As we move toward another winter season, I’m reminded that in the communities I love, there are two separate worlds unfolding. In one, people are looking forward to a season of connection where holiday gatherings, parties, and travel abound. In the other world, people are having difficult conversations about risk tolerance, taking stock of safety measures needed for travel or gatherings, or abstaining from these activities altogether. 

Over the last few years, I have witnessed the incredible dissonance between these two worlds within the Buddhist communities I practice and teach in. This spring, when the US ended the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency, I saw practitioners who were thrilled that meditation centers were dropping mask mandates and couldn’t wait to get back to a “normal” retreat. I also spoke with, sat with, and cried with others who knew that for them, this change meant something close to exile from the dharma communities they cherished. Overwhelmingly, that second group of people were chronically ill, immunocompromised, or disabled.

I feel acutely aware of this in part because I currently live with a chronic, invisible illness that places me at greater risk of long-term suffering and disability were I to contract COVID. Retreat practice and sangha have always been a deep refuge for me, so I was heartbroken as meditation centers that had once been my spiritual home became increasingly risky to access. Even as rates of the virus surged, I have found it difficult, and at times quite unwelcome, to out myself as vulnerable and ask for accommodations. As a result, I have lost the unfettered access to once beloved communities, practice opportunities, and aspects of my livelihood.

For many in the US, the rationale for dropping protections, like masking and free access to testing, has been deceptively simple: today, only members of vulnerable groups or the elderly are likely to die from COVID. Take a moment and really read that carefully. Allow the unspoken part of the sentence to grow louder. Place yourself in the shoes of someone who is chronically ill, disabled, or elderly and is receiving the message from our government and institutions that their life is acceptable collateral damage to neighbors who are eager to get back to normal at all costs. Ableism like this is baked into every aspect of the culture, and our meditation centers are certainly not exempt from it.

It may be helpful to remember that COVID-19 is still among the top leading causes of death in the United States. This year, Long COVID will also induct millions of new people into the ranks of the sick and disabled. Depending on which study you review, Long COVID affects anywhere from 7.5 to 40 percent of people who contract the virus and has more than 200 possible symptoms. It can last for months or indefinitely, and there is no cure or standard effective treatment. Long COVID can negatively impact a person’s quality of life, leave them bedridden, unable to work to support themselves, and more. Unfortunately, as a culture, we seem eager to forget this reality. Our yearning to return to “normal” is incongruent with the fact that vulnerable people must continue to live, work, and practice in a world that often feels like it would rather pretend they don’t exist than adapt in a compassionate way. In the Buddhist community, how do we face this truth, rather than turn toward delusion?

Ableism like this is baked into every aspect of the culture, and our meditation centers are certainly not exempt from it.

This delusion is consistently fortified by the invisibility of sick and disabled people in public spaces. Whether these spaces are physically inaccessible, or a person feels too unwell or unsafe to join them, the end result is a disappearance from the public eye. I often think about this in relation to dharma communities throughout the country. Which sangha members are now absent from your local sitting group? Who are the longtime community pillars that have quietly absented themselves from our meditation centers? Did they just stop practicing, or do they no longer feel safe in the communities that used to be a refuge? 

I’m not alone in longing for a spiritual community that holds on to an ethos of care at a time when masking and other precautions are unpopular. Monica Magtoto, a movement teacher who supports many meditation retreats, shared her concerns about dharma centers dropping mask requirements in a recent conversation:

“As someone who has experienced the life-changing impact of retreat, knowing that that experience is now not an option, or is now a dangerous option, for so many people is disheartening to say the least. It’s a huge reminder that many dharma spaces are only created with the most privileged and able-bodied in mind. Are we living the precepts if we choose to exclude or do active harm to so many? Are we living the eightfold path?”

Today, meditation centers have a wide range of approaches to COVID, and while some protocols are inclusive, many reinforce the message that our sick, elderly, and disabled sangha members are acceptable collateral damage. For drop-in groups and daylong retreats, a vast majority of centers have eliminated previous precautions such as masking and onsite testing. Some communities offer suggested recommendations like vaccination, testing negative with an at-home test, or not attending when sick. Other centers have kept mitigations like air purifiers and CO₂ monitors, and a few even hold occasional outdoor events. For most residential retreats, precautions have typically dropped to a testing requirement on the first day of the retreat. A very small number of retreat centers do offer retreats with a focus on practice outdoors, and some retreat centers have brought back masking for specific retreats this fall as COVID cases see a seasonal increase.

One notable outlier, the East Bay Meditation Center in Oakland, California, still has a wide range of COVID precautions in place, including masking, clear descriptions of the air filtration systems present in their space, and priority seating next to windows and air filters for the elderly and disabled. On their website, they share:

“When we commit to justice movement building and mindfulness, this means that we commit to self-care as collective care, and we also dedicate ourselves to supporting the health of our communities. This is not achieved through policing. It comes about through building relationships of trust that express themselves in our saying to one another, ‘I’ve got your back. Your health and your family’s health and the health of the people with whom you come in physical contact with are important to me.’”

While we may have seen public declarations like this in 2020 and 2021, such an explicit statement committing to collective care today is relatively uncommon. To those living with chronic illness and disability, however, such sentiments can offer tremendous refuge and allow us to better plan where we sit or go on retreat. This refuge is especially needed as meditation centers resume prepandemic levels of programming with fewer safety precautions. In the past year, I have watched the meditation centers I work with make sweeping changes to their COVID policies, often with little to no leadership or input opportunities for vulnerable groups. One colleague who works at a retreat center, and asked to remain anonymous, shared her thoughts about how dharma communities are showing up for the sick and disabled, and her own experience with Long COVID: 

“It feels hypocritical that we wouldn’t ask our sangha, who are dedicated to awakening and freedom from suffering, to put on a mask to alleviate someone else’s suffering. It feels deeply contrary to our mission. How is it that we are not open to being even slightly uncomfortable when it could mean someone else’s life? The stakes are too high and long-term effects are still not even fully known. When I share this view, people often respond, ‘Well, that’s because you have Long COVID.’ Well, yes… that’s precisely the point.”

This is not the first time a dharma community has faced this type of devaluation of sick people. In fact, it goes all the way back to the time of the Buddha, in the Kucchivikara-vatthu Sutta. In this sutta, a monk was incredibly ill with what was likely dysentery. He couldn’t care for himself and, due to his illness, also couldn’t do anything to support his fellow monks. Because of this, the monks stopped caring for him. As you might imagine, the Buddha had some things to say about this. He said to the monks:

“Monks, you have no mother, you have no father, who might tend to you. If you don’t tend to one another, who then will tend to you? Whoever would tend to me, should tend to the sick.” 

This is not far off from what we face today. Without a public safety net that demonstrates true care for us, if we don’t take care of one another, who will? The Buddha is clear that if we would care for him, then that grace should also be extended to others. This is at the heart of our dharma practice: not just to meditate and receive the teachings, but to truly live them. It’s said that the Buddha once shared with his attendant Ananda that sangha, with its admirable friendship and camaraderie, is the whole of the holy life. So many of us know this in our bones: the friendships we’ve made and the support we’ve both given and received within our dharma communities are jewels of immeasurable value. But how are we living this teaching today, if we cannot extend this sacred friendship to our sick and disabled sangha members? 

As we explore this question, perhaps even more questions will reveal themselves, opening up deeper teachings around sangha, sila (right conduct), and our own mortality. We may ask ourselves: What delusions are we clinging to, particularly in terms of how we devalue the sick, elderly, or disabled? Are we denying the inevitable reality that, in time, we too will become sick, disabled, and pass away? Are our decisions truly aligned with our commitment to nonharming? As we sit with these questions, it is likely we will also ask how we might do better. Fortunately, there is a simple place to begin: actively listening to those who are sick, immunocompromised, and disabled and taking their needs for inclusion and safety in our communities seriously.

The post Sangha in the Age of Long COVID appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

How do we make the invisible visible? How can we see the unseen? We could get fancy and I could give this practice a name—the practice of seeing with the great wisdom eye of liberating compassion. In plainer language, in diversity and inclusion work, it begins with looking around the room and noting who’s here and who isn’t here. It’s a practice of mindful awareness.

For example, in the Zen Buddhist Temple in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where I started training in 1982, we were located in an old house that we were renovating. There were steps that led from the street level up to a porch, then a narrow doorway with a threshold that you had to step over, and then an entryway area that took you up to the meditation hall and other parts of the temple. But there was no wheelchair ramp. Therefore, by definition, we never had any people coming to meditate or practice with us in wheelchairs or who had severe mobility limitations. We never saw them in the meditation hall. Was it because there were people in that city in wheelchairs who didn’t want to come? We didn’t know, and we didn’t find out at that point. Since that time, a ramp has been built, and it has become a diverse and thriving sangha. Sometimes it takes time. We’ll never get to our goals unless we have in mind that we want to become more inclusive. 

Usually, when we ask who isn’t here, someone will be confused and ask, “How can I see who isn’t in the room?” We can extend “the room” to all the places we go on a regular basis, on vacations, and special trips, as well. We can look around any time and ask ourselves how many people appear to be here in the room. I want to emphasize the word “appear.” We can’t always know how others self-identify, but as humans we do look around, even if we’re not aware of it, and we’re constantly making these assessments.

