In 2019, Satyadhana, Aparimana, Padmayogini, and some representatives of the College met in King’s Cross to discuss how Triratna “doctrine” related to peoples’ experience along the path of insight. The context for the discussion was the following observation: quite a few people look back at Triratna teaching in the light of insight and identify that some of it has been misleading and counterproductive. This had been causing tension that needed to be addressed for the health of all involved in Triratna.
Although Satyadhana resigned before these discussions could come to fruition, Padmayogini and Aparimana invited others to form the ‘Mandala of Insight Group’ to carry these discussions forward.
The Mandala of Insight Group aims:
- To look at how we communicate, especially around Dharma practice, experience and insight, in the context of mutual valuing and respect for each other.
- To create situations where Order members feel able easily to share and communicate about their deep experience of Dharma practice, and to create this kind of communication amongst ourselves so that we exemplify it.
- To look at how insight is presented and taught at the moment and how Triratna teaching bears up in the light of experience on the path.
We’d like to share an update on how we have continued to work with these aims.
We spent quite some time researching Sangharakshita’s teachings and Triratna’s cultural expressions of them, in relation to how helpful they were for more direct insight or wisdom teachings.
Out of this we produced a 7 point discussion paper (you can read the paper with some commentary here).
We met with and had good discussions with college members and members of the Sikkha meditation Kula around this paper. There was broad agreement with the underlying spiritual content of the 7 Points, and these discussions helped point out changes we could make, particularly around language, in order to make the document more accessible to more people.
Opening out the discussion to the wider Order was always part of our planning and so this 7 points paper and invitations to a series of Order seminars to discuss it, was added in Threads and on our Order Facebook forum in March. We said
What we have come up with is a discussion document. It is unfinished and imperfect as yet, and we need you to take the discussion further.
Over 170 Order members signed up for the seminars and recordings, which exceeded our expectations and showed us the appetite and need for such discussions. It was really good to hear from people engaged in understanding and practising in this area of wisdom, insight and spiritual death. We had a lot of feedback and questions and many people wanted more opportunities to continue with this sort of conversation.
In order to facilitate that we are going to hold regular monthly discussion groups for any Order member who would like to take part. More loosely based than our seminars, we’ll start with a topic and see where it leads to, if the group is too large to allow for participation from everyone we will split into smaller groups.