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Kamalashila:

Community, Nature, and Reality

BUDDHAFIELD DHARMA SERIES I:

FESTIVAL TALKS 2009-10

KAMALASHILA - COMMUNITY, NATURE, AND REALITY

Buddhafield Dharma Series I: Festival Talks 2009-10

An introduction

These booklets have come out of the Dharma teaching on the

Buddhafield Festival , and the wider Buddhafield project.

Originally posted as audio talks on FreeBuddhistAudio

(www.freebuddhistaudio.com/browse?p=Buddhafield), they’ve now

been edited and published on-line to reach a wider audience. You’ll

find the rest of the series online at issuu.com/buddhafield .

Buddhafield itself is at www.buddhafield.com or on Facebook - and

in a field in the West of England!

Thanks to Akasati for most of the work in preparing and editing

them for publication. Her essay introducing the series is available at

issuu.com/buddhafield/docs/akasati-ecology_buddhism_and_buddhafield

December 2010

http://www.freebuddhistaudio.com/browse?p=Buddhafield

http://issuu.com/buddhafield

http://www.buddhafield.com/

issuu.com/buddhafield/docs/akasati-ecology_buddhism_and_buddhafield

BUDDHAFIELD DHARMA SERIES I: FESTIVAL TALKS 2009-10 PAGE 3/29

Kamalashila - Community, Nature, and Reality

Creating effective and satisfying community is perhaps the most

urgent and difficult challenge facing our individualistic,

disconnected world. Maybe something can be learned from

Western Buddhists who have been experimenting with various

solutions since the 60s.

Solitude: the beginning

My own interest in community life comes out of experiences in

solitude, which is really not as peculiar as it sounds. Some years ago

I spent eighteen months on retreat in some woods on a hill in south-

west Wales. It was the most inspiring time of my life and years later

I am still assimilating its effects. I passed my time happily alone in

my dome tent burning wood, drawing water from the hillside – and

discovering that being close to nature provides wings for my

fledgling understanding of things. Afterwards it seemed to me that

rather than spending the rest of my life in continued busy-ness and

travel I should stay in one place and continue exploring the dharma

in natural surroundings – this time with others.


My dream was of an ecologically aware Buddhist community. Yet

when I started my retreat, I was not at all interested in ecology. My

reason for going to the countryside was to escape the distraction of

other human beings. I expected insights and realizations to arise in

meditation, not out of my surroundings. I knew I would learn about

lighting fires, tying knots, chopping wood and conserving water, but

I never expected natural things themselves to give insights into the

dharma. Yet in the event every single insight came from these

things. You could say they were instigated by the elements and

local spirits, for whose teachings thirty years of traditional Buddhist

training had prepared me.

As I lived, alone and simple, I became sharply aware of events

around me: seasons changing, the opening flowers, birds,

grasshoppers, frosts and dews. Getting connected with so much

living, interacting variety was like entering a timeless sacred

community, as in the famous Navaho chant:

…All day long may I walk

Through the returning seasons

may I walk…

Beautifully joyful birds


On the trail marked with pollen …

With grasshoppers…(and) dew about my feet

may I walk…

With beauty before me … behind me … above me … all around me …

In old age, wandering on a trail of beauty, lively, may I walk…

It is finished in beauty.

As you may be thinking, solitary life was not always marked by

beauty and joy. I managed several dozen times to get myself

trapped in some very unsettling situations, like the night I got

completely lost until the small hours in a fog, or the time I slipped

knee deep into my toilet. However because I had unrestricted time

to deal with such events, and there was no one else around to

confuse me with their scorn, disgust or anxiety, I could experience

each situation much more thoroughly, and the outcomes were

always transforming and positive. Through accepting my situation

again and again came a growing rapport with the surrounding

natural world in which dharma (by which I mean the true nature of

existence and the conditions necessary for seeing it), was far more

evident to me than usual. Moreover such experiences gradually

undermined my natural human pride and rigidity, leading to a series


of experiences in which my idea of myself collapsed along with the

world I assumed I was living in. I remember that this illuminating

period especially transformed the way I felt about others. I loved

people before with the usual variations, but now my love came

from somewhere deeper; and despite the isolation from the human

world I felt an immediate connection with all life that I had never

experienced before.

