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Shaking Up the Buddhadharma With Online Practice

Shaking Up the Buddhadharma With Online Practice

Last updated on: October 29, 2015 at 9:35 am by Dosho Port

Shaking Up the Buddhadharma With Online Practice 2015-10-29T09:35:08-06:00 Dosho Port

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Quick question: what sparked the compassion revolution in Buddhism that we now call the Great Vehicle (aka, Mahayana)?

One answer: Writing.

Yup. A new theory has it that the proliferation of the ability to read and write that took place a bit more than 2,000 years ago changed the Buddha Way by inviting a level of intersubjective reflection that was previously not as readily available.

As Alan Cole puts it in “The Diamond Sutra as Sublime Object: Negation, Narration, and Happy Endings,” “…Mahayana Buddhism and the discovery of writing likely have much to do with one another.”

Now that’s a factor I hadn’t considered before.

Scroll ahead a couple thousand years and POW! – the internet. What impacts will this have on dharma teaching and practice? What creative, new formulations might emerge that will shake up the buddhadharma and fit with the way-seeking heart of our time? How can this new level of intersubjective reflection be directed toward wisdom and compassion?

Although that’s several more quick questions, the answers are not so quick and are still mostly unformed and unknown. I suggest, though, that we may be on the cusp of a sea-change in dharma practice similar to the blooming of the Mahayana. Below I’ll outline a bit or our experiment, playing at the entranceway, through Vine of Obstacles: Online Support for Zen Training.

Some of the more pedestrian changes are already just a matter of how people do things in the contemporary world. Nowadays – and if you’re reading this you already know – to find a place to practice, folks just search online. To learn about practice, we take to the internet where we find millions of offerings (text, audio, video) – quite a dramatic change from the late ’70’s when I became interested in dharma practice and could find zero books in the local bookstore and about six dharma books at the University of Minnesota. When I was ready to look for a teacher and community, I used the yellow pages. Yellow pages, dharma directories, and printed newsletters are now rare artifacts of an earlier time.

But how does the internet impact people who actually want to engage in the practice?

To date, online training programs are uncommon and most online classes try to recreate what works for in-person courses – they’re structured for a specific time duration with one-way presentations (videos) and a few conference calls for students to connect with the teachers and each other. For example, as I write, this offer arrived in my email:

“Watch Free as Over 30 Teachers of Mindfulness and Yoga Share Wisdom and Practical Teachings for Our Everyday Lives.”

Great stuff, I’m sure, and … generally unidirectional (rather than interactive) and passive. Except for how it’s delivered, so last century! Also, online offerings tend to be framed as the second-rate, country cousins of in-person dharma work – “if you can’t show up and do the real work, then there’s this.”

Now I’m just a poor white guy raised up in the swamps of northern Minnesota, but I’ve been wondering if there is something about this technology that allows for new opportunities in how we do this work (and who with) that will lead to a new turning of the buddhadharma. How might that unfold?

I get an inkling that’ll be from using the new mix of technologies as fully as we can. In my view, the most pivotal capacity that the internet allows is for near instantaneous connection between teachers and students and between students and students, across space via text and/or audio/visual means. The photo above, for instance, is a screenshot from a recent practice meeting with a long-time student who lives 1,500 miles away. Her four-month old baby joined us for the session.

Although this kind of practice meeting was rare just a short time ago, now many (perhaps most) dharma teachers meet with people through Skype, FaceTime, or Google Hangouts. Meeting with babies, though, always seems new.

On Vine of Obstacles: Online Support for Zen Training, we’ve played with the internet’s capacity for connection and rather than producing cat (or even “does a dog have buddha nature?”) videos, we’ve focused on enhancing interaction, transparency, and accountability within a practice group of people devoted to zazen and working within a curriculum. Our courses are designed to be self-paced with plenty of active learning through reflections and application. The course on Dogen’s “The Bodhisattva’s Four Methods of Guidance,” for example, begins with a conversation between a practitioner and her/his near-and-dear one. The practitioner inquires about how the near-and-dear one sees the practitioner in terms of giving, kind speech, and beneficial action.

During our twice annual twelve-week practice periods, practitioners intensify their home-practices, working their zazen, study, and engagement edges. One tool that we use for this is the practice planner. Each week, practitioners develop a practice plan for zazen, study, and engagement that fits their particular circumstances and then share it with all the practitioners in the practice period. Small groups of five to seven practitioners follow each other’s practice life, commenting through our Moodle forum.

In the current practice period, one group, composed mostly of millennials, is experimenting with WhatsApp (a cross-platform mobile messaging app) to remove barriers from their conversations.

This kind of frequency of contact about what is actually happening in the work, allows for an openness of heart between practitioners that I’ve seldom seen even in in-person practice periods. The format itself contributes to this – our comfort level is often greater when writing than when talking face-to-face. Each practitioner also has more time to consider and share what they’re moved to share than in an in-person small-group session, for example, where there might be twenty-minutes for a half-dozen practitioners to express themselves.

From this kind of authentic sharing, we understand that our issues are shared and that lightens our load. We see that we can let down our Zen face, and connect with others as we are. We are inspired by the obstacles that our fellow practitioners face and how they live through them. We develop a consistency and depth with practice in the world that compares favorably to that developed in any in-person community. And we witness each other waking up.

The student-to-student work complements regular zazen, teacher-student practice meetings, dharma study, and bringing the practice to life in the tangle of the world. So it’s really the same old dharma (zazen, study, engagement), rebooted and refreshed with modern technology.

Of course, there are also limitations. This way of training takes a lot of teacher time so the group size has natural limits. For students, some internet fluency, or interest in developing such, is essential. In addition, it is helpful for a practitioner to have done some in-person work, because the body aspect of practice is difficult to learn through online work alone. And communication online doesn’t satisfy everyone all the time.

If you’re interested in giving it a whirl, we’re gathering a new small group for our “Guidelines for Studying the Way,” introductory course. We have a handful of openings. Click here for more information.

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