I have just returned from the biannual convention of the Western Buddhist Order. For various reasons, I have missed a few and so it was some years since I had last attended. It was a very inspiring and uplifting event for me and I had several moments of what I can only call epiphany when I deeply realised that I was doing something profoundly valuable. Perhaps the most moving moment was when the names of those Order members who had passed away or resigned since the previous convention were announced, and we contemplated them in a spirit of metta. For me, this underlined how fragile our fledgling spiritual community is. It has no divine right to continue but will only endure while those of us who constitute it continue to make efforts to deepen our going for refuge to the Three Jewels. This is a sobering thought and a weighty responsibility.

The 1000-armed AvalokiteshvaraParaphrasing the sentiments of a talk given by a colleague: ‘We are either a force for disintegration, or a force for coherence, there is no neutral option.’ While this sounds very stark, it rang true for me. The natural tendency of any system is towards entropy, towards dissolution – this is another way of understanding impermanence. It is only if we make deliberate efforts in the opposite direction that something will survive; a house that is not maintained actively will over time begin to decay, and so it is with everything. If we want something to continue we cannot remain passive but rather we need to actively rebuild it over and over.

I was also very struck when the newly ordained members announced their names and how this underlined the organic nature of the Order as a web of connections; as new members enter the community becomes reconstituted, renewed in some sense. Something that is both challenging and inspiring about our particular Order is that we understand our participation in it as a practice in itself. The Order is not a neutral background upon which we paint the details of our spiritual lives; rather, our membership of the Order – our active participation in it – is itself a spiritual vocation, resulting in ongoing transformation as we are challenged to both sustain and deepen our individuality while engaging with a collective dimension. This is a tricky negotiation but a potentially very rewarding one. Being a member of a spiritual community requires us to think of our lives in a broader context, in relation to our impact upon the spiritual community as a whole – and even the world. Setting our conduct within a much larger set of concerns can help us to generate better perspective on the individual decisions that we make.

A powerful metaphor for understanding our Order is to see it as a bodhisattva - that is, as a being who is concerned to help all other beings to gain Awakening. While individually we can perhaps do little, the sum total of all our modest efforts to help others amounts to something significant. This has been inspiringly portrayed in an image of the 1000-armed Avalokiteshvara, which depicts each of the bodhisattva’s hands as the face of an individual Order member.

Convention Review