In Part 3 of my “Sangha Challenges” discussion, I finish my list of reasons you may resist joining a Buddhist community or find it challenging to maintain your relationship with one over time. I present each challenge as an opportunity for growth and learning.
Quicklinks to Article Content:
Challenge #5: Hurt and Disillusionment / Forgiveness, Inner Strength, Giving Up Expectations, Deeper Understanding of the Sangha Treasure
Challenge #6: Dissatisfaction with the Way the Sangha is Run / Patience, Giving Up Preferences, Middle Way Between Passivity and Insistence
Challenge #7: Feeling Like We Don’t Belong / Reaching Out with Concern for Others
In the first episode of this series, I reviewed the benefits of practicing with a Sangha, or Buddhist community, and talked about how it’s very important to tread the Middle Way when deciding whether to stay with a community and greet various challenges as “opportunities,” and when to give yourself a break and move on. Then I started my discussion of a list of experiences related to Sangha that may stress you out, disappoint you, or annoy you, and I continued with that list in Part 2.
So far, I’ve presented the following four Sangha Challenges and the practice opportunities they offer:
Challenge #1. Resistance to Authority or Organized Religion / Learning to Trust a Little at a Time
Challenge #3: Not Wanting to Be Seen, Fear of Rejection / Cultivating Courage and Sincerity
Challenge #4: Insufferable People / (Almost) Unconditional Acceptance
In this episode I discuss three more Sangha Challenges, finishing my list.
Challenge #5: Hurt and Disillusionment / Forgiveness, Inner Strength, Giving Up Expectations, Deeper Understanding of the Sangha Treasure
I assume most, if not all, religious communities aspire to be harmonious and compassionate, especially internally. In our Soto Zen text on our moral precepts, the Kyojukaimon, it says, “we take refuge in the sangha as its members are wise and compassionate.” It also says “harmony is called the sangha treasure” and that “they who release their suffering and embrace all beings are called the sangha treasure.”
This sounds lovely, and in my experience Zen and Buddhist communities do their best to enact this ideal. In most Sanghas, most people are friendly, welcoming, and at least aspire to be nonjudgmental. On the whole, Buddhist groups make an effort to be tolerant and inclusive (although they may be limited by their ignorance about how best to go about this, especially in the case of racial, ethnic, or class differences).
Sangha members are usually considerate and respectful; I have never encountered long-term members of Sanghas who overtly attack others, call other people out publicly, indulge in fits of temper without later apologizing, dominate conversations in order to pontificate at length about an agenda the group doesn’t share, or demand others change to fit their preferences. New visitors to a Sangha might demonstrate such behaviors, but either they stick around and the culture softens them, or they leave. Members of Buddhist communities certainly find themselves indulging in criticism of others behind their backs from time to time, but this activity is constrained by our moral precept which tells us not to do this. It is rare that unrestrained social assassination or civil war breaks out in a Sangha the way it can within groups that have no commonly held values against such things.
That said, as the old saying goes, “people are people.” Sangha members will manifest all the regular human shortcomings, including self-absorption, arrogance, aloofness, unskillful communication styles, and insensitivity. They may fail to express a sincere and nonjudgmental interest in you, or fail to notice you are hurting and in need. They may demonstrate greater care and affection for other people than they do for you. They may find themselves in difficult circumstances largely caused by their own choices, and you may end up embroiled in their problems in a way that’s not helpful. You may come to depend on someone in the Sangha and then they up and leave, cutting all ties with the community. The list goes on – basically, you can end up hurt or disappointed by Sangha members in any of the ways you’ve been hurt or disappointed by family, friends, co-workers, etc.
What makes hurt and disappointment within Sangha particularly challenging, of course, is that its members are supposed to be “wise and compassionate.” Sangha is supposed to be a place of harmony. Sangha members are supposed to “release their suffering and embrace all beings.” Sangha is supposed to be a place – as I discussed in the last episode – where we can safely open up and let ourselves be seen and known. Where we can work on our karma around relationships by staying engaged and taking responsibility for our own reactions. Where we can gently push our own boundaries in order to build our social trust and comfort.
It’s painful to try to reconcile these aspirations for Sangha with reality if someone in the Sangha has hurt or disappointed us. This is especially true if that person is the teacher! This sense of injury is comparable to the hurt many people experience around the ways their mother or father has failed them. The one kind of relationship where you should be able to trust the person to care for you and look out for your best interests, and instead you got hurt.
