“After paying homage to the Blessed One, he sat down on one side and the Blessed One instructed, urged, roused, and gladdened him with talk on the Dhamma.”

Rathavinita Sutta, Majjima Nikaya 24 (”The Middle Length Discources of the Buddha”, Bhikkhu Ñanamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi, page 241.)

“Then the Blessed One gave the householder UpÄ?li progressive instruction, that is, talk on giving, talk on virtue, talk on the heavens; he explained the danger, degradation, and defilement in sensual pleasures and the blessing of renunciation. When he knew that the householder UpÄ?li’s mind was ready, receptive, free from hindrances, elated, and confident, he expounded to him the teaching special to the Buddhas: suffering, its origin, its cessation, and the path.”

UpÄ?li Sutta, Majjima Nikaya 56 (”The Middle Length Discources of the Buddha”, Bhikkhu Ñanamoli and Bhikkhu Bodhi, page 465.)

“Monks, I do not say that the attainment of gnosis is all at once. Rather, the attainment of gnosis is after gradual training, gradual action, gradual practice. And how is there the attainment of gnosis after gradual training, gradual action, gradual practice? There is the case where, when conviction has arisen, one visits [a teacher]. Having visited, one grows close. Having grown close, one lends ear. Having lent ear, one hears the Dhamma. Having heard the Dhamma, one remembers it. Remembering, one penetrates the meaning of the teachings. Penetrating the meaning, one comes to an agreement through pondering the teachings. There being an agreement through pondering the teachings, desire arises. When desire has arisen, one is willing. When one is willing, one contemplates. Having contemplated, one makes an exertion. Having made an exertion, one realizes with the body the ultimate truth and, having penetrated it with discernment, sees it.”

Kitagiri Sutta, Majjima Nikaya 70, tr. Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Background

There is a great and growing interest in Buddhism, worldwide and in the United States. There are many possible events behind that interest:

• The worldwide recognition of the Dalai Lama as perhaps the one person on the planet who most nearly embodies truth and goodness
• The widespread emigration to the West from Buddhist cultures—from Tibet most prominently, but also from Sri Lanka, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, and other war-ravaged countries of Southeast Asia, and also from China and Japan, for economic and commercial reasons
• The increasing prominence, in intellectual circles, of Buddhist practitioners who were born and educated in the West; who went to the Eastern sources of Buddhism for training and, frequently, ordination as monks or nuns; and who have, on their return, worked diligently to spread the Buddhadharma: founding sanghas, conducting workshops, translating sutras, and writing books and giving lectures to help Western audiences understand the Buddha and his teachings
• The easy accessibility of good modern English translations of the Pali Canon, e.g. the wealth of sutta translations on the Access to Insight website and the continuing series on The Teachings of the Buddha from Wisdom Publications. These translations are accurate and are, for the most part, written in graceful, unmannered English. Most have come from Americans or British who have been traditionally educated in Western colleges and graduate schools, and who have then travelled to Asia for further study and ordination as monks and nuns. The translations they’ve then produced are informed by the best contemporary scholarship and also by each translator’s personal experience as a committed practitioner.

Against that background, many Westerners are coming to see Buddhism as a desirable alternative to the spiritual traditions in which they were raised, traditions that have come to emphasize profession of belief over ethical action, that have allowed themselves to become associated with some very reactionary (homophobic, misogynistic, anti-democratic) elements in our society, and that remain tied to an understanding of human history and the nature of things that is difficult or impossible to reconcile with scientific rationalism. To those Westerners (or to some of them, at least), Buddhism seems to offer an understanding of our human condition that is subtle, profound and persuasive, along with a path that is very much focused on ethical behavior and that promises an end to the pain and frustration of living in an impermanent and imperfect world; as an added feature, the foundational stories and teachings of Buddhism do not challenge credulity.

But such a curious Westerner, at least in Cincinnati, if he or she searches for a Buddhist community to get involved with, is unlikely to find anything very satisfying.

From what I’ve seen, most Buddhist sanghas in the US are focused very intensively—sometimes almost exclusively—on meditation practice. If a person seeking enlightenment regarding Buddhism (not Buddhist Enlightenment, necessarily) were to visit any sangha in this city, she would find a small group of adults, mostly single or there without their spouses, coming together to chant texts, either in an unknown language or of such esoteric content as to be virtually impenetrable without an extensive crib sheet, and to sit in silence for long periods, punctuated only by shorter periods of walking in silence. While such groups may participate in some social mingling before or after the sitting, that mingling is likely to be excessively informal, with talk of current events or of people the visitor is unlikely to know, and little or no discussion of the Dharma. There are exceptions—the bi-monthly dharma talks and discussions at the Buddhist Dharma Center and probably similar events at other sanghas—but the picture I’ve painted is not, by and large, unfaithful to the situation that actually exists.

