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Three Jewels Gathering
A Talk by Marty Janowitz
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[The following talk was given by Marty Janowitz at the first Three Jewels Sunday Gathering on October 6th. In his introduction, Richard John described Marty as "one of the national treasures" of the Shambhala community, leader of the Council of Warriors, and former executive director of Clean Nova Scotia.]
Marty Janowitz: Good morning. My son has some treasures too. Most of them are moldy and knotted up, and they’re in the back of his dresser drawers. So I take your welcome under advisement. I am more pleased to be giving the first talk of this Sunday Gathering than you probably know. It is something that I have been hoping would happen for a long time.
In some sense, this event is a bit like an acorn that has been sitting around waiting to germinate. Now all of the factors have come together so that it can take seed. As you know, inherent within any acorn is an oak tree. And every oak tree by its nature is a home for squirrels, bugs, birds and other animals. Possibly it is also the basis of a home for humans. Also within it are nutrients, the richness of the whole process that can feed and fertilize the next acorn to be readied for the next oak tree. In that spirit of ecology, today’s gathering has the possibility of being very fertile ground from which lots of things could germinate.
The diminishing community
Now you may be wondering why I’m making such a big deal out of all this, so I’ll give you just a little bit of history. I am sure there are many other threads that weave in here, but in my experience it goes back to a conversation I had with the Vidyadhara Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche in 1984 in Mill Village down on the South Shore during his year-long retreat there. For some reason he and I were conversing in his bedroom one morning. I was doing what I often did around him, which was to complain. That morning I was complaining about the diminishing sense of community I was experiencing within the world of his students.
For a number of years before that, I had lived in Boulder, Colorado, where there was a large community, not dissimilar in size and richness to what we have in Halifax today. When I first became a member of that community, it was very alive and vital, almost churning. Things were popping up all the time and everybody felt like they were really part of something. We all knew each other, which was easy when there were only fifteen or twenty people. That became harder when there were twenty-five or fifty, and harder still when there were a hundred and then many more. But in those early years, there was an effervescent sense of ‘community-ness’. Indeed, we called ourselves "the community," and we still call ourselves that.
In this conversation, I was complaining that we didn’t seem to have much of that any more, that people didn’t know each other as well. We didn’t see each other as much, and we seemed to be going off in different directions. We didn’t have that mixing of mind, inspiration and experience that we had before. The Vidyadhara said that it was no accident that within most of the world’s spiritual traditions there was something that brought the community together regularly, usually on a weekly basis. Come hell or high water, that gathering happened. It included some ritual and an aspect of whatever the spiritual practice was, and it was generally accompanied by what we might call a talk, but which in most of our earlier experience was typically called a sermon.
Now I for one had been glad to do away with all that stuff in my life. In my case, I grew up in a Jewish community. When I was young I was first dragged, and later went willingly to the weekly gathering of the Sabbath. It had its form, which was always the same, and that event always occurred. As a child, over many weeks and years, I came to know and be part of my community through my participation in the Sabbath. I knew the elders and they knew me, first as a scurrilous little person underfoot and in children’s services, later as a questioning pre-Bar Mitzvah adolescent in training, and right before I threw the whole thing aside, as a fully participating young adult. So that community had a natural way of connecting and renewing with itself.
Rinpoche and I talked about this phenomena and the fact that in the earlier days of the Buddhist community in Colorado and elsewhere, we had a similar pattern of getting together which seemed to nourish our community. In Boulder in the early years, it happened every Friday evening, which was easy in those days because we were mostly young and mostly didn’t have children. We got together and sat, and then Rinpoche gave a talk. Then we did what a young community would do: we went and hung out somewhere. At a certain point, while Rinpoche would still come, but he would ask other people to give the talk. The first time I ever gave a talk in a Buddhist-related context was on one of those Friday nights. I could still give that same talk, it’s so seared in my memory from the original fear –Rinpoche sitting five feet away.
But back to this conversation in 1984, I said that yes, we did those kinds of things back then; but now that wouldn’t be practical. We have too much going on. We all have lives, families, careers and activities- we’ve got to fit in seminars, events, a variety of practices and dharma activities. And because we work, most of that has to happen on the weekend, so how could we possibly do that now? He looked at me and said, "When was the last time the Jews cancelled a Sabbath?" [Laughter] That was pretty much the end of that conversation.