The thing is, I estimate that our Buddhist practice can make us, say, a 10% better person to be in any kind of relationship with. That number is more or less arbitrary and I borrow it from Dan Harris, the author of the book 10% Happier.[i] Harris is a journalist and television news anchor who was propelled along his journey with meditation when he had a panic attack on national television. He argues that being 10% happier can make a huge difference in your life. Similarly, being a 10% better person to be in relationship with may not sound like much, but it is.
Still, we would really like practice to result in all of us being 100% wonderful people. Or at least 80-90% wonderful. It can be profoundly disillusioning that people – even teachers – who have been practicing for many years can still, at least at times, fail to meet our needs for warmth, kindness, compassion, or respect. What good is practice if it leaves people this flawed?
Although imperfect people may result in painful disillusionment for us, in the context of Buddhist practice, disillusionment is a good thing. It means we have been relieved of our illusions. In the case of hurt and disappointment within our Sangha, we can no longer maintain the illusion that our practice will make us perfect, or the illusion that practice can make the world perfect, or the illusion that if we embrace practice wholeheartedly enough, we will never be hurt or disappointed again. One of the most challenging and painful things about human relationships is that real hurt can occur even when neither person in the relationship is definitively wrong or bad. The vast majority of the time, we hurt one another inadvertently because of things like misunderstandings, differences of view, or fear of rejection.
I hope my discussion of being hurt or disillusioned by Sangha members doesn’t scare anyone away from Sangha! I don’t mean to imply you’re any more likely to be hurt by Sangha members than by anyone else in your life, and in fact you’re much more likely to have positive experiences with people in a Buddhist community than negative ones. Much of the hurt and disappointment you may experience in Sangha tends to come only after you’ve been a member for a while – once you’ve gotten to know people and formed relationships. The longer you’re part of a community, the more likely that, eventually, someone is going to cause you some emotional distress or pain.
To some extent practicing with hurt or disappointment is no different within Sangha than it is in any other area of your life. You try to forgive, and remind yourself that your narrative about the relationship isn’t inherently true. If the person failed to meet some of your needs, you look for other ways to have those needs met. You work on cultivating a conviction about your own Buddha-Nature, giving you a firm place to stand when experiencing perceived insensitivity, rejection, or disrespect.
What’s different about practicing with Sangha even if you’ve been hurt or disappointed by one or more people in a community is working with your relationship to the Sangha treasure itself. Can you still take refuge in Sangha – that is, rely on it, learn from it, stay engaged with it – even though you’ve been hurt or disillusioned? Depending on how complicated, prolonged, or serious your negative experience has been, continuing to trust and treasure the Buddhist community may be difficult. Sometimes other people have failed to support or defend us even if they weren’t the ones who hurt us. If we have extended our trust in the intimacy of a spiritual community and had it violated, it may seem wiser to withdraw and practice on our own, without so much of a risk of hurt and disappointment.
If we can keep our hearts and minds open, we have the opportunity to learn a profound spiritual lesson. Can we accept and embrace other human beings even though every one of them is imperfect, and is liable to disappoint us sooner or later? Can we view ending up with a bruised heart now and then as the cost of loving? Can we give up our ideas and expectations about how people and Sangha should be, and appreciate how they actually are?
It’s important to realize that the treasure of Sangha is very real, but it goes beyond any individual. Any individual can fail, at least at times, to embody the Sangha treasure by “supporting harmony in the community,” but the treasure of Sangha as a whole endures. Kindness endures. Compassion endures. Our natural need for companionship on our path remains.
It is difficult to emphasize how enduring the Sangha treasure is, despite the shortcomings and even misdeeds of human beings. For one reason or another you may have left behind an entire Sangha, and depending on the circumstances this can be devastating. Even then, however, the Sangha treasure endures. You will find other like-minded, kind, supportive people. Your life will continue to be enriched by your human relationships. If you want it, you can find the support of a community that does its best to be harmonious.
Challenge #6: Dissatisfaction with the Way the Sangha is Run / Patience, Giving Up Preferences, Middle Way Between Passivity and Insistence
Another challenge you will probably encounter, sooner or later, if you participate in Sangha is dissatisfaction with the way the community is run. By “the way the community is run” I mean all aspects of it from the practical to the explicitly religious. The list of things we can find fault with or be irritated by is literally endless. You may be put off by your first encounters with a Sangha – their website, the hours they meet, the lack of clarity about what to do when you first arrive. The meditation periods may be too long or too short, the air conditioning may be on too high, or you may dislike the ritual and ceremony (or wish there was more of it). You might think the teacher should emphasize enlightenment more, or that the community should work harder on diversifying itself in terms of race or class.
