The Practice of Sangha

Thich Nhat Hanh explains that sangha is more than a community, it’s a deep spiritual practice.

A sangha is a community of friends practicing the dharma together in order to bring about and to maintain awareness. The essence of a sangha is awareness, understanding, acceptance, harmony and love. When you do not see these in a community, it is not a true sangha, and you should have the courage to say so. But when you find these elements are present in a community, you know that you have the happiness and fortune of being in a real sangha.

In Matthew 5:13 in the New Testament of the Christian Bible, we find this statement: "Ye are the salt of the earth; but if the salt hath lost its savor, wherewith shall it be salted? It is thenceforth good for nothing but to be cast out and to be trodden underfoot of men." In this passage, Jesus describes his followers as salt. Food needs salt in order to be tasty. Life needs understanding, compassion and harmony in order to be livable. This is the most important contribution to life that the followers of Jesus can bring to the world. It means that the Kingdom of Heaven has to be realized here, not somewhere else, and that Christians need to practice in a way that they are the salt of life and a true community of Christians.

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Earthquakes and Blossoms Appear

Zen teachings and calligraphies of Kobun Chino Otogawa Roshi, who died tragically while trying to save his young daughter from drowning. With a remembrance by Kojun Jean Leyshon.

Who Is Your Teacher?

The real purpose of practice is to discover the wisdom which you have always been keeping with you. To discover yourself is to discover wisdom; without discovering yourself you can never communicate with anybody. In everyday life, we can pick up some glimpse of wisdom, as the polished tool of the carpenter expresses that there is wisdom in the arm of the carpenter. It is invisible; you cannot draw it and show it.

Wisdom doesn't come from anywhere; it is always there as the exact contents of awakening—it is always there and everywhere. What you can do is to uncover it, like going to the origin of a river. Have you been to the source of a river? It is a very mystic place. You get dizzy when you stay for a while. An especially big river has several sources, and the real source, the farthest point which turns to the major stream, is moist and misty, with some kind of ancient smell, and you feel cold. You feel, "This isn't the place to go in." There is no springing water, so you don't know where the source is.

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Panel: Full-Time Practice

Joseph Goldstein, Judith Lief and Robert Thurman discuss the role of full-time practice in the West

Buddhadharma: What role have long-term, full-time practitioners—whether monastics, priests, mountain yogis or forest yogis—played in the development of Buddhism? Are their activities essential to the continuation of an authentic Buddhist tradition?

Robert Thurman: It is definitely a fact that in the Buddha's time people were inspired to drop out of their ordinary life occupations and become full-time practitioners. The Buddha would say, "Come here, Bhikshu," or "Come here, Bhikshuni," their clothes would change to orange saffron robes, and they would become monks or nuns just like that.

So monasticism was an essential element in early Buddhism. However, I don't like to define a full-time practitioner only as someone who is a monastic or on retreat. I would say that the fate of Buddhism has depended historically on full-time practitioners, people who turn their lives toward enlightenment as their constant preoccupation, but that has not always been monastics or retreatants. There have been lay people who have practiced the dharma by not responding in anger to violence when people shouted at them or hit them or did something wrong to them. That is also full-time practice. When you are out on the street and someone is kicking you and you do not freak out, that is very strict mindfulness. Applying antidotes to the kleshas is a forceful practice.

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Songs of Milarepa

Song of Mahamudra

Sung in reply to the challenge raised by three scholars

At the time I'm meditating on Mahamudra
I rest without struggle in actual real being
I rest relaxed in a free-from-wandering space
I rest in a clarity-cradled-in-emptiness space
I rest in awareness and this is blissful space
I rest unruffled in non-conceptual space
In variety's space I rest in equipoise
And resting like this is native mind itself
A wealth of certainty manifests endlessly
Without even trying, self-luminous mind is at work
Not stuck in expecting results, I'm doing O.K.
No dualism, no hopes and fears, Ho Hey!
Delusion as wisdom, now that's being cheerful and bright
Delusion transformed into wisdom, now that's all right!

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Awakening "the One Who Knows"

The Buddho is "the one who knows in accordance with the truth." The renowned Thai Theravadin master Ajahn Chah (1918-1992) says that this clear and penetrating knowing frees us from the deception and suffering of untrained mind.

There are two ways to support Buddhism. One is known as amisapuja, supporting through material offerings. These are the four supports of food, clothing, shelter and medicine. The act of amisapuja supports Buddhism by giving material offerings to the sangha of monks and nuns, enabling them to live in reasonable comfort for the practice of dhamma. This fosters the direct realization of the Buddha's teaching, in turn bringing continued prosperity to the Buddhist religion.

Buddhism can be likened to a tree. A tree has roots, a trunk, branches, twigs, and leaves. The leaves and branches depend on the roots to absorb nutriment from the soil. The words we speak are like branches and leaves, which depend on a root—the mind—to absorb nutriment and send it out to them. These limbs in turn carry the fruit as our speech and actions. Whatever state the mind is in, skillful or unskillful, it expresses that quality outwardly through our actions and speech.

