Sangha

Sangha is the community of practitioners: the people walking the same path as you, and the third of the Three Jewels in which a Buddhist takes refuge. The Sanskrit word means something like company or assembly. In Tibetan it is gendün, made up of the words for wholesome and for aspiration: those who want what is good.

What the word covers

Strictly speaking, sangha refers to practitioners who have genuinely seen the nature of mind, the arya sangha. These are the ones in whom refuge is taken. Not because they are faultless, but because they show that the path can be walked. Someone has gone ahead of us here and arrived.

The word is also used for the community of monks and nuns, who preserved and passed on the teachings across the centuries. In the Nyingma tradition a second line runs alongside it, just as old and taken just as seriously: the ngakpas, the yogis and yoginis with long hair and a household, who practise without monastic vows. Padmasambhava was not a monk himself. For many Western practitioners that comes as a relief. A life with a job and children does not rule out serious practice.

Then there is sangha in the everyday sense: the group you sit with in the same room on a Saturday morning. They have nothing to prove. They are people like you, with the same mornings when nothing wants to work.

Why you do not do it alone

Practice is, in the end, something nobody can do for you. It is also hard to keep up on your own. You turn up on Saturday because you said you would, and on a morning when the sofa looks better, that is reason enough. What begins as an arrangement becomes a habit, and habit carries you through the stretches when you feel nothing at all. Those stretches come.

There is something else. Practise on your own for long enough and you drift, without noticing. In a group you hear how someone else reads the same text, and you catch the places where you had quietly started filling things in.

In Vajrayana the word carries further weight through transmission. Receiving the same transmission from the same teacher makes you a vajra brother or sister to everyone who was sitting there. The tradition is not sentimental about this, but it is strict: friction between people and old grievances harm the practice of everyone present. Harmony within the sangha is not a matter of politeness, then. It belongs to the practice itself.

At Rigdzin Dzogchen Ling the sangha is small and concrete. We meet every Saturday for the Düdjom Tersar Ngöndro, and on Sunday for Chö. Once a month there is tsok, on Guru Rinpoche day and on Dakini day, where the food that has been offered is shared out among everyone present at the end. Anyone who wants to come and have a look is welcome. Sitting down with us is the only way to find out whether it is something for you.