Jan 05 2009
Sangha
This is an autobiographical post. There are certain views in it which I will expand on in the future, but this post in itself is just to set the scene really. I don’t guess I consider this my first real post yet, so it’s kind of messy and stream-of-consciousness. Further posts will be better edited, but I thought this post sufficed in its current form.
I first found Buddhism while alone in my room. This was how I spent most of my life at the time. I was reading an article about meditation and it said that it didn’t require sitting in the lotus position, which a lot of articles said. This made me wonder, “If meditating doesn’t require sitting in the full lotus, where does that idea come from?”
I found a page on Buddhism and read for ages, constantly being surprised by everything I read. I had known Buddha wasn’t a god, but I didn’t know Nirvana didn’t mean a place, or that there was nothing supernatural about Buddhism. I know believe that Buddhism has not made the best case for itself over time and hopefully I can explain some things the way I understand them on this blog. The thing you’ll have to remember is that I’m not any sort of authority in Buddhism. I’m not even a monk. Taking advice about Buddhism from a blog written by someone claiming to be the worst Buddhist ever might not be the greatest idea.
Anyway, I stopped studying Buddhism in my room because of various things I didn’t understand. I had no one to talk to about Buddhism and I wasn’t really building a meditation practice, so it just kind of faded away.
I moved house, and I found in my new town of residence was a temple. I went, and I was hooked. But then that faded. The main sect of Buddhism that appealed to me was zen. Zen seemed to be the bare minimum of beliefs and practices. The sangha I was a part of spent so much time chanting and I had a suspicion they believed in things I most definitely didn’t. This led to a crisis in which I wasn’t sure if I was actually Buddhist. I asked on e-sangha, an online forum for Buddhists, and in the beginning most said yes, but then a huge wave of people told me no, and did so almost angrily.
I stopped going to the sangha because I didn’t feel it was right for me.
I’ve been reading Thich Nhat Hanh’s book The Heart of The Buddha’s Teaching, and it’s really convinced me that if your welcome in a sangha, go. If you can go and practice your own thing, go and do so because a sangha of any sort is a great thing. I’m considering returning to the sangha I left now, but I’ll be taking my own versions of the sutras they recite and maybe I’ll sit in a chair. Kneeling as rigidly as they do really killed my back. I plan on doing this because I know they will let me and still accept me for doing all this.
My return visit will be this Sunday, January 11th. I’ll put up a post about it when it happens.