How many people here appear to be people of color, younger, older, in wheelchairs or scooters? How many people here appear to be women, men, [non-binary], or maybe I can’t tell how they may self-identify in terms of gender? How many people here are of various body shapes and sizes? Or who appears to me to be low, medium, or higher income? I want to stop and emphasize that we’re invoking a mind state—and this is important as we’re beginning to ask these questions—that is spacious, gentle, compassionate, and contains friendliness and lovingkindness. As we begin to practice seeing the unseen, we’re going to get a peek of how much we don’t know, which can be unsettling, irritating, or just plain scary. We’re also surfacing our unconscious assumptions, thoughts we’re thinking that we don’t know we’re thinking, beliefs that we have held our entire lives. It’s likely that we’ve never examined these beliefs because they are so core to who we think we are and how we’ve been raised—how we’ve been conditioned. 

We need to invoke a mind-state that’s an antidote to whatever anxiety may arise, an attitude of gentleness, kindness, openness, curiosity, and interest. If you have kids or work with kids, you know that it’s natural as human beings to be curious about so many things, especially when we’re younger. We can practice metta, or lovingkindness, for ourselves: may I be safe, healthy, happy, peaceful, joyous, and at ease. Then we can proceed on as though we’re contemplating this koan. We’re talking about building inclusive sanghas, and as we know, the sangha is the third of what’s called the three jewels: the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha. We go to the sangha for refuge, we go to the Buddha for refuge, we go to the dharma for refuge. So how can we create sanghas that are true refuges—harbors in the storm, safe and welcoming spaces of healing and renewal of spirit—in the samsaric world?

Ask yourself this without demanding a quick answer to emerge, but go deeply into the question. Of the three refuges, I’d say that sangha is the most difficult. It presents the most problems—not that we don’t wrestle with the Buddha and the dharma, but the sangha is made up of real people. They’re our communities. They’re our friends. They become our spiritual family. And that’s where the rubber meets the road in a lot of our practice. It’s hard to be serene and spiritually wonderful when people we find annoying, or difficult, or who we feel just aren’t harmonious with our group for whatever reason show up. In fact, we may really struggle with accepting others as our sangha members when we feel that they are just so different from whoever we are. At that point we need to step back and take a look and ask ourselves, “What is my dharma practice about really?” Many of us will say, “I want to become a calm, centered, wise, and compassionate person,” but there’s another way of looking at this as well.

In 1985, I was on pilgrimage with my original Zen teacher and we were passing through San Francisco. Along the way on this pilgrimage—which went from Mexico City all the way up through Texas, the West Coast, across the Rockies, through Colorado, and then back to the Midwest—we visited as many Buddhist groups of every sect and lineage that we could find. At a Chinese temple in San Francisco’s Chinatown, we met a Chinese monk who only spoke a limited amount of English. I remember distinctly that he said, “I became a monk because I wanted to learn about the world. I wanted to learn about the world.” 

We need to ask: How reflective are our sanghas, or spiritual communities, of the entire world? How can we learn? How can we see more deeply, and grow spiritually more and more? Very simply, how can we learn about the world?

♦

Further resources listed in this Dharma Talk include: “Making the Invisible Visible: Healing Racism in our sanghas, in our Buddhist Communities (2000) and “Dharma Color and Culture: New Voices in Western Buddhism,” edited by Hilda Gutiérrez Baldoquín, (Parallax Press, 2004)

The post Seeing the Unseen appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Monastics in long brown robes entered the hall for formal lunch in order of seniority, the longest ordained members of the Plum Village tradition leading the way. Monks on one side of the room and nuns on the opposite, they sat down on purple mats and pillows and adjusted their robes like blankets over their crossed legs. Backs straight, hands in their laps, eyes cast down or closed, they waited as their brothers, sisters, and lay visitors—about 200 people in all—filled in the rows behind them.

One mat at the front of the room was left empty, covered in a simple brown quilt. An orchid with twenty delicate yellow flowers sat in front of it, along with a simple wood placard bearing the word Thay. Thay is Vietnamese for “teacher,” and the placard held the seat of the founder of the community, Thich Nhat Hanh. In January of 2020, when I visited Plum Village, Thich Nhat Hanh had already moved back to Vietnam to live out the last of his days at his home temple. He died in January 2022.

Thich Nhat Hanh wrote more than one hundred books, and his teachings on mindfulness, engaged Buddhism, and interbeing (his word for interconnectedness) have been influential within and beyond Buddhism. His legacy can also be seen in the formal lunch—monastic and lay students together seeking to embody what he taught.

Thich Nhat Hanh did not name a successor. If the Buddha is to be reborn in the 21st century, “he will manifest in the form of ‘A Beloved Community,’” he wrote, referencing Martin Luther King Jr.’s vision of a community committed to equality, justice, and nonviolent reconciliation.

Yet our attachments to our egos can impede harmony even among the most well-intentioned followers. From the Buddha’s death onward, power struggles and division have resulted in the development of various schools, often with differing ideas about the transmission of authority. Throughout history and into modern times, Buddhist sects—as well as those within Christianity, Islam, and other religions—have splintered following the passing of charismatic leaders.

Such leaders, the foundational sociological thinker Max Weber theorized, earn their authority based on their charisma or “divinely conferred” gifts. There is contention among scholars about how Weber’s theories apply to Eastern and nontheistic cultures, says Rhys Williams, a sociologist who studies religious organizations at Loyola University Chicago. Yet he adds, Thich Nhah Hanh undoubtedly held authority grounded in his unique qualities and abilities, to use a more secular definition of charisma.

Charisma allows leaders to push boundaries and bring social change, for better or worse, which also makes their deaths a particularly volatile time, Williams explains. In communities that survive the loss of a charismatic leader, Weber saw that authority tends to move to either the person who can claim the closest connection to the past leader or to the person who qualifies based on an agreed-upon set of rules, such as winning an election. In these ways, charisma becomes institutionalized, allowing it to last beyond the lifetime of a singular person.

Thich Nhat Hanh’s death offers an opportunity to see how the dynamics play out in one Buddhist community today. Since his stroke in 2014, his followers have tried to maintain the ineffable qualities that lent him his charismatic authority. For his monastic continuation in particular, doing so presents intertwined challenges: they must maintain a young tradition and stay true to his spirit by pushing at its bounds—all while no single person holds authority.

Establishing a Tradition

Fred Eppsteiner, founder and dharma teacher of the Florida Community of Mindfulness, met Thay in the 1970s. At that time, Eppsteiner said, “there was no Thich Nhat Hanh tradition, there was no Plum Village tradition. It was just him and just his freewheeling, creative way, his experimental way of responding to society, and the people who came to him for the great knowledge of Buddhist philosophy, psychology, and meditative practices that he offered for their benefit.”

Over time, his teachings, poetry, chants, and practices—such as formal lunches, walking meditation, and his Touching the Earth and Beginning Anew practices—have coalesced into a tradition. This tradition is rooted in Vietnamese monasticism as well as in the reform movement that sought to modernize Vietnamese Buddhism.

“Considering the amount of innovation that we associate with Thich Nhat Hanh, it’s important to note the amount of tradition that is also present,” says Jeff Wilson, a scholar of Buddhism in North America at the University of Waterloo, Ontario.

In the midst of the Vietnam War, Thich Nhat Hanh started the Order of Interbeing as part of his efforts to apply Buddhist thought to the modern world. When he ordained six social workers into the new order, he gave them fourteen precepts of Engaged Buddhism—now called “mindfulness trainings”—as spiritual tools to help them as they worked for peace and rebuilt bombed-out villages. These were a modern interpretation of the bodhisattva precepts.

They must maintain a young tradition and stay true to his spirit by pushing at its bounds—all while no single person holds authority.

In the early 1980s and by then exiled from Vietnam, he and Cao Ngoc Phuong, one of the six Order of Interbeing members, established Plum Village as a practice center in the south of France. Thich Nhat Hanh reopened the Order of Interbeing to followers from the Vietnamese diaspora as well as Western students. Then in 1988, Phuong—now Sister Chan Khong—and a few others became Thich Nhat Hanh’s first monastic students, vowing to live celibately and follow a modernized monastic code.

Eppsteiner, one of the first Americans to join the Order of Interbeing, describes those years as a period of increasing formalization, with the monastic body becoming the central organization. The Order of Interbeing’s charter emphasized the equality of laypeople and monastics, as well as a nondenominational approach to Buddhist teachings, Eppsteiner says. By becoming a formal tradition centered on monastics, he says, “the danger is that it will become what Thay rejected.”

Orlaith O’Sullivan, who has been a member of the Order of Interbeing since 2012, says that monastics and laypeople play complementary roles. She repeats an image from Sister Jina, one of Thay’s first European monastic disciples: Plum Village is the palm of a hand, and laypeople are the fingers that go out and work in the world.

As a volunteer, O’Sullivan has built practice communities in Ireland and coordinated the activities of the Wake Up Schools movement, an international network of classroom teachers practicing mindfulness. Practitioners may turn to monastics for answers due to the monastics’ deep commitment to the practice, she says, but “I think we all try to be a refuge for people.”

The monastics estimate that up to 200,000 people have committed to Plum Village’s Five Mindfulness Trainings for laypeople. Practitioners can deepen their practices with others through more than 1,000 local and online sanghas. To help laypeople get started, Plum Village offers a “sangha in the box” package with materials and guidance for facilitating a group, but there is little additional support or oversight.

