Ven Karma Lekshe Tsomo delves into the significance of Dharma friendship and community in Buddhist practice. She explores the concept of Kalyanamitra (spiritual friend) and its four aspects: helper, friend in good and bad times, counselor, and compassionate companion. The talk emphasizes the importance of choosing friends who lead us on the spiritual path, maintaining precepts, and cultivating virtues like generosity, patience, and forgiveness within a Dharma community. Lekshe Tsomo highlights the benefits of group practice, the need for confidentiality to build trust, and the essential role of loving-kindness in all relationships. She also addresses potential pitfalls in Dharma centers, such as competitiveness and the sharing of meditation experiences, encouraging practitioners to focus on the ultimate goal of liberation rather than comparing spiritual achievements.

Ven. Karma Lekshe Tsomo began exploring Buddhism as a young girl because her family name was Zenn. In 1964, at the age of 19, she set off to Japan with her surfboard and wound up sitting zazen at a temple in Tokyo. In 1989, while studying Buddhism in India, she was bitten by a viper and barely survived. Returning to Hawai’i, she completed a Ph.D. in comparative philosophy, focusing on women in Buddhism and death and dying. Her books include Into the Jaws of Yama: Buddhism, Bioethics, and Death and Women in Buddhist Traditions. She is currently planting trees and vegetables at La’i Peace Center, a project of Sakyadhita Hawai’i, on the North Shore of Oahu.

Full Transcript

Aloha, everyone. Good morning from Oahu. I'm very happy to join you this morning. I'd like to acknowledge the land that I stand on is the traditional homeland of the Hawaiian people who have maintained their spiritual traditions and cultural traditions for hundreds of years. And we're very grateful. I'm looking out over the Pacific Ocean and we have a nice team of volunteers here this morning. It's a beautiful day. And a great day that I really appreciated sitting with you folks this morning. It was lovely.

The topic that we're going to take up today is Dharma friendship and the concept of community. Can everyone hear okay? Okay, great. I think this is a rich topic and I thank Rebecca for suggesting this topic. It gives us lots of scope for exploring what we mean by spiritual friendship, Dharma friendship, and what we mean by Dharma community, spirit or concept of community. So it sort of naturally falls into two different explorations.

The idea of spiritual friendship. What do we mean by spiritual friendship? Well, in Sanskrit, the word is Kalyanamitra. Kalyanamitra could be translated as spiritual friend or as Dharma friend. And it's a central concept in early Buddhism. In the text, the canonical discourse, the state that companionship with the wise nurtures our spiritual and personal development. As we progress, we listen to good advice, rational faith, noble thoughts, clear thinking, self-control, good conduct, conquest of the hindrances, gaining of wisdom, and consequently liberation. So, gee, that's a lot, isn't it? I mean, did we really expect that spiritual friendship would yield all of these benefits?

The text talks about four good-hearted friends, four different types of good-hearted friends. They may overlap, but one is the helper, and another is the friend in good times and bad. Another is the counselor, and fourth, the one who's compassionate. Now, hopefully, our friends would have more than one of these qualities. Serve more than one of these functions or benefits, we could say.

Those who help us. I've just been ill for about three months, and I can tell you that having a Dharma community has been so amazing because people really rallied around. All the doctors and nurses weighed in, and people were sneaking me snacks in the hospital, and they were ferrying me to the doctor's appointments and all of this, rescuing me when things, you know, the medical thing didn't work, and that was really amazing. So, the idea of helpers. Yeah, and I think this becomes more and more important as we get older, and we're all getting older. So, that, of course, means that we help others, not only that we ourselves are helped.

Second, the friend in good times and bad. I'm sure we've all had the experience of having a friend who was around all the time when we were in good health and in a good mood. But then, when things went on the rocks, where were they? Right? That happens inevitably, I suppose.

Then there's the counselor. There are those that we go to for advice and counsel, and I think that applies to all of us. Hopefully, if we're fortunate, you know. I mean, it may be that we don't have this advantage. We don't have people that we can count on for good advice, and if we don't, we shouldn't be counting on them. So, I think that's important.