That situation, as I understand it in relation to the history of Buddhism in the various cultures in which it’s taken root, is not characteristic of Buddhism in those cultures or of Buddhism through its history. To oversimplify greatly (but not, I think, misleadingly), Buddhism has, whenever it’s taken root in a new culture, gone through a period similar to what it’s going through in the U.S. today, a period where it had been adopted by a relatively small group of serious seekers who had travelled to the source to find training in the Dharma and the practice, and who had returned to introduce their countrymen to what they’d learned. During this period, for the mass of the lay population, Buddhism felt alien and difficult to approach. As lay Buddhist communities grew in each culture, however, and the lay people became more vocal and more involved in the governance of the sangha, those sanghas adapted local rituals and forms of spiritual practice to the Dharma that had been brought to them, and from that effort the various national or cultural variants of Buddhism emerged—Tibetan Buddhism, with its panoply of spirit beings and tantric practices; Chinese Buddhism, with its taoist colorings, its emphasis on sudden enlightenment and its delight in paradox; Japanese Zen, taking the Chinese form several steps further and merging those with a tradition that values heroic individual effort. In the other direction, the Theravada traditions that took root in Sri Lanka and throughout Southeast Asia borrowed folk ritual for their day-to-day communal practices and established relations between laymen and monks based on an economy of merit exchange. In all of those traditions, meditation was commonly practiced by monks and nuns but not, extensively, by lay Buddhists. (There are, obviously, many exceptions to that generalization: committed lay men and women in every culture who find Buddhist meditation practice important to their development as good Buddhists and as good people.)

This document suggests a new model for bringing people together to deepen their understanding of the Buddha’s Dharma—to study the foundational texts, to see how the lessons the Buddha taught in those texts apply to the perplexities that they confront, as citizens, as family people, as workers, as neighbors—and to develop a path of practice that will integrate the Dharma into their responses to those perplexities.

A New Dharma Center: Foundational Considerations

The Buddhist meeting envisioned here will respond to the needs and interests of people who consider themselves Buddhists, as well as to the many more who have learned a little of Buddhism and who might consider that as a way to follow. If it’s true that many Americans are ready to hear the Buddha’s teachings, they are likely to be most receptive to those teachings if they are presented with due respect for the cultural norms the Americans have grown up with.

The Buddha’s foundational message is that there is pain; that the cause of pain is wanting things to be other than they are; that if we can end that wanting, the pain will end; and that the way to stop wanting things to be other than they are is an ethical discipline with eight factors: right understanding, right intention, right speech, right action, right livelihood, right effort, right mindfulness, and right concentration. Through 45 years of defining the detailed meaning of that message, extracting its implications, demonstrating its applicability to virtually every aspect of human behavior, exploring necessary corollaries to the truths it embodies, and showing the benefits of living one’s life according to those truths, the Buddha elaborated a doctrine that is coherent, practical, persuasive, and universally relevant. Here and now, half a world away from where the Buddha taught and several millennia distant from his time, his Dharma points the way to a clear vision of our human condition and to the behaviors we need to develop to respond positively and sanely to that condition.

The ideal is a meeting structured to appeal to an American audience—not to all Americans, but to those ready to receive the Buddha’s teachings, i.e. those who have experienced pain in their lives and who have found traditional theistic religions insufficient to either explain that pain or to relieve it. Such a center, to be most effective, would borrow from existing American practices and traditions as long as what is borrowed does not diminish the fidelity with which the sangha transmits and practices the Dharma. The following practices, which most Americans are familiar with from whatever religious tradition they grew up with, or from the general cultural milieu, seem to me to be worth considering as models for this new kind of meeting; none are in conflict with the Buddhadharma, as far as I can see, and each would contribute to the comfort level of an American family, relatively new to Buddhism, coming to join other such families in learning and developing a way of living based on the Buddha’s teachings.