“It’s a fine line between organizing and getting involved, and then staying away from becoming like a Vatican—centralized,” says Brother Chan Phap Dung, a senior dharma teacher.

Each region or country has its own organizations for the Order of Interbeing. Laypeople in these organizations put forth and mentor new applicants to the order and new lay dharma teachers, with monastics providing final approval to these applicants. There are more than 3,000 members of the Order of Interbeing around the world.

According to the Thich Nhat Hanh Foundation’s 2022 annual report, 533 monastics live in eleven practice centers, situated in France, Germany, the United States, Australia, Thailand, and Hong Kong. Sister True Dedication sees Thich Nhat Hanh’s decision to ordain monastic students as forward-thinking. “There is something about the monastic commitment—about the monastic precepts and the way that the body, held by the monastic code of conduct, can hold the dharma, hold the practices, find the future and carry it forward,” she says.

The Monastic Continuation

Tall, thin, and with a wide grin, Sister True Dedication had blonde hair before it was shaved off on her ordination day in 2008.

Thich Nhat Hanh was not serving as abbot when she left her life in Britain to join Plum Village in France, but as teacher he largely set the agenda. For instance, True Dedication remembers how he declared the monastery vegan, seemingly overnight, shortly after she became a nun. Her diet at the time consisted largely of yogurt and cheese, she says with a laugh.

Then in his 80s, Thich Nhat Hanh was busy establishing new initiatives: the Wake Up movement for young adults, Wake Up Schools for teachers, Institutes for Applied Buddhism in Germany and Hong Kong, a monastery in Thailand, and an online sangha.

As a young nun, True Dedication was an eager volunteer. Formerly a journalist with the BBC, she became Plum Village’s communications liaison, working on everything from websites and press releases to books. She worked closely with Thich Nhat Hanh and Sister Chan Khong on efforts related to climate change, human rights, and other social issues.

Working at a computer, however, was not what True Dedication expected of monastic life, and Thich Nhat Hanh was demanding. She once tried to refuse her teacher’s request for assistance, saying she was working in the garden instead.

“Working in the vegetable garden, helping Thay, it’s all the same,” she recalls him responding. “I think Thay was saying, ‘You need to dare to find peace in the action.’”

Religious organizations need considerable resources—both financial and human, says scholar Jeff Wilson, and monastics serve as a spiritual workforce. Traditionally in Buddhism, the lay community has supported the monastic community financially in exchange for karmic merit. At Plum Village, the conviction that they are working to improve the world helps motivate monastics to work for no personal financial gain. It also motivates laypeople to support them. As such, Wilson calls Plum Village “an exemplar of a post-merit model.”

Buoyed by their closeness to Thich Nhat Hanh, book sales, and dana given for retreats, the monastic body has been sustained by this model since Thich Nhat Hanh’s stroke.

Now a dharma teacher, True Dedication sees her role as supporting younger monastics as they learn both the organizational and spiritual lessons of their work. “The sangha career becomes our career,” she says.

No-self Leadership

Whenever Thich Nhat Hanh gave a retreat or spoke in prominent places, he always traveled with an entourage of brown-robed monastics. It was an intentional effort to deflect attention from his singularity, according to Brother Phap Dung, who joined the monastic order in 1998.

Nonetheless, “our teacher provided the leadership,” he reflects. “We’re under his aura.”

His singular role became an issue in 2009 when Thich Nhat Hanh developed pneumonia on his US tour. While he recovered at Massachusetts General Hospital, a thousand people gathered in Estes Park, Colorado, for a retreat aptly themed “One Buddha is not enough.” A book by the same name captured dharma talks and reflections from the weekend.

Participants shared how, as they overcame their disappointment, they began to see their teacher first in the monastics, then in each other, and finally in themselves. “Here was interbeing, right before our eyes. Thay and the Sangha were one and the same. We and the Sangha were one and the same. Here was Thay, present with each of us, in each of us,” wrote Soren Kisiel, who joined the Order of Interbeing on the retreat.

The idea of no-self theoretically would prevent Buddhist groups from becoming cults of personality, Wilson says, “and yet the history of Buddhism is full of this.” What is unique about Plum Village, Wilson adds, is that it came to a horizontal power structure without struggling through a major scandal, as has been the case with a number of Buddhist groups.

Monastics provide a “check and balance” on each other, Brother Phap Dung says. Practices such as rotating mentors, reciting the precepts every two weeks, living in close quarters, and providing each other with feedback allow the “sangha eye” to see issues before they grow and make decisions together.

“We are now in the process where we’re encouraged not to say, ‘Thay would do it like this’ or ‘Thay would say that,’” Phap Dung says. “Our teacher had an opinion, but now we need to deal with each other.”

Nonetheless, Thich Nhat Hanh’s presence was palpable on the retreat I attended months before the pandemic. Many retreatants came because they had read one of his books. Participants gathered around a screen in the Dharma Hall to watch one of his talks given years earlier. At the end of walking meditation one day, the group came to a tree shading a statue of the Buddha. After a monk shared that Thay had planted the tree, retreatants reverentially approached to touch it.

In dharma talks, monastics repeat imagery that Thich Nhat Hanh once used to explain profound concepts. Just as he did, they will hold up a piece of paper to illustrate “dependent arising”— like the two sides of a paper, left and right, joy and suffering cannot exist without each other. Even their script on a whiteboard resembles their teacher’s.

“Thay and the Sangha were one and the same. We and the Sangha were one and the same. Here was Thay, present with each of us, in each of us.”

In order to continue its influence, Wilson says, Plum Village “will need to produce communicators of a similar level from within who also pique people’s particular interest—without, however, developing too much of an ego complex.”

Younger monastics told me Phap Dung was a Zen master. Retreatants seek him out for private consultations and hang on to his every word—though not as they might have Thay’s poetic language. There is a lightness and informality in Phap Dung’s speech, peppered with laughter.

He and his family escaped Vietnam, and he spent his formative years in Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley. He reveals the anger he felt toward his father as a young person and his grief at his passing. A week after Thich Nhat Hanh’s death, he let tears flow during a talk watched by tens of thousands on YouTube.

It’s not just him, Brother Phap Dung says. People look to all the elder dharma teachers for guidance now. “For me there is less pressure to be like Thay or to fill in something which is not fillable. You just do whatever matches your capacity and your interests as you grow,” he says.

A Process for Change

At a question-and-answer session during an online retreat in 2021, a lay practitioner pressed the monastics about the place for nonbinary individuals in a very gendered monastic tradition. Brother Phap Dung responded that Buddhism has continually adapted to new contexts throughout its history. Plum Village’s center in California, for example, once experimented with bending the lines of cushions that typically separate women and men during formal lunch into an arc, recognizing the spectrum of gender identities.

While monasteries in other cultures would not have taken such an action, Phap Dung acknowledged, the monastics are increasingly aware that the tradition itself can be a source of suffering. The mindfulness training on “True Love,” for instance, once said relationships should be recognized by family, which is impossible for those whose families have rejected them due to their sexuality.

A few months after Thich Nhat Hanh’s death, Plum Village announced that it had revised the training. “I resolve to find spiritual support for the integrity of my relationship from family members, friends, and sangha with whom there is support and trust,” the new text reads. It also now includes a line about not discriminating “against any form of gender identity or sexual orientation.”

Thich Nhat Hanh tasked his monastics with keeping the tradition adaptable, which means revising anything from mindfulness trainings to rituals. To enable the community to do so, Thich Nhat Hanh taught the monastics how to make decisions on their own, Phap Dung explains.

The process of consensus that he taught builds upon Plum Village practices of deep listening and nonattachment of view, as well as precedent in Buddhist history and scripture, which reference majority voting within monastic communities. The ultimate decision-making body is the council of fully ordained monks and nuns.

When a proposal is made to this council, those who agree are asked to remain silent, while others have an opportunity to voice their dissent. The proposal is accepted when all remain silent.

The process, Phap Dung explains, is “an opportunity to practice, to watch your mind. You should have an opinion, you should be able to express it, but you should also be ready to let it go and be affected by others.”

When the idea to revise the mindfulness trainings was raised in the midst of the pandemic, Phap Dung facilitated an asynchronous consensus-building process among the international dharma teachers’ council. “There was an exchange of over one hundred emails back and forth,” he says, smiling.

Watching ideas grow via the email thread while others withered was fun—“like watching something organic,” Phap Dung says. As the edits coalesced, he set a date by which any additional changes could be suggested. Acceptance was determined by the email thread going silent.

Thich Nhat Hanh had revised the mindfulness trainings twenty years ago in consultation with a small inner circle of students. One of his revisions at that time was to add “not contributing to global warming” (now “climate change”) to the practices. The change would influence later actions, such as the practice centers going vegan and monastics supporting the international climate accords.

Likewise, some of the retreat centers have already made changes to help LGBTQ+ practitioners feel more welcome. For instance, some centers have created all-gender bathrooms and “rainbow” camping sections for those who don’t feel comfortable—or welcome—staying with either the monks or nuns.

Plum Village, however, is not the most progressive Buddhist community on identity issues. “We’re still a very binary culture in the monastery,” Phap Dung says. For now, it is up to practitioners to find their place within that culture.

