Growing a Beautiful Multifold Sangha at Deer Park

Brother Chân Pháp Lưu

Rock-climbing. Deeply sharing the Dharma in the heart of the mountain. Breathing, and keeping our minds clear. Siblings on the mountain chanting for the morning sit, spread out atop boulders. Coyotes singing in the chaparral. Walking the paths, clearing new ones.

I’ve been reflecting on how we can realize collective awakening – I mean really, truly do it. Thay set out this great task for us, and we are doing it every day: by showing up for walking meditation, for sitting meditation, by opening our hearts to shine light on each other, by eating together. These are small but powerful gestures. Each day, each session I show up for, my individual self – this concept that still surfaces in moments of pride – is diminished, and the harmonious whole of the Sangha shines brighter. Every day at Deer Park we see this manifest. And each of us becomes more whole as a result. Feeling the energy of the Sangha, I feel grateful that we do not choose to reinforce divisions but rather see how we can immerse ourselves in the collective body and energy of the Sangha, like a drop of water in the Pacific. There is great joy in this.

Surrounding us in the hidden mountain are bushes of chamise, black sage, and ceanothus. Laurel sumac does not tolerate frost, and early European American farmers looked to it as an indicator of where they could grow citrus. Indigenous peoples used chamise as kindling, as it splinters easily and burns green thanks to the aromatic oils in its resin. Black sage, a type of mint, makes a flavorful infusion. Each plant species has its beauty and lives in harmony according to its own particular properties. This is our Sangha.

Looking at myself, I see that I have particular qualities: I can write, give Dharma talks, sing and play and write songs. I love taking long walks, and spending time in nature. And while many of my monastic siblings also enjoy these things as well, there are many who are more skillful than I am at each. For collective awakening to become a living reality, an authentic experience, I need to celebrate the joy of these qualities in myself and in others, without discrimination. I praise my brother’s new song. I rejoice in my sister’s powerful Dharma talk. I smile knowingly when I see my brother sitting in meditation on a boulder behind Solidity Hamlet. Together, we rejoice in and see the beauty of each person’s practice, and its flowers and fruits.

Recently, I’ve been encouraging my father to buy a house near Deer Park, so that he could stay close to the community in his old age. He will soon turn 82, and he cannot walk all over, up and down the mountain as he once could. My monastic siblings love him very much, and are so kind to him. When he visited recently, he only attended breakfast and a caroling session before Christmas. He loved to hear the monastic choir learn the Coventry Carol. Even though he does not participate in sitting or walking meditation, he still feels the energy of mindfulness generated by the Sangha. He is being healed, and he tells me so. I rejoice in his healing. Every day he heads out before dark to walk laps around Solidity Hamlet. The brothers got accustomed to this, his daily constitution. Every time he comes back to Deer Park, he reminds me, “The food is better in Clarity!” The greatest gift I could imagine, for him, would be to transition from this life surrounded by the Sangha.

He loves breakfast; it is the activity he attends without fail: toast, jam, oatmeal, and fresh fruit. Every breakfast he leans toward me and asks, “Can we talk?” And every morning I remind him that we eat breakfast in silence. It’s our morning ritual.

Brother Minh Niem and Stephen, a long-term lay friend, are becoming bread-making masters, with a masa madre fermenting throughout the Rains Retreat regularly folded into fresh dough, kneaded then left to rise. The folded layers are visible when you peel back the baked crust of the baked loaves. Brother Dao Phuong returned from Italy with extra virgin olive oil; add some of it with salt to the hot bread, et voila! Enough for brotherhood, and happiness.

Tonks and B, also longterms here, are exploring an alternative career: community. They help lead our mindful backpacking trips, and are essential now to the yearly teen camp. What does it mean to be a couple, growing on the spiritual path, in a monastery? They are providing themselves with a doctorate in Right Living. Without community there is no future for our planet, and more and more young people like them are realizing this.

The Toyon Family is an embodiment of this realization. They are solidly Midwestern, hailing from the prairies of central Canada, the music studios of Nashville, Tennessee, and the school hallways of Rust Belt Ohio. One from Toronto, and one from East Los Angeles, with Vietnamese and Egyptian parents, respectively. One was raised in a Hindu community. Just like in the 50s and 60s in Vietnam, young people are coming to the practice to find community, and to community to discover the practice. Clearly, political change is not enough: we need to trace the arc of transformation in the world with our own lives.

How wondrous is the robe of freedom!
It is the field of all good seeds.
I bow my head to receive it today,
and wear it lifetime after lifetime.

Aaron, formerly Br. Phap Man, lives here, and has been gently guiding the lay friends during the Rains Retreat. On Lazy Day Mondays he can be found hanging out – literally hanging on to the cliff of the waterfall! – on climbing ropes. I come out with him bringing tea and enjoy the morning in the shade of a mountain, putting on climbing shoes and hitching the rope to my harness to start the climb.
Breathing in, I reach for the tiny crack in the rock wall. Breathing out, the rock and I are not two.
In, crack in rock.
Out, rock and I are inseparable.

Here we are, at the cusp of a great flowering of Buddhism in America, and the Plum Village tradition is sending down deep, diverse roots. As I walk on the red ground of the valley, moving through the fragrant chaparral, I remember Thay’s words: “The ancestors have already prepared everything.” With each mindful step, their will becomes manifest.