As all practitioners reading this will understand, the conditions for

such transformation were many and various. No doubt the main

influence was a daily commitment to hours of meditation and

reflection. But I am sure an equal part was played by the

surrounding landscape, which constantly reminded me in the most

uncompromising ways of the purpose of my retreat. Along with my

inconstant moods nature appeared variously beautiful, ugly, gentle

or harsh; but there was never any escape from the reality of it.

Whatever the weather or my state of health, if I needed to urinate

or get water and firewood I was forced go outside. I was in my mid

fifties, never in the best of health, and my retreat started in

December. Over the freezing winter months of 2001 (during which

fell a record number of days’ rainfall), whenever I felt very cold or ill


I longed for the convenience of piped water and mains electricity. I

sometimes became impatient with practical matters, cursing the

need to tie a knot or split logs with frozen fingers. However as I got

used to my situation my tetchiness and anxiety dissolved. I began

feeling at home in it all; I began to love it. I saw increasingly that my

resistance to any painful experience – to the irritated person

experiencing pain, and the direct experience of pain itself – were

actually quite unfixed things that would teach me everything about

the dharma… if only I could let the smokescreen of my outrage

disperse and become curious about what was really happening.

Little insights like this enabled me eventually to become a real local,

a native who easily inhabits his environmental niche. And from that

point, I came into a creative and dharma-inspired relationship with

every local plant and animal.

Nature-based Dharma community

I sense that my delusions have been re-establishing themselves in

the years since leaving my retreat, which inevitably happens with

any incomplete insight experience. However I am sure their

dissolution was real at the time, and I am inspired at the possibility

that others could make the same kind of shift. Even more


importantly, a community of practitioners can help each other

absorb such experiences into ordinary life. This is what has aroused

my interest in a nature-based dharma community. Insight is not so

hard to achieve – the real work is in its integration and continuance

over the months and years, and the possibility of doing that in

company appeals deeply to me.

I imagine us establishing something large and land based with a

diverse population; a community who would eventually evolve its

own ways of dharma teaching. It would be lively, even controversial

in some respects, yet helpful to society and attractive of visitors.

People would come and attend retreats, meditate, and explore the

Dharma from the point of view of nature and deep ecology.

Nature must have informed the Buddha’s own feeling for the

Dharma. He chose to live in nature even though, after his

Awakening, no one would have thought any the less had he

returned to a conventional indoor life as his basis for teaching. His

decision to remain in the wild seems to indicate that it supported

his realisation better. The Buddha became as considerate of the

needs of non-human beings and plants as his own kind, teaching his

disciples how to cultivate love for snakes and other fear-inspiring


creatures. And his central teaching of vipashyana is a revelation of

the vastness and profundity of Nature as it is beyond all concepts of

space, time, location, and relationship – yet is applicable right here

in the so-called real world, in ethics, love, and helpful activity. A

new, nature-based approach to Dharma would come from this

essential revelation. It would need considerable articulating. It is

not enough to live in nature with mindfulness and curiosity; we also

need to gain some realisation of vipashyana, talk about the

experience, study others’ writings on it, reflect on it, write, and

argue.

Though spiritual practice is always something individual, in an

ecologically aware culture personal relationships are a very

important aspect of Dharma practice. Nature is an infinite field of

relationship and awakening to reality must involve insight into its

meaning. Reality is personal, even though in the Buddhist vision

people are seen not to be permanent entities. Each being has a

personal history that is unique and inalterable. The connections

made with others are inescapable, and are reinforced in every

meeting, thought, and decision. These connections live vividly in all

minds, whether awake or asleep. It is a core aspect of reality.


The ideal eco-dharma community

Because ecological awareness is about relationship, the ideal eco-

dharma community would include families and partners as well as

single individuals. It will also be an excellent situation for the

monastic or single-sex communities that have provided the usual

model in our tradition, but the emblematic ecological community is

a mixed-sex environment reflecting the whole of life. Up until now,

because the Triratna Buddhist Order is non-monastic, single sex

situations have tended to provide its setting for intensive dharma

practice. They offer its younger unattached members in particular a

working ground that is clearer, less distracted by the powerful

forces of affairs and relationships.

