A high degree of commonality
A talk by Dhammarati, at the Men’s Order Weekend, Padmaloka, May 2014
THE THEME OF THE ORDER WEEKEND is ‘Insight in the Order’. I want to leave the ‘Insight’ part of that mainly to Kamalasila and Tejananda, who’ll be speaking over the next couple of days, and I wanted to focus more on the ‘Order’. In particular, I wanted to talk about the paper that’s recently been circulated, ‘Ensuring A High Degree Of Commonality Of Practices And Teachings’, which we’ll be discussing over the next couple of days.
Bhante, in his preface to the paper, makes the point, rather a poignant one, that he doesn’t have much longer to live. When you see Bhante at Adhisthana, taking his walk every morning at 11am, usually with Buddhadasa, walking from his cottage, by the side of the pond, and having a little sit-down on the bench; it’s clear that we’re seeing someone coming towards the end of his life. I hope that it’s a while yet, but that’s a moment that Bhante has been preparing for, and preparing us for, for some time. As he says in the preface, the Order ‘will soon be without the benefit of his leadership and guidance’. He’s a little wry about it: he goes on: ‘Order members are by no means unaware of this impending development’.
As Subhuti says in the paper, Bhante ‘has for so long been our ultimate source of unity, not merely symbolically but through his active guidance.’ We’re approaching the the most significant transition that the Order and Movement have been though, where Bhante will no longer be able to play that unifying role, and where the responsibility for that unity will pass to us, to the next generation of the order. ‘His departure will require a new response from us all if we are to remain united.’
What is the response that’s required of us? What are the conditions that make sure we remain united? This is something that Bhante has been giving thought to for years. Bhante described the 2009 paper as ‘in some ways a refounding of the order’, a clarification of fundamentals on which the unity of the order depended.
One of the most fundamental points Bhante made in that paper was to describe the order as ‘the community of his disciples, and the disciples of his disciples, practicing in accordance with his particular presentation of the Dharma’. I know some order members for whom the language of discipleship raises some questions. As Vishvapani says in his recent blogpost: ‘Those like me who are members of the Triratna Buddhist Order need to explore what discipleship means for us’. I wanted to go back to the paper, because Bhante is quite specific, in some ways at least, about what he means by discipleship. He talks about it in ways what have quite practical implications for us as individual practitioners; he also talks about it in relation to us us as a community.
In terms of individual practice, he says:
‘My attitude is a quite traditional one. My approach stems from the nature of spiritual life itself. For commitment to be strong it has, in a sense, to be narrow. It is only through intensity of commitment and practice that you achieve any results. You will not achieve that intensity if you try to follow different teachers and their different teachings and practices, at the same time.
You need to follow a particular set of teachings and practices within a particular framework under a particular teacher in order to experience any real progress.’
Then Bhante goes on to talk about the conditions for an effective spiritual community:
‘…the Dharma needs to be made specific to a particular Sangha. It needs to hang together, doctrinally and methodologically, if it is to be the basis of a Sangha or order. Everybody needs to be following the same founding teacher, be guided by the same doctrinal understanding of the Dharma, and undertaking broadly the same set of practices.’. And he makes a practical point:
‘If they do not do that they will not have sufficient in common to be an effective Sangha and will not be able to make progress together on the Path.’
This idea of the order as a community of disciples isn’t an arbitrary one: it’s recognising that ‘progress together on the Path’ is made more practical in a community if there’s a shared understanding of the Dharma, and broadly the same set of shared practices.
That approach, Bhante says, is ‘a quite traditional one’. In the Cetokhila Sutta, for example, the Buddha talks about the conditions that are needed for growth to be possible. It starts on very familiar ground: you need confidence in the ‘Teacher’, the Dharma, and the Sangha. But then the sutta takes an interesting next step. For growth to be possible, the sutta says, as well as confidence in the Dharma, you need confidence in the Training, the sikhaya, the specific practices that you do. As well as confidence in the Sangha, for growth to be possible, you need to have good relationships with your ‘companions in the spiritual life’; not just the Sangha in the abstract, but supportive, deep relationships with the people you actually practice with.
When we were discussing the sutta on the preceptors retreat in February, the connection was made between the point the Cetokhila Sutta is making, and the ‘Inner’ refuges of the Tibetan tradition, where the Buddha, Dharma and Sangha are reflected at a more personal level in the Guru, Yidam and Dakini: our personal Teacher, the practice we commit to, and the relationships that inspire and support us. That idea, of the dharma being made specific to a specific sangha, has roots in the tradition.
The problem that it is trying to address isn’t an imaginary one, as I learned from a friend of mine from another Buddhist tradition, where there have been some problematic developments since the death of their founder. Each centre in their community, and the teacher responsible for each centre, is completely autonomous. They don’t have any formal connections to other centres or to their peers; each teacher only has a responsibility to their own teacher. After the death of their teacher, there was nothing to stop the different centres in their community gradually drifting apart. My friend was saying that he’s watched a little change happening to the liturgy at one centre; a little change to how they practice at another. And he’s seeing what began as a single community gradually diverging, to a point where people from one entre can no longer engage as easily with people from another one. Nothing dramatic, no big schisms, just centres in the same community drifting apart in the absence of a framework to hold them together. His remedy, by the way, is a simple one, but one that would mean quite a shift in their culture: he hopes that in future, when such changes happen, people will bear in mind not just their own centres, but the wider community as a whole.