“We have to be skillful to know how to organically evolve together,” Phap Dung says, adding that consensus is not about achieving agreement but rather about staying committed to the practice and community as it develops. “This is a big step for us, because we now have a process for change,” he says. “This is the first time we’ve done something on this scale without our teacher.”

Planting the Future 

Before Thich Nhat Hanh’s funeral and cremation, monastics gathered to hear tributes to their teacher in the narrow hall in Tu Hieu Temple in Vietnam. Thich Nhat Hanh’s body lay in a casket behind an altar. His empty mat, with flowers and tea set before it, formed part of an inner circle around which the rest of the mats were shaped.

As part of the ceremony, a monastic read a letter edited from Thich Nhat Hanh’s previous writings for this occasion. Monastics and lay practitioners form a “complete multifold sangha,” it read, using an inclusive term for the fourfold sangha, which refers specifically to male and female monastics and laypeople. The word choice perhaps foretold the revisions to the mindfulness trainings. “The monastic sangha and the lay sangha rely on one another, support one another, practicing to transform and serve all living beings,” the letter read, calling upon practitioners to take refuge in the sangha.

Serving as Thich Nhat Hanh’s continuation requires preserving his memory, his teaching, and his beloved community. It also means pushing the bounds of his tradition.

According to Max Weber, religious groups inevitably go through a process of “routinization” following the death of a charismatic leader. Sociologist Rhys Williams notes that it’s difficult to find an example of a religious organization that does not follow this path. In Weber’s model, Williams explains, authority “becomes stable, repeating, established—institutionalized either in traditional or legal processes—until a charismatic challenge rises again.”

Everything is impermanent, the monastics say, but they are also confident as they approach the future without their teacher. During the period of transition between Thich Nhat Hanh’s stroke and his death, the retreats continued to attract thousands of participants annually. Just days after his death, seven people joined the monastic communities in France and the US, vowing to transform their suffering and bring happiness to all beings.

Plum Village is like a forest—a refuge and place of refreshment for all those who come to it, Sister True Dedication says. Thay was a huge tree in that forest, she continues. Though his tree has fallen, it continues to nourish the soil so that new trees may grow.

“Thay has left us all his teachings, all his research, all his guidance, all his ideas for how we should organize and make decisions, and also all of his dreams for the work that he wanted us to do in the wild,” she says. “It’s very rich earth.”

The post After Thay appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

I find Japanese architecture and interior design extraordinarily beautiful. This has been true for a long time. In the very early days of my practice, Japanese-style surroundings seemed to be a necessary part of zazen, even if it was in a big old landmark house in Riverdale, New York. Although it wasn’t a monastery in Japan, Zen Center New York did its best to imitate one. It worked as long as you didn’t look at the walls and the ceiling, or the stairway and the carpets outside the zendo. 

I remember reading in one of Trungpa Rinpoche’s books that you ought to be able to sit next to garbage cans. Yes, yes, of course, how cool, but actually I couldn’t imagine myself doing such a thing despite the fact that I had first learned to sit zazen to the sound of traffic. Recently a friend gave me the website address for Felsentor, a Zen center in Switzerland. Standing in the gardens surrounding a perfectly gorgeous zendo, apparently constructed exactly as they are in Japan, one sees in the distance a stunning panorama of mountains and water. I hope I get there some day, though probably now sitting in the zendo will be less important than walking around the gardens and hanging out with the view. 

What exactly was this need for a particular kind of place in which to sit? When I look back on it, I can remember something about the ordered, simple, and beautiful space the zendo provided that made me feel ordered, simple, and possibly even beautiful. And then there were the sitting robes and a particular posture finally mastered. All of this contributed to a very satisfying self-image—not exactly what zazen is all about. It makes me think of Master Yunmen shouting at his monks that when they sit, they “sit with a sit-view.” Eventually, I realized that I was hitching a ride on the zendo—and it had to look like a zendo. There were two of us: the one learning to sit and the one viewed, looking a particular way in a particular setting.  

One day in our group’s early years, before the Berlin Wall had fallen, we were visited by an East German Lutheran pastor. He talked to us about his sitting group. Getting together for such a purpose was actually against the law. He and his friends had to hide in various basements and often change the places where they met. He expressed such a longing to sit and such gratitude that there even was such a thing. It was a privilege to be able to sit together, no matter where, and to be willing to risk getting caught. I will never forget that evening. It really changed something in me. 

Another thing that affected me deeply was seeing a photo of Gary Snyder sitting on his zafu alone in the dust outside the fence of a munitions plant he was protesting.

What binds us as a group is sitting together no matter where or how.

That was followed by several years of learning to sit no matter where we found ourselves. After the house in Riverdale was sold, we sat in the basement of a little house in Yonkers, where Bernie Glassman, the founder of Zen Center New York, was doing his work with the homeless. When that space was no longer available, we moved to the floor above the bakery that ZCNY ran in a bad part of town. We shared the open floor with the bakery offices. As time went on our makeshift zendo became smaller and smaller as more room for desks was needed. There was some traffic outside, but more noticeable was the yelling from the bar below. After that, we sat on large rocks at School 6, an old Yonkers school abandoned because of asbestos. When the sit was over each morning, instead of sweeping and polishing the beautiful wood of a Japanese-style zendo, we picked up the beer cans, condoms, and needles left the night before on the sidewalk that ran along the schoolyard. And then, of course, there was sitting on the selection site of Auschwitz for five or six days in late November weather. I had come a long way from “sitting with a sit-view.”

The No Traces Zendo, as we were known then, was nowhere. We sat for a while in a church basement. We couldn’t use zafus and zabutons because the floor was too wet, so we sat in a circle on folding chairs. Nowadays, a small group of us sit on chairs in my modest living room once a week. Once a month we do zazenkai, a daylong sit, at a sangha member’s home overlooking the Hudson in Riverdale. We push back the furniture in her large living room and set up a zendo, arranging the zafus and zabutons that are stored there. And a few times a year we sit at Grail Center, a lovely place that sleeps twenty-five in the heart of the Hudson River Valley. 

This is probably the closest we will ever come to a “real” zendo. We are renters and pride ourselves on leaving no traces, although it’s become a bit of a joke that one of us always does leave something behind—a cell phone, a book, a zafu. We were guests at the church and we are guests at our friend’s in Riverdale. In my living room I’m not sure what we are. 

Having no home has been a wonderful practice. It’s probably not an accident that one of my favorite 20th-century Japanese Zen Masters is Homeless Kodo. He had no temple. What binds us is sitting together no matter where or how. In addition to sitting, our main practice over the years has been group work, a talking practice we do, where we have learned to be completely open with one another. One evening last year, instead of our talking practice, we sat together in my roof garden for about an hour in total silence watching an amazing sunset over the Hudson River. A few weeks ago on a very icy morning three of us who had managed to get to Sheila’s Riverdale house for zazenkai ended up drinking tea in silence at 6:30 a.m. Eventually, we were joined by others who had successfully braved the ice. We just stayed in the kitchen, where we all had a silent breakfast together. Then we went into the living room, and without making it a zendo, we turned a motley collection of chairs around to face the river to watch the ice floes pass by.

And long before the pandemic, there was Zoom. What is now called The No Traces Sangha includes a few people living in New Hampshire, one in Paris, a couple in California, and even one in Singapore, so we meet virtually for our weekly meeting. Once COVID hit we started a Zoom zendo open twenty-four hours for sitting. Unlike other Zoom zendos, we don’t feature a screen with a picture of a beautiful empty hall with zafus and zabutons neatly lined up with maybe an altar at the end. It’s just us on the screen sitting, some facing the camera, some sitting in profile, and others mysteriously not in the picture but nonetheless there. 

Our retreat last summer was in New Hampshire, at a once-working farm. The place was gorgeous—land, trees, gardens, houses. In the house we used for retreats the bedrooms had bedspreads, wallpaper, and rugs. The kitchen was astonishing. A beautiful library replete with books and paintings on the walls served as the zendo. I said to one of the owners and directors of this marvelous place, “We are not used to this.” A true Zen person, she responded, “It’ll be good practice.”  

 No longer sitting with a sit-view, but in a zendo wherever we sit. 

⧫

This article first appeared on Mountain Cloud Zen Center’s site. 

Listen to a recent Tricycle Talks episode with Nancy Mujo Baker on the Zen precepts here:

The post Sitting Nowhere Leaving No Traces appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

My dear friends in California, happiness is not something you get from outside. To me, happiness is born from peace. With the practice of mindfulness, we can calm our body and our mind. Then peace and happiness become possible. The Buddha body is in us. Using the energy of mindfulness, we can touch the body of the Buddha within us and around us at any time. And I know the sangha body is in me and around me. The trees, the grass, the blue sky, and the flowers are all elements of my sangha. And you are my sangha body. You take care of me.

In Vietnam, we used to say, “When a tiger leaves his mountain and goes to the lowlands, he will be caught by humans and killed.” When a practitioner leaves his or her sangha, at some time she will abandon her practice. We have to take refuge in our sangha, our community of practice. We cannot continue our practice very long without a sangha. The art of sangha building is crucial to our practice.

If a sangha is available in your area, please keep in touch and take refuge there. If the sangha doesn’t have the quality you expect, don’t abandon it. Do not look for a perfect sangha. Stick to the one you have and try, with your practice and your joy and peace, to improve its quality. This is very important.