And then, fourth, the one who's compassionate. Of course, we expect everyone in the Dharma Center to be compassionate, don't we? So, that, of course, it all begins with us. If we are compassionate, we will definitely attract, naturally, compassionate friends and companions.

Now, the Tibetans have a very strong tradition which I think is relevant here. They say, the person who corrects you is your truest friend. The one who always praises you is your worst enemy. Hmm, that sounds a bit counterintuitive, but think about it, you know. Usually, we get angry if someone corrects us, and I've even had people say, I don't need your advice, I have my own teachers. Seriously, as a nun, yeah? But in fact, according to this advice from the wise, which are some of the most amazing Tibetan lamas, the one who corrects you is your dearest friend. Otherwise, how do we improve? How do we even know our weaknesses? We may have an idea, but we don't know how we appear to others, how we affect others. It can be for good or for ill, but if someone helps us out on the path and says, you're not listening, oh, that's a great gift, isn't it? If someone were to remind us that we need to do more attentive, compassionate listening, that would be a great benefit to us. And of course, that friend will take a risk in saying so, in making a correction, but for us, it's a great gift.

Second, the one who always praises you is your worst enemy. Oh, how does that work? I thought people that praise us were our friends. Well, according to these great lamas, when people praise us, they're not going to be able to do anything else. So, we need to be more attentive. I think that's the key to success. And the third one is the one who is the most important. According to these great lamas, when people praise us, there's a danger that we will get arrogant. You will get proud. Of course we all have qualities and it's, I think it's a good idea to pat ourselves on the back when we do something right.

It's interesting that in American society, there are so many people who apparently don't like themselves. Some of the Burmese masters, I remember we had a Burmese teacher who came through and he gave a week long retreat. And at the end, he asked his translator, you know, what does self-loathing mean? He wasn't familiar with this concept. I'm not sure how to explain it. Maybe it's our insular society. We all grew up with our own beds and our own toys and our own rooms. And sometimes we're not well socialized. Whereas in many other cultures, people are living in close contact and communities with their family members, extended family members. And maybe they have more experience in getting along. And so it's interesting to think about that. And I think it's a good idea to think about that. In any case. Those two to think that praise is not necessarily. It can be beneficial for encouraging us on the path. And of course we want to take everything as the path. Don't we? I mean, so. On the other hand, I think it's a good idea to think about the other two.

The other two are the two most important things. The first is the arrogance. It's apparently one of the greatest hindrances to Dharma practice, to progress on the path to awakening. Is arrogance pride and arrogance. So in the Pali canon. The early Buddhist canon in the Upaddha Sutta. There's a conversation between. The Buddha and his disciple. And the Buddha is the one who is the most important companion and attendant. He took care of everything. We're making all the arrangements for lunch. And. Teachings and so forth. And in this sutta. Ananda enthusiastically declares. This is half of the holy life, Lord. Admirable friendship. Admirable companionship. Admirable. Comradery. Is actually the whole of the holy life. When a monk has admirable people as friends. Companions and comrades. He can be expected to develop. And pursue. The noble eightfold path.

So this is an early translation, of course. So it's not gender neutral. But it does of course, obviously apply to everyone. And not just to monks in the early days. The Buddha's. The sanghas were primarily monks. Also. Some nuns. But eventually he taught people of all different backgrounds. So we can say that. This advice. That. Admirable friendship. Admirable companionship. Admirable. Admirable camaraderie. Is actually the whole of the holy life. So we shouldn't discount. The idea of spiritual friendship. We should value it. And there's some other advice that comes in a later commentary. Those quotations are from the early suttas.

