The other week I went googling for something I could share with the Dewdrop about gratitude for sangha. I found this little story about Ananda, which I had never heard before.
Ananda went to the town where Buddha was staying and, on arrival, bowed down to the Blessed One, and sat to one side. As he was sitting there, looking up in adoration to Buddha, Ananda said to the Blessed One, “This is half of the holy life, lord: admirable friendship, admirable companionship, admirable camaraderie.”
Ananda was the first cousin of the Buddha and one of his principal disciples. You’ll see his name on our lineage chart. He was said to be his most devoted companion. You could see that Ananda loved and perhaps even worshipped Buddha, which was a problem.
He had an astonishing memory, could remember Buddha’s teachings verbatim, and it was through his vivid recall of every talk the Buddha gave that they could be later written down as the Sutras. He served the dharma well, but he was not Buddha’s successor. His intellectual gift was both his strength and his weakness, as some of us know for ourselves. It was a lifelong barrier for him. He could memorize the teaching, but he could not see it or realize it. Most of the time Buddha was saying to him, “Don’t do that! Don’t say that! Don’t think that!”
And that’s how Buddha responded in this case, when Ananda said that the “sangha,” so to speak, was half of the holy life. Half of the spiritual life. Half of our practice. “Don’t say that, Ananda. Don’t say that!”
What exactly constitutes an “admirable friend.” Why is sangha a jewel?
Here in the Dewdrop we all live at a distance from one another and come together in person only a few times a year. On that basis we may believe that we are good friends. We may even like one another. And I’m always saying this is not a friend group! This is not a social event! This is not a family reunion! Sangha doesn’t serve that purpose, it is much more profound and powerful than that, because it’s how we are brought to see and wake up from our egocentric separation.
Sangha is defined as “beings living in harmony.” When we sit alone at home, we are not in sangha, which Buddha defined as two or more disciples who discard the self for the dharma, continuously help each other, exert themselves in the practice of the Buddha’s Way, and strive to spread the teaching to all beings. Even when we sit together on Zoom, we are doing our best to maintain the sangha, being present and visible to one another, just as in the zendo. Alone, we sit where we want, how we want and when we want. When we gather, we surrender our separate ego-selves to sangha. We do not do things our way.
Nyogen Roshi would always say that sangha is like a bunch of rough stones in a lapidary. When the lapidary turns, the stones slam into another over and over, and eventually the rough surface is worn away to reveal a polished gem within.
When I arrived at my first retreat at ZCLA, I was given a slip of paper with everything I needed to know during my stay: my housing assignment, my training position, and my samu assignment. It said my job during the work period was to dust the zendo. The zendo had nothing in it except zabutons and zafus. Nothing on the walls. You know, empty. When I reported to the woman in charge of zendo cleaning she said “You don’t have to finish today.”
And I thought to myself: “What? I’ll be finished in two minutes! There is nothing to dust in here! I hope they have something more for me to do. Some better use of my time!” I really was confused about how little there was for me to do.
And then I said to myself, “Why don’t you just dust? Can you do that? Not get caught in your story about how easy this is, how pointless it is, how important it is, how spiritual it is, how fast you can do it, how much you like it or hate it?” Maybe just do what it says.
I started to dust the doors and windows and baseboards and anything and everything. I did that for two and a half days. If you’ve ever dusted, I mean really dusted, you know that once you start you just keep going.
Turns out there really was a lot of dust in that zendo. It was in my head. I was spinning in dust! Thinking myself to be so competent and capable and that this task was trivial. I was so used to judging the outcome of my efforts; to be driven toward accomplishment.
It can be difficult to practice with sangha in a formal retreat. It should be. If you don’t have a hard time, sometimes, with sangha, your practice isn’t working.
It’s not just in our work assignment that we see the trouble we cause. Some of us get training positions we think we are good at. Some of us get training positions we think we’re bad at. There are certain seats we like in the zendo and seats we don’t like. Some folks seem to be given big responsibilities and some, little or no responsibilities. We might see some members as important and some, not so important. There is jealousy, resentment and grievance. There is gossip. And sometimes people come right up to you and tell you what they don’t like about you.
There is all of that. Why? Because of your judgment, your preference, your likes and dislikes, your wants, and even what you call your “needs.” Your self-image. All of that comes into play.
And it’s all so transparent. In sangha, nothing is hidden. If we do our practice, everything is clear and undisguised. We see why we are suffering and why others are suffering even if they don’t see it.
One time I went to see Roshi and said, “I’m having a hard time.” He said, “I know.” And I was shocked. Is it that obvious?
One time in retreat, before the start of a block I came upstairs and went over to Kyoji and said, “I’M NEVER PRACTICING IN THIS ZENDO AGAIN!!!” I was angry and hurt. And because she is an admirable friend, she didn’t tell me I was full of shit.
I had turned the zendo into a cave of demons. Who was the demon? It was me.
When you first start coming to a retreat, you might have problems with quite a bit of it. Where you sleep, for instance, or whether you sleep. What you eat or what you don’t eat. The noise, the hours, the silence, the sitting, the chanting and bowing: all the discomforts we don’t have to deal with when we live in a world of our choosing.
Sangha doesn’t always serve us by serving us. It also serves us by not serving us.
Of course, if people stay with the practice, some of these difficulties fall away. People soften. And part of it is that we take responsibility for ourselves instead of insisting that the world take responsibility for us. That’s a huge shift. That’s transformation.
Nyogen Roshi is always asking us why our lives haven’t transformed. How do we transform our lives? THE HARD WAY.
It’s hard to see how hardened we are! How greedy. How needy. How selfish. How self-serving, isn’t it? Buddha tells us why that is so very necessary when he answered Ananda.
You can see where Ananda is coming from: he’s coming from the standpoint of separation, where’s there’s me and you, inside and outside, parts and divisions. He’s in dualistic thinking. What is half of the spiritual life, anyway?
There are no halves here. There are no fractions here.
“Don’t say that, Ananda. Don’t say that!” Buddha says. Admirable friendship, admirable companionship, admirable camaraderie is actually the whole of the holy life. Sangha is the whole thing!
But it’s dependent on you: taking the backward step and turning the light inward. Not judging, not wanting, not comparing, not controlling, not demanding, and not thinking.
Just dusting.
Ananda entered the order of monks in Buddha’s second year of teaching and in the 25th year was appointed his personal attendant. Perhaps that’s how long it took for him to mature from slavish devotion to being truly present and useful. Maybe that’s how long It took for him to stop driving Buddha crazy, but maybe not.
Because in Buddha’s last words to Ananda, he admonished him again: saying “It may be, Ananda, that some of you will say, ‘without the Buddha, the Sublime Teacher, there is no teacher for us’. No, Ananda, you should not think that when I am gone.”