I taught a class last quarter at UC’s Osher Livelong Learning Institute in “The Teachings of the Buddha”. The class attracted more than 30 students, which is quite large by OLLI standards; it’s clear that there’s a lot of interest in Buddhism. The students were sharp, attentive, and involved with the teachings that we covered. They found the Buddha’s Dharma comprehensible, for the most part, and, again for the most part, they recognized the relevance of the teachings to the conditions of their lives and of our culture. Many of them, it was clear, were attracted to the Dharma and were looking for ways to integrate it into their lives.

The sticking point for many of them, it turned out, was not what I expected it to be. They were cool with the non-theistic nature of the discourses, and they understood that the Buddha’s demand that we confront the harsh reality of our circumstances did not, therefore, mean that Buddhism was somehow gloomy or “pessimistic”; they understood how accepting responsibility for the consequences of our actions could provide a foundation for morality and could bring meaning to our lives. Even kamma and rebirth didn’t dim their enthusiasm (although that might have had something to do with the relatively naturalistic slant I gave to our discussion of those doctrines). What disturbed them about Buddhism, and what, for almost all of them, was a deal-breaker for their acceptance of the Dharma as their personal path, was the failure of contemporary Buddhism to provide the kind of communal experience, the sense of fellowship, that they received from their participation in church or temple services.

“Do Buddhists have a church?” “Do they have regular meetings?” “What do they do when they get together?” Those were the questions I got, and the answers I was able to give were clearly not answers that satisfied whatever felt need it was that had stimulated the questions.

Now I’m quite ready to believe that my own growing dissatisfaction with the modes of practice that dominate Buddhism meetings and the dominance of communal meditation in those practices probably affected the answers I gave. Someone who was more enthusiastic about communal meditation than I am might have responded to those questions with an explanation and a defense of meditative practice that might have given the students the assurance they were looking for and given them also more encouragement than I gave them to attend meditative sessions and take up the practice. But I understood their questions to be revealing of a need that, again as I understand it, contemporary Buddhist practice is not fulfilling.

It was that experience with my OLLI class that stimulated me to begin thinking more deeply about an idea that I’d been noodling for several years – the idea of a Dharma Center that would focus more on exploring the teachings and less on the practice of group meditation. As I talked to various people about that, the idea began to assume a more distinct outline. That outline is what I’ve written as The Concept, and I’ve set this site up to explore that concept in more detail and, if there proves to be enough interest, to begin working on the very difficult task of bringing real shape to the outline, to actually start a New Dharma Center.