Master the core of practice, rise to the challenge

Dharma Drum Mountain’s magazine Humanity (DDM): Could you talk about the process of building a monastery and establishing a sangha community? Why is a sangha community important for spiritual practice? How is it different from living in ordinary society?

Venerable Thubten Chodron (VTC): I was among the first generation of Westerners who studied and ordained with Tibetan Lamas in India and Nepal in the 1970s. While our teachers taught us the Dharma generously, they were refugees, having recently fled the Chinese communist takeover of Tibet in 1959, so they were focused on surviving and rebuilding their monasteries in exile. Thus they did not have the resources to support Western monastics, and many Western monastics had to work to sustain themselves. Coming from non-Buddhist backgrounds, our families and friends did not understand what we were doing. Living in Asia, we also had visa and health problems, and faced the challenges of learning the Dharma in translation, in a different culture. As a result, many sincere Western practitioners had difficulty keeping the precepts.

Buddhist monasteries for Westerners remain few and far between. There are many more Dharma centers for lay practitioners in the West today, so many Western monastics in the Tibetan tradition continue to live on their own and struggle to support themselves in a non-Buddhist culture. Over the years, I had the idea to establish a monastery in the U.S. where Western monastics could live and practice together without having so many difficulties. In 2003, I established Sravasti Abbey in Newport, Washington, USA. From one resident monastic (myself) and two cats, we now have 22 resident monastics and four cats.

The sangha as an organization is essential for the continuity of the Dharma from one generation to the next. A community of monastics living at a monastery can give monastic ordination, they can offer regular Dharma teachings, and when people need spiritual help, the monastics can help them. This is very different from having monastics or lay teachers scattered in individual homes. There are lay teachers, but they have family commitments. Dharma students can’t just show up at a lay teacher’s house and ask for counseling.

One of the first things the Buddha said after he attained awakening in Bodhgaya was that he was not going to pass away until he had established the fourfold assembly of fully ordained male and female monastics and male and female lay practitioners. For a place to be a central land where the Dharma is flourishing, the fourfold assembly must be present, and the fully ordained monastics must perform the rituals of the bimonthly confession and restoration of precepts (posadha), the rains retreat (varsa), and the invitation for feedback at the end of retreat (pravarana). These community rituals are very powerful in bringing monastics together and strengthening our purpose.

Living in community also supports the growth of our individual spiritual practice, because it forces us to reflect on our behavior and subdue our self-centered mind and afflictions. Members of a community can’t do whatever they want. In a monastery we voluntarily follow the schedule and participate in whatever the other monastics are doing because we share a common purpose. As the saying goes, if the trees in a forest are near each other, they protect without from the wind and grow straight. But if the trees are far apart, strong wind will blow them over. When we live with other monastics who share the same discipline, we help each other to keep good ethical conduct, cultivate our good qualities, and reduce our negative ones. Ultimately this enables us and others to attain liberation and full awakening.

DDM: In the last twenty something years, challenges have you faced in establishing a sangha community in the West? How have you overcome them? Do you think that an “American Buddhism” will develop in the future?

VTC: As Buddhism is still relatively new in the West, most people aren’t familiar with Buddhist teachings or the lifestyle of Buddhist monastics. They don’t recognize our robes, and they haven’t learned that the Buddha set up an interdependent relationship between the sangha and the laity. When I started Sravasti Abbey and told the lay students that the sangha would eat only the food that people offered, they thought we would go hungry.

However, by educating the public, people came forward to support us, and we have never gone hungry. In the early days, I did an interview with a local newspaper and explained how a Buddhist monastery functions based on an “economy of generosity.” The next day, a local woman, a complete stranger, drove up to offer us a carload of food. A team of dedicated local volunteers formed over time and they shop for and bring us groceries come rain or snow. Through our presence on the Internet, people worldwide learn about us, listen to teachings, and send donations to support us. It’s very moving and inspires us to practice well to repay the kindness of the donors.

In addition to lack of knowledge about Buddhist culture, another challenge we face is deciding what adaptations could support the transmission of the Dharma to the West. For example, gender and racial equality are regarded as important values in Western societies. If people come to the monastery and it looks like one group is being discriminated against—for example, the nuns are seated behind the monks and are not permitted to teach—many people in the West will reject Buddhism outright, which is a real pity. This is why Sravasti Abbey holds gender equality as a key value and has worked to establish a community of bhikshunis, even though the full ordination for women is not extant in the Mulasarvastiva Vinaya lineage of monastic precepts held in the Tibetan tradition.

Nonetheless, full ordination for women is available in the Dharmaguptaka Vinaya lineage held in East and Southeast Asia, and we are very grateful to the Taiwanese monastic community for helping us receive it. We appreciate the bhikshunis who have come to Sravasti Abbey to teach us the precepts and how to conduct vinaya rites. To receive the bhikshuni ordination, Western nuns must travel to Asia, where we are unfamiliar with the culture and language, to receive the full ordination. Our dream is to offer the dual sangha ordination for monks and nuns in English at Sravasti Abbey in the future. While we will make cultural adaptations, we will adhere to the meaning of the Dharma and the Vinaya as it has been taught to us. We follow the sutras and treatises transmitted in the Tibetan tradition, and the Vinaya transmitted in the Chinese tradition.