If there is no sangha available where you are, then practice looking deeply in order to identify elements of your future sangha around yourself. Members of your sangha may be your child, your partner, and a beautiful path in the woods. The blue sky and the beautiful trees are also members of your sangha. Please use your talent and your intuition to create a sangha for your own support and practice. We all need a sangha very much.

Our practice should be supported by the people around us, and we can learn how to support them in return. We support them by looking deeply so we can recognize the seeds of peace, joy, and lovingkindness in them. We touch these seeds, and we water these seeds every day in order to make other people bloom like flowers. And when these people bloom like flowers, we all become happier. We have to help each other in our practice. The practice of meditation is not an individual matter. We have to do it together.

The Buddha, Shakyamuni, our teacher, predicted that the next Buddha would be Maitreya, the Buddha of love. We desperately need love. And in the Buddha’s teaching, we learn that love is born from understanding. The willingness to love is not enough. If you do not understand, you cannot love. The capacity to understand the other person will bring about acceptance and lovingkindness.

It is possible the next Buddha will not take the form of an individual. The next Buddha may take the form of a community, a community practicing understanding and lovingkindness, a community practicing mindful living. And the practice can be carried out as a group, as a city, as a nation.

We know that in the spirit of the Lotus Sutra we are all students of the Buddha, no matter what tradition we find ourselves in. We should extend that spirit to other traditions that are not called Buddhist. We can find the jewels in other traditions—the equivalent of the Buddha, the dharma, and the sangha. Once you are capable of seeing the jewels in other spiritual traditions, you will be working together for the goals of peace and brotherhood.

We should include everyone in our practice. Use your talents and your creative ideas. Organize a day of mindfulness in such a way that children love it. Many children who have come to retreats in North America have had a joyful time. And parents become happier when they see their children happy. Organize a day of mindfulness in such a way that our friends enjoy it and want to practice more and more. One day of mindfulness can bring about a lot of peace, friendship, understanding, and love.

My friends, once again, you are my sangha body. I offer you all my support and wish you very strongly to take care of the sangha body which is our refuge. I take refuge in you, my sangha.

⧫

From the Spring 1994 issue of Inquiring Mind (Vol. 10, No. 2) © 1994 Inquiring Mind and Thich Nhat Hanh

Related Inquiring Mind articles:

• “The Flute of the Buddha: Art, Practice and Everyday Life” by Thich Nhat Hanh  
  
• “Peace Becomes Possible: An Interview with Thich Nhat Hanh” by Don Lattin, Alan Senauke, Barbara Gates, and Wes Nisker  
• “Taking Refuge in Community” by Ajahn Amaro
  
• “Awakening Together” by Larry Yang 

The post The Next Buddha May Be a Sangha appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

In 2018 I was ordained into the Triratna Buddhist Order, a spiritual community of people who have pledged themselves to following the Buddhist path to enlightenment. This was the culmination of ten years of effort and exploration, joyously completed. Something that had seemed impossible for me had finally happened. This is the story of how I was able to move from the statement ‘I don’t have friends’ to being able to say, ‘I have many friends.’ It’s the story of how Buddhism helped me to develop rich, close, emotional connections with people who are not family members. 

For most of my life I have understood that I think differently from other people, without knowing why. I saw some things very clearly while other things were a complete mystery to me. I can recognize patterns and see how these patterns connect. If you act in a certain way then certain results will usually follow. But I find it very hard to read non-verbal communication. Mostly I just don’t see it, but when I do, I often misinterpret what I’m seeing. If you say something to me, I hear your words but I don’t pick up on the context behind the words.

As a child I was often ill and I was also very shy. As a result, I regularly missed school or was by myself at school. I got on perfectly well with people, but did not develop close friendships. 

The same patterns were there when I left school. I worked well with people, I was intelligent and articulate, well organized and could explain things clearly, but I made no close friends. There were work relationships that I enjoyed, but they never developed into anything outside work. People asked me about problem-solving or process issues but never about emotional problems or other personal difficulties. We sometimes went out as a work group but never simply for a coffee. I did not miss having any close friendships but sometimes I wondered what it would be like. Other people seemed to enjoy them! 

Then, when I was 50 years old, I found Buddhism. I wasn’t looking for Buddhism at that point, I simply wanted to learn how to meditate. There were three Buddhist groups within my local area and I wrote to them all asking if they had chairs to sit on to meditate, because I find getting up from the ground challenging. Only one group replied, so I decided to go with them and went into the local Triratna Buddhist center for the first time. 

I’d never been anywhere like this center. I was welcomed at the door. The place was full of people chatting in small groups, with lots of laughter. People invited me into the groups and said hello. We all went together into the shrine room and then after the meditation came out and chatted more—with a large array of teas and biscuits! I knew that there was something different and wonderful about the place and I wanted to be part of it. I wondered if, here, I could find people who would continue to talk to me. So, I started attending the center regularly. The only real difficulty I had at this point was that people wanted to hug me and I didn’t want to be hugged by people I didn’t know well. It was very uncomfortable. 

One of the distinctive focuses of Triratna Buddhism is the crucial importance of sangha, the spiritual community of people who follow the Buddha’s teachings. Sangharakshita built the movement with this exchange between the Buddha and Ananda at its core: 

Ananda said to the Blessed One, ‘This is half of the holy life, lord: admirable friendship, admirable companionship, admirable camaraderie.’ 

‘Don’t say that, Ananda. Don’t say that. Admirable friendship, admirable companionship, admirable camaraderie is actually the whole of the holy life. When a monk has admirable people as friends, companions, & comrades, he can be expected to develop & pursue the noble eightfold path.’ (SN 45.2 ‘The whole of the holy life’ – Access to Insight, 2013) 

Triratna Buddhists work hard to develop spiritual friendships between people and try to bring this into every encounter. So, the warm welcome I received on first entering the center was part of the ethos of Triratna. 

For a while I simply enjoyed the unusual feeling of being with people who accepted me and who were always happy to talk. It was enough just to feel part of something that wasn’t to do with my work. As I chatted, I started to be more interested in Buddhism and, after some reflection, asked to join a study group. This study group opened so many doors for me. The same people met together, with minor changes, for about six years. I was suddenly part of a small group with the shared interest of learning more about Buddhism. Study training in Triratna is well organized and comprehensive—and I loved it. But, even more importantly for me than the study aspect, it also exemplified aspirations about how to be with the same people over a long period of time and how to make connections with them.

To begin with it was hard. This was partly because I found the pressure of people difficult. The sensory input of several people having an animated discussion was challenging. I found myself tensing up and trying to block some of it out. However, as we learned how to listen to each other, there were fewer times when several people were talking at once. I learned by watching other people how long it was good to talk for. I also learned how to leave space for other people in the discussion. I discovered how to live with the feeling that I’d missed the time when it was appropriate to say something (so sometimes I would not be able to say what I wanted). 

One of the other group members was really empathetic, a “heart” person, while I’m more analytical and a “mind” person. We discovered, to our mutual delight, that we could start a conversation coming from completely different places but eventually meet in the middle. This is such a rich experience, we both learned different ways of seeing and the world felt brighter because of this. I was beginning to build the foundations for closer relationships with other people. 

After studying for a year, I decided that I was a Buddhist and that I wanted to make a deeper commitment to Buddhism, so I asked to become a mitra. The word mitra is usually translated as “friend.” I discussed this with Order members, and they agreed this would be a good step. I then took part in a ritual, where I was introduced to the whole sangha and made the three traditional offerings of a flower, a candle, and incense, so that my deeper commitment could be witnessed. 

I’ve never found rituals easy. There are usually too many people in the room and the mantra chanting is overstimulating. Normally I don’t want to be in the room doing this but, in this case, it felt really important to be seen. I wanted to take part in this ceremony with other people. I did find the sounds and the pressure of people challenging but I knew why I was there, and I wanted to be there, so it was bearable. 

Once I’d made this deeper commitment, I also realized that I would like to be ordained into the Triratna Buddhist Order, so I entered the ordination training. To become an Order member, you have to build links with other people; it’s an integral part of being in the Triratna movement. That sounded like a lovely idea, but I’d never had a friend and I had absolutely no idea how to go about developing friendships. Eventually someone asked me if I would like to go for a coffee with them, and that was a huge relief. I made a note in my mind: you ask people to go for a coffee. 

But the fact that I was going to meet someone for a coffee brought up a whole new area of difficulty. What do people do when they “go for a coffee”? I assumed that the idea was to talk, but talk about what? I was terrified. At that point I had no “small talk.” I could not imagine how I was going to get through this meeting that felt so important. But I went, and it was very clunky. I could talk about non-specifics and we could discuss Buddhism, but I could not find any way of getting closer to the other person. I met other people after the first “coffee experience” and it was clunky with everyone. The conversations just didn’t flow. 

At this point, many people would have given up on the idea of building a relationship with me. I was incredibly fortunate that the people here did not give up. Instead, we kept meeting and people began to give me feedback about how talking with me felt for them. 

At the start of this process the feedback was helpful. People said, “You talk too much and don’t let me get a word in.” So I made a mental note to talk for less time and then pause, and this seemed to help. They said, “You are too intense.” So I tried to be gentler in the way I spoke and to give less detail. I tried to approach topics less directly and put effort into softening my speech. 