So, Bhante argues that the order needs a ‘high degree of commonality’ if it’s to stay unified. But that need for commonality creates a possible problem, that Subhuti puts very well in the recent paper:
‘how do we maintain a high degree of commonality, while remaining open to the development and evolution of our overall system? How do we make sure that any new approaches are faithful to the spirit of the order, and have some kind of collective acceptance, while allowing for creative and useful innovation and development?
In 2009, Bhante raised this issue quite explicitly, and said the college, in dialogue with the rest of the order, needed to figure out a mechanism for this. But in 2009 I’m not sure we were in a position to respond. Since then, the papers from Bhante and Subhuti which have clarified the fundamentals of our system of practice; and the Area and International Councils give us a framework for such discussion within the whole order and movement. We’re at a point where we can come back to the question of ‘how do we maintain a high degree of commonality, while remaining open to the development and evolution of our overall system?
Insight and the System of Practice
We’ve spent a lot of time in the last couple of years talking about that ‘overall system’. It’s worth remembering that, right from the start, Bhante defined the system in a broad way:
The system is not meant to be a rigid system, with carefully defined boundaries. Each stage is meant to cover a vast range of experience and practices… For example in the second stage, the stage of positive emotion, there can be joy, ecstasy, bliss, compassion: everything that’s of an emotionally positive nature, from ordinary positivity to sublime spiritual experience. One shouldn’t think of these stages in too narrow a sense… Sangharakshita, A System of Meditation, 1979
In the 1978 seminar when Bhante first talked about the ‘Five great Stages of the Spiritual Life’, a precursor to the ‘System of Meditation’ lecture the following year, he explicitly linked the five stages to the five spiritual faculties, those fundamental elements of the experience of awakening. If we understand that connection, we can see that the system isn’t meant as a narrow, arbitrary selection of practices, but as the practical ways that we as a community are developing the essential elements of spiritual experience.
This is a very rich way of thinking about, and describing spiritual experience. In the February Shabda, Moksananda wrote an article called ‘Bringing Spiritual Death to Life’. The article was sparked off by what Moksananda saw as a move in the Order as ‘into a more explicit exploration of vipashyana… and a willingness to talk about what that really means and our own exploration of it’. He goes on: ‘Spiritual Death needs to include all 5 aspects of this system’. That approach ‘… offers us a shared language and perspective on the Dharma life, and preserves and uncovers the richness of the Dharma in its many facets’. Moksananda’s article does a great job of ‘uncovering the richness’ of the experience of Spiritual Death, so I want just to quote some of the points he makes.
‘As integration, we could describe Spiritual Death as… letting go of prapancha and being willing to come back to direct experience, mindful of whatever arises within experience as being characterised by the 3 laksanas and especially anatta… As Sangharakshita puts it in Crossing the Stream: “Constant mindfulness of emptiness is the secret of success in the spiritual life. (…) The remembrance of emptiness, far from decreasing one’s power of spiritual activity, increases it enormously. It becomes easy, effortless, spontaneous, full of joy. Because the obstacle to activity, which is the self, has been removed.” ’
Drawing on an important strand of Bhante’s thinking, he writes:
‘Likewise, the stage of Spiritual Death in its fullness is also experienced as positive emotion… It also of course involves contacting maitri and the other brahma viharas and acting from them, even serving them. Spiritual Death is not different from the practice of ethics and the ten precepts. It has to move into the actual business of living and become self-transcending in the sense of action that comes out of a sense of increasingly unbreakable empathy with ‘others’… Again in Crossing the Stream Sangharakshita wrote: “It may, in fact, even be said that the criterion of our having truly understood the illusoriness of the ego-conception is whether or not we are able to feel for the sufferings of others that ‘painless sympathy with pain’ which is, according to Buddhist teaching, the natural and spontaneous outward expression of all true spiritual attainment.” ’
I found Moksananda’s descrition of Spiritual Death, approached from the point of view of Spiritual Receptivity very evocative: For some order members, he says:
looking at the belief in a separate self may take place within the context of a strong practice of connecting with a Buddha or Bodhisattva and reciting their mantra — we may come to see the truth of annata through experiencing and reflecting on body and mind as being completely and utterly made up of the purifying nectar of Vajrasattva… It may be that the most meaningful way for some people to talk about the stage of Spiritual Death is as a direct experience of the ‘yidam’, unmediated by ideas, and as a giving up of ‘self’. Seeing the emptiness of ‘self’ may come about through much more of an actual felt dissolution of self in the presence of Reality.