Regarding “American Buddhism,” Buddhism in America will continue to develop and spread, but I don’t think there will be one “American Buddhism” because people have different interests and dispositions. My concern about Buddhism in America is that it will be diluted with non-Buddhist ideas and that the Vinaya and sangha will be lost if practitioners don’t understand their value. Here, too, we must educate people about the value of the sangha, and address their concerns about the saṅgha as an institution being relevant to modern society.

DDM: Sravasti Abbey has the aspiration, “May Sravasti Abbey always be a beacon of pure Dharma and an agent of peace in our world.” However, the Abbey is located in the mountains, so how do you connect with people in the world?

VTC: The Abbey is about an hour’s drive away from Spokane, the second largest city in Washington State. We’re also near Coeur D’Alene and Sandpoint, which are good-sized cities in Idaho State. Our monastics offer regular in-person teachings in Spokane, and every month we have Sharing the Dharma Day and Offering Service Saturday that are well-attended by locals. We also offer courses and retreats throughout the year that people from all over the U.S. and the world attend, and people are welcome to visit and stay with us any time aside from our annual winter retreat.

We also have a strong presence on the Internet, especially on YouTube where we post a short talk by one of our monastics every day. These talks are very popular as they help people to relate the Buddha’s teachings to their daily lives, and many guests tell us that they found our monastery through these online videos. We also livestream and post longer teachings online regularly, and people who want to study Buddhism in a structured way can join our online distance learning program, Sravasti Abbey Friends Education (SAFE) program.

We regularly update our website with photos of our activities and way of life, and two authors of Buddhist books who teach internationally live here as well—myself and another senior American nun, Venerable Sangye Khadro (Kathleen MacDonald). Many people learn about Sravasti Abbey through our books and also the extensive teachings available on my website Thubtenchodron.org.

DDM: When major events occur in society, what kind of influence can Buddhism exert? For example, how do you guide people to respond to the elections in the United States, including how to practice before and after the elections? Regarding the huge fires in Los Angeles, what can ordinary people like us do for those in that situation?

VTC: As Buddhists, we can model responding to major social events with openness and a calm mind, instead of becoming upset or afraid. After all, this is cyclic existence, and we are ignorant sentient beings. Problems are part of samsara, which is why practicing the Dharma is important.

For events like the U.S. elections, I guide people to apply a Buddhist perspective to the situation, to recognize how all the people involved are overwhelmed by ignorance. The politicians, their staff ,and supporters don’t understand the law of karma and its effects, and their worldview is limited to this lifetime. They don’t reflect on whether their actions are ethical and what the long-term effects could be and they are concerned with obtaining the happiness of only this life. When we see this situation and people’s confusion and suffer in it, events such as the elections become a cause for us to cultivate compassion instead of falling into anger, fear, or despair.

I also emphasize how important it is not to criticize or deprecate specific people. Instead, we evaluate their ideas and actions based on whether they are realistic and beneficial. If they are erroneous and harmful, we can speak up with wisdom and compassion, like Bishop Mariann Budde who recently appealed to President Trump to have compassion for migrants and LGBTQ+ people. We evaluate government policies from the broader view of how they affect all sentient beings, instead of just the interests of our particular group. Ultimately, regardless of who the president is, we still have to practice the Dharma, uphold our precepts, and continue to teach and benefit sentient beings.

As for the fires in Los Angeles, I invited some of my old friends living there to come to Sravasti Abbey if they needed a place to stay, but fortunately their homes were not affected. We can also donate to organizations that provide disaster relief. One area where people with expertise could contribute is in the field of insurance, because as a result of the wildfires in the US, fire insurance has become very expensive, and many insurance companies no longer offer it. This has put many people, including Sravasti Abbey, difficult situations. For the long-term, as a Buddhist community we can continue to bring awareness and do our part to alleviate the climate crisis that is at the root of these weather-related disasters.

DDM: In response to rapidly changing times, as seen in the developments of AI technology, climate change, aging societies, a declining birth rate, and so forth, how should people adapt ourselves and enhance our resilience while recognizing the importance of our interdependence in life?

VTC: Although you didn’t mention it, one development I am especially concerned about is the ubiquity of smart phones today and their addictive power. Our obsession with a small screen mutes our creativity and our thinking processes; it harms our relationships with living beings. For example, parents giving digital devices to young children to keep them entertained. But what will the long-term effect be on their minds? Are they learning social skills? Are they forming human relationships with others?

Regarding AI, we should go slowly and cautiously in determining how to use it responsibly and productively, instead of getting so excited about it because it’s something new. My students have used generative AI to ask questions about Buddhism, and AI often gives wrong answers. In one case we were looking for a Vinaya citation and the chatbot hallucinated a quotation that didn’t even exist in the scriptures! It’s sad to see that society would rather put extensive resources into training robots to make money, rather than investing in education for future generations of human beings.

As for fears about aging societies and the declining birth rate—I’m always astonished to hear this, because just 25 or 30 years ago, everyone was worried that we have too many people on the planet and we need to lower the birth rate. There could actually be some benefits to having a smaller population, because we’re already over-consuming the limited resources that the earth has to offer. If we’re always worried about the birth rate just so the economy will do better, at some point, we will overpopulate the planet, which will harm all living beings on the planet. The Buddhist perspective has a lot to offer scientists and IT people, and I hope dialogue between them expands.