But in the. A commentary called the Visuddhimagga. The arahant. Identifies the need to find a good friend. In order to develop. Excellent concentration. The good friend should understand. The following. The Tripitaka. The Dharma. The law of cause and effect. Beneficent. Worldly knowledge. Oh, we wouldn't necessarily expect that. And the four noble truths. So a good friend should be familiar with the Buddhist teachings. So the Buddhist texts. And that should. Impel us all to study harder. And the third. Beneficent worldly knowledge. Well, So that's interesting here. I've got some lovely workers. A whole team of Jamaicans. And a French monk. Wonderful. Person who comes by and fixes things. So their expertise is. Of course, the French monk. Meditates a lot. The other fellow. Is basically. A fixer upper. And he is so valuable. Because he's. He's a great. Expert. And he's. Building things. And making the Dharma center. More accessible. And more valuable to the community. So worldly knowledge. Is not supposed to be the main focus for the monastics. But for the community. It's very important. And fourth, the four noble truths. Okay. So our Dharma companions. Our good friends. Should be familiar with the. Four noble truths.

And. Further. Says that. A good friend. And here he's talking about. A monk friend. But it would apply, I think more broadly. Should have seven qualities. That good friend. Should be lovable. Respectable. Venerable. A good counselor. Patient. In listening. Be able to deliver deep discourses. And. Not apply. One self to useless ends. That's a good one. So we want. Loveable. Respectable. Venerable. Dharma friends who are good counselors. Good listeners. And are able to. Give Dharma talks. And who do not apply themselves to useless ends. I think this is really important. And this would be the reason to choose Dharma friends. Rather than just anybody. I mean, there are eight point two billion people on earth. Who do we hang out with? And. If you've noticed recently, there's a lot of silly stuff going on. There's a lot of fun. Of course, there are many disasters in the world. And that's not trivial. But. There's also a lot of trivial things that. Pre-occupy people. You know, sort of. The intense concern with. Fancy foods, for example. Now, nothing wrong with foodies. I think it's very important and it's great that. Now the cuisine is getting its due respect. and food and so forth. On the other hand, sometimes it gets a little bit out of hand, right? People can go on and on. The restaurants are all concerned because they used to get people in and out the door in an hour, and now it's stretched beyond two hours because everyone is taking selfies with their lunch. Yeah, it's cutting into the restaurant owner's profits, and so they're really quite worried about that.

So, choosing good friends, friends who lead us upward on the path. And of course, there are those that we will want to help, who need our counsel, who need our advice, and I'm not saying that we should abandon them at all, but for our close circle, it would be best to choose people who are leading us on the path, upward on the path. Upward is just a figure of speech, but you knew what I mean. Now, of course, self-cultivation is essential. We need to meditate, and basically that's an individual endeavor. But if we don't recognize our connectedness and learn to get along with people, we can become really narcissistic and egocentric in our practice.

And I'm 79 years old, and I've been visiting Dharma centers since I was 19, and I'm here to tell you, so there are a lot of problems in a lot of Buddhist centers. And so, it's really important for us to be blunt about this and see what we can try to do to improve the situation. I say this not as a critique of any particular tradition or center, but simply to notice that it can be very discouraging, especially to new people, if they come and find that the people at the Dharma center don't get along, that there's gossip and infighting and so forth, and they expect more of Dharma practitioners. If they're new to Buddhism, they're looking for something that will improve their lives. They're not looking for more of the same, what the worldly people do in gossiping and backbiting and bickering. No, we should be able to do better than that. So, that means that our practice on the cushion needs to translate into everyday life. That's almost a cliche. We know that. But since we're talking about the idea of spiritual friendship, let's recognize that this is something we need to be aware of. Otherwise, we can easily become uptight, judgmental, defensive, self-righteous, and none of that bodes well for our community.

Actually, I think we're working against our own self-interest in trying to become liberated. We're trying to become liberated from all these delusions. So, why would we go to a Dharma center to just get sucked into more of those delusions? No.

On the upside, through friendship, we have the opportunity to develop so many virtues. We can develop our practice, for one thing, because it's so much easier to practice with a group. Don't you find? I mean, when we practice alone, if we get down to it at all, hello, we may be tempted to sort of weasel out when we feel uncomfortable, shorten the session. Something's always coming up. The refrigerator repairman is sure to turn up any minute. We better stop now while we're ahead. So, there's so many excuses we can make to not get down to the practice. Whereas, if we're at the center or maybe with just a group of close friends, it's so easy to practice because everyone's practicing. Out of respect, we want to continue without interrupting them. And so, we complete the session. That's to our benefit and the benefit of our spiritual friends.