But as time went on and we still weren’t really connecting the feedback became more painful and confusing. I was given information such as “You are not listening to me,” which was confusing because I was listening, as hard as I could. I was told, “You are not interested in me.” This was very painful. I was more interested in people than I ever had been in my entire life, and yet this wasn’t coming across. I was told, “You don’t have empathy.” This was both painful and confusing because I know that I have lots of empathy and I was trying to express it. Why couldn’t the people I was talking to see that? 

This phase lasted for several years, with both me and most of the people around me getting more frustrated. Why couldn’t I do what was being asked? Nothing seemed to work. At the same time, I was finding that with two people things seemed to be different. I now know that both these people had met autistic people before. They assumed that I was autistic but that I didn’t know it. They didn’t expect the sort of responses that most non-autistic people were looking for. Our friendships developed more quickly because of this and they remain two of my closest friends to this day. 

Four years ago, when I was 60, my sister contacted me to say that she had just been diagnosed as autistic. I went looking for information to help her and found the best description of me that I’d ever seen. My first response was, “But that can’t be true!” When I thought of autism I thought of severely autistic people, and I knew that their experience was not mine. And yet, there was so much in the description of autism that did fit. I researched further and discovered the concept of the autistic spectrum and suddenly everything made more sense. It was possible for someone to be autistic but not be severely autistic. I did the self-tests and discovered that my scores were way above the threshold values for autism. So, I asked to be tested formally. I was diagnosed with what is now called “level 1” autism (in the UK) and might previously have been called Asperger syndrome. 

That diagnosis was liberating. Suddenly I understood why I was having problems with communication. I told the people around me immediately and from just about everyone I got the response, “Oh, that’s what it is!” Swiftly followed by, “Then you are doing so well!” I sent them information about how autism affects communication and the ability to build relationships. I explained that I could not respond in the ways that they were expecting. 

Immediately things opened up. We realized that I could not read their non-verbal communication accurately and so could not find the appropriate responses. We also realized that they often could not read my body language accurately as well. For example, when they thought that I was showing worry or anger, I was concentrating. Almost at once we began to develop genuinely deep friendships which have stood the test of time. I’ve also developed strategies for showing that I’m listening. One of the most useful is the phrase “What I’m hearing is…”. I often use this phrase to check that I have understood what is being said. Often, I haven’t, but that’s fine—we can clear up any misunderstanding immediately. As a result, people have started to say that I am a good listener, and that is precious to me. 

Now I can truthfully say that I have many friends and some of these relationships are close, intimate friendships. We can talk about anything. It’s just wonderful! It’s taken so much time and effort from me and other people. This has happened because other people were prepared to put the time and effort in—because of their Buddhist beliefs and the ethos of the Triratna Order. I am now an Order member and sometimes I still can’t believe that this is possible. I have so much gratitude towards Buddhism and the Triratna approach to Buddhist teachings. They have changed my life for the better. 

♦

Adapted from Autism and Buddhist Practice: How Buddhism Can Help Autistic Adults Cultivate Wellbeing (Jessica Kingsley Pub, December 2022), edited by Chris Jarrell.

The post How Recognizing Her Autism Helped One Practitioner Form Lasting Friendships  appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Christopher Jinkan Powers had always harbored dreams of becoming a priest. But when he was diagnosed with stage IV cancer in 2016, he feared he would have to abandon his aspiration. “I had already had two open-heart surgeries, and because of the cancer I was mostly bedridden,” he told Tricycle. “I couldn’t go to a temple, let alone ordain.” Looking for a way to continue his practice while in the hospital, he began to sit with Treeleaf Zendo, an online Soto Zen community. As he became more deeply engaged in sangha life, he worked with his teacher and Treeleaf’s founder, Jundo Cohen, to develop a plan for ordination. For the past few years, Powers has served as a novice priest at Treeleaf, sometimes leading ceremonies from his hospital bed as he receives chemotherapy.

Founded over a decade before the COVID-19 pandemic normalized online retreats, Treeleaf has been at the vanguard of virtual Buddhist practice. Cohen formed the community in 2006 as a practice space for people who could not leave their home because of illness or disability. Soon, though, the sangha expanded to include practitioners around the world who couldn’t attend in person because of schedules, geography, natural disaster, or war.

Over the past decade, Treeleaf has ordained several of its members who, like Powers, demonstrate dedication to the dharma but are unable to pursue traditional monastic training. This year, the organization is piloting the first formal nonresidential path to Soto Zen ordination. Called the Monastery of Open Doors, the program is designed for committed Zen practitioners whose circumstances prevent them from participating in residential training.

One novice priest, Sergey Washin Tsarenko, lives in Odesa, Ukraine, where the closest Zen center is 500 kilometers (311 miles) away. After meditating without a community for a couple of years, he joined Treeleaf in 2014 and eventually ordained with Cohen in 2019. When Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, Tsarenko was determined to continue his priest training. “I feel I need to be connected to the sangha more than ever,” he wrote. Even during curfews he continues to host daily sits each morning so that people from around the world can practice together. “This would not be possible without Treeleaf.”

Kokuu Andy McLellan began practicing Buddhism in 1997 after he was diagnosed with myalgic encephalomyelitis, or chronic fatigue syndrome. Because of his illness, it is difficult for him to leave his home, so he cannot participate in residential monastic training. In 2017, he received shukke tokudo, or novice ordination, and he has been helping Cohen develop the Monastery of Open Doors to support others who hope to deepen their practice but face similar physical challenges. “There shouldn’t be one pathway to being a priest,” McLellan says. “We’re trying to open up alternative paths for those who can’t go the traditional route. If you’re chronically ill or living with a disability, that is another form of training. Through your illness, you learn to cultivate compassion and understanding of suffering without being in a monastery.”

Cohen agrees, noting that “illness and other hardships may be life’s most powerful koan, and a hospital bed or wheelchair can be a monastery.” In collaboration with the novice priests, he has worked to build an awareness of illness and disability into every aspect of training, including how students learn Zen liturgy, Buddhist history, ethics, and pastoral care.

“If you’re chronically ill or living with a disability, that is another form of training.”

At Treeleaf, as in most monastic training programs, novice priests are expected to lead sits and ceremonies for the community. But at the Monastery of Open Doors, they also learn how to adapt components of each ceremony so that all members have a way to participate regardless of the physical challenges they may face. Because many members have limited mobility, priests have developed ways to perform rituals while seated or, like Powers, while lying in a hospital bed. “We want to show that even if you’re disabled or chronically ill, you can still practice,” McLellan says. “And not only can you practice, you can ordain.”

McLellan and Powers have worked together to find ways to preserve the reverence and sincerity of ritual acts while reducing the physical effort involved. For instance, many ceremonies involve full prostrations with the forehead brought all the way down to the floor, but this can be difficult, if not impossible, for sangha members. Now, they have the option of lifting a bowing cloth, or zagu, up to their head instead. In addition, Powers developed ways to don the kesa, the ceremonial cloth that symbolizes the Buddha’s robes, so that the movements require less physical strain and the wearer’s arm is left open for IV medications.

Soto Zen practice also emphasizes the importance of seated meditation, but the traditional seated posture isn’t always accessible to Treeleaf’s members—some need to recline during zazen, especially during longer meditation periods. To normalize lying down as an acceptable meditation position, Cohen began referring to the posture as “lion’s pose,” recalling the iconography of the Buddha reclining in his final days as he prepared to enter parinirvana. During Treeleaf’s annual retreats, all members recline for some of the meditation periods, regardless of their ability. As Cohen noted, “It doesn’t matter if you have perfect posture. It’s a question of what your body needs.”

Like Cohen, McLellan feels that it is important to change the narrative around what meditation practice should look like. When he meditates with Treeleaf, he often sits with his wheelchair in the camera frame so that others living with chronic illness can see that they are not alone. “We like to get images out there of people in wheelchairs practicing with the same sincerity and love to show that disabled people have a place in the dharma too,” he told Tricycle.

Treeleaf is committed to showing that people with disabilities have always had a place in the dharma. When novice priests learn about Zen lineage, they also learn the stories of people throughout Buddhist history who dealt with illness and physical challenges. This aspect of training was spearheaded by Powers and McLellan, who developed a “differently-abled ancestor ceremony” as a means of increasing the visibility of people with disabilities in the history of Buddhist practice. During retreats, the whole sangha chants the names and stories of these individuals, honoring “those who may have been met by exclusion or fear, those for whom the path was filled with obstacles and barriers, those for whom entrance was so often denied.” The names of these figures are included in the lineage charts that members receive when they take the precepts or ordain.

In addition to studying Zen liturgy and history, novice priests learn how to be supportive members of their community, both within Treeleaf and beyond. “Today, Zen priests have become more like ministers,” says Cohen. “This is beyond zazen. Modern Zen clergy need to know how to respond to sangha members’ crises and concerns.” To this end, priests complete courses in pastoral care, grief counseling, and healthy boundaries, and receive guidelines on when to refer someone to a mental health professional.

McLellan has found pastoral care to be the most meaningful part of his role as a priest. Outside of Treeleaf, he moderates online support groups for people living with chronic illness. “One thing I’ve learned from these groups is how many people out there feel scared and alone,” he says. “If you can just listen and be there for someone, it can make a huge difference.”

