Rev. Danny Fisher

My very dear friend John, who is a tremendously gifted caregiver, recently recommended that I take a look at the Summer 2006 issue of Buddhadharma: The Practitioner’s Quarterly, specifically the forum with Roshi Bernie Glassman, Robina Courtin, and Ryushin Paul Haller, entitled “How Should I Help?”

The forum explores “the relationship between social engagement and Buddhist practice,” an issue near and dear to my heart. The comments of the teachers are striking in their insightfulness, and I think offer those of us interested in this issue much to consider as we explore the relationship between formal dharma practice and work in the world.

Here are quotes from each participant that kept me thinking after reading the entire piece:

ROSHI BERNIE GLASSMAN: Separating out action and meditation almost implies that while you’re meditating you’re a Buddhist, and when you step outside of the meditation hall you’re something else.

[...]

ROBINA COURTIN: If we were talking about music, the same question would arise: How much do you practice and how much do you perform for others or teach others? The answer seems obvious. The extent to which I have practiced is the only extent to which I can do something worthwhile for others. Otherwise, we’re just wasting time. The more I practice my piano, the more capable I am of putting it out there. If we’re practicing properly and have a sincere wish, we will respond to the need when it arises, better and better all the time.

[...]

[RYUSHIN] PAUL HALLER: I’ve noticed that some people definitely come to practice through being of service–doing hospice, prison, or homeless work is the dharma gate they enter through. After a while, the other aspects of practice start to take on relevance and appropriateness. Perhaps in the orthodoxy of our Western practice situations, we think almost exclusively of people coming through the meditative dharma gate…I think we need to examine whether in our communities we have set up a hierarchy where meditation is the primary practice and helping others is a kind of secondary extension…We may think of ourselves here in the West as the orthodoxy, the cornerstone, of Buddhist practice, but if we can put ourselves in a wider context–the context of the whole of Buddhist practice around the world–it’s a lot easier for us not to cling to that position of righteousness…So we should stop assuming that anyone who is sincerely practicing will look and be just like us.

Also included with the “How Should I Help?” forum are a few excellent and quite relevant teachings by Buddhist teachers Gil Fronsdal, Traleg Kyabgon Rinpoche, and Reginald A. Ray.

The Summer 2006 issue of Buddhadharma: The Practitioner’s Quarterly is available on newstands now, and you can read an excerpt here.

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I also recommend taking a look at last week’s Religion & Ethics Newsweekly cover story on infant mortality. Lucky Severson’s feature pays special attention to Memphis, TN, the city with the highest rate of infant mortality among America’s sixty largest cities. He reports:

For every 1,000 babies born in Memphis, at least 14 don’t survive, and most of those die within a month. In some parts of Memphis the statistics are even grimmer.

…Zip code 38108…is one of the poorest neighborhoods in Memphis. The infant mortality rate here is four times the national average and worse than that of many Third World countries.

Poverty is a major factor behind premature births. Neighborhoods like these, with high teen pregnancy rates, offer little or no prenatal education…And many women don’t get prenatal care because they lack health insurance…Violence and the stress that comes from it is another factor, along with malnutrition.

R&E‘s story is a must-read for those who work in the field of chaplaincy–it points to social justice issues that cry out for our attention not only as caregivers but also as peacemakers.

You can read the story online, or you can download the podcast version here.

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Lastly, PBS offers yet another recommendation-worthy piece in an upcoming episode of Bill Moyers On Faith and Reason featuring Acharya Ani Pema Chödrön.

I’ve found what I’ve seen of Moyers’ series terrific so far, and I think Ani Pema is an exquisite teacher of the Dharma. I am very much looking forward to this conversation.

Check your local listings for showtimes. The podcast version of the program should also soon be available for downloading here, and you can always order a DVD recording of Moyers’ interview with Ani Pema here.

The podcast is neither here nor not here.

That’s not some clever Buddhist maxim, but rather my way of letting you know that the first official episode of the podcast has arrived and that it’s less an episode than a test of about a minute in length.

The test was conducted with Audioblogger, a service that appealed to me because it makes mobile recording extremely easy.

However, I am concerned about the sound quality, hence this test.

Your comments, feedback, and suggestions are welcome and appreciated.