We did however talk a little further about what such a gathering within a Buddhist community would be like, and of course it would be pretty simple. When I left the retreat, I went back to Boulder and I had this news, that we should do this thing. I proposed it a few times, but… we were perhaps too busy and it didn’t attract much support. We even tried it in a half-hearted fashion in Boulder and Halifax occasionally over the years, for a few weeks or months here and there. But for one reason or another that I won’t bore you with, it went away. The time was never right.
Mixing new students and old dogs
For some of you who know me, it’s fair to say that I typically became a little too much of a pain of the ass about this over the years, saying this is something that some day we would figure out is important to do. In recent times for various reasons, this discussion has come up afresh. Among other places, it has come up here in Halifax, where we have a large and very diverse Shambhala Buddhist community.
We have people doing all kinds of things, different practices, programs and events – all the things that go on. Nonetheless, one unfortunate outcome of all this compartmentalized activity is that we don’t know each other. I look around this room, and I see a fair number of people that I have known for a long, long time. A few, I talk to a lot because we happen to be in the same activity or practice group. I see other old, dear friends and comrades, some of whom I’ve known for twenty or thirty years, but with whom I probably haven’t had a word in a year or two or five. And I see a whole bunch of other people who I don’t think I’ve ever seen before. Yet I know that some of you have been members of this community for a week, a month, a year, five years, maybe ten years! I’ve never recognized you before, and you may not have ever seen me.
So as we say, what’s wrong with this picture? It is no wonder we spend a lot of time talking about how to build more of a real community. How can we have an integrated community wherein newer students know and regularly have access to so-called treasures, rather than their literally being in some back drawer? And likewise how can what we typically refer to as ‘old dogs’ keep the challenge and freshness of having to deal with questions and be on the spot. We have to be more than theoretical old dogs, but walk the talk with people. That would actually be an interesting, engaged community.
Particularly I see some younger people here, children and teenagers, who’ve got to wonder what the whole thing is about. The only time they typically get together with the community that is so important for their parents is a few times a year: Shambhala Day, Midsummer’s Day, those kind of things, which in and of themselves are odd, strange events. Those are the ways in which my children experience my path. Or when I hire a babysitter so that I can go do what I want to do, and they get to stay home.
So all of this weaves together to arrive at this morning. Interest, concern and leadership have come together for us to say okay, now is the time for this morning to be the first of what could be the next 10,000 weeks of gatherings. You today are the oak tree of gatherings, so that a year or ten years from now, it will be inconceivable that the community was not getting together on Sunday mornings in this way. And people will ask when was the last time the Buddhists cancelled a… whatever we call it. (We’ll get to that in a minute.) And we will be getting together not out of rote, but because it is meaningful. It refreshes us, energizes us, and nourishes the web, the ecology of our community.
Taking refuge as a community
So I want to say a few things about how to seat this event a little bit in a Shambhala Buddhist context, beyond just the story. In considering this, I realized that one good way to think about this type of getting together is in the context of what we call taking refuge. For those of you who are Buddhist practitioners, I don’t need to bore you with all that. For those of you who are not, I will only say that it has to do with how an individual and a community of practitioners lets go and joins something at the same time. We let go of isolation and welcome aloneness…together.
That’s an interesting concept: we welcome aloneness. We are all individuals who wake up in the morning and work on whatever it is we have to work on. Sometimes we think that is a very lonely thing. However, from the point of view of our tradition, it is not lonely, but it is alone. "Lonely" implies cut off, isolated. "Alone" suggests that we alone can walk our path. We alone have to use our legs. Nobody can drag us along a path that we are not willing ourselves to walk. We cannot and will not accept somebody else’s journey.
In our tradition, when we take refuge, this is usually associated with a vow, which means, "I am ready to walk this path." We take refuge in three aspects. We take refuge in the Buddha, the example of awake. In a Shambhala context, it is embodied by the principle of basic goodness. In both, it is the same basic touch, with the heart of awake- an openness and genuine connection that we can reach out to and be inspired by. We touch that in our meditation practice, where we connect with who we are, which inevitably includes that sense of awake. And so if our gathering, taking refuge as a community is going to have this sense of touching the heart of awake, sharing the space of awake, it has to include sitting practice. Can you imagine a Buddhist gathering where it was all just blah blah blah? Well, we’ve been to many of those. [Laughter] Let this not be one of them.