For Powers, too, service forms the heart of his work as a priest. Following his open-heart surgery and cancer diagnosis, he began volunteering at his local hospital, providing emotional support and guidance to people facing new diagnoses or complex procedures. A self-proclaimed “big-time nerd,” he also runs Dungeons & Dragons nights at the public library in his hometown of Fresno, California to help kids with intellectual disabilities learn math. “Being a priest means being of service,” Powers believes. “And it’s not just service to our sangha but service to the sangha of the whole world.”

Tsarenko originally sought ordination for this very reason. Through Treeleaf, he leads weekly meditation sessions called “Sitting for Peace,” where individuals from around the world come together to chant the Heart Sutra in English, Ukrainian, and Russian and dedicate their practice to those injured in the war.

“Zen practice is difficult even under normal wordly conditions,” Tsarenko reflects. “In times of war, it is even more difficult because we are constantly under threat. Sometimes we enjoy silent days where there are no attacks. But other days are full of grief because we lose people. So how do we stay balanced? It all starts from zazen. Zazen is the core of our practice. It’s the marrow in our bones. So we sit zazen, and we try to enter deep samadhi [meditative concentration] and generate compassion. Then we get up from the cushion and try to bring this compassion into the world.”

After leading online sits each morning, Tsarenko volunteers at food distribution centers, packaging resources to send to the latest “hot areas” impacted by attacks. He also plants trees by the seaside with a team of volunteers. To date, they have planted and cared for over 1,500 trees. He sees this as fundamentally connected to his role as a priest: “In our practice, we care about all sentient beings. Trees are also sentient beings, and they have a lot to teach us.” Particularly now that bombings have ravaged much of his country’s landscape, Tsarenko feels more committed to planting trees than ever. “Even in war, we can’t forget about beauty.”

Cohen believes that these types of service, though untraditional, are valid forms of training and help priests cultivate wisdom and compassion in the context of their everyday lives. “The point of the Monastery of Open Doors is to train good priests, no matter what winding road gets them there,” he says. “Many of our priests can’t go on ango, the traditional three-month residential retreat required for ordination. But another kind of ango is to be in a battlefield helping load trucks with food or to be nursing your dying spouse at their bedside. That is Zen training. That is abiding with the great question of life and death.”

Cohen acknowledges that Treeleaf’s approach is unconventional, and he still encourages those who are able to pursue residential training to do so. “If every priest were trained like we train our priests, it would be a disaster,” he jokes. “We would lose all the traditions that can be taught only in a residential setting. But there’s room for all of us: the Western monasteries, the monasteries in Japan, the hermits in their caves, and now, the Monastery of Open Doors. We have a place too.”

The post The Monastery of Open Doors appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Dharma Vote, a self-described “community of mindfulness practitioners dedicated to social political engagement,” is meeting every week until the US midterm elections on Tuesday, November 8. 

The Zoom sessions are held every Sunday from 4 p.m. to 5 p.m. Eastern, during which time volunteers meditate and write letters together to encourage potential voters to engage in the democratic process. There will also be additional sessions throughout October with guest teachers and talks on social and political topics, including the environment.

“We care about a lot of things. We care about the environment, we care about reproductive rights, we care about economic justice, we care about so many different causes,” said Kristen Rae Stevens, a meditation and yoga teacher, Ayurvedic practitioner and consultant, and Dharma Vote’s lead organizer. “Come and bring your letter- and postcard-writing, tell us what you’re working on. Tell us about your local elections and local concerns.”

Dharma Vote was started in March 2020, prompted by Buddhist teacher Ethan Nichtern, asking a group of students what they might do ahead of the November 2020 presidential election. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns, Zoom became the only way for volunteers to meet, and letter-writing became the focus because it was one thing everyone could do together while online, Stevens said. After the 2020 election, Dharma Vote continued to write letters for the 2021 Senate runoff elections in Georgia that saw Rev. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff elected, the Virginia gubernatorial elections in the fall of 2021, and community-oriented work with organizations including Black Lives Matter. 

Dharma Vote’s newsletter has more than 1,600 subscribers, and the Slack channel has more than 250 users from across the US. Stevens said that more than two years into the pandemic, inviting people to join in another virtual meeting can be a tough sell, but that the group is committed to creating an “open and heart-forward space” where the participants can talk about challenges, lift one other up, and find solidarity and support. 

Guest teachers have included Buddhist teachers Ethan Nichtern and Sharon Salzberg, and Reggie Hubbard, a yoga teacher, activist, and founder of Active Peace Yoga. Stevens said that the group hosts guest speakers involved in government and policy as well as dharma teachers. 

“A lot of what our community asks for is being held in the space by someone who is in deep practice, but also for information,” Stevens said. “We have a lot of people who are steeped in dharma practice but have very little political organization or political knowledge. And so they’re kind of like: How does this work?”

The group initially began with a nonpartisan focus, Stevens said, but has since slowly become more partisan, leaning left, and supporting Democratic candidates. 

“At this point, I don’t think if someone were to have differing ideas or thoughts that they would come to the meetings,” Stevens said. “I would hope that we would be able to hold a wider space for discussion, if it was a respectable discussion. But we haven’t had that opportunity,” Stevens added. “We’re also not a monolith—there’s a lot of representation in how people are seeing or experiencing what’s going on, even within more Democratic party lines.”

More information about Dharma Vote, including the newsletter sign-up and events schedule, is available on their website. 

The post ‘Dharma Vote’ Organization Meeting Weekly Until the Midterm Elections appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

A number of years ago, I was the manager of a thriving Buddhist meditation center in a large urban center. The community was full of sincere, deeply committed practitioners, many of whom had turned to the dharma after experiencing trauma or addiction. I loved the sangha deeply and was committed to serving what had become a refuge for so many. However, it was also an extremely male-dominated sangha where many of us felt the weight of a subtle sexism that slowly eroded the fabric of a community we loved. 

When the meditation center first opened and we began to develop its programming, I remember advocating for a sitting group for practitioners who identify as women. It felt important to me given the dynamics of the sangha, but was dismissed—until Donald Trump was elected president. 

By that time, I had resigned as manager, but I joined a cohort of incredible people to co-create and lead this fledgling women’s sangha. Things changed quickly, and a year or two after the women’s sangha began, the meditation center it was born from collapsed following the sexual misconduct of its founding teacher. It was a heartbreaking time for countless people.

As the community dissolved, the women began to talk with each other in ways they hadn’t before. Deeper truths came out. I heard experience after experience of women feeling less valued, less seen, and less respected than their male counterparts in our sangha. The stories I heard weren’t about sex or harassment. They were the kind of small, subtle incidents that you feel afraid to name because people will tell you you’re overreacting, or you might get labeled as being “difficult” or “crazy.” The stories I heard reflected my own experiences—not one horrific event, but a slow accumulation of moments that illuminate the knowledge that you’re not as valued or respected as other people.

Years later, as a practitioner and counselor of Depth Hypnosis (a therapy that draws on Buddhism, hypnotherapy, and shamanic wisdom), I still occasionally work with members of that sangha as they grapple with that experience of shattered trust, as well as many others who have experienced harm in spiritual or religious communities. I’ve witnessed and known deeply the kind of spiritual harm that corrodes an entire community when women and other groups are not treated fully as peers. That is some of what’s on my mind now as Roe v. Wade is overturned. 

For all of us who are members of a sangha, we must acknowledge that more than half of the people in our community are currently faced with a deep and painful spiritual question:

How do we navigate our relationship to faith, to community, and to ourselves when we are living in a society that no longer deems us worthy of bodily autonomy?

This question will touch all of us, but particularly the most marginalized members of each sangha. For many, this will be far more than a spiritual and philosophical question. It will be a question about survival. How do we survive and practice the dharma in a world where crucial choices around health, our bodies, and our lives can no longer be exercised? How will we respond as the overturning of Roe v Wade disproportionately touches the lives of our sangha members who are women, but also women who are poor, disabled, queer, transgender, or from BIPOC communities? As practitioners, leaders, and as sanghas, these are questions we must answer.

Lama Rod Owens shared on Instagram earlier this week, “Just to be clear, as a spiritual teacher I will continue not abiding by any law, tradition, belief, or etiquette that jeopardizes access to basic resources supporting the safety, happiness, and health of myself and others. I will also continue helping others do the same.” 

As Buddhist practitioners committed to ethical conduct and to liberation from suffering, it is appropriate to question (and at times actively disobey) the rites and rituals that take us farther away from truth or that cause harm and suffering to others. Even if those rites and rituals are handed down to us from the Supreme Court.

So how do we address this in our sangha in the days and months that follow? Here are some possibilities for communities to explore:

1. Understand the impact on your community: It is important to understand that many people in your sangha are reeling right now. Their ability to safely choose whether or not to bring a child into this world, whether they can seek legitimate medical care for an ectopic pregnancy or other deadly condition, or address pregnancy after incest or rape has been deeply jeopardized. This has medical, psychological, financial, legal, and spiritual implications for everyone involved. This will be a life and death issue for some. 

2. Honor the emotion, lack of safety, and trauma that arises: It is also important to know that the fear, grief, and anger your sangha members feel today is connected to all the places where their bodily autonomy and sense of value or belonging in society has been violated in the past. This ruling may leave members of your sangha reliving the times they have been harassed, assaulted, or made to feel small and powerless. They carry the weight of their own trauma, and perhaps also the trauma of their mothers, grandmothers, and beyond, as a sort of epigenetic shadow. It is our task now to do everything we can to ensure their safety, respect, and wellbeing. I mean this directly around access to safe and legal abortion, but also relating to lifting up their place and belonging in the sangha. 

