Bev told me about the building that Women Writing for (a) Change had recently purchased and remodeled, and she said that she thought that they would be interested in hosting a group like we were discussing. Bev is a member of WWf(a)C, and she volunteered to talk to the people who run the group and let them know what we were thinking of doing. The result of that was that I visited them on Monday and was thrilled with the reception I received and with the space I saw. Kathy Wade, the Executive Director; Mary Pierce Brosmer, the Founder; and Andrea Nichols, the facilities manager, were all very interested in what we were thinking about, and they were all eager to have us use their space for our meetings. There would be a cost, but a relatively modest one: $150 to use the space for half a day.

The space itself is quite magical (and most of you know that I don’t use words like that lightly). They’ve put a lot of thought, love, and craft into making it a space where people can feel safe and comfortable, communicate easily with one another, and express their creativity. I think that it’s a space that would accomodate the concept of a New Dharma Center gracefully and naturally, and I’d love the chance to take an interested group back for another visit. It’s in Silverton, on Plainfield Road near the corner of Montgomery. There’s a free municipal parking lot just a few buildings north of the WWf(a)C building.

I went back on Wednesday and took the photos below. You can click on any photo to see a larger image.

The spaces in the Women Writing for (a) Change building are warm and welcoming. In the center of the first floor, on the wall of the structure housing the elevator, a lovely statue of a female boddhisattva stands in front of the WWf(a)C hanging; I think it’s the Tibetan “White Tara”, but I’m not sure; maybe someone more familiar than I am with Buddhist iconography can provide a more certain identification.
There are large discussion areas on both floors; the left-hand photo is of the second floor and the right-hand photo is the first floor. Both areas are very flexible; there are lots of chairs sitting around, and they can be arranged in a circle, as shown here, or in rows, depending on what we might decide. The first-floor discussion area has lots of floor cushions (when I first saw it, there were no chairs, just a circle of cushions, where a group of teenagers had been meeting). They’re not zafus, and I doubt that they’d be very comfortable for a long meditation session, but we could certainly bring zabutons and zafus or meditation benches if we wanted to set one of the areas up for meditation.
The table in the large boardroom is modular; it’s made up of about eight modules that can be easily pulled apart and moved against the wall to free the area up for rows of seating.
The whole space is very open, with modular wall panels that could be moved to accomodate larger or smaller groups. These shots are of the first floor space.
Here’s another shot of the large discussion area on the second floor. The space is full of beautiful and useful stuff, like these comforters; and there are lots and lots of floor cushions that we could use any way we wanted to.
The first floor is arranged with five or six small-medium size discussion areas. The modular walls that separate one area from another are acoustically efficient, and I think that it would be entirely feasible to have quiet discussions going on in adjacent areas without one disturbing the other.
More of the first floor discussion areas.
And still more. The first floor of the building is an enormous space, but it doesn’t feel at all cavernous or hollow. Rather, the feeling throughout the building is of warmth and closeness. It’s clear that all of the furniture has been donated, but despite the fact that it’s come from a wide range of sources and (with a few exceptions) nothing matches, the whole appears totally harmonious. It’s been very thoughtfully put together.

We’ll start with “Simple Gifts”, a song that I’ve loved since I first heard Pete Seeger sing it at Oberlin in 1955.

The song was written by Elder Joseph while he was at the Shaker community in Alfred, Maine in 1848. What appeals to me is the song’s truth, its freedom from dogma, the beauty and singability of its melody, and its clear connection with dance. Here are the lyrics:

The song’s been recorded by almost everyone. One of my favorite versions is the short one by Judy Collins, from her album “Whales & Nightingales”. You can get it from AmazonMP3.com for $.99.

Another possibly cautionary example is The Buddhist Churches of America, a U.S. branch of the Japanese Jodo Shinshu variant of Pure Land Buddhism; in addition to their use of the word “church” to define their gathering places, the BCA uses the terms “Reverend”, “Minister” and “Bishop” to refer to members of the Church hierarchy. While meditation is not typically part of their practice, and while they do have a relatively straightforward focus on the Buddhadharma, they are very much targeted to Japanese-Americans; there’s a lot of chanting, and that is almost entirely in Japanese. And there is, for me, an uncomfortable mysticism about the basic Pure Land doctrine, that chanting the name of Amitabha Buddha over and over will guarantee rebirth in the “Pure Land”, in which one is promised virtually certain Enlightenment. For those looking for salvation through ritual, faith, and supplicatory prayer, but who no longer identify themselves as Christians or Jews, the BCA may offer an alternative. But that is not, I believe, what we are about.

I think that it’s very important, early on, to articulate a set of guiding principles that will fix the grounding of our Center and of the Dharma that we practice in the Buddha’s teachings. We are not trying to assimilate into a foreign culture, as were the Japanese immigrants who founded BCA in 1944. And we are not trying to resist proselytizing Christians, as were the “Protestant Buddhists” in Sri Lanka. Rather, we are trying to arrange a setting for the Dharma that will make it most easily accessible to those who are ready for it and who need it most.

In many of the suttas, in the formula statement which describes the Buddha’s reputation, one of the items is that he is “the only one able to tame those ready to be tamed.” I believe that many Americans today are ready to be tamed, and that they need to be tamed, not by Buddhism, of one lineage or another, but by the Buddha, through the words he left with us.

Though some of my more devout Buddhist associates may balk at the idea, these days I have increasingly come to see Buddhism in America as an elaborate thought experiment being conducted by society at large–from the serious practitioner who meditates twice daily to the person who remarks in passing, “Well, if I had to be something, I guess I’d be a Buddhist.” The object of that experiment is not to import some “authentic” version of Buddhism from Asia, as some believe, but to imagine a new model for religion altogether–one that is nondogmatic, practice-based and peaceful.

In that case, all the more reason to keep Buddhism in America alive. But to keep that experiment running (as it must if it is ever to yield practical results for the broader religious culture), it has to get itself grounded in the realities of American family life. That is why I tell every Buddhist I meet these days to make friends with a local priest or rabbi and ask what kinds of programs he (or she) is offering for children and families. For if Buddhism has much to offer the West, it surely has much to receive as well. Whatever new religious model is going to emerge over the next 100 years as the result of the inevitable cross-pollination of religious cultures in America, one can only hope that it will preserve the best of East and West.

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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.