One Sangha
by Al
I am starting a Buddhist group blog now, called “One Sangha,” if I can recruit some fellow bloggers for it. I had made some noise in that direction with OpenBuddha, which still has an empty blog sitting there. On some discussion with a friend, I was donated the OneSangha.org domain that he had registered but wound up not using.
My goal is to get a group of between four and seven bloggers who are Buddhists to all contribute posts written for that blog. They can be on any Buddhist topic or ideas, news, or other items of interest to Buddhists. The overall intent is one of unifying the different strands of Buddhism together, hence the name. We are all, after all, one sangha. There are not multiple sanghas (well, except in practice, pun intended). One of the great joys of the current age for Buddhists is that we have access to the traditions, practices, and teachers of all of the surviving forms of Buddhism with very little actual effort. This should be a golden age for Buddhism and we should be taking advantage of the opportunities it brings to enrich our understanding of how we practice Buddhism for ourselves but also the possibilities for a Buddhism in the centuries to come. I think this is a fairly noble ideal.
I would like to have the bloggers express the diversity of Buddhism. Ideally, I think the blog should have a practitioner of one of the major Mahayana meditative traditions, like Chinese Chan or Japanese Zen, a Pure Land tradition (which means probably a Japanese school), a Vajrayana or Esoteric Buddhist practitioner (probably of the Tibetan variety), and a Theravadan or Insight Meditation practitioner (since the latter schools are drawn from the Theravadan tradition). Obviously, there will probably be overlap and more people than that but that would express the kind of variety that I would like to see. People signing up would work with me (as I plan to blog as well), on codifying the thrust of things. The blog will not be a platform for sectarianism, which I will say from the outset. That would completely go against the “One Sangha” intent. I would expect that people would blog at least one post a week, which is a fairly low requirement. If we had five people, that would be a blog post on most days of the week, which would work out well.
I don’t expect that the people participating to necessarily be academics or accredited teachers (such as monastics or priests), though those would be more than welcome.
If this sounds interesting to you or if you know someone who might be interested, please feel free to comment. You can also e-mail me as “albill” on the domain of this blog, “arcanology.com” and I will receive the message.
Comments
Hey Al,
Since you emailed me on this, sure, I’ll contribute. Your idea comes at a particularly significant time for me, since the inscrutable flow of karma has managed to manipulate me into the position of coordinating a study/discussion series for our local Karma Kagyu group, and in the process of putting things together for this, I was reminded of something that struck me many years ago, when I first encountered Tibetan Buddhism: despite all the attention that often is focused on strange looking Tantric practices, they really do base the whole thing on the realization and teachings of the Buddha, and not one bit of that stuff is discarded. There really is a common basis for what we all are doing, and it’s a really good thing to be doing. So, a major part of what I can contribute is my experiences wading through the Three Vehicles and trying to relate them to the lives of whomever shows up on a given Tuesday night. Which I’m doing only because no one else is here to do it. Karma’s a wyrd thing.
W.B.
Well, if no one’s taken it, I wouldnt’ mind doing a Pure Land point of view on the blog. :)
I have a message about to a Jodo Shinshu priest but we’ll see what he says. :-)
Of course you know I’m in :-)
Gerald – I recall reading you were leaving the Pure Land fold and flirting with Shingon or Tendai… wind up back in Jodo Shu?
Correction: left Jodo Shinshu, not Jodo Shu. See post titled “Parting Ways with Jodo Shinshu”. :) Got tired of Shinshu culture among other things.
Did try Shingon for a time, but didn’t get far. It’s just not possible to practice alone, without enough people for support and lately I’ve found support from a Jodo Shu group, so that’s been nice. There’s more to it, but that’s the story I’m sticking with for now.
Technically though I’ve not decided to commit to anything for the time, but I have enough of a background in Pure Land that I can post a thing or two on the subject.
Didn’t realize you read my blog by the way, I don’t believe we’ve met. :)
Al: If the Shinshu priest agrees, I think he’d be a much more suitable choice quite frankly.
Don’t know if I have the same cache as a priest, but I’d be interested if the spot is open.