3. Uplift the voices and stories that need to be heard: As we move forward, people in your sangha may need to share their stories—of abortion access, of childbearing, of bodily autonomy, and of the many ways that patriarchy has colored their lives. They will need to see these stories reflected and honored by the voices of their teachers. They may need to come together to make meaning, to deeply grieve, and to express their fear and anger. This is part of the immense healing capacity of being in a sangha—if we choose to make it available.

4. Take action: Your community may feel called to organize and find ways to advocate for change and this may be an impactful way for your sangha to explore, or continue to explore socially engaged dharma. Members of your local community (or people in other states) may also need practical help and support—money, travel assistance, mental healthcare, childcare, and more. This is something that your community can actively organize around.

A final note: It is important to remember as we grapple with the spiritual and practical issues of bodily autonomy, safety, and belonging, that we still have a choice. We have the choice to be there for each other. To acknowledge that this issue impacts all of us, whether we can become pregnant or not. To respond with compassionate action. Making this choice is how spiritual survival can occur, and how we can live deeply into the truth of our interconnectedness with one another.

♦

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The post How Can Sanghas Respond to the Overturning of Roe v Wade?  appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

I have had many strong loves in my life: children, animals, the color and smell of orange, swimming, fish, flowers, flamenco, Foucault, the art of Agnes Martin… The list is kaleidoscopic. But one of the most moving and indelible loves I have had is for my sangha. 

By sangha, I mean the group of people and the organization where I received not only training in Buddhism but also a profound sense of personal succor. It is where I encountered “shelter from the storm.” It is where I was welcomed with all my disheveled confusion and gently invited to sit on a cushion and delve into the crevices of my mind. It is where I learned to sit straight, follow my breath, and let go of my thoughts. It is where I learned how to extend myself to others with compassion, one baby step at a time. It is the multiple friendships that allowed me to see others and myself without judgment. It is everyone who held my hand, made me laugh, shared their story, gave me a livelihood and a place to live, and, last but not least, showered me with the gift of the Buddhist teachings. It is where and with whom I sat in meditation and grew.

I could go on endlessly about the qualities of this third of the famous three jewels that are part of the foundational elements of Buddhist training. Sangha is right up there with the Buddha and the Dharma as a vital part of the path of unimpeded peace. 

Before I was introduced to Buddhism, I was a very confused young woman, and I eventually realized that I needed to find a teacher. Not long after, I met my first dharma friend—someone equally confused and on the same quest. This friend “knew someone, who knew someone, who KNEW,” and he gave me a book. One phrase from that book—“mix your mind with space”—became my mantra. I followed its echo to the source, and there I found a vibrant world of intelligent people gathered around a dynamic and unfathomably brilliant mind in the form of a chubby, not very cherubic person who became my teacher, spiritual mentor, and door to wisdom.

It was an extremely diverse scene underpinned by a well-organized and financially accessible program of training staffed by enthusiastic and devoted students. I was deeply impressed. The basic practice was a simple meditation. The teachings presented were ancient, precise, and intellectual, representing a lineage of unbroken scholarship dating back to the Buddha. There were time requirements, testing, and progressive levels of instruction. Meanwhile, the dignity and intelligence of the central figure, the teacher, never failed to stop me in my tracks. The whole atmosphere was permeated with a playful creative wisdom that was gentle, incisive, clear, and inclusive.

I had found my spiritual home and felt deeply inspired. I was given a lifetime of practice and study materials and I imagined growing old within that sangha. I could think of nothing better to do than continue learning and practicing the progressive stages of meditation, and to help newer students in the same way I had been helped. 

And then, one day, the teacher died, and everything changed. 

I naturally expected the new leadership to support and maintain the brilliant and complete stream of teaching that had been established by the founder. Gradually, however, vital elements began to be edited or deleted. A new guru figure was installed and eventually an entirely new curriculum introduced. As things changed, some of us started referring to the new structure as “Buddhism Lite,” seeing it as more of a nod to the new age mindfulness movement than a serious study of Buddhism. Those of us who questioned the changes were not welcome and friends literally turned their backs. We were no longer eligible to teach, hold administrative positions, practice as we had been trained, or speak freely. The masterpiece that was the world of our teacher was carved up and damaged to the very foundation of its lineage. So I left. 

In the end, however, the details of what happened are inconsequential to this story. The general experience of profound disappointment fits with anyone who has witnessed upheaval and change within their spiritual group.

Watching one’s beloved sangha collapse is a devastating experience, but one that I now see as not only inevitable but enlightening.

It was a terrible personal loss. I grieved. I blamed. I was angry—about losing my connectedness, my entitlement, my world, my future, my investment of time and energy. I found myself out in the cold and on my own, and most devastating of all, my practice faltered. I couldn’t sit on a cushion without mentally claiming my due in revenge or recognition. Early on in my dharma life, I used to say that the sangha organization gave me the strength to maintain my mindfulness. But with the sangha not in my life anymore, my mindfulness went right out the window. Poof.

I was a child who had lost my home. And I know I am not alone in that. 

Watching one’s beloved sangha collapse is a devastating experience, but one that I now see as not only inevitable but enlightening. It’s easy to be comfortable and supported in a beautiful bubble. But there’s the rub… 

A sangha, when viewed as an organization, is a composite like all things. As described by Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche, Chandrakirti—a scholar of the Mahayana Madhyamaka school from around 600 CE—painstakingly analyzed the nature of a chariot to describe the inherent insubstantiality of our experience:

We apprehend chariots. We think that there are such things as chariots. Supported by a chariot, we can go from place to place. However, if we really look, where is the chariot? Are the wheels the chariot? Is the axle the chariot? Is the place where the driver stands the chariot? No. The wheels are the wheels. The axle is the axle. The place where someone stands is just that and nothing more. Each part of the chariot is, individually, just that part of the chariot and, individually, none of them are the chariot. Is there a chariot that is separate from those individual elements? Not at all. What about the shape of those elements? Is that the chariot? The shape is formed by the gathering together of many things; how could it be a chariot? Well, what is going on? We apprehend the gathering of many things as a chariot when, in fact, there is no chariot.” (From Khenchen Thrangu Rinpoche’s Essential Practice: Lectures on Kamalashila’s Stages of Meditation in the Middle Way School) 

And that’s how sangha organizations are. They are chariots that deliver the dharma. They are never anything singular, solid, or long-term. So, when sanghas inevitably dissolve or change, or when they can’t provide a desirable practice environment anymore, what happens then? Are we left helpless? 

In the biography of Milarepa, the famous Tibetan saint, it was only when he left his teacher Marpa’s sphere of influence after years of study and returned to his hardscrabble home and unfinished karma that the teachings finally stopped being theoretical. He had no choice but to take the wheel of dharma into his own hands. When he collapsed at the height of his distress and pleaded for Marpa to visit him, a vision of Marpa appeared, telling him to get a hold of himself and apply the teachings. And that, then, is what he did. He hitched up his chuba, went back into his cave, redoubled his resolve and exertion, and continued his practice.

According to Chögyam Trungpa in Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, “There is a very dangerous tendency to lean on one another as we tread the path. If a group of people leans one upon the other, then if one should happen to fall down, everyone falls down. So we do not lean on anyone else. We just walk with each other, side by side, shoulder to shoulder.” 

I think that becomes very clear when things fall apart. You can’t lean, even on the teacher. Suddenly your own life, and your relationship to all that you have learned, becomes a very intense and lonely place to be. Can you maintain unwavering conviction in the truth of your meditation practice without having your hand held? Are you prepared to face the rawness of your own insecurities without weekly support meetings? Can you really, truly apply the teachings of emptiness and radiant compassion and stand on your own two feet as a warrior in the world? If you can, no one can ever take that away from you. Then, perhaps, you are truly walking the path. 

Seeing the organization fall apart, and having the rug pulled out from under my feet, freed me. It allowed me to finally face the reality of my aloneness, the genuineness of my commitment to the dharmic path, my naked weaknesses, and my karmic situation, solely on the basis of my practice and understanding. Without the cocoon and distracting politics of the organization, my journey suddenly became very, very personal. 

After leaving, I fell into a long period of not practicing. But as my old confusions began to arise, I realized I too needed to “hitch up my chuba.” If I was going to stabilize my practice this time, I had to learn how to walk on my own, even if it meant starting over, which was not going to be easy. Rather than finding a new teacher to follow, as some of my other dharma friends had, I decided to devote myself to studying the legacy of my teacher from beginning to end. Eventually, and with no little exertion, it became crystal clear what makes the dharma important to me, and why it works.

Now my commitment to this path is indelible and not dependent on the changing fortunes of a composite organization. Though I continue to connect with interesting, supportive teachers and fellow practitioners who help keep me moving along the path, I don’t think I will join another organization. It was fantastic being immersed in my teacher’s world and I came away with a treasure trove that will last me several lifetimes. But the Buddhist world is incredibly vast, rich, and accessible these days, so there are many communities and traditions to explore. I do feel a deep sadness that such a brilliant community has been lost, but all my anger about those dark days has disappeared. I consider myself lucky to have experienced the particular magic of that time, and I hope to share what I can with the same generosity. In the meantime, my sangha has opened to include a wide variety of companions, and is growing every day.

The post Leaving My Sangha appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.