There is a time for shopping around for a Sangha that feels right for you. I encourage this. If something you encounter in this process feels wrong or strange, try respectfully inquiring about it. You may receive a response that puts you at ease. Different kinds of Buddhism can be very, very different in terms of their overall culture and ways of practice, so one kind may completely put you off while another lets you feel right at home. Even within types of Buddhism there is great variation between lineages and temples.
At a certain point, though, you’re not going to experience the full benefit of Sangha practice unless you commit to a community. (This isn’t to say you can’t also practice other places, but you go more deeply into one Sangha instead of keeping all your interactions with Buddhist communities fairly superficial and impersonal.) Once you’ve made a commitment, you get to deal with all your ideas and preferences about your chosen community.
How soon you are troubled by your reactions to and opinions about your Sangha depends on your personality. Some people are irritated from the get-go and immediately start suggesting improvements (or they bite their tongue and just think about such improvements). Others of us are so excited about getting involved with practice that we more or less like all of it… for the first couple years or so. Then we start to develop opinions about how things could or should be done in order to better share the Dharma or nurture the Sangha. We may get quite passionate about our ideas because we care deeply about our community and practice.
Some of our dissatisfaction with how our Sangha is run is very valid, and some of our ideas may be quite valuable. However, if we get too concerned with these things, we may cause misery for ourselves and others. Most groups of people – not just religious communities – are fairly conservative, in that once the group establishes a way of doing something, it resists changing it. The longer something has been established, the more resistant it usually is to change. In our Sangha, we may get fed up and leave because things don’t change in the way we want them to, or fast enough. We may become convinced that important opportunities will be lost, or even that terrible things will happen, if our concerns aren’t addressed or our suggestions aren’t taken.
There are two ways I can think of to turn our dissatisfaction with our Sangha into a practice opportunity.
The first opportunity is to practice giving up our preferences. This is central part of traditional Buddhist monastic practice, where monastics give up almost all the personal choices that we householders take for granted, and then submit to a common discipline. Lay people encounter a similar experience within the context of a silent meditation retreat. Such a practice isn’t always easy! Someone else decides what you eat, when you eat, when you sleep, how much you meditate, and what work practice you’re going to do. You don’t get to choose who is sitting next to you, or what teachings to study.
Giving up our preferences may not be easy for many of us, but learning to do so can be a tremendous relief. It’s like there’s a little monster inside our head who is constantly on the lookout for ways to change the world to our liking, whether that’s to make it more comfortable for us, or to make it match our ideas about how the world should be. We’re subjected to a constant tirade of inner critical commentary and burdened with an associated set of agendas.
Assuming we and the other people in the Sangha are safe, we have an opportunity to ignore our preferences and see what happens. We can’t avoid the thoughts and feelings arising in us, but we can simply observe them. We don’t have to make them into imperatives we need to act on. The vast majority of the time, even if we ignore our preferences, everything will be just fine. This profoundly changes our relationship with our own opinions and impulses, giving us greater equanimity as well as appreciation for whatever is in front of us.
The second way to turn our dissatisfaction with our Sangha into a practice opportunity comes later in our relationship with our community – and I’m talking at least a year or two of regular engagement, and usually more like 5-10 years. At a certain point we’ve learned the way things are done. We’ve practiced nonattachment to our preferences, ideas, and opinions. Then, especially if we’re fairly active within our Sangha, we once again notice something could be improved, or have an idea we think is valuable.
Ideally your Sangha processes include ways for senior members to help shape and lead the community, or at least provide feedback that is thoughtfully received. Honestly, I don’t know too many communities where the earned wisdom of senior members is efficiently and harmoniously incorporated into the way the Sangha is run. Once most Sanghas are more than 10 or 15 years old, they usually try to forge such processes, and the results are usually more or less beneficial to the community. However, inevitably some people seem to get left out of the decision-making process, sometimes leading to hurt and dissatisfaction.
It can be very challenging to practice long-term with a Sangha when you feel some dissatisfaction about the way your Sangha functions. If you can take advantage of this awkward opportunity, you may learn a lesson that will be applicable to every other area of your life. Can you walk the Middle Way between the extremes in this situation? One extreme is dwelling on what dissatisfies you, thereby making yourself (and probably others) miserable, or perhaps driving you to leave the community.