The second aspect of taking refuge is refuge in the dharma, in truthful teachings. This is a shared path of learning, of questioning and engaging our understanding of what we are doing. This in itself has a couple of aspects, which are what is told and what is experienced. This is also very important for us. If we don’t get together in this way, these kinds of talks could turn into the kinds of sermons some of us grew to hate- morality abstracted from experience and confusion. What is told and what is experienced means that there has to be an atmosphere of shared challenge, of engaging our mind and our spirit around what and why we are doing in the context of our real lives. We are calling this a talk, but ultimately it should be a two-way exchange.
The third aspect is taking refuge in sangha or community; in the companionship of people who are alone yet walking the path together. And here the Vidyadhara used an image, which is very simple and apt. Each person has two legs to walk the path. We’re not just together to lean on each other, such that if one person falls over, the whole thing topples like a stack of dominoes. In a sangha, if someone is weak or needs support, someone beside them can reach them and offer them some strength. To be ready to do so, it is important for us to spend time as people together, hanging out, getting to know each other. And it is so important for our children to gradually become familiar with all of this in a natural way, as they are ready, and as we say, to be introduced into the playground of the warriors.
And that is also why – as Richard said in one of his pre-announcements about this – it’s about food, because food creates a vehicle of exchange. At the end when we leave the room, there will be food. It’s not the food that is important, it’s the fact that because we are so driven to eat we will hang around awhile and get to know each other. [Laughter] It could be a big bowl of money; that would keep us here too, but we might be less likely to share.
So these three elements are what Trungpa, Rinpoche said in 1984 were the three wheels of this kind of a gathering. If we did something, it had to have those three pieces: of practice; of sharing the teachings; and of shared informal time together- Buddha, dharma and sangha. Now this is not rocket science; it is not innovation. This is precisely what is done in spiritual traditions of every sort–perhaps we just felt like we were above it all and didn’t need it. Maybe we do. We’ll find out.
The marks of change
So the intention is that from this morning on, we will gather in this way every Sunday morning in this center – and perhaps over time in other centers – for the rest of human history. [Laughter] Or not! We can’t be too attached to the outcome, but this is where we are starting. And any other things that we have to do, they will become part of this gathering or happen around it. They will somehow have to intersect. Just like any church or synagogue, you don’t find that in the middle of the service there are clubs and meetings going on elsewhere.
So we’ll get there, and if we do, I’ll suggest only that in our tradition it is said that there are three changes or marks that occur from taking refuge. The first is known as the change of attitude, which is that when people experience this community, it will exude its community-ness, an attitude of warmth and welcome. When I see you who I’ve never spoken to in my life, I’ll go, "Hi X!’ And you’ll go, "Hi Marty." And if I come with my children even every other or every third or fourth Sunday, over the course of the year my children will have interacted and been part of my community a dozen or two dozen times in a very basic ordinary way. You will have to deal with my eleven-year-old coming up to you and saying, "Hi X. Buy me some gum?" [Laughter].
The second is called the change of mark, which is that we would see the results of that. In the sense of an individual taking refuge, you start to see some signs of sanity. In our case, I’d like to think that we will experience more and more the signs of healthiness that come from having a strong community- new people will be magnetized, will stay and we will all reach out further. Rather than trying to create this kind of community we might find that we can’t help ourselves.
The third change is called the change of name. At a refuge ceremony, you are given a name meant to embody the aspiration, the possibility of how you could go from your entwined, neurotic state to an awake version of the same energy. So what would the name be, for us as a group? We'll have to decide. Today was announced as the "Sunday Gathering." I think of it more like a "Three Jewels Gathering." It may or may not be a Sunday thing everywhere. But if it manifests with the jewels of awake, learning and community, then it will be a jewel of a gathering.
That’s all I have to say. [After a period of comments and questions from the audience:] Maybe now we can move on to that third aspect of sharing community, not knowing if it’s hot or cold food we’re having served, fearing the worst but hoping for the best – it’s hot? Good. So I’ll stop there. Let’s eat and be together.
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