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Gene Smith's Mission

Lawrence Pintak profiles Gene Smith, the man from Ogden, Utah who single-handedly spearheaded the preservation of thousands of Tibetan texts after the Chinese invasion of Tibet in 1959. Smith’s mission continues.

He has spent his life wrapped in the dharma.

For the past 40 years, Gene Smith has lived, breathed and slept with the teachings of Tibetan Buddhism. Smith is not a monk, he has never sat an extended meditation retreat, and there is no Ph.D. after his name. But he is a legend to lama and scholar alike.

“Gene Smith single-handedly put Tibetan studies on the map,” says Leonard van der Kuijp, chair of the department of Sanskrit and Indian studies and professor of Tibetan studies at Harvard. “I think it’s safe to say that if it had not been for him, most of us who do Tibetan studies today would be doing something else with our lives. Tibetan literary culture was one of the most prodigious in the world. Gene has been instrumental in keeping this alive.”

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Ask the Teachers

Question: Some teachers say that if you're having difficulty with your meditation you shouldn't force yourself to stay on the cushion. How do you know when you're forcing your meditation, instead of applying proper effort? Should you continue with the practice if you're feeling a lot of resistance and your mind is racing? Do you recommend short periods of meditation or longer ones?

Tulku Thondup: Whether you should shorten your meditation periods or not depends on why you are having a hard time meditating. If the reason is that you lack inspiration and confidence to meditate—whether because you don't have enough physical or mental energy, your concentration span tends to be short, or you are under the pressure of strong, persistent, mental and emotional resistance—then it is better to meditate for shorter, more frequent periods. Once you start to get a real taste for meditation and experience its benefits, your inspiration to do it will grow, as will your meditation energy. When that happens, you must expand the period of meditation and unite your life as one with the meditation.

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Illness: The Way Beyond Suffering

by Jim Bedard

In August 1995, I was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia and given just weeks to live. Over the next year I was close to death many times. I had months of chemotherapy, radiation, surgery, and many other invasive and painful procedures. In February 1996 I underwent a bone marrow transplant.

My diagnosis was completely unexpected. I had visited my doctor because of some swelling in my hands and feet that I suspected was an allergic reaction to something I had ingested. Within days I was unconscious, on a respirator, in intensive care. My family, friends and Zen teacher were taking turns saying goodbye.

After being unconscious for many days, I awoke in ICU to find myself surrounded by machines that monitored my heart rate, blood pressure, blood oxygen levels and other vital signs. There were nine tubes going into my body administering chemotherapy drugs, antibiotics, blood products and other medications. I was terribly thirsty and too weak even to lift my arms off the bed. It was days before I was allowed a drink, weeks before I could climb into a wheelchair, and many weeks again before I could walk on my own.

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Readers' Exchange

My understanding of what it means to live a spiritual life has evolved over years of practice and possibly to a greater extent, from my decade-long experience with breast cancer.

When I was first drawn to the dharma I was seeking the joy and peacefulness missing in my life. Now, moments of love, joy and acceptance are more plentiful—yet I don't regard them as the goal. For now, in the depths of my journey with illness, it is a wild dance of opposites: hope and despair, fear and acceptance, delusion and clarity, struggle and surrender.

Finding the courage to open my heart to these depths has been transforming and has often led not to more pain, but to more peace and acceptance. It is as if I entered the darkness and emerged into the light

Without illness, when all is well, it’s too easy to just intellectually accept the truth of suffering. Cancer has challenged me to practice dharma in the trenches. It has opened my heart to my own suffering which I now see as the suffering of all. It has been the birth of compassion and courage in my life, an unexpected gift.

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Dharma Dictionary: Roshi

Defined by Michael Wenger

Roshi may be translated literally as “venerable old one” and is the Japanese pronunciation of the Chinese characters for laoshi (teacher). As such it is a general term not limited to Zen or Buddhism.

In Japan, the Rinzai and Soto schools use the term roshi differently, and it is used somewhat differently again in the West. In the Rinzai school it is a term of respect for someone who has completed the koan study, received Inka (seal of approval) and is abbot of a training monastery. The term has a very specific definition and applies only to a small number of people in Japan—perhaps fifty to eighty. The formal title is shike in Rinzai Zen. In regular usage one may be called rodaishi (old great teacher) or so-and-so Roshi.

In Soto Zen, roshi is a term of respect that you might use when addressing or speaking about a teacher, an abbot of a temple or a priest very senior to you. At Eiheiji, one of the two head Soto temples in Japan, there may be as many as forty senior priests who might be called roshi. The same practitioner might also be called sensei with no disrespect. Sensei simply means teacher and is used to refer to or address anyone doing the function of teaching—from a kindergarten teacher to a Zen master.

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