Moksananda’s paper goes on to look at Spiritual Death from the perspectives of Spiritual Rebirth, and Spiritual Death itself, ‘seeing directly and for ourselves the illusion of self, and not just once but coming back again and again to that direct, immediate perception of self as a construct’. I could quote more, but maybe it’s enough to refer you to the article itself. It gives a real sense of how the system of practice can help draw out the richness of the nature of ‘Insight’ more fully than the more familiar conceptual language sometimes does.
Continuity and creativity
Though the system of practice is a flexible one (‘In principle, there is probably hardly any practice from the Buddhist tradition that cannot be accommodated in our system…) Bhante has tended to advise ‘more and more of less and less’
I’ve always emphasised going more deeply into what one has, rather than trying to accumulate a whole array of practices. What we’ve already got is, broadly speaking, sufficient. We’ve got Mindfulness of Breathing and Mettabhavana, we’ve got awareness in general, the Four Satipatthanas, the Four Brahmaviharas, the preliminary practices, the Six Element practice, and so forth. There is so much there to be got on with. I think some people want something new without having a full acquaintance with what already is available.
How do we go more deeply into what we have? At Adhisthana recently, we had two Colloquia, looking at how people were practicing in two areas: Mindfulness, and Spiritual Death. On the Mindfulness Colloquium, Vishvapani was leading us through a meditation practice; and at the end of the practice, there was a dialogue, helping people to clarify and articulate what their meditation experience had been like. It was done very carefully and intelligently, and it was interesting watching in how the dialogue supported the experience going deeper. One of the points that Vishvapani made on the Colloqium was that, if we think about practice going deeper, if we’re not careful we can tend to think about that in terms of new practices, in terms of new content. Vishvapani pointed out that, for a community that puts a value on ‘a high degree of commonality’ then new practices are inherently problematic. The real task is to build the skills, the intensity of engagement with the whole practice of spiritual life, the dialogue with other practitioners, that support going deeper into those fundamental elements, like awareness, empathy, receptivity.
So to come back to the question Subhuti poses in the paper: how do we, on the one hand, take seriously this need for a community to share a high degree of commonality of practice; and at the same time find a way of keeping our own practice alive and creative? I don’t want to set that up as an opposition. We need to find a way, as practitioners, in a community of practitioners, of taking both of those equally seriously. How does our practice deepen, and how does it come in to deeper communication with our ‘companions in the spiritual life’?
Subhuti, in his paper, suggests an analogy that I found helpful: he references the Samdhinirmocana Sutta. The Sutta is one of the early Yogachara texts, and the job it set itself was to square Yogachara teachings with the Prajnaparamita and early teachings. Basically what it said it was doing was to make explicit what was implicit in earlier teachings, articulating more fully things that were less fully spelled out in the earlier teachings.
Subhuti was drawing an analogy with how teaching develops in the movement: we come along to a center, we hear the dharma being taught, that’s our basic framework. We start to practice, and that practice unfolds in our own character and experience. We explain it in ways that make sense to ourselves, and we start to teach to other people. Most order members have particular themes, things that come out of our own deep concerns. And as we teach, in a sense we’re making explicit something that was implicit in the teachings we heard. The way I will explain the teaching, the way you will explain it, grow out of a shared framework, but inevitably takes on our individual emphasis. Subhuti suggests that there’s a problematic step where ‘making explicit may amount to a new teaching or practice, and this is where we need to work to maintain a high degree of commonality’.
He makes a very practical point, that as part of a spiritual community, we have to find a way of relating our own developing practice, our own deepening experience, to framework we share with other members of the order, particularly in the framework that we’ve inherited from Bhante, because that’s the framework that all of us, with all our different emphases, share.
The Commonality paper suggest some mechanisms that may work as a way of doing this. I won’t summarise them here: they’re given in a very thoughtful and detailed way in the paper that would be hard to do justice to in a talk like this, so let me refer you to the paper itself. Subhuti asks that people discusss the proposals, in Chapters and other collective situations. That discussion itself is part of a deeper engagement with each other. We’re still in a process of putting these mechanisms in place, even a process of figuring out how it’s best done, but it’s practical work that we need, as Bhante requested in 2009, to find a way to do. The request of the paper, if we agree with Bhante that to be an effective spiritual community we need to ‘be guided by the same doctrinal understanding of the Dharma, and undertaking broadly the same set of practices’, then that we take that commitment to the unity of the order as seriously as we take our own deepening experience.
At the end of the paper there’s a postscript, and Subhuti says:
The process of retaining a unified approach that is faithful to our teacher’s presentation of the Dharma, whilst being capable of beneficial evolution, is a very delicate one, never settled and perhaps never entirely pleasing to all. There will, perhaps inevitably, be much opportunity for polarisation… The main antidote to such differences of concern becoming sources of real schism is engagement and discussion — and discussion that is honest and forthright, whilst being reasonable and respectful. We trust that that spirit will inform debate about such matters in the Order — including debate about this particular paper.
I hope that over the next couple of days we can begin that honest, reasonable, respectful discussion, about how we create a high level of commonality of practice, that is at the same time alive and creative.