Through spiritual friendship, we can develop so many virtues, not only discipline in our practice, but also generosity, compassion, patience, and forgiveness. Forgiveness is an interesting topic that could be the subject of an entire talk. But we all need patience, we all need compassion, and we can all improve in generosity. Now, generosity would apply not only to material things, let us remember. As spiritual friends to one another, we should also remember that there's a lot of work to be done around this center. And we all benefit from a center. Yet, sometimes most of the work falls on a few shoulders.

We want to appreciate people like Rebecca, who take responsibility for organizing these gatherings. It's amazing. An excellent communicator who's willing to take the risk of a faulty Zoom transmission, you know, and is willing to put in the time to help others gather to practice. So, she and so many others, a lot of time and energy goes into this. So, appreciating their generosity and trying to develop it ourselves. If we pitch in, many hands make light work after all. Then the center will grow and develop and be a place of practice for more and more people.

That, of course, harkens back to our earlier sort of discussion about making the Dharma Center a place where people want to come. See, and that's important, you know, especially for new people, for the younger generation. After all, we're competing with so many other activities, so many interesting activities. People could be going to Burning Man, or they could be going to, you know, all these trendy activities. And so, why are they going to come to, you know, they could be going to a Christian church where they get free coffee and donuts, you know. What do they get when they come to the Buddha Center? Quietly. What? How can we compete? Right? So, we want to make the Dharma Center a happy, loving place where people feel comfortable and content and get, you know, get some benefit in their spiritual development.

This brings us to the topic of creating community. There's a quotation that says, we express our gratitude. It was in your liturgy this morning. I picked it up. It's a beautiful phrase. We express our gratitude by accomplishing the way together. We express our gratitude to our foremothers, forefathers, by accomplishing the way together. That's beautiful. So, as I mentioned, our discipline is often better in a group. And so, this is a good reminder that we're all in this together. And we can like rowing about across the ocean of samsara. If we paddle together, we're going to get there faster.

Now, in creating a community, there's some things that are really super important. One is keeping the precepts. Traditionally, this meant, you know, no killing, lying, stealing, and so on. No sexual misconduct and no intoxicants. And I think in the Zen context, it focuses more on the bodhisattva precepts, the compassion, and so forth. But I think all of these are important because, as we know, many Dharma centers have gone and entire institutions have gone on the rocks by not following the precepts. And so, we all want to be attentive to respecting one another, respecting precepts that the Buddha taught.

The Dharma center, I know, I've been to centers where it's just sort of like a mating game, you know, people who, you know, we are in there. But that's not what we're here for, right? And so, we're here to practice on the path to awakening. And whatever we do outside the center is our personal business. But in the context of the community, we want to show respect to one another, generosity, practice deep listening. And I think also, something that comes with deep listening, probably most of you have done workshops on compassionate listening or attentive listening, or there's so many buzzwords for this. But one of the agreements that we make when we do these workshops on deep listening is confidentiality. Confidentiality is the basis for trust. And so, when people confide in us, if we take a role as a counselor or as a spiritual friend, and people confide in us, we want to be careful about sharing that information with others. In fact, when people share their deepest aspirations or their, you know, traumatic experiences and so forth, it's between the two of us, right? And so, we should respect that and keep that in confidence until and unless that person wishes to share with a wider group. I think keeping confidentiality in the Dharma Center is important for many reasons, but especially about establishing a basis of trust, a foundation of trust among the members of the community. So, this is something we could discuss, but it's something I've been thinking about.

So, of course, in the Dharma Center, we also want to generate loving kindness to all. And the more I do this, the more I think that loving kindness is the basis for all healthy human relationships. So, no matter what the question, love is the answer. And sometimes, I mean, I started out practicing in Japan, and I go back to Japan, and I often sit in Zen centers and so forth. And sometimes, this is not emphasized as much as in some other traditions. So, just because people don't talk about it doesn't mean that there's no loving kindness or compassion there. It's just that it doesn't seem to be as big a focus. We don't get as many reminders, perhaps, in some centers about the importance of loving kindness and compassion. But in human relationships, I really increasingly believe that this is one of the most important things that we can develop in our Dharma practice.