However in the last two decades hundreds of seasoned

practitioners have left these environments to live alone or with a

partner. They were not simply blown off-track by the winds of the

world. Single sex communities are usually geared to the needs of

newer and younger people, and that emphasis can gradually taper


down the interest of more experienced practitioners. Even though

the absence of the opposite sex often fosters deeper, more relaxed

friendships, not everyone experiences such environments as

friendly. I have personally benefited greatly from many years in

single sex communities and would do most of it all over again, yet I

also know the experience for a significant number of long-term

practitioners has overall been disappointing.

Inevitably, mixed sex Dharma practice communities will involve big

challenges. Family and sexual ties involve strong attachment and it

will take considerable collective experience to manage these well.

Since we have yet to acquire this experience there will be difficult

lessons to learn. There have been spectacular failures in mixed sex

religious communes (especially, for some reason, in the 1980s). No

doubt it helps if the mixture contains many trusted elders living

close by; I think of Dhardo Rinpoche, Sangharakshita’s friend and

teacher in 1950s, whose community in Kalimpong included a large

school for Tibetan refugee children. We have in fact learned a lot

about community dynamics in our formative years, especially about

the relationship between the ideal of spiritual community and the

tendency to fall into group patterns.


Ideally, each member of a spiritual community consciously works on

him or herself. They reflect, meditate, practise the precepts, and

thereby come to understand essential truths about themselves.

Unfortunately in a real life situation people can lose interest in such

truths, cease to cultivate meditation and ethical principles, and

become insensitive to the thoughts and feelings motivating their

actions. When that happens it strengthens the tendency to

negative group behaviours like bullying, deference, favouritism, and

competition. These arise within a group when over-dependence on

others obscures the capacity to take initiative in communication.

We may be unconsciously relating to a perceived pecking order. We

might be over-compliant, unwittingly afraid of offending some

authority, or have an unnoticed tendency to manipulate those who

put us in that position. Everyone is subject to group patterns like

these, but the whole purpose of spiritual community is to allow its

members the freedom to reject them and to relate as an individual.

Challenges and needs

In practice, this is a challenge. In families and sexual partnerships

especially, it is not easy to be so free. The attachment we feel

towards a lover, parent, or child can enclose us in a kind of bubble.


A couple beginning their relationship may look to one another for

emotional support in such an exclusive way that they disengage

from community life. Or parents, feeling intensely protective of

their children, may keep them away from other community

members. Group-based feelings are natural enough, yet they can

undermine community life: when others react, we may start feeling

isolated and unable to share. In our disconnected state of society,

where increasing numbers live lonely and die alone, it seems worth

making the effort to form communities of all kinds. As Sangha

members get older, the possibility of sharing with like-minded

friends offers a richer quality of life, not to mention the mutual

inspiration to practise. The alternative is hardly attractive: people

living isolated from the Sangha in old age will easily lose their vision

of Dharma.

Mahayana Buddhism and Deep Ecology unite around the point that

all biological organisms have needs. All beings whatsoever need

others to support their existence. The ideal Mahayana practitioner

– the Bodhisattva –appreciates this. He or she knows the need of

everyone in the web of life, and especially what is needed most of

all: enlightenment. Very few are able to see that enlightenment is a


need. The majority of humans, not to mention other organisms,

have to occupy themselves with needs that are far more basic. And

they certainly need attending to; indeed our accumulated neglect of

the needs found in nature is a terrible disaster. It is most

unfortunate that we have so naïvely and so appallingly exploited the

earth and its peoples. Yet there is no point descending into

despondency. A Buddhist ecological community can easily educate

itself about these needs, practise Dharma, help wherever possible,

and avoid doing further damage. We can generate as much of our

own power as possible, eat mainly local, organic food and be more

politically active. In short, we can set a much-needed example of

how everyone will need to start living in a sustainable future.

The need for such an example is very great. The privileged

westernised portion of the human race, entertained as we are in

our comfortable homes, have come to feel that nature hardly

touches us and even that we are more powerful than nature or are

a race beyond it. Yet one only has to consider the effect of normal

events like volcanic eruptions, orbital shifts, and global weather

patterns to see the foolish arrogance of this. Nature can never be

something outside our lives; it is simply everything, from Buddhas to


barcodes, Birkenstocks and bee-eaters. And as Frank Egler famously

expressed it, ecosystems may not only be more complex than we

think, but more so than we can think.

We must cooperate and find a solution to the mess we have made.

