My talk tonight covers the following themes: Who or what is the sangha, what is life like without Sangha, what life is like with Sangha? How we can build Sangha, and how much we should really value the Sangha
Let us jump into the first theme, and establish who exactly the Sangha is, (at least for the purposes of this talk).
According to that amazing encyclopedia in the Sky that is Wikipedia, it is: “The community of those who have attained enlightenment, who may help a practicing Buddhist to do the same. Also used more broadly to refer to the community of practicing Buddhists, or the community of Buddhist monks and nuns.”
So to keep the scope of this talk focussed, I am excluding the first half of the definition, which is enlightened teachers.
I am really talking about the practicing Buddhists that we meet at the LBC, or on retreat. So this would include order members, mitras, and anyone else who is practising at some level, which would include many regulars.
I know some pedants would object to this definition. Again from Wikipedia “Some lay practitioners in the West these days use the word “Sangha” as a collective term for all Buddhists, but the Pali Canon uses the word parisā (Sanskrit, parisad) for the larger Buddhist community — the monks, nuns, lay men, and lay women who have taken the Three Refuges — reserving ‘Sangha’ for a more restricted use.”
So that is how it is used in the Pali Canon, but if you spend any time at all down the LBC, it is used more broadly, to include all practising Buddhists. And it is the latter, broader definition that I am going to be talking about tonight.
The Sangha started by the Buddha calling people bhikkhus. Then the whole vinaya started to build up as rules were added one by one, just like a legal system is built up by caselaw. Then there were the lay followers, and the benefactors who provided food.
Our modern day LBC sangha differs a lot from the ancient Bhikkhu sangha, but I am sure there are many parallels, from the positive support and warmth of kalyana mitrata, to potential negatives of power struggles, hypocricy, showing off, and other group dynamics.
However the positives far outweigh the negatives as I hope to demonstrate in the rest of this talk.
So now I have defined the word Sangha, at least for this talk, my second theme tonight is to talk about my experience of life without Sangha.
I honestly think the sangha is the lifeblood of Triratna, and also any other effective spiritual group.
There have been times in my life I have been away from this, and it has had a severe effect on my practice, and connection to the other two jewels.
One example of this was a period of a few years of my life in the early 90s when I lived in Peterborough, away from any Buddhist Centre. There was no Triratna group there at that time, and I do not think there was a Buddhist group either.
I designated a room as a shrine room, and meditated there and listened to taped dharma talks. But I did find it a struggle to stay inspired, as I was surrounded by non sangha. My meditations became a bit of a struggle, and I started to question the importance of them. My spiritual quest all seemed a bit less relevant to anything, and I got sucked into thinking about work a lot, which always had an element of anxiety. I was the financial controller in the head office of a group of potato factories, and I had a scary boss who sometimes used to yell at me.
So I always had this underlying fear that things would go wrong, eg the accounts I was responsible for would be late, or have a big mistake in them, and I would get yelled at. To avoid this I used to work harder and faster, which put me under more stress. But I always seemed to have a base level of stress and anxiety that always seemed to be there, except once a twice a year when I went away on holiday.
I just mention this, as it is how a lot of people live in our society, and it is the opposite of the sangha experience. So by contemplating what a horrible time it was, just makes me really realise what a beautiful experience the sangha is.
Since there was no Buddhist group, I remember going along to the Quakers a few times, as that seemed to attract nice spiritual people. I actually went to a Quaker retreat in Birmingham. One of the sessions, the leaders said “and now we are going to meditate like the Buddhists do, we are just going to add a stage onto the end”, and they lead us through a 6 stage metta bhavana practice, with the extra stage at the end being metta towards God. My general experience at that retreat was pretty similar to a Triratna beginners retreat.
I also joined a mens group. It seemed quite a weird thing to do as I do really enjoy the company of women. But the mens group did allow me to be more myself, and share deeper parts of myself than would have been possible if there were women there. I kept on trying to turn it into a spiritual group, and talk about spiritual things. But mostly the others were not interested.
So these were examples of the opposite of sangha, and groups which were a bit like sangha. I can remember at that time, I kept on having a recurring desire to have more connection to a real sangha.
I used to have fantasies about packing in my job and going to live in a Buddhist community somewhere in the countryside. It seemed a really attractive option. Although I had done things like that a decade before,after that I had been unemployed for about a year, despite trying really hard to find a job up and down the country and I felt it was too risky to sabotage my career even further.
As well as this, there is at least one example of a Triratna sangha going a bit off the rails into the realm of power trips, and phony holy zealots. Aryatara springs to mind. On page 26 of “The Triratna Story”, Vishvapani is quoted as saying “The sometimes vicious bullying was masked for perpetrators and victims alike by the idea that criticism or fierce friendship was a form of spiritual practice”. A good friend of mine used to live there. Almost thirty years later he still moans and complains about it, and has even just written an academic paper about it.
So that is what life is like without the sangha.
How about what life is like with the sangha? That is my fourth theme for tonight.
I remember how I felt the first time I walked into the LBC. I really felt that this was a place where people liked me just the way I am. That I don’t have to put on an act, and pretend to be someone else. A place where I could let go of my feelings of unworthiness, and feel lovable and loved. I got very addicted to it, and went there a lot.
It felt like a very magical place. A very healing place. The like of which I had never experienced before. It was not the place that was magical, of course. It was the sangha.