• A concern for the family. I think that our new meeting must include activities targeted to children: songs, stories, and lessons that would help them, gently and with a compassionate understanding of childhood experience, to consider that experience—what happens in their school classrooms and on the playground, what they see in movies and on TV shows, what they hear in popular songs, what they read about popular entertainers, what goes on at their parties—to understand all of that in the light of the Buddha’s teachings, and to learn how to respond to it with a measure of skill appropriate to their age and understanding.
• A focus on teaching. Admittedly, the distinction between teaching and preaching is sometimes difficult to discern, but in all traditional American religious institutions, the service is centered on a dharma talk of some sort, whose purpose is, in the words of the Buddhist discourses, “to instruct, urge, rouse, and gladden [the congregation] with talk on the Dhamma” in whatever way that institution understands the Dhamma. In our New Dharma Center meetings, I would hope that our Dharma lessons would take their texts from either the Tipitaka (the oldest and most probably authentic collection of the Buddha’s discourses) or from some other foundational literature of a mainstream Buddhist tradition, and that we would attempt, in examining the texts, to discover their relevance to the conditions of our lives here and now.
• A deep concern for social justice. While some people are attracted to Buddhism for purely private reasons, seeking a practice that will help still their inner demons and lead them to a personal awakening, many more are attracted to the Buddhist ideal of compassion. As the ideas of Engaged Buddhism receive wider and better informed attention, many are coming to see how the Buddha’s teachings identify the root conditions of the injustice and pain that pervades our world and point to a discipline of social action aimed at eradicating those root conditions and so ameliorating the pain and injustice—our social and cultural dukkha. I see the New Dharma Center as locating itself solidly and unambiguously in the tradition of Engaged Buddhism, and I would hope that the Center could develop a program of activities, possibly in cooperation with the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, that would offer members of the Center opportunities to work directly and purposefully on action within that tradition.
• Music. There is something about music, even if it’s only an unaccompanied guitar improvising on a theme, that helps the listener still the mind, release obsessive and anxious thoughts, and accept the raw perceptual experience of hearing. In addition, the singing of hymns is a powerful communal activity that helps a gathering of people cohere and come to a sense of itself as a cooperative entity. I’m not aware of any Buddhist hymns, but I can think of a number of songs in the American folk tradition which, if they were to be sung in the context of a Buddhist sangha, would inevitably reveal Buddhist themes: the Shaker hymn “Simple Gifts”, Stephen Foster’s “Hard Times Come Again No More”, Si Kahn’s wonderful round “Step by Step” (which we sang at Joanna Macy’s recent workshop), “Turn, Turn, Turn”, “Passing Through” (the great Dick Blakeslee song, which Pete Seeger sang through the ’40’s and ’50’s), and certainly others. I think it would be worthwhile to compile a book of songs that could be understood in the light of the Buddhadharma and to sing those when we come together.
• Quaker worship as a model for meditative contemplation. Paul Davis describes a practice he’s experienced in retreats with Thich Nhat Hanh as something very similar to the practice of Quaker “unprogrammed worship”. As I remember what Paul told us, it goes something like this: after receiving a Dharma talk, the retreat participants sit in silent contemplation of what they’ve heard. If one wishes to share a response to the talk, that one stands; a bell is rung; the person bows to the group and the group bows back; the person speaks his or her piece; bows are traded again; a bell is rung; and the person sits back down. There is no cross talk; all sharing is in response to the particular aspect of the Dharma that was the subject of the talk. As a model for meditative practice, that is very different from the satipatthana practice that the Buddha recommended to the monastic sangha. But I feel that it is quite appropriate to a lay practitioner, and that it would, because of its similarity to Quaker practice, be familiar and comfortable to an American lay sangha.
• An order of service. In traditional churches—not only Protestant churches, but temples and mosques as well—the congregants know just what the order of business is; what signals the end of the socializing that proceeds the service, what music, if any, accompanies the taking of seats, what songs will be sung and at what point in the service, what the text is for the day’s teachings and how long that teaching will take, what activities follow the teaching, what signals the end of the formal service, and what optional activities might follow the service. In meditation-oriented Buddhist meetings, such a published order of service is unnecessary, since the order does not change much, or at all, from one session to the next. At the New Dharma Center, on the other hand, while the meetings will be structured in a consistent way, each session will differ from the others in details. A published order of service would be helpful in making the meeting participants comfortable and helping them join the meeting activity purposefully.
• Member governance. For meetings associated with a monastic community or a particular Buddhist tradition, there is really no question about the governance of the meeting; rules are set and responsibilities assigned by tradition and/or the presiding teacher/monk. The New Dharma Center will have to determine for itself how things are done, how responsibility will be allocated, and how accountability will be monitored. In that regard, once again, the New Center might be more like a Quaker meeting or a small Jewish minyan than it is like other Buddhist meetings.

The role of meditative practice at the New Center.

Placing meditation at the center of lay Buddhist practice does not, to the best of my knowledge, find justification in the Discourses. In his teaching to the Kalamas, in his discourse to the merchant Dighajanu, in the long and detailed exposition of the Dharma that he gave to the Brahmin youth Sigala, the Buddha never mentions meditation (or concentration, which in the tipitaka is the term commonly associated with meditative practice.) Nor does he talk about concentration in his many discourses to King Pasenadi and King Bimbhisara, in his discourses to various Brahmins, or in his discourses to headmen in the Samyutta Nikaya. All of the discourses in the tipitaka (at least, all that I’m aware of) that are concerned with the importance, the goals, and, especially, the methods of meditative practice are addressed to members of the Buddha’s sangha, the monks and nuns.

