comes to be an insight practice. It's a practice through which we begin to transcend self and other. We begin to go beyond ourselves in our own views and become receptive to others' views. And in that way we start to approach insight, we start to break down the distinction between self and other. And I was very struck at an order convention last summer when around 400 order members came together. And there's some very strong and divergent views in our order about what the order is and how best to practice. And I've come to realise it's always going to be like that. There are always going to be debates going on. There are always going to be differences of opinion. And that's a good thing, you know, because it's part of the creativity of the order. And if everybody just agreed, if everybody had the same view, then it wouldn't be a dynamic order, it wouldn't be a creative order. So there's this natural difference of opinion. And we can't do anything to stop the difference of opinion, and it'll be a bad thing to do so. You know, people are going to clash, they're all going to have different views on things. But what we can do is we can practice kashanti, we can practice tolerance in relation to other people's views. And we can practice meta towards them, even when we disagree with them. And what struck me most about that convention last summer was that you could have 400 people together holding a whole range of views, but they could meet together in harmony and in a spirit of meta. So for me, that really gave me confidence in the order. Not everybody thought the same, but that people could feel differently and still meet in harmony. And I know some of us were here, were there for that convention. We hope you enjoyed today's Darmabite. Please help us keep this free. Make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. And thank you. [BLANK_AUDIO]
