Secular Buddhism UK

This a major concern for me. I’m a recent convert to buddhism and like everyone have had to resort to making do with teachers from existing traditions, laden,  as they are, with much cultural and supernatural baggage which is barely satisfactory.

My current practice is supported by weekly attendance at a tibetan buddhist centre with guided mindfulness meditation from a zen monk (but he’s out of town for 3 months) and this is not ideal. I would point out where I live there are no other options. It’s not a major city. None of the traditions really suit my needs and our local buddhist centre does not offer extended retreats for indepth study. Its pricey to attend retreats and to attend weekly meditation i have to spend $20 in petrol and attendance fees.

In an ideal world, my buddhist teacher would be a secular buddhist and belong to a buddhist centre where I could attend for regular meditation, do retreats and also do long (say 6 months) retreats for study and mediation. I would pay by donation according to my means, and volunteer my time and labour in exchange.

As its shaping up, it seems there’s no move to establish secular buddhism beyond books, articles, website communities, and retreats held by about two teachers globally.  I think this state of affairs may serve the need of buddhist teachers more than we lay buddhists. It seems there’s no interest in the future, whereby people would be trained to teach a secular dharma. Why is that? I wonder if people are afraid of becoming an organised religion and end up with all the same problems and foibles. I predict that if such infrastructures are not developed, secular buddhism will remain a marginal affair. And what will happen when our current excellent guides (the batchelors go)? (I don’t wish to insult them by suggesting they are intentionally self-serving but i would say that the effect of this approach is thus).

If I thought I were teacher material, I would make sure I got skilled up and then head out to spread the secular dharma. It’s something I strongly believe is needed. I believe it won’t and can’t happen if you sit back and wait for people to find it. Buddhism and secular buddhism in particular won’t be found if it can’t be found. It can’t be found if there’s no presence on the ground, no teachers and no centres. I myself had a very very hard time finding somewhere to go to learn meditation. It took me a few years, partly because i didn’t know what i was looking for and partly because when i did know what i was looking for, the options were unsuitable and i had to go along to a totally inappropriate place until in an obvious effort to get rid of me, my teacher sent me to my zen teacher. If I had known of a secular meditation and buddhist centre, I’d have been able to start a practice long before now.

Secular buddhism shouldn’t be hard to find. I believe there’s need for thought and effort to be given to provide training buddhist teachers and facilities where lay buddhists can easily and regularly go to develop a deep practice. Facilities should be as numerous as churches.  If you leave it at the odd retreat and mish mash of ideas that is currently available,  our practices will be unsatisfactory.

When one becomes a  psychotherapist, one studies a formal course and practices  therapy with patients whilst under  supervision from a qualified and experienced therapist which is essentially like going through therapy for trainee. After graduating, one goes away and develops one’s own personal approach but with support from colleagues to help get established professionally. A team of therapists will meet weekly to get help with their trickier cases. In this way the therapist is both independent but not alone. There are of course the professional bodies but therapists work quite freely within these guidelines and I can’t see why a similar model couldn’t be applied to raise secular buddhist teachers.  I raise this and the next example of how secular teachers could be made because in an email from Anantacitta,  i was told that there is no interest in developing a school of secular buddhism because its believed people can develop their own practices. Well they can if they are given sufficient appropriate teaching but why should teaching be denied them and therefore why should there not be teachers in the first place. There is nothing to be afraid of. We can have independent secular buddhist teachers. You can build independence into the training. Otherwise the only option is for prospective teachers to go along dishonestly and put up with all the claptrap of the other traditions for a number of years before going their own way.

At art school/university, one is trained to develop one’s own art practice and practice it at the same time, being taught by highly qualified and skilled artist-teachers. After graduation one goes ones way to develop one’s own unique path after one has been given a solid grounding in the major streams of thought and given the tools to develop a critical, rigorous and relevant practice. One is encouraged to develop professional connections and be part of the arts community. There are galleries and various events and infrastructure to nurture emerging artists.

These other models could be useful in helping establish a body of highly trained secular buddhist teachers. There is no reason to be afraid of not going down this route. One should rather be afraid of not doing it.