The Buddhist approach is to consider the causes, especially those

embedded in our own minds, fixed deep in our attitudes,

relationships and views. Arguably for example our perfectionism –

our apparently bottomless desire for convenience, safety and

orderliness – has been an important condition for humans’ abuse of

the natural world. And in our inward justifications for that misuse

we are influenced by the embedded idea that nature is evil.

European culture is still, after two thousand and more years,

adjusting to the authoritarian suppression of pagan values

containing far more positive understandings of nature. For

millennia nature has been seen as something to be mastered and

risen above, to be transcended if we wish to make spiritual

progress. We were told that the world was made for the benefit of

humankind and that nature is for our use and profit. Accepting this

idea has done little good, it seems.

the environment as home


It would be constructive now, rather than viewing the environment

as our enemy, a slave or somewhere we do not belong, to recognise

it as our precious community – as our home. For as ecological

science has shown, all beings and all things are in relationship. By

ignoring this we have gradually fallen into a tragic mess of family

betrayal. The world we have all been busily creating has been

intended, basically, just for ourselves. All other beings have been

regarded as expendable, second class, mere commodities. And the

very few of us benefiting from this stratification (i.e. those in the

privileged richer nations) seem increasingly disconnected from the

natural world from which we have been creating distance. It is

hardly surprising. We are also getting more and more disconnected

from one another, preferring to live in increasingly smaller units –

often just a couple or entirely alone. We are even becoming

increasingly disconnected from ourselves, as our busy lives afford

less and less time for reflection. We tend to identify as ‘me’ our

shifting surface awareness with its endless complexes of likes and

dislikes, perceptions and prejudices. As a result the deeper inner

world of feeling, empathy, ethical sensibility, clear thinking and

heartfelt communication is becoming unavailable to many people.


Community, aloneness, and all beings

Is a certain atomisation in society – and a disengagement from the

group – not desirable from a Buddhist point of view? A popular

view of Buddhism is a path for the lone individual, more or less

separate and disconnected from others. It is true and important

that the training helps individual people struggle with and transcend

their particular conditioning, including social conditioning. Yet at

the same time its methods continually refer to, learn from, give to,

collaborate and share with others. Buddhism speaks to the

individual yet is not an individualistic, narcissistic teaching. It is lived

at least as much for others as oneself.

This implies community; relationships with others are vital if the

practices are to work. The Buddha himself went forth on his quest

for awakening because of other people. It was having seen that

sickness, aging, and death are inescapable, and then encountering a

spiritual practitioner, that prompted him so radically to change his

way of life. We need something of that motivation, too.

No doubt what originally moved us to start meditating and seek

insight was our own suffering, not that of others. However as we

practice, personal suffering reduces. And sooner or later we come


to terms with the reality not only that others exist, but that their

sufferings and perceptions of things are as valid, at least, as our

own. This is an opening to the beginnings of compassion, which for

Buddhism is completely inseparable from insight.

Hence the value of extending our idea of our community to include

all that lives. In Mahayana Buddhist countries spiritual practice is

always dedicated ‘for the sake of all beings’. And for indigenous

peoples generally, it is considered civilised to be sensitive to the

existence of non-humans: it reduces our pride and arrogance and

makes us better people. Witnessing animals’ and insects’ special

concerns, troubles and joys brings us down to earth, reminding us of

our responsibilities and our proper place in this world. As animals

we may be at the top of the tree evolutionarily speaking (along with

chimpanzees), but many others are intelligent. Certain others

moreover are far stronger, more sensitive, more industrious and

much more persistent than most humans. Traditional tales like

Aesop’s Fables entertain us with stories about the special qualities

of nonhuman beings – as in the race between the hare and the

tortoise, which is surely instructive in the present context. In

observing how others live there is much we can learn, but first we


must acknowledge them as brothers and sisters in need of our care.

One of the worst effects of our ignoring the lives of other beings –

human as well as non-human – is how that maintains our own

considerable ignorance. Conversely, if we were to cultivate more

awareness of others’ individual lives, however apparently simple

they may be, our understanding of life generally would surely be

transformed.

Shrines: ancestors and beyond-ness

There is a play of reciprocity between ourselves and those we are in

community with. It also takes place across time, as the influence of

our ancestors offers lessons to us in the present. All human

communities have evolved ways to hold their ancestors in memory.

