It Takes a Sangha
excerpted from Shambhala Sun | March 2009
by Noah Levine
For positive change to take place in this world, our spiritual practice has to be so much more than just getting our ass on the meditation cushion for some part of each day. Perhaps we dedicate an hour or two to formal meditation daily, but we are still left with the rest of the day. This is where our actions, words, and livelihood all become integral aspects of our spiritual practice. Meditation is a necessity for creating positive change, but we are not meditating merely to get good at meditation, or to have pleasant spiritual experiences. We are, as Gandhi put it, trying to “be the change we wish to see in the world.”
We live in a very different culture, a much more global world, from the one that existed at the time of the Buddha. Naturally, the problems are different and on a different scale than the ones the Buddha faced in ancient India, but as a Buddhist, I take his life’s path and example to heart and find it directly applicable on our streets and in our communities today.
The Buddha spent seven years meditating on the causes of suffering, and through his own effort he experienced the end of suffering. He spent the rest of his life teaching others how to end suffering through wise understanding, intentions, actions, speech, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, and concentration. He consistently spoke out against war and all forms of violence. He was an ally to the poor and oppressed as well as a council to the rich and powerful. He acted locally on the issues of his time. He addressed sexism, racism, and war in his society and was a local activist as well as a spiritual teacher. The Buddha founded a community, a sangha in Buddhist terms, of ethical behavior, spiritual practice, and political engagement that eventually led to a radical shift in Indian thought and action. He changed the world then and now.
The point of spiritual practice is both to have a meaningful and fulfilling life of ease and well-being and to utilize our life’s energy to bring about positive change in the world. The Buddhist intention was not to live one’s whole life in silence on a meditation cushion. It was to bring the wisdom and compassion that develops in formal spiritual practice into our relationships with each other and into all aspects of our lives. The formal practice period teaches us many valuable things, but we must continue to, as the Buddha suggested, “strive forth with diligence.” This is where the rubber hits the road. With the mind fine-tuned through meditative training, we continue forward in the outer revolution of meeting ignorance with understanding and hatred with compassion. The understanding and compassion that develops through meditation’s natural response is wise action—taking the practice to the streets, serving the needy, protecting the oppressed, and educating the masses in the universal truths of kindness, generosity, and forgiveness.
All social change starts from a small group of like-minded people. Examples of this are Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr.’s non-violent campaigns against racism and colonialization. By themselves these two men would have had very little influence over their societies. The communities that gathered around them are what made the difference. The power of community is at the heart of all political, social, and spiritual transformation.
From a Buddhist perspective, community, or sangha, has always been the container in which both personal and societal awakenings occur. Siddhartha Gautama, the enlightened Buddha, was clear about the need to have wise friends to walk the path to awakening with, to meditate with, and to serve with. If the Buddha had not founded a community based on his experience of ethical behavior, meditative discipline, and compassionate action, the teachings of enlightenment would have died long ago.
It is the community that carries on the tradition of being politically involved and socially relevant. My own entry into Buddhism came as a result of help from others in the community. I began meditating while behind bars, incarcerated as a youth for my crimes of dishonesty, violence, and drug abuse. I had lost my way and knew little about ethical behavior, generosity, or true happiness. The kindness of others led me to change my life. The guidance of wise teachers and compassionate friends led to the transformation I experienced. The local community nursed me back to health and taught me about being of service to others. They cared for me when I was still unable to care for myself. Through the examples of my teachers and the community, I learned to be honest, kind, and forgiving. Through meditation, I learned to see clearly the impermanent, impersonal, and unsatisfactory nature of my own mind. This was liberating, and as I saw my own potential for freedom, I understood that all beings had this same potential.
Through talking with each other and having community, we see that every one of us is experiencing the same things. At heart, everyone has resistance and attachment. This is the Buddha’s first noble truth, that suffering is a truth of human existence. It happens for all of us and there is a cause, which is the craving for things to be different than they are. The pain in life is a given, but the suffering and dissatisfaction we put on top of the pain is extra.
When we can see that that it is true for everyone, we begin to respond with more care, love, and compassion to ourselves and each other. Eventually, this comes naturally. It is the heart’s natural expression of our own process of liberation, our own inklings of freedom, of being awake. Once we’ve acknowledged how much suffering we have experienced in our lives and have clearly seen how much suffering there is in the world, the only rational response is an engaged, compassionate response to all forms of suffering. As spiritual aspirants, we must commit our life’s energy to creating positive change in the world.
Just as we have a personal intention for awakening, we also have an altruistic intention to bring freedom to this world by responding with care and compassion to the overwhelming ignorance and suffering. We can do this by directly addressing the constant destruction of life through non-violent actions, and by responding to the greed and hatred that pervades the human experience with compassionate and generous acts of service.
The practitioners in the communities I’ve founded have developed collective responses based on the realization of individual practitioners of the suffering of others and the need to alleviate it. In San Francisco, our community teaches meditation in institutions and to at-risk youth. Ten years ago, we began a meditation class at the local juvenile hall, and over the years, that one class has grown to over twenty a month throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. In support of this engaged expression of our community’s Buddhist practice, the Mind Body Awareness Project, a non-profit organization, has come into being, and similar organizations have been founded in New York and Los Angeles. Thousands and thousands of kids, in the midst of a difficult time in their lives, have been introduced to the practice of meditation, not in a strange, mystical, religious way, but in their own language or idiom.