When people get angry with us, for example, when people get exasperated with us, if we can approach a situation with loving kindness, often it can diffuse an otherwise unpleasant situation and save us a lot of grief, a lot of time in cleaning up the mess. If we get upset in return when someone gets upset with us, then it just compounds the problem. And of course, you remember the story where someone came to the Buddha with this question, what do we do when people get angry at us? And so, what happens if someone brings you a plate of burning coals and offers it to you? Do you accept it? Oh no, oh no, my lord. So, similarly, if we accept those burning coals, we only burn our own hands, right? We don't need to accept that anger, that outrage. We can patiently listen to their complaints and then try to transform the situation, diffuse the situation. And mentally, we have to be careful that we do it genuinely, generate loving kindness toward them, which hopefully will help them to calm down and we can try to resolve whatever it is that they find troubling.

So, I think that's a good one. Now, so, I'm ending with this topic, just the whole question of Dharma Center meltdowns, because I've witnessed quite a lot of them. Not so much in other countries, but definitely in the United States, plenty. And I don't know why that is, except that we're very individualistic. We're, as I said, we're used to getting our own way. And also, I think the Dharma Centers attract a lot of very competent, very intelligent people, highly educated and so forth. So, there is also a danger of competitiveness, competitiveness in our Dharma practice, and also competitiveness in our Dharma work in the Center. You know, everybody knows how to do it best. And so this can sometimes lead to problems. There's also of course the question of jealousy. And this raises the question about whether and when we should share our experiences in meditation.

So a Dharma friend, you know, would be someone who counsels us on the path. But at the same time, how much information about our Dharma practice do we share? If we were to, you know, start going on about all our achievements in meditation, then obviously it could cause some problems. People could feel, I'm not getting those kinds of experiences. There's a story that Goenka tells, another of his Vipassana courses. The first time he went down to a Vipassana center in Rangoon, he was still quite young then, and he was a multi-millionaire, his family were multi-millionaires, but he had suffered from migraine headaches. Maybe some of you have done Goenka courses and know this story. And finally, in exasperation, before becoming a morphine addict, he decided to go down and try a 10-day meditation course. He was a Brahmin, so going to the Buddhist was kind of a big deal. But in any case, when he went there at the lunch table, people were talking about their experiences in meditation. Oh, I heard, you know, Dharma sounds and I saw lovely visions and on and on and on. And he thought, well, you know, that's not happening for me. I think I'm in the wrong place. So he tried to escape. And he was just leaving out the gate of the meditation center when the woman who organized the course, the 10-day course, saw him and said, Oh, Sir, where are you going? He says, I am leaving. This scene is not for me. This scene is not for me, he says in English. The scene is not for me. Oh, well, what's happened? And he said, well, I don't know. You know, some people are having visions and hearing divine sounds and having all these amazing experiences. And I'm not getting any words. Oh, but that is not the point of meditation. The point of meditation is not to see divine visions or to hear divine sounds. It is liberation. So anyhow, one way or the other, she talked to him into returning to the course. And by the end of the 10 days, his migraine headaches were gone. So he later became a very popular meditation teacher. You can hear his discourses on YouTube.

So this points out the dangers of competitiveness in spiritual development. And we do want to be aware of that. Is it helpful? Whenever people would go to Goenka and say, oh, I saw this in my meditation. He would just say, just keep sitting. Just keep sitting. And we would quote him because it was so cool. We would just say, no matter what happens, you go to the Pure Land, you go to wherever you go. Just keep sitting.

So with this as an introduction, and I hope I haven't offended anyone by raising some of these difficult issues. But it's all in the spirit of Dharma friendship. And I'd be happy to hear your views. If there are any questions or any experiences that you would like to share that may be helpful on this topic, please feel free. Rebecca, you want to?