The other extreme is cutting off your own concerns and ideas. Remember, you’ve already done plenty of giving-up-preferences practice. You know the difference between a demand made by the little self-interested monster in your head and an idea that could be beneficial to others. Cutting off your own concerns and ideas may take the form of writing off your Sangha’s ability to change, concluding that your voice doesn’t matter, or emotionally withdrawing from your community in a way that leaves you disinterested your Sangha’s vitality and development.
There is a Middle Way between dwelling on your dissatisfaction versus cutting off your sincere responses and ideas. It requires self-confidence balanced with humility, and lots and lots of patience. It requires you to keep speaking up and offering your point of view, but without getting overly attached to results or a specific time frame.
I confess I’m not very good at walking the Middle Way I just described. I’ve got plenty of self-confidence but not so much humility or patience. It meant I did a lot of complaining and pushing for change when I practiced with my original Sangha, and then channeled all my energy into starting my own Sangha. This means I’ve gotten to set everything up more or less how I like it. This has been lovely for me for the last ten years or so, but already I need to start listening to and incorporating the concerns and ideas of my senior members. Hopefully my seniors will be better at patiently, respectfully, but persistently advocating for change than I was. Our community can only benefit from the wisdom and creativity of its senior members. If you are a committed member of a Sangha, I hope you consider sticking around to help it become the best community it can be.
Challenge #7: Feeling Like We Don’t Belong / Reaching Out with Concern for Others
The final Sangha-related challenge I want to discuss is feeling like we don’t belong. This is an incredibly common experience, at least among the Americans I work with, so if you feel like this sometimes, you are definitely not alone!
At deep level, all of us are looking for a sense of belonging. We may or may not look to Sangha to meet that need, but it can.
In his book The Art of Community: Seven Principles for Belonging, Charles Vogl says:
“I define a community as a group of individuals who share a mutual concern for one another’s welfare. It’s distinct from a group whose members may share ideas, interests, proximity, or any number of things but lack concern for one another. Such groups can have huge memberships, like the Museum of Modern Art, the American Medical Association, or Greenpeace, but their members do not share any strong social connectedness…”
“When we do find people who share at least some of our values, there’s a real opportunity for friendship. It doesn’t matter if this is at work or on our block, or while volunteering in a distant country. Building community creates a venue for friendship, and friendship defeats loneliness. In deep community we can be vulnerable and still know that we belong…”[ii]
Even if we’re not consciously searching for community, even if we don’t think of ourselves as feeling lonely, it is wonderful to feel like we truly belong in a group of people. It’s helpful to think about what that means. Of course, a sense of belonging is impossible to pin down in words, but it certainly includes an experience of being seen, understood, and valued. We want a sense that others are glad we’re there, that they care about our well-being, that they feel warmly toward us. We also feel like we belong when people accept us even when we behave in a way that feels natural to us, and share what we really think and feel.
Sadly, it is not uncommon for people in Sanghas to wonder whether they really belong. (At least this is true in Western, convert Buddhist Sanghas; it may be less true in “heritage” Buddhist communities where most people have a cultural connection to Buddhism that goes back generations, but I don’t know.) You may doubt your belonging if you perceive that other people don’t notice or value you. Maybe no one comes over to talk to you during tea break, or maybe you are suffering from health issues but no one asks enough about how you’re doing for it to even come up. Unfortunately, sometimes someone is absent from the Sangha for a prolonged period, and no one reaches out to find out how they are. Nothing makes you feel like you don’t belong like disappearing and having no one even notice.
Doubts about belonging may also spring from an impression that you don’t fit in – that your lifestyle, opinions, beliefs, or personality are either things you need to hide or tone down to be accepted, or that your expression of these things causes people to dislike you.
Please note, in this discussion I’m talking about a doubt about belonging that arises after you have been part of a Sangha for a while. If you’re still in your searching-for-a-community phase, it’s fine to tune in to your social perceptions and go with your gut in terms of whether you fit in to a particular Sangha, or whether the people in a Sangha are friendly or not. The challenge I’m discussing comes later – when you have joined a community and feel at least somewhat invested in it. Obviously, at some point you have felt comfortable there. You care about the Sangha and the people in it and have a sense that at least some of them care about you, too. But then you start to wonder…
Whatever social anxieties, inhibitions, or issues we have experienced elsewhere in our life are also going to show up in our Sangha relationships. If you struggle with a sense of belonging in Sangha, you’ve probably struggled with it elsewhere too. As I mentioned earlier, a belief that we are not seen and valued in our Buddhist community may be especially painful because of how it conflicts with the ideal of Sangha. Still, as painful as it might be, Sangha presents us with an opportunity to work on our interpersonal karma.
