In todayand#8217;s FBA Dharmabyte, Paramabandhu offers us ways of and#8220;Creating Spiritual Friendship.and#8221; Includes a reading of the lovely poem on compassion titled The Unseen Flower by Sangharakshita.
Talk given at Padmaloka Retreat Centre, May 2001
[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. [music] So I'll go through those one by one. The first few are mostly in a way to do with starting friendships, how one goes about starting friendship. And then the ones after that are more about developing friendship and maintaining friendship. So the first one is take the initiative and take an interest. It seems to me that's very important that we take initiative if we want to be effective in terms of developing friendship. Something I remember from my pre-buddhist days, my first year at university, I was particularly drawn to a group of people who were in my year in the college. And one person in particular is a guy called Jeremy who I was sort of attracted to as a very talented person. And so I just kept going along to, you know, hanging out with that group of people in a way. And I suppose in a way taking an interest in some of those people, including Jeremy. And in the second year, I remember Jeremy made a comment about the fact that he was a friend of mine or that we were friends. And I was surprised because it sort of hadn't expected it. And it's what I wanted. But I almost hadn't dared hope that he and I would become friends. You know, he just seemed such a much more talented, charismatic or, you know, he just seemed to have lots of qualities. You know, that I didn't have them, that it just seemed unlikely that we would become friends. But it seemed to me as sort of reflecting, you know, back on it, it largely had come about just simply because I wanted to become a friend of his. I just kept taking an interest in him. I think it's unlikely that you're going to develop friendship if you don't take initiative. It's insufficient to wait around for other people to come and, you know, make friends with you as it were. You have to do the running. Perhaps especially with order members, you need to do the running as it were. So even if you're a shy person, I know a lot of people feel shy, they lack self-confidence. But I think it's just terribly important just to try and overcome that in whatever way you can and take some initiative. You know, it's actually true for everything. You know, it is our life. If we want something, we have to do it. If we wait for things to be provided to us, well, we probably just end up feeling resentful. And certainly the case with friendship, we need to go out to other people. And, you know, again, particularly, you know, again with sort of order members. I mean, very, very occasionally sometimes you can be in order and get the experience of feeling being seen as sort of a friendship machine or a friendship providing machine. But actually, we're just human beings trying to go for refuge to the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha, just as you're trying to go for refuge to the Buddhist, Dharma and the Sangha. So we need to take the initiative and particularly by taking an intro. If you don't take an interest in the other person, well, again, I don't think friendship's going to happen. I don't know if you've ever had the experience of being with someone where you just feel they're not really interested in you. And you sort of think, well, I'd quite like to just sort of have a little cardboard cutter. I could just park here and I'll come back later. So, you know, we need to try and take an interest in the other person. So that's my first point. Take initiative, take an interest in the person. My second point is don't expect friendship. It is sort of a counterpart to this taking the initiative. When I was thinking about this talk, I was reminded of a poem about compassion by Bante. The poem is called The Unseen Sun. I just need to read that because I think although it's about compassion, I think it applies very much to friendship in a way. So it goes, compassion is far more than emotion. It is something that springs up in the emptiness which is when you yourself are not there. So that you do not know anything about it. Nobody, in fact, knows anything about it. If they knew it, it would not be compassion. But they can only smell the scent of the unseen flower that blooms in the heart of the void. In a way, I think friendships are a bit like that. It's like if you go trying to grasp after it, then you won't find it. It's something that sort of blooms mysteriously, almost like if you're not actually looking for it. So we need to take the initiative. We need to take an interest in other people, but not expect anything back. Certainly not expect that friendship is going to happen. It may well happen, and in my experience it often does happen. But we can't necessarily expect it to happen. If there's a very strong wanting friendship, well that will tend to put people off. In a way, all we can do is set up the condition in which friendship may bloom. But again, it's a bit like you're growing something. You can't keep pulling up the thing to see if the roots are growing. It just doesn't work. And in a way, a related thing to that is that friendship takes time. Friendship is really the work of years rather than weeks or months. It takes a long time, I think, for friendship really to mature. In a way, I think one can think of friendship as prolonged mutual meta. So it's meta. We can start developing meta right away. We can start being friendly to people right away, but it needs to be prolonged and mutual before friendship can really bloom, really happen. So we have to have this balance between these first two points. On the one hand, taking the initiative, taking the interest in other people, but on the other hand, not expecting friendship necessarily to happen. In a way, taking the initiative, but holding that lightly. I think it's very important. It's sort of I sometimes feel my general motto about things is "hold them lightly." But it's certainly true in terms of pursuing friendship. We hope you enjoyed today's Dharma Bite. Please help us keep this free. Make a contribution at freebuddhistaudio.com/donate. And thank you. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [BLANK_AUDIO]
