What Is Sangha?
A Sangha acts as a refuge, a safe oasis from the hurry up life many of us live, and an essential support to our awakening. People experience deep peace and healing in Sangha. The teachings, the practices, the caring, the Five Mindfulness Trainings, and the Dharma sharing create beautiful containers for transformation of suffering and for liberation. A peaceful Sangha is a rare treasure in our busy, tumultuous world. Learning to be in Sangha is one of the most essential parts of our practice, is deeply satisfying and can be transformative.
The spirit of Thich Nhat Hanh (Thay), a Vietnamese Buddhist monk and social activist, author, poet and Nobel Peace Prize nominee, is still with us although he died on January 22, 2022. He lived much of his life as a monk at Plum Village, a small community in France where he taught, gardened, wrote many books and helped refugees worldwide.
Our Plum Village tradition has its own forms: inviting and listening to the bell, walking as a sangha rather than individually, bowing to each other and using specific guidelines for group Dharma sharing etc. At the heart of our practice is the awareness of impermanence, the recognition, healing and transformation of suffering, the flowering of compassion, the commitment to embody the ethical trainings, the opening to our true nature, and feeling at home in the life we have. The Sangha is a key support to our awakening.
We gather together on the first Sunday of each month in mindfulness. The two-hour peaceful and nurturing Sangha includes noble silence, sitting meditation, reading of the 5 Mindfulness Trainings, Dharma presentation and Dharma sharing. There is also opportunity for music, videos, special readings and poems. Currently the Sangha meets via zoom as our attendees often join us from other communities or states.
The Next Buddha May Be a Sangha
From Thich Nhat Hanh's closing remarks for a day of mindfulness event. See more at Tricycle.
"In Vietnam, we used to say, “When a tiger leaves his mountain and goes to the lowlands, he will be caught by humans and killed.” When a practitioner leaves his or her sangha, at some time she will abandon her practice. We have to take refuge in our sangha, our community of practice. We cannot continue our practice very long without a sangha. The art of sangha building is crucial to our practice.
If a sangha is available in your area, please keep in touch and take refuge there. If the sangha doesn’t have the quality you expect, don’t abandon it. Do not look for a perfect sangha. Stick to the one you have and try, with your practice and your joy and peace, to improve its quality. This is very important.
If there is no sangha available where you are, then practice looking deeply in order to identify elements of your future sangha around yourself. Members of your sangha may be your child, your partner, and a beautiful path in the woods. The blue sky and the beautiful trees are also members of your sangha. Please use your talent and your intuition to create a sangha for your own support and practice. We all need a sangha very much.
Our practice should be supported by the people around us, and we can learn how to support them in return. We support them by looking deeply so we can recognize the seeds of peace, joy, and lovingkindness in them. We touch these seeds, and we water these seeds every day in order to make other people bloom like flowers. And when these people bloom like flowers, we all become happier. We have to help each other in our practice. The practice of meditation is not an individual matter. We have to do it together.
The Buddha, Shakyamuni, our teacher, predicted that the next Buddha would be Maitreya, the Buddha of love. We desperately need love. And in the Buddha’s teaching, we learn that love is born from understanding. The willingness to love is not enough. If you do not understand, you cannot love. The capacity to understand the other person will bring about acceptance and lovingkindness.
It is possible the next Buddha will not take the form of an individual. The next Buddha may take the form of a community, a community practicing understanding and lovingkindness, a community practicing mindful living. And the practice can be carried out as a group, as a city, as a nation."