Recently i attended a Goenka Vipassana retreat. I was extremely impressed by the model that Goenka had set up to disseminate his method of meditation. This system could work very well with secular buddhism for both retreats and giving new teachers an avenue for practising in a controlled environment. This system could establish a network of centres for local people to attend and be part of a secular buddhist community. For readers unfamiliar with Goenka retreats, all vipassana centres are financially independent and run by volunteers. They also manage themselves according to their own aims and ideas but they seem to work together as well since i noticed our female manager of my came from another part of the country. Meanwhile one of the highlights of the retreat were the nightly video’d dharma talks by Goenka which we watched on high definition tvs. Although we all paid by donation, the centre was doing very well financially and the facilities were excellent. Each centre is run by a board of trustees who are nominated, i think annually. Secular buddhism could learn a great deal and go far by adopting the goenka model for centres and retreats. I am not suggesting we do exactly the same as Goenka but rather look to this model as a starting point to what could be done for secular buddhism. For instance, one difference would be instead of teachers being stuck at the stage of assistant teacher with no independence and all teachings being disseminated by Goenka himself, using htis model would be only one avenue and teachers could go off and develop their own directions after a bit of an apprenticeship using the goenka model with say stephen and Martine (or any other good teacher) doing the dharma talks and instruction. On a goenka retreat the assistant teachers role is to answer questions and fine tune the experience of the students. Its good and valuable experience for all.

So how do we start down this path? I’d like to be part of something like this. I also want to do some extended intensive study, ie for about six months so i can concentrate on developing a good mediation habit and some systematic sutta study of my own. A retreat centre is conducive to such practices where as home life is often not. And going to another traditions centres seems to almost out of the question for me. Why should people in the future not have these options open to them?

People like Stephen and Martine have had the benefit of intensive study and practice. Is it supposed that secular buddhists either do not want or need a similar experience, or that when they do, they should go to a monastery in the existing traditions? Personally the more I look into those options, I can’t see how I could fit in.

Prospective members are asked to remember ‘Buddhist ethics’ about speech when posting or commenting, and kindliness and no-harm seem to get an ethical ‘thumbs-up’, whereas frivolous speech seems to get a ‘thumbs-down’.

Some questions: Why are Buddhist ethics touted on a secular Buddhism site? What’s the secular basis of these ethics?
Aren’t we trusted to develop our own value-system (after all a suggested approach to shared values is proposed somewhere else)?

Further questions: What’s a working definition of frivolity against which we can discuss the ethics or values involved? What’s supposed to be wrong with frivolity? Is frivolity somehow wrong as a matter of principle everywhere, in all transactions with all people at all times, or are we just supposed to avoid frivolity on this site, as a matter of Buddhist ethics?  Is frivolity a no-go area for non-secular Buddhists aside from the way they converse?  I don’t know the answers to these questions, that’s why I’m asking.

Are my questions frivolous?  I genuinely don’t know how you, the reader, will respond.

Peter

With deep respect…….we reverence the Buddha.

What do these words conjure up for you? I’m a self-styled and possibly temporary secular buddhist, more a ‘bird of passage’ than a member of the flock, more a hawk than a dove. With this post, I’m going to sink my talons into this business of reverence and respect, hold it momentarily, giving both respect and reverence the once-over with my beady eye, and maybe my beak. It’s what hawks do, so don’t take offence. We hawks have our own place in the seeming order that’s more flux than order, more disordered than mere flux; beyond definitions of flux, disorder even. Some call a hawk’s place an unkind or savage place relative to the dove, but don’t we know that’s picking and choosing, partial, judgemental, and unsatisfactory? We surely do. It’s just how things are, or seem to be.

Here are some interesting definitions of reverence, touching also on respect:

1. (n) Profound respect and esteem mingled with fear and affection, as for a holy being; the disposition to revere; veneration.
2. (n) The act of revering; a token of respect or veneration; an obeisance.
3. (n) That which deserves or exacts manifestations of reverence; reverend character; dignity; state.
4. (n) A person entitled to be revered; a title applied to priests or other ministers with the pronouns his or your; sometimes poetically to a father.
5. (v.t) To regard or treat with reverence; to regard with respect and affection mingled with fear; to venerate.

Do these dictionary words match what you conjured up when you read them at the head of this blog? Note that I now say “you conjured up” rather than “the words conjure up”, because I think we need to take responsibility for what we do when we react to stimuli, like the words on a screen or a page. Maybe you might read the definitions again, and pay closer attention to your reactions – positive, negative or neutral.

I’m not going to know how you react, unless you comment below, but my aim is less to have you comment (you can) than to provoke in you a sense of responsibility for your reaction. You do acknowledge, don’t you, that whether you like or dislike what comes up in you, it’s you that makes it happen? It’s not in any way connected to any ‘out-there’ rightness or wrongness in the matter, because there isn’t any inherent rightness or wrongness in anything. The same way it isn’t good to be a dove and bad to be a hawk, or bad to be a dove and good to be a hawk. Unless you conjure up a feeling that one or both of these propositions is right (or wrong).