Given that one of the stimulating conditions that evoked this proposal was that most Buddhist sanghas place what I consider to be rather more importance on group meditation than the Buddha himself did, the temptation, in imagining a New Center, is to diminish the importance and the role of meditation. That would, I think, be wrong.

I think that there are four considerations regarding meditation that might guide a New Center policy.

• First, technical meditation—sitting on a cushion or walking with exaggerated slowness and watching your breath—is a discipline that requires the right setting and the appropriate conditions to be a useful practice. The Buddha advised his monks and nuns, in preparing for meditative practice, to find a private quiet place, at the root of a tree, in a remote forest grove, or in an uninhabited hut, to practice their meditation. It was not, as I read the discourses, the sort of activity that was commonly practiced when the sangha came together. When that happened, the purpose was typically to hear and discuss a Dharma talk, either by the Buddha himself or by a senior monk. Before and after the talk, the Buddha advised the monks to discuss the Dharma among themselves. So, when they were together, the sangha was typically either receiving a Dharma lesson or discussing the Dharma. When they were meditating, they were doing so alone.
• Second, the meditation hall of a typical modern Buddhist sangha is designed to facilitate technical meditation in a group; for someone not used to sitting on the floor, it’s not the most comfortable setting for hearing a Dharma talk or discussing the Dharma, and the discomfort could easily distract a participant’s attention.
• Third, technical meditation really demands training from an experienced meditation master. That person is not necessarily someone who is also good at explicating the Dharma or leading a discussion of the teachings.
• Fourth, there are wide variations in how different Buddhist teachers and different traditions understand meditation—its importance to Buddhist practice, the specific techniques to be followed while meditating; and the proper goal of meditative effort. Attitudes range from an understanding of zazen-style sitting as the primary practice of a practicing Buddhist to the attitude that meditation is equivalent to mindfulness and as long as one is mindful, one is engaging in meditative practice, regardless of setting and posture.

Given those considerations, I suggest that the New Dharma Center should try to build relationships with existing sanghas that focus their efforts primarily on meditation. We should encourage members of our group to include meditation as part of their practice, and we should direct them, for training and meditation sessions, to those other centers. On a regular basis, I would hope that we could have people from meditation-oriented centers provide Dharma talks to our group, not only to explain meditative practice, but to help us all understand how their tradition views the Dharma and the role that meditation plays in bringing the Dharma to life and to living.

It’s also entirely likely that we will wish to include a meditation session as part of our regular meeting, even if it is not the primary focus of the meeting. Those who wish to participate in a group meditation could arrive half an hour early and sit; that practice would, undeniably, help to establish a frame of mind which is well prepared to hear the Dharma.

Where to Go from Here

First, there has to be a core group of people who are interested in the sort of meeting proposed here, who would work together to flesh the idea out and to handle the various tasks that have to be done to bring the meeting into existence and build its membership. Among those tasks:

• Establish a set of principles (including a mission statement) that will guide us in our planning and help anyone thinking about joining us to determine if there is a good fit. The guiding principles will, I hope, keep us focused on the Buddhadharma, while acknowledging our intention to create a form for our meetings and a structure for our center that differs from the forms and structures that are commonly seen in other Buddhist groups.
• Work out the details of organizing the Center: define the organizational structure, decide on what sort of organization we will be legally and set up a corporate entity, anticipate the logistical problems we will have to overcome.
• Plan the structure of the meetings: what will happen when, and who will be responsible for each part of it.
• Determine a budget for the operations of the Center and plan to get the money we will need to operate.
• Define what we’ll need in the way of facilities and conduct a search to find a location for the Center.
• Plan a schedule for the first couple of months of meetings: the dharma talks that will be given and who will give each.
• Develop and implement a member recruitment plan; get the word out to other Buddhist centers and to other audiences that might be interested—area colleges and universities, progressive church congregations, coffee shop regulars, etc. Determine the process by which becomes a member, either a provisional member or a regular member.
• Write and publish the materials that we need to communicate with our membership, our prospective members, and the community at large.

I think that we’ll need to begin, fairly soon, with a series of small meetings in which interested people can discuss the idea, expand it where necessary, correct it where it needs correction, and determine, each one them, his or her level of interest.

If those meetings evolve into a core group that will make the decisions that have to be made and undertake the tasks that have to be completed, then the New Dharma Center will come into being; if not, it won’t. So be it.

I will keep posting on this website, articles that flesh out the basic outline presented in this proposal. I’ve also created a mail list, that I hope you will subscribe to. If you have questions about what’s here, or if you think you might like to be part of the core group, please send me an email.