Building Blocks of Belonging... WILLA BLYTHE BAKER

 

According to Willa Blythe Baker, making a strong, healthy community starts with understanding how it is constructed.

The first practice the Buddha taught his disciples was the practice of refuge. For 2,600 years, Buddhists have engaged in a ritual of reliance on buddha (the enlightened guides), dharma (the teachings), and sangha (spiritual community). Taking up this basic practice is the act of entering the dharma community. It’s how we step inside.

These sources of refuge—buddha, dharma, and sangha—are likened to three jewels. The teacher, the teachings, and the community of practitioners are jewel-like in the sense of being valuable and magnetic sources of safety and support. They are jewel-like in that they refract the light of truth into a thousand colors. In buddha, we seek refuge from instability. In dharma, we seek refuge from ignorance. In sangha, we seek refuge from fear and loneliness; we discover that no matter who we are, no matter what we have done, we can find belonging.

Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary, social scientists who do research on the psychology and behaviors of groups, have concluded that humans share a need to belong, “a pervasive drive to form and maintain at least a minimum quantity of lasting, positive, and impactful interpersonal relationships.” Put another way, we need one another in order to thrive and grow. We are safer and happier when we bond together.

It has even been demonstrated that when humans feel lonely, their brain circuits light up in the same regions that register physical pain. Loneliness literally hurts. Is it any wonder that many who end up at the doorway to community come to assuage the pain of loneliness? From our isolation, we are drawn to belong.

I lived in a Buddhist monastery for over a decade. I arrived feeling fearful and fractured, having just lost my mother to a sudden aneurism. I remember a conversation from my first visit there. I was in the dining hall, speaking to a monk and nun, and I brought up the subject of my mother’s passing. I braced myself for a change of subject, which is what I had become used to—the awkward silence, the “I’m so sorry for your loss,” the pivot to lighter matters. Instead, these two people leaned in. “Tell me what happened. How did she die?”

There, the subject of death was not unwelcome. I was relieved. It felt, as if for the first time, like someone was mirroring back to me that what happened was not a tragedy. It is part of being human, this mortality. You can learn from it—a lot. In that monastery, I found a culture of reflecting on death as a practice.

All communities harbor their own cultures, for better and for worse. A community’s culture is a shared perspective that surrounds our sanghas like an aura, emerging from what we think, believe, feel, and do. It is by nature invisible, intangible. The death culture found in Buddhist sanghas is an example of a shared perspective, one that opens up a new vista of understanding for those of us who live in a death-denying society. This might be one of the better parts of sangha culture, when we find that subjects that are taboo elsewhere are welcomed here. That can produce healing. We find ourselves making friends with people who can support us in ways that others cannot, or will not.

Seeding Culture

One chilly day in a moment of pandemic-lockdown fever, I decided to pursue bread baking. My sourdough guru, Elaine, looked me in the eye through the screen of my laptop and said sternly, “It all comes down to the culture.”

Elaine meant “culture” in the sense of an organic catalyst, the combination of a living organism (yeast) and a nurturing environment conducive to its growth, but she could just as well have been talking about sangha. Community is a living, breathing, embodied ecosystem, and our intentions and attitudes provide a culture that is either conducive or detrimental to the growth of the individuals who find refuge there. Dimensions of our community culture can be nurturing or toxic—and often, despite our best intentions, they are both. The quality of our sangha comes down to its culture, yet rarely do we step back to evaluate what it is—or why.

Most dharma communities, though strong in values, are weak in structures. This is overlooked by most people walking in the door. They are looking for a dharma that fits. They rarely look at the contours of power.

In sangha, we inherit a live culture passed down to us by our spiritual ancestors. There are dimensions of this culture—art, music, rituals, chanting, practices of meditation, both the material culture and the non-material culture—that are beautiful and compelling. But Buddhist culture also includes practices, attitudes, and beliefs that clash radically with our local customs, assumptions, and education. At its best, this clash is productive, inviting countercultural ideas that enhance our lives, our community, and our families. But the clash also reveals dimensions of this inherited culture as unsuitable for our time and place.

It has taken some decades of Buddhism’s presence in the West for practitioners to gradually entertain the possibility that there are dimensions of this inherited tradition that can be prejudicial. For example, we might inherit sectarianism, a tribal culture where only initiates feel welcome. This vibe of exclusivity can be poison. It sets up the group to define itself against others who are “outsiders.”

Patriarchy, too, has saturated Buddhist institutions in Asia for millennia; its stain has become mixed with the practice, with source texts, and with power structures. It too is a toxin. If we don’t recognize and name patriarchy, it will infect our minds, hearts, and spirit, here in North America and specifically in your sangha.

This clash doesn’t have to be a crash. It can be an invitation to discern what is right, fair, true, and useful. For the dharma to thrive, it must fit the culture it is in—it must become a seed that can thrive in the soil of this particular time and place. How will the dharma manifest here? Who will have access to it? What values will we teach the next generation?

Feeding Culture

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