Now if I’ve baffled you, that’s too bad,  so I’m going to say what I’ve conjured myself up about respect and reverence, from my temporary position as a secular buddhist. I can’t conjure up any respect or reverence for the buddha, his name, for his image in my mind (it’s very vague and fuzzy, unless I imagine him scratching his head or blowing his nose clear of mucus).  I can’t feel reveence for buddha pictures or rupas. Although I have manufactured respect and conjured up reverence in the past, I can’t any more conjure up reverence for his teachings, any more than I can for the teachings I’ve received from anyone else (there have been lots of good ones).

I’m glad of them, the teachings: I find them wholesome, effective and reliable under test conditions. I would willingly recommend them to anyone else who sought my recommendation on life-affirming and self-fulfilling exercises leading to a new and vivid way of being. But these teachings are human-scale, devised by mankind, suited to mankind’s purposes, like the wheels on a bicycle. I don’t revere wheels or those who invented them.   Iguess that, like the Buddha’s teachings, they took a long time to get right, and involved lots of people.   I like the neat way wheels go round and round, unlike squares and more unlike rectangles. But they don’t command my respect, or instil awe or fear (perhaps rotating circular saws might).

I’ve heard it said and I’ve read that Buddha deserves deep respect and reverence for his teachings. I’m curious to know why. Gotama’s name is linked inseparably from his teachings on the Four Noble Truths, and his various other supposed utterances. I’ve no warrants for challenging the fact that he did in fact speak in the Deer Park on the Noble Truths, but I’m less convinced that Gotama actually created this teaching ab initio – from nothing, in a kind of philosophical Big Bang!  History teaches us that Big Ideas and Big Revelations are the culmination of a long process of incubation or gestation, and involve a lot of very complicated,  intricate and multifactorial influences.

Another reason for my uncertainty, indeed my deep scepticism, is the Buddha’s own teaching tells us that this is how events happen.  Nothing ‘new’ is ever created.  His own Big Idea was interdependent transformation (or interdependent origination) – and that,  like the Double Helix of the genetic code and  Einsteins General Theory of Relativity – came to its inventors in a state of altered consciousness.  Interdependent transformation  is sometimes referred to metaphorically as “The Jewel in Buddha’s Crown”.  It’s seen as the single fundamental teaching from which all other teachings (including the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Noble Path) and all Buddhist practice flows.

You’ll know that it demonstrates that nothing comes into existence except as an inherently empty ‘event’, the apparent but illusory ‘result’ of an infinite coalescence and interpenetration of antecedent ‘events’, a flux, neither moving nor standing still, neither coming into being nor fading away. This flux is, as Longchenpa said, “Serene and insubstantial as the sky, we call it unborn”. Neither – on these terms – does it need to be maintained, preserved, promulgated, passed on, perpetuated, or pickled in wine vinegar in order to survive. It is the deathless.  The events or entities we call “me” are It.  Sri Nisarghadatta said “I Am That”.   Jesus said “I Am The Way, The Truth and The Life”.  Same message, different messengers.

On the basis of his own teachings, therefore, I can argue that Gotama was ‘just there’ – in the right place and at the right time, at the right conjunction of interdependent events, for his own insight to occur; and his disciples were just there in the same way, when he was of a mind to talk about it. He could no less. He might have kept it to himself, of course, but it wasn’t a virtue that he passed it on, it’s what we do, its in our Nature: nothing special.  One might even liken Gotama’s awakening to winning Eurolottery; and like the 140 million Euros recently won, it will all eventually be spent, diffusing into the world’s economies to serve a thousand trillion other purposes, without forseeable end.

I rest my case. I see within secular buddhism no cause for the contrivances and conditioned states of quasi-religious respect and reverence, neither yet grounds for mocking and gratuitous ridicule of course (although ridicule has its proper well-judged place in all serious discourse). But I do like poetry, so I will end, unsentimentally yet moved, with the short quatrain that opens Longchenpa’s “Jewel Ship”* (A Guide to the Meaning of the Pure and Total Presence, The Creative Energy of the Universe):

Naturally serene, seamless like space,
Embodying wholeness, the unity of ever-fresh awareness and its field,
Unchanging, impartial, not biased towards being or not-being,
I salute the supreme universal creativity.

*”You are the Eyes of the World” :Longchenpa, Translated by Lipman K & Petersen M, Snow Lion Publications, Ithaca NJ, USA (2000)

Peter Goble