Shrines are often set up for the purpose, as when an offering table

is set for the Buddha in a meditation room, a kitchen shelf is

specially dedicated to the local spirits, a mossy log under a tree

functions as a nature shrine, or some hero’s monument is erected at

the centre of town. All these give their communities a focus for their

highest values. Dedicating a special location to those we respect

provides a medium for connecting to and celebrating them as part

of our community, enhancing everyone’s appreciation of the


community culture. This can be seen in war memorials and graves –

community shrines at which people often make offerings as a way

of expressing appreciation of their connection. Again one often

sees by the dusty roadside bunches of flowers poignantly tied, still

in their cellophane or in honour of someone whose life has sadly

ended at that spot.

Such shrines are beautiful despite being disorganised, dirty and

untidy, because they are expressing something beyond this world.

Beyond-ness is what makes a true shine. We can enhance the

simple beauty with lovely arrangements of flowers, skilful

woodwork, silk hangings and golden images, and the devotion thus

expressed can be deeply inspiring. Yet we can overdo the aesthetics

and lose the connection with the other world. A real shrine is never

merely a decorative feature or an art object. It has to be a portal to

another world: it must give actual access to the world of the

Buddhas, the spirits, our ancestors or all three.

In the past, ancestors have played a prominent part in community

awareness, whereas a component in modern alienation seems to be

our loss of a sense of ancestry. How do we feel about our own

ancestors? It is common for modern people to feel virtually


nothing, which is surely indicative, and would be considered a great

impoverishment in any indigenous culture.

In many Buddhist meditations one imagines not only the Buddha in

front, but to the surrounding horizons all beings, starting with one’s

own mother and father. It seems important to connect our feeling

for the Buddha with our sense of having grown up into the world. I

once led a month-long retreat during which the participants, as an

experiment, dedicated a large outdoor shrine to ‘the ancestors’,

which could mean whatever anyone wanted. In the course of

developing the Buddhist loving-kindness meditation (mettabhavana

– often connected with gratitude), we began reflecting on the many

influences we had received in our lives, especially those (like the

Buddha’s) that had brought us to practising the dharma. We all

came to realise how strong an influence (positive and negative) our

own family has been – and from there, all our forebears going back

into history. The connections and memories are intensely,

sometimes painfully alive – and of their nature likely to continue so,

though awareness can transform associated feelings and their

sometimes devastating effects. In creating this shrine we wanted to


acknowledge these influences on us, and bring them not only into

our sense of community, but also into our spiritual practice.

Though their influences from the past are fascinatingly powerful, we

often know very little about our own families. If we all lived

together in some West African village as members of a tribe who

had inhabited that area for millennia – or if we were part of an

indigenous Buddhist community in Burma or Tibet – we would all

share the same ancestors, and their memory would be evocative for

everyone in the village. Life’s dimensionality is far blunter for most

of us in the West. Since billions of us have dispersed in migrations

throughout the world we usually have scant knowledge of previous

generations and often scant interest, too. There is even a strange

tendency to feel that life began with our own generation. The

impressions we have, even of the recent past, can seem quaintly

irrelevant, like fading sepia-toned photographs.

This really quite severe loss, of a sense of the past’s living influence

on us now, increases our disconnection. How lonely many of us are

these days. Yet the ancestors remain as influences and memorial

facts, even amidst the complexity of modern life, and offer a rich

wellspring of inspiration. Spiritual practitioners always have the


great teachers of the past available for recall. And even if we know

nothing whatever of our great-great-grandparents, our culture yet

possesses a rich array of myth and written history. Reading myth,

or listening to it, opens a channel for the influence of our ancestors.

In the opinion of Malidoma Some, a West African shamanic teacher,

we in the west need to acknowledge as ancestors major cultural

figures like Shakespeare and Socrates as well as other poets,

writers, philosophers, teachers, artists and social activists.

I did not grasp the importance of any of this until I noticed how

profoundly our retreatants were moved by the shrine we were

building. It began with hardly more than a mossy tree trunk, but

soon people added appreciations of deceased family members

written on wood and then all kinds of offerings started appearing –

flowers, stones, branches, grasses, drawings and carvings – until

after a day or so someone dug a well and filled it with water. A

model boat and some paper fish then appeared, after which

inscribed stones and even money was seen lying on the well

bottom. The well seemed to symbolise the possibility of drawing

refreshment up from the depth of the past. Everyone including me


found they wanted to sit by the ancestors’ shrine. It drew you with

its evocative, slightly eerie atmosphere.

