With Ruby and Greg at IMC
This past weekend I attended the third annual InterSangha Conference held at the Insight Meditation Center in Redwood City, California, as a representative of Portland Friends of the Dhamma. My traveling companions were Ruby Grad and Greg Satir. Ruby is the Friends of the Dhamma board president and Greg is secretary. I am vice-president. We joked that we almost had a quorum for a board meeting. We met at Ruby’s house at 4:30 Thursday morning and made it to Eugene before stopping for coffee on the 700-mile drive. I would have preferred coffee two hours earlier, but we found nothing open on our route out of town and onto the freeway.
Even after getting slowed down in traffic across the Bay Bridge and through San Francisco, we parked across the street from IMC precisely at 5:30. We were just in time to join the circle for the opening remarks given by Kim Allen, who headed the planning committee and ran the programs through the weekend. We met Jeff Kerr, from the Portland Insight Meditation Community, and who would be staying with us in our accommodations in San Francisco.
We then walked nine blocks to Stafford Park, where there awaited a huge pot-luck dinner provided by IMC members. We ate in the park because of the regularly scheduled meditation that would soon begin at the center. Once at the park Greg and I, who are highly skilled introverts, hung along the periphery of the gathering crowd as dinner preparations were completed. Soon much to our relief, the feeding line began to form. Piling food onto one’s plate is a fine activity for those of us who otherwise have trouble getting conversations started. Eventually, though, having found a table, we were immersed in conversation with Steve and Carolyn and Lori and Kathryn and a number of others.
Although it was sunny and mild when we arrived in Redwood City, by 7:30 or so it was getting uncomfortably chilly. I was glad I wore a jacket.
Dinner over, the four of us drove north back to San Francisco. After some misdirection we found Judy’s apartment (thanks to Google Maps and Jeff’s phone), where we would spend the next three nights. Judy, an IMC member but not part of the conference, was, ironically, house-sitting in Redwood City, so we had the place to ourselves. Judy’s ground-floor, row-house apartment was typical of the area near the UCSF Medical Center. It felt as though I were staying in a bit of history. Frank Norris’s McTeague, A Story of San Francisco, is among my favorite novels.
InterSangha’s purpose is to gather lay communities within the insight meditation movement for a weekend of inspiration and discussion of common concerns. There were about 60 attendees from communities as far away as Minnesota, Vermont, British Columbia, Quebec, and Mexico.
Because Portland Friends of the Dhamma has a tight focus on the lineage of Ajahn Chah and support of the monastics within that tradition, it does not fit the description of an insight meditation community. We do, however, share the common roots of Theravada Buddhism.
Program sessions ran all day Friday and Saturday. One of the more interesting panel discussions was “Dana, Financial Models, and Fundraising.” Greg was among the panelists. Dana is a Pali word that, strictly speaking, means almsgiving. According the the Buddhist Dictionary, dana “especially the offering of robes, food, etc., to the monks, is highly praised in all Buddhist countries of Southern Asia as a fundamental virtue and as a means to suppress man’s inborn greed and egoism.”
In contemporary western parlance, however, dana has come to mean a monetary donation to the community to keep the doors open and pay the teachers. Where this isn’t enough, most communities suggest donation amounts, charge fees, and take part in fundraising activities, sometimes not just to cover immediate needs, but to maintain contingency funds. Friends of the Dhamma does none of these, which differentiated Friends of the Dhamma from most, if not all, of the other groups represented.
During his presentation, Greg stressed that dana is a gift given without obligation and with no expectations. It ensures that everything that happens has support and that it’s ”being OK with something that ends. Dana keeps it closer to the idea that things can close if there is no support for it.” In other words, were people stop supporting Friends of the Dhamma, the doors would close, and that would be just fine.
Sunday morning offerings included the opportunity to sit with the IMC community or take a tour of a recently purchased former nursing home that is to become the Insight Retreat Center, about an hour’s drive from IMC. Our band of travelers took part in neither, choosing instead to take to the road early so as to arrive home Sunday evening, which we did safely.