If we wonder whether we really belong in our Sangha, one the best things we can do is shift our attention off our own feelings of hurt, isolation, rejection, alienation, or loneliness. We don’t have to suppress them or pretend we don’t feel them, but we also don’t have to entirely believe they are grounded in reality. It is extremely easy to dwell on our lack of belonging and find countless examples from other people’s behavior to confirm it. This is especially true because of a sense that we don’t belong tends to be based primarily on things people don’t do that we wish they did. Our imagination can come up with a very long list of friendly, kind, generous, and compassionate things people could do to indicate they care about us.
Instead of dwelling on our hurt, then, it’s a wonderful practice to look around and find a way to demonstrate your care for others. Do you care about your fellow Sangha members? How are they doing? Are they lonely? Has it been a while since you’ve seen them? It may sound crazy, but you might even take things further and actually reach out in a friendly and explicit way. Invite someone to coffee. Tell someone it’s really nice to see them, and then tell them a reason why (showing you have paid attention to them in the past).
From my own experience and from what others tell me, it seems like a whole lot of the social isolation we experience in the West comes from fear of rejection. We don’t want to invite someone to coffee because they might say no. We don’t want to tell someone how much we appreciate them – they might blow us off because they don’t care what we think, or demonstrate a complete absence of appreciation for you. So many missed opportunities if most people are walking around feeling the same insecurities!
It may sound strange, but one of the loneliest places I’ve lived was in a residential Zen community. Perhaps because a bunch of us were living so closely together 24-7 (meditating, eating, working, keeping the Zen center operating), whenever we had any spare time people would withdraw or disappear. Maybe because we were all triggering each other’s karma, there was very little explicit warmth, affection, or camaraderie. Not all Zen communities are like this, but I know it’s not unusual for residential practitioners in particular to be very serious and focused on themselves.
That’s why I found it remarkable when I recently visited the Zen monastery where I go for sesshin. The place seemed decidedly jollier than during my many previous visits. People smiled when I arrived and came up and hugged me. The residents watched movies and went on hikes together on their days off. I was talking about this increased social warmth with one of the residents while we worked together in the kitchen. He was born and raised in Puerto Rico, and he told me about how much more central friendship and social connection is there, compared to the mainland US. After a while, I realized that a significant part of the more welcoming and friendly social environment at the monastery was due to this one person. He approached every person, especially new residents, with love and enthusiasm. He didn’t let people shrink off into their lonely silos. He gave an abundance of warmth and love, and people responded in kind.
If we approach people trying get affirmation that we belong, we’ll likely be disappointed. If we focus instead on how much we care about others, and let them know, we will find ourselves in a situation that is transformed into real community.
Conclusion
That concludes my list of Sangha Challenges and Opportunities. I sincerely hope that what I have discussed can help even one person out there find the strength and patience to preserve and deepen their relationship to Sangha. The Sangha treasure is, frankly, rather mysterious. On the one hand, Sangha is about real human relationships. It’s not philosophical or theoretical. It’s not something you can experience or benefit from on your own. On the other hand, the Sangha treasure is not synonymous with an ideal, harmonious community composed of people who are always kind, compassionate, generous, warm, demonstrative, and loving. Such an ideal is lovely, and helps guide our aspirations, but no human community actually fulfills it.
Sangha is a community of fallible human beings working together to practice the Dharma and to approach the ideal of social harmony. This may make it sound rather unremarkable, but that’s not the truth of the matter. When I think of the Sangha treasure, I am filled with gratitude that I will never be without it – that even though individuals come and go, even though communities change over time, even though my relationship to Sangha may change, there will always be someone to sit in meditation with me. To chant the Heart Sutra with me. To discuss practice challenges with. To hold my hand if I am in great distress, communicating verbally or non-verbally, “You’re okay.”
Endnotes
[i] Harris, Dan. 10% Happier Revised Edition: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works–A True Story. Dey Street Books, 2019.
[ii] Vogl, Charles. The Art of Community: Seven Principles for Belonging. Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Kindle Edition. 2016.