Bhutanese writer/director (and Buddhist monk) Neten Chokling Rinpoche’s new film Milarepa, a biopic of the Tibetan mahasiddha who lived and taught during the eleventh and twelfth centuries of the common era, is currently being screened around the world.

Although I have not yet seen the film, I have come away from my exploration of the production’s website with the impression that it might be a tremendous piece of work.

You can view the film’s trailer here. You can also make a reservation for one of the film’s benefit screenings in the United States here.

For more about the life and teachings of Jetsun Milarepa, I recommend this exquisite teaching by the Venerable Bardor Tulku Rinpoche, as well as Lobsang P. Lhalungpa’s sublime translation of The Life of Milarepa.

I’ve been hemming and hawing about whether or not to put a “blogroll” in the right hand column with all the other links. I’ve ultimately decided not to, but I’d like to share some links to and descriptions of blogs I read regularly and enjoy. In the future, I hope to share more as I discover them.

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BUDDHIST BLOGS:

• American Buddhist Studies Center: Jeff Wilson
• Blogmandu
• The Buddhist Blog
• Dharmavidya
• dharma:vision
• Dreaming of Danzan Ravjaa
• Fogdux
• Green Clouds
• Interlog
• lotusinthemud
• My Zen Life
• Paper Frog
• Tricycle Blogs
• Woodmoor Village
• Zen Blog of the Vimala Sangha
• ZenDiary.org
• Zen Filter
• Zen Under the Skin

RELIGION, SPIRITUALITY, AND POLITICS BLOGS:

• Chuck Currie, M.Div.

(Anything you like about the form of this blog has been shamelessly stolen from Chuck, a U.C.C. licensed minister and all around terrific fellow.)

• Faithful Progressive

(Check out the F.P.’s interview with yours truly.)

• Father Jake Stops the World
• Get Religion
• the possibility of fire
• Swami Uptown
• Velveteen Rabbi

COMEDY/HUMOROUS BLOGS:
(CAUTION: All of the following contain vulgar language and/or potentially offensive material.)

• The American Mastodon
• Funnsylvania
• Pete Rose Haircut
• The Spoonbender
• WULAD

MISCELLANEOUS BLOGS:

• The Cub Reporter
• Fridgeir
• Dave Kehr
• Precinct 13
• Rebel Kitten: Surrealism & Revolution
• Rebel Kitten East

The following is an interview I did with Dharmavidya (David Brazier) a little over eight months ago. The impetus for our conversation was a project I was working on at the time about the tension I (perhaps wrongly) perceived between Buddhist monastic practice and social engagement.

Like my interview with Acharya Judith Simmer-Brown, Ph.D., I think the interviewee surfaces powerful sentiments about the keys to a monastic culture’s survival and vibrancy and also suggests something about the character of what we might call “Western Buddhism.” It begs to be shared.

A Pureland Buddhist priest and psychotherapist, Dharmavidya is the founder of the Amida Trust, an organization based in England and dedicated to exploring issues of social action connected with Buddhist practice. In addition to all of this work, he is the author of several marvelous books, including The Feeling Buddha: A Buddhist Psychology of Character, Adversity and Passion, Zen Therapy: Transcending the Sorrows of the Human Mind, Beyond Carl Rogers, and The New Buddhism.

Dharmavidya also maintains an eponymous blog and contributes to more than a few multiblogs.

Although I have not formally met Dharmavidya, we have become fairly well acquainted via the internet. When I began my first (and now defunct) blog about a year-and-a-half ago, I managed to connect with a few individuals from the Amida Trust, including Dharmavidya himself. Today I am a regrettably infrequent contributor to his online endeavour Interlog, a multiblog dedicated to discussing Buddhist and Christian interfaith issues.

My interview with Dharmavidya (conducted across e-mail) was previously published on another of his blogs, Questions in the Sand, November 28, 2005, with the title “Do Social Engagement and Practice Conflict?”

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DANNY FISHER: From the looks of things, the Amida Trust does a lot of work devoted to issues around social engagement and Buddhist practice. What are you learning and discovering about how notions of monasticism might be reshaping in the 21st century? Similarly, have you noticed new trends in thinking about engaged Buddhism? Is anything apparent to you in terms of what distinct energies and ideas Westerners can offer these two areas? What wisdom might your tradition have to offer in terms of thinking about work in the world and the priestly/monastic vocation?