I sometimes meet new people at the LBC or the Hertford Buddhist Group. I wonder if they feel the same thing that I felt the first time I went. I think they often do. I can often see in their eyes that they experiencing something very positive. But often their rational mind is fighting back and processing it into data that it can deal with.
I remember dragging a non Buddhist friend to the Sydney Triratna Centre, and he had a short conversation with an order member there. Afterwards he told me that during the conversation, he had the experience of being loved, that was more intense than anything he could remember in recent times, apart from with his girlfriend. Those were his words. But they do capture something of the experience of the sangha.
Talking of girlfriends. Yes of course, they can be amazing, but also there can be incredible pain and loneliness if you split up. Or if you don’t split up, then there can be other negatives such as having to fulfil some of their demands and desires. With friends in the sangha, you get some of the same positives, but not the same negatives. They might move away, or stop being part of the sangha, but you can still be friends with them if you want. Plus you will still have all your other friends in the sangha.
It is a different kettle of fish if you have a girlfriend in the sangha. I know someone who did this, and then split up, and he avoided going to the centre for the next 6 months, as she was always there. Caveat sangha girlfriend.
In our culture, the trend is to have a stressful job where we are pushed to work harder and faster, and where people are angry at us. At the same time, family ties are breaking down, and we are often isolated. Stuck at home watching TV as a way of dulling our consciousness, and forward winding the evening till bedtime. Monday morning is excruciatingly painful, and we somehow have to survive, till the most blissful time of the week, Friday evening, when we can forget about work. But the more we cling to the weekend, the more insubstantial it becomes, as it quickly dissolves and dribbles away into Sunday evening. Just like the accelerated end of a life in the deva realm.
We may grab a bit of companionship and friendship inbetween with our friends and family. But they tend to be unreliable at best. Good friends and family end up getting married, and then end up too busy to have any contact with you other than superficial and occasional. And maybe these people end up making demands of us, so that they are just another source of stress.
This is when we need to go to the sangha and relax, and connect with our spiritual friends.
Apart from the healing, and positive social side of the sangha, it does of course have many other benefits. This dharma study group is part of sangha. And through it we learn to engage with inspiring and wise Buddhist minds, and to uncover our own wisdom, and see things from a deeper place.
Rather than passively listen to or read a talk, we discuss our own thoughts, and then prepare projects. We are learning to communicate our own thoughts and our own wisdoms. This makes the insights our own rather than just intellectual learnings. In other words, it helps us connect with the jewel of the dharma.
It also helps us connect with the jewel of the Buddha, by really allowing us to process the Buddha’s words together in depth, and to experience the shared ideal of enlightenment.
Another aspect of sangha is going on retreat, which is like dharma study on steroids. The whole process is a lot deeper.
I went to a mens’ event last Summer, where Vedanya gave a talk about the importance of sangha. He also talked about how important it was for us to build sangha.
That is my fifth theme. Building Sangha.
I had honestly not really thought about this before I heard Vedanya’s talk. I just thought sangha was something that other people had already established. Other people had set up the LBC, and retreat centres. All we had to do was turn up for a bit, make a financial contribution now and again, and consume a bit of sangha for a while, and then go home again.
Yes of course, we can just do that if we want. But wouldn’t it be an amazing thing if we could actually help build sangha so that other people could experience this too.
The Hertford Buddhist Group is a small Triratna group near me that I had been to a couple of times over a two year period. I had dismissed it as a beginners group, and of no real interest to me.
But after Vedanya’s talk I thought it would be a great vehicle through which I could help build sangha. At the same time, I could also take some of the burden off Rob. He is the person who had been running it almost singlehandedly over the last few years.
The end result is that I get to lead it about once a month. Sometimes we get up to 14 people. Most of the people always say that they are not Buddhists, but they just like meditation. That is fair enough, I used to say the same thing. But I do feel it is very important for these people to have this little experience of the Triratna sangha, however imperfect it is. I know our tiny Buddhist group is an imperfect and hollow imitation of the LBC, so I am encouraging them to come to the source.
I know it is possible to get intoxicated with a guru complex, and think look at me, aren’t I special leading this class? And maybe that is part of my experience. And I have learned to enjoy being visible, and the centre of attention. But I believe the biggest part of my motivation is just helping these people have the same experience of sangha that I first had when I walked into the LBC. If you ever get the chance to do something like that, I would thoroughly recommend it. I also know that if I ever find myself away from a Triratna centre again, I will just create a mini sangha like the Hertford Group, now I know how easy it is, and how much people really need it.
In conclusion, I will close with a thought about how much or little we should really value the Sangha.
According to the Tiratna Vandana, the Sangha is “worthy of worship, worthy of hospitality, worthy of offerings, worthy of salutation with folded hands, an incomparable source of goodness to the world”
Obviously this is not talking about the broader community of practicing LBC Buddhists like me, who can be a bit half hearted sometimes. It is talking here about those who are really practicing at the highest level, who really act as a massive inspiration, and who keep the flame of the Buddha’s teaching alive.
Yes, they are worthy of all these things and much more.
Our world is full of comfort, greed, existential emptiness and angst. What it needs more than anything is “an incomparable source of goodness to the world”. We need a twenty first century source of goodness to speak to our modern society. An ancient source will not be heard in this digital, short soundbyte culture.
If we cannot be an incomparable source of goodness to the world ourselves, then at least we can be part of the broader community that helps support this source, and helps it spread out into the world.
That is really what Triratna is all about. Concentrentic circles of various levels of practice. Let us move towards the centre together!
The end