In New York City, the meditation community that began while I was living there continues to grow. They’ve expressed their engagement primarily by serving the homeless. The community supports a soup kitchen with monthly donations and warm bodies to help cook and serve food on the Bowery, which is down the street from the center where they meet twice a week to meditate.
Currently, I am living in Los Angeles, where the community recently opened a meditation center called Against the Stream Buddhist Meditation Society. Our first task has been to create a local space for people from all backgrounds to learn and practice the Buddhist path, and we are now creating a number of social service programs. Some people in our community are going into local jails and juvenile halls, some are working with gang kids, and others have begun to organize a program to feed the homeless. We have regular gatherings to discuss and practice spiritual engagement within the day-to-day life of the modern American experience.
These acts of engagement are known as the way of the bodhisattva, a name that refers to anyone committed to personal positive change and helping others to find freedom from suffering. The way of the bodhisattva recognizes that the goal of spiritual practice is not about what we can get for ourselves or what we alone can experience. Rather, it is about how we can serve the truth of interconnected existence and defy the false belief that life is about serving ourselves and living as if we were separate from all others and from the world itself.
On path of the bodhisattva, we have many tools: education; resources of money, time, and energy; our capacity to protect others from harm; and our ability to inspire spiritual awakening in others. The compassion that is the basis for bodhisattva activity is both natural and cultivated. It is a natural outcome of our internal transformation to use our life’s energy, to help others get free from confusion as well—to respond not only with friendliness and compassion to our own pain, but also respond with understanding and compassion to the pain in the world.
Yet for many of us, the needs of the world feel too pressing to wait until genuine compassionate understanding develops. Perhaps you’ve already experienced anger in an attempt to change the world. Anger is a very understandable and natural reaction to oppression or ignorance. But anger is also a source of suffering; it is motivated by fear. If we want to eradicate suffering, it makes sense to start with our own suffering, but we don’t have to wait till we are free from suffering to take positive actions in the world. As our meditation practice develops and our perspective transforms, the old anger reaction becomes the new compassionate response. Outwardly, the difference may be minimal, but inwardly there is a big difference between acting out of anger and acting out of compassion.
As I see it, service-oriented actions must be an integral part of our gradual transformation. In Buddhist mythology, there are stories of the many lifetimes of compassionate service the Buddha experienced prior to his birth as Siddhartha and his final awakening. In one life, he was a generous king, in another a compassionate animal. Sometimes he incarnated in hell realms, sometimes in heaven realms, but his progression from lifetime to lifetime was always motivated by an altruistic intention. Because we know that we have the ability, on some level or another, to help each other alleviate suffering, part of Buddhist practice is to bring that intention into the forefront of all our endeavors. We do this by developing a sincere and altruistic motivation, as expressed by the repeated intentions of the bodhisattva:
“May my life’s energy be of benefit to all beings. May I be of service. I commit my life’s energy to compassionate work.”
The Buddha talks about having this kind of intention as a prerequisite to enlightenment when he includes our livelihood as a part of the eightfold path. Not only do we have to use our livelihood—our life’s energy—in a way that is non-harming in order to become truly free, but we have to take it an extra step and do something positive, to add something and help each other along the way. This doesn’t mean we have to stop our chosen careers and become social workers, or dedicate ourselves to feeding the starving masses, although those are both good options. For many of us, it may just be a very simple shift in our motivation in whatever we are doing, wherever we are in our lives. We can bring the intention to respond to each person we meet with more caring, kindness, and understanding—to be more compassionate and wise with our life’s energy.
Although our motivation to help others may be very sincere, it is important to acknowledge that it may not always be one-hundred-percent altruistic. We often serve with mixed motivation. Sometimes it feels like we have to do this in order to forgive ourselves for the harm we’ve caused and the negativity we’ve created. We could be motivated by guilt, or just a healthy sense of regret and a commitment to karmic purification. At other times, we may be motivated to serve out of a desire to look good, or to appear altruistic and gain praise.
A drive to use all of one’s life energy to serve may arise, and this is a very understandable desire, but it is essential to be clear about the mixed motivation we have at times. Serving feels good. We like the experience of getting out of our self-centered thoughts and feelings by focusing our attention on doing good for others. We gain love and respect from those we help. But we must constantly be reminded that, as the Buddha has been rumored to have said, “You could search the whole world and never find another being more worthy of your love than yourself.” The truest altruism, then, includes oneself at all times—to make sure that our intention is to serve all beings, not just others.
The transformation from the selfish spiritual desire (I need to do this for myself) to a more altruistic desire (I dedicate my life’s energy to the benefit of all beings) is quite gradual for most of us. Yet when that motivation changes, it is natural to have the spontaneous aspiration arise to have all beings benefit from our life’s energy, because this is, in fact, the natural response of the awakened heart.
Our mindfulness meditation practice, our formal and informal training, develops wisdom—insight into the impermanence of everything, the absence of a solid self, and the way our actions create suffering. This wisdom is liberating, but it is only one wing of freedom. The other wing is compassion. Without caring and compassion, all the wisdom in the world is dry, lifeless. It takes caring and understanding for a fully awakened heart to soar to freedom.
Just like the original community formed by the Buddha, the Buddhist communities in Asia have had a great impact and influence on creating less violent and more ethical societies. It is my hope and prayer that Buddhism will have an equally powerful impact on the Western world. May we walk together the path of creating positive change in this world.