DHARMAVIDYA (DAVID BRAZIER): Thank you. Good questions. First, the issue of monasticism. Buddhist renunciant practitioners might be called monks, but the original concept was not that of a cloistered person following a rule of stabilitas (staying in one place), which is the definition of monk in most western traditions. Buddhist monks were really friars. They are mobile (homeless) in basic concept. This is certainly our concept at Amida. Full renunciation implies freedom to go wherever one is needed in the service of other sentient beings. That is what faith and practice mean. Our monastery is, therefore, the mother ship for expeditions. People go forth and return. There is then a synergism through sharing. We all learn from one another and grow in faith together.

As for the internal style of monasticism–the liturgical life, the community, the roles and relationships, the day to day work–they should all be shaped to help people learn how to be errant bodhisattvas able to handle responsibility, work in harmony with other, remain established in deep faith even in the midst of adversity, trust one another and so on. The monastery is a training ground for character, a spiritual powerhouse where people can come and recharge, a mirror for each of us in which we see all the crinkles of our foolish nature. This is where we find out what we are, abandon some of our more glaring pretensions and antisocial quirks, and grow up a bit. Practice is about doing something about oneself–which means no longer spending all one’s time reprocessing one’s delusions.

Second the question of Western Buddhism and social engagement. Even today Western (and quite a few Eastern) approaches to Buddhism seems to me to be fundamentally at odds with engagement and, in my view, therefore, at odds with what Buddhism is and should be about. I do not see Buddhism as a quest for personal enlightenment that is somehow the property of an individual and I fear that Western Buddhism has taken Buddhist practice and commodified it. Far from understanding non-self ever more deeply and growing in faith, Western Buddhists are all too often just making practice into a personal indulgence and support for introspective rumination. They think that the more disengaged they become the more spiritual they will be and this is a fallacy. An activist friend of mine said: “You see good activists become Buddhists and then you never see them again.” In other words, the Western approach is still strongly implicated in quietism. Despite the fact that many people think that Westerners are more world-oriented and extravert than Asian people, broadly speaking, in Asia Buddhism is a social force as much as a personal one whereas in the West it is not.

In Pureland, I do feel that there is a different outlook–in fact, there is OUT-look rather than only IN-look. For us there is no basic conflict between practice and engagement–they both tend in the same direction and are difficult to distinguish from one another. Practice is faith and faith is tested and strengthened through encounter. Engagement is, therefore, a strong and essential part of our practice. Another strong part is encounter with each other. This yields community, fellow feeling and team spirit, which are all expressions of faith. We have quiet periods as part of the natural rhythm of life, but we would not think that silence matters more than communication, say.

We have developed a system of different forms of commitment and ordination based upon people’s availability, which is a function of their degree of renunciation. The more renunciant people are the more engaged they are likely to be. It is the fly renunciant people who are likely to be sent to India or Africa. Others might support them, but they are not free to go. It is important to ask, do I have the faith to do Buddha’s work? Do I have the faith to respond to what the universe puts in front of me? Or am I too busy with my own plans for my own salvation to listen to the suffering in the world? What would Buddha have one do?

One might need extra contemplative time to recuperate or digest experience after particularly challenging assignments, but we do not see a conflict between engagement and deepening of practice–they are synonymous. If one really is not free to go forth abroad, then one can go forth locally. Whatever the details, engagement is practice, even if it is engagement with one’s housemates or the ants in the garden.

The majority of Western Buddhists seem to be caught in a concept of what Buddhism is that is essentially antithetic to engagement and yet still feel from first principles that engagement must be necessary or right and so finish up in a conflict. I suggest this is a misunderstanding of Buddhism. All Buddha’s disciples are bodhisattvas. Bodhisattvas are those who have the faith to do the Buddha’s work. Doing the work strengthens that faith. It all points in one direction.

If one thinks that practice is something done when one disengages, one misunderstands practice. If one is seeking something for oneself from the practice, one misunderstands practice. So I would say: Just have faith and go forth in Buddha’s light and it will all take care of itself. A path will unfold. There are people–there are certainly some here–who will be companions for you on the Way and together we (even though we are and remain deluded beings in many ways) become the Buddha body collectively. Buddha lacks for nothing, yet needs something–you. Don’t keep him waiting too long.