MY OWN WALKING - Checking In Then Out Of Religious Institutions

This year, in June, it will be seven years since I resigned as an Order Member in the Triratna Buddhist Order. It occurred to me that maybe it would be good to do a bit of check in with myself. Where I was with that decision now, and more generally to review what I've done since then, and where my understanding and practice has now reached. I thought writing about various aspects of my spiritual life might be useful to clarify things for myself, because it usually does. And that maybe the readership of my posts, may also find some of this of interest.

I'm going to start by looking at my responses to religious institutions. When I wrote my resignation letter from the Triratna Buddhist Order, it was not without some regrets. Removing myself from the Sangha ( the community of fellow practitioners ) in particular I found difficult. And from time to time, I am aware still of the void this has left. I am following my own path at the moment, and this appears to necessitate walking it alone. Even though I recognise how much easier it would feel if there were fellow travellers alongside me. Any institution requires you to make conscious compromises in order to belong to it. And I certainly benefited from belonging to a supportive religious context for most of my twenty five years of involvement with Triratna. 

I was a Triratna Order Member for eighteen years, and over that time I moved towards the centre of it, and then drifted out towards its fringes, in a cyclical orbit numerous times. Each time something in the form or manner of my involvement or practice was lost or consciously dropped by me. I was finding belonging to its institutions discomforting. It felt increasingly like I was this 'ill fitting wheel' not willing to constrain myself fully to the commitments I'd made at ordination. Rather than stay a passive bystander within Triratna, I decided I needed to move completely outside of it,simply in order to gain a more open receptive viewpoint. To connect with what I believed when free of external Buddhist contexts. I was once happy to belong to the movement, but had to recognise I no longer was.

At this time Triratna was coming out of a period of deep self examination, recrimination and cathartic adjustments as a result of a scandal regarding the sexual behaviour of its founder. This abuse had all happened more than fifteen years before my involvement. Nevertheless it was a stain upon the reputation of the movement that it never can fully expunge. The period was well over by the time I got involved. I never experienced any of the coercive control alleged to have gone on then. However, the scandal affected everyone's confidence and trust, and I was not unaffected by that. Many Order Members resigned because of it. In fact I think it might have been easier for other folk to understand why I had left, if I'd said it was due to the scandal. But it really wasn't. 

In any religious group, its very easy to find oneself enthralled by a leaders charisma. Though in the case of Triratna's founder, Sangharakshita, you could not find someone less charismatic. But nonetheless people look up to the founder of a movement they had found beneficial, and expected him to be an exemplar in all things, to provide a example of what a person more spiritually developed than them might look or feel like. But this was always a projection. No one should have been at all surprised that Sangharakshita  might have major flaws and imperfections. No one would survive untainted by close public examination of their sex proclivities and relationships, not even a spiritual teacher.

I never wanted nor needed Sangharakshita to be perfect. He founded the movement, organised its teachings and practices, these introduced me to Buddhism which I've hugely benefited from. I continue to respect his legacy purely on that level. It is never easy to hold someone within an aura of respect, when there is this other side of them that appears to run completely counter to what you expected of them. We demand a level of perfection of such individuals that apparently cannot be sullied in any way. Its indeed hard to hold these sort of contradictions, whilst avoiding making excuses or to explain away their flaws, failings and follies, but still respect and honour them for the good that they have done and how this has changed you for the better. It often feels like a much clearer moral path to paint them in a black light and simply drop involvement with them and move on. But that is not always an entirely truthful or honest depiction, either of them or of you. It's so easy for it to become virtue signaling.

Let me be clear here. Out there in the human world there is no ideal perfect religious institution you just haven't found yet. You will be on a fruitless journey if you set off to find one, believe me I've tried.  Whether religious or secular, institutions are full of flawed individuals, who occasionally might be found immoral or corrupt. One has to acknowledge, as the writer Francis Spufford pithily put it - The Human Propensity To Fuck Things Up. The failings of individuals within a faith and its institutions, is not necessarily synonymous with, or a reflection on, the validity or fraudulent nature of God, The Buddha, Mohammed etc. It is most often human practitioners getting it wrong, and often trying to hide or obfuscate the trail that leads to their ineptitude or moral failings being revealed. The Buddha's teachings have survived and some people find them still relevant two and a half thousand years later. But there have been plenty of times when human errancy has had to be corrected, and movements of renewal launched. Religious institutions always have to be open to revive, change and transform themselves, if not they will very slowly die of rigor mortis.

Once I was outside of Triratna, I spent a good six months or so just absorbing the consequences of my leaving. Though eventually I did start attending a Zen Priory in Norwich. Whilst I liked many aspects of it, once I'd been there for a while I had a better sense of its practices and institutional structures. I could see that if I were to go deeper into it, I would find it more restrictive than Triratna. Zen has a much more rigidly top down sense of where spiritual authority comes from. Then came lock down. For a while I attended another zen group on zoom, but after about six months I could sense a similar institutional pressure moving towards me. I backed away.

At this point I drew two conclusions. One, I had been actually looking for another form of Sangha to join, but found that Zen groups had a much weaker sense of this as an active practice. Two, I was no longer up for joining a Zen or any other form of Buddhist order. I'd had it with all of that. I didn't want at my age to learn and take on a whole new range of specific practices, rituals and traditions.  Both of these conclusions were instructive about where I was, and am still at. I have joined no other Buddhist groups or otherwise since then. I'm not anti institutions, just not interested in being part of them right now. This may or may not change in the future. I do not predict or prohibit anything.

I am by nature a quietly slow and steady Buddhist practitioner. I have certainly benefited from being a part of institutions, and can often value their structures and the sense of belonging they bring. Though a wider perspective tells me, that I chaffe with that after a while. That I stayed an Order Member for eighteen years is nothing short of a miracle. This was partly encouraged by friends urging me to not give up, not to move on as was often my habit. All of which made the decision to leave so much more cathartic once it came. 

I remain outside of any particular Buddhist movement or institution. Whilst fundamentally I'm a Buddhist in my core beliefs, in the way I perceive and respond to my daily experience. Also the language I use to describe my experience is still largely Triratna's, with a smattering of Zen and Dogen. I have felt an increasing sense of being liberated to explore whatever the hell I am drawn to, though not rushing to make it all neat and coherent as though it has been thought through beforehand. It hasn't. I find I am more of a religious mish mash than even I suspected. There have been some small but significant shifts away from Buddhist viewpoints, but these will be for next time, when I'll be - Checking Out My Faith & Doubts.