After witnessing the feelings involved, I saw how much we need to

feel proud of our human inheritance, and that our own life is

worthwhile. Honouring the ancestors reminds us that people in the

past (like our parents) had strong faith in us and the lives we would

live after them. The ancestors in a way act as mentors, encouraging

us to activate the good and creative within us. Remembering them,

we wish for their blessing.

the blessings of the living

We need the blessing of the living too. How tragically wasteful it

seems, from this perspective, that we have become so uneasy in our

dealings with the elderly. For indigenous peoples the knowledge of

the elders may be vital for survival. No one else may remember

how to survive a set of conditions that last appeared fifty years ago.

The elders are a precious resource. So it is sad to see, in our own

society, how readily the elderly can be dismissed by the less

experienced. It is even sadder to see how fearful men and women

now become at the onset of aging, afraid they will increasingly be

seen as unattractive or irrelevant. The characterising of seniors as


useless, distasteful, slow and expensive is our culture’s second great

family betrayal, following that of our environmental relations.

Yet all of us are on our way ourselves to becoming elders, just as our

elders are on their way to becoming ancestors. Any elders’ life

experience is invaluable. Elders are by and large good company,

and their wisdom and experience has a potential to profoundly

change lives. If this is valued, their memory will stay alive after

death as they join the ‘world’ of the ancestors.

We can speak of family, cultural and spiritual ancestry. Connecting

to the latter is considered vital in spiritual traditions worldwide, but

is not an easy idea for us in the west. In ethnic forms of Buddhism

throughout Asia some kind of recollection of the school's line of

influence, perhaps a visualisation of a ‘refuge tree’ displaying upon

its branches the lineal teachers, is considered fundamental to a

spiritual path. Its necessity is unclear to us, but amongst people

who live in a nature-connected world it is understood without a

thought that in order to be a community, all must share their lives

with the ancestors, elders and mentors. This brings the blessing of

happiness. Indeed the primary function of community could be said

to be its ability to channel the blessing of the ancestors, since that


connection is what keeps its spirit and culture alive. In Buddhist

terminology this is adhisthana, the blessing or ‘grace-waves’ of the

tradition and the culture of dharma stemming from the life of

ancestral Buddhas like Sakyamuni – who actually existed in history

and whose teachings many present readers will have actually

received.

We clearly need some time to develop a realistic appreciation of our

ancestors, elders and mentors. Spiritual groups in the west generally

are discovering they need to adapt the customs they inherit from

eastern lineages to the very different attitudes here. Take for

example the common expectation that a spiritual teacher should be

perfect – and the outrage people frequently seem to feel on

discovering they are not. Yet it seems obvious that teachers will

inevitably be imperfect, and therefore disappointing, in one way or

another. Malidoma Some has some amusing stories about his

relationship with his own spiritual mentor, Uncle Guisso, and how

irritating he found him. ‘I remember more vividly the times when I

yearned to kill him than… when I wanted him.. for my own sake.

Almost every time I was with him, something he did or said,

something he did not do or failed to say, irritated me profoundly


and stole …curses out of my mouth. I must confess that though he

is still alive, I can’t stand seeing him because our conversation is

almost always a slippery journey into the sticky mud of

disappointment. Yet I love my mentor beyond what I can say.’

This mixed emotion rings very true. It reminds me of Buddhist

mentoring, where the teacher sometimes seems engaged

constantly in challenging students, often causing them

embarrassment, irritation and humiliation. Yet evoking these

reactions is not the teacher’s intention - they are the natural

consequence of the ignorance of the student making contact with

the teacher’s wisdom. Feeling that disparity can be difficult and

challenging.

In Tibetan tradition the lama is the root of all blessings. In the

ordination ceremony the preceptor’s crucial act is to pour drops of

consecrated water on the crown that flow down and fill the initiate

with the water of adhisthana. Yet the extraordinary ceremony only

draws attention to something that, from the perspective of the

ancestors, could happen all the time. For we are already in the

presence of the Buddhas, the lineage of teachers, and our

ancestors; we are moreover literally surrounded by all beings on


this earth. Their blessings flow from above, below and all directions.

If we are mindful of our relationship to them, we feel our practice

witnessed by all, from unawakened beings to the Buddhas.


Appendix