One of the distinctive features of Ken McLeod's website, Unfettered Mind, is that there is no centre, membership, or community to join in the familiar Western Buddhist sense. This was not accidental.
In 2005, as Ken prepared to take a sabbatical from teaching, he reflected on why, years earlier, he had moved away from the Buddhist centre model to work directly with individuals and small groups:
From Releasing Emotional Reactions 7
Ken: And that’s one of the reasons why I developed the model that I did fifteen years ago: seeing people individually and working with people in small groups, and not actually creating a center, but just working with people directly. Because by then I had seen so much confusion and turmoil and problems develop because of the organizational demands of the center on the students, and how it corrupted or distracted them from their practice, and so forth.
And this was a problem in Tibet also. Jamgön Kongtrül the Great was hauled out of a three-year retreat at a young age because he had to teach grammar to the Karmapa of that generation, because he was the best grammarian. So, a huge obstacle to his practice. Situ Rinpoche came to him and said, “I’m really sorry to do this, but you’re the best, so we need you.” He did extract a promise from him to be able to do three years retreat at a later point, but it was about ten years later when he was able to do it.
And so I elected a model in which there wasn’t any center or any organization or anything to get in the way of the teacher-student relationship. Lots of other stuff got in the way, but there wasn’t that, anyway. And that has been successful, and the understanding that I’ve seen grow in some of the people that have been kind enough to work with me has shown me that some good things came out of that.
Now, for whatever reason, that model has run its course. So as many of you know, I’m taking a sabbatical from teaching. And this is very similar to what I did about fifteen years ago, when I gave up another model, a model I never had much enthusiasm for but I just gave it up. And I spent about three months thinking, “Okay, what’s the right model for me to be able to help people?” And I knew it wasn’t a center and I knew it wasn’t a number of things. So I happened on this. And the time has come for me to do that again.
A little later, a student asks whether the absence of a centre might undercut sangha:
**Audio note:** Newcomb’s question is barely audible in the recording.
Newcomb: At Karmê Chöling I’ve just been through the kind of political upheaval and distraction and so on, that I think you mention is involved in centers. And one thing that it did was really test the sangha. I wonder if not having a center undercuts the notion of sangha.
Ken: Well, not exactly. Another of my intentions was, because I’d seen all of that, “Okay, I’ll teach in such a way that no community will form.” [Laughter] On that one, I wasn’t so successful. And there is a group of people that have come together through their work with me, I suppose, and right now they’re struggling in different ways. Art, do you want to say a word about this?
Art: Nooo. [Laughter]
Ken: I think that says it all. And there’s an on-going conversation here. The conversation is really, “What does a community of shared intention look like?” Because most communities that form lose that sense of shared intention and become something else. Which is exactly why you’re experiencing all of that turmoil. And this is a question that’s very deep. But the sangha—the third jewel—is a community of shared intention, not a community of hierarchy or mutual dependence. But a community of shared intention. And what does that actually look like? And that’s a question I’m very interested in exploring. And that’s what Art and a number of other people here are very much in the middle of. That fair? Yeah, they’re actively exploring that.
Five years later, in A Trackless Path, Ken returned to the question of institutions, this time from a different direction, acknowledging what they make possible, but also how they get in the way:
From A Trackless Path 8
Ken: Yesterday I talked a bit about how we come here out of this curiosity. Whether that curiosity about our lives comes from something being out of balance or from experiencing something which doesn’t fit into the ordinary scheme of things. And I think I also talked about how, in my view, every religious teaching, every religious doctrine, every philosophical school, every form of practice comes out of that same curiosity. People seeking to come to terms with how they experience life.
Now, if you look at this from a sociological point of view, there’s a very consistent pattern of evolution: that certain ways of thinking, some of them catch the imagination of other people or speak to them, and so “a teacher” emerges. Maybe evolves into a religious leader which leads to the formation of a sufficiently large group that requires some organization, codification of the teachings, formalization of procedures and rituals and lo and behold you have an institution.
And then those institutions carry teachings and practices over centuries. One of the roles of the sangha, the monastic sangha in Buddhism very explicitly—and this is how it’s often termed—is the holder of the teachings. Because it provides the continuity—when everything else may be in various forms of chaos—by which the teachings are passed from generation to generation. Something that it has done very faithfully for 2,500 years, which is a reasonable measure of time. And the same is true of other religious institutions.
But at the same time, forms are solidified, ways of behavior are formalized and very often with many institutions a certain rigidity and eventually a certain calcification sets in. Certain ways of thinking are permitted. Other ways of thinking aren’t. And so what happens over time is that institutions work for some people and don’t work for others. And this goes on and has gone on for centuries.
But now another kind of problem starts to come up. In the early 90s, when I was going through some fairly significant changes particularly in my relationship with the formal institution of Tibetan Buddhism—and the reason these questions were coming up is that I couldn’t do the standard practices. All of those doors had closed very firmly. And even though I knew how the practices worked, my body, my psychology, whatever, didn’t allow me to work with them. And it was a very difficult period.
A great deal of pain—I mean it was fair to say bitterness. It was in the early 90s. I can actually remember being in my car by the parking lot by my old office asking myself the question, “Where are the records for those whom the system doesn’t work and they had to find their own way?”
Well, the answer is there are no records. And there never will be any records. Because it’s the institutions that determine what is carried from generation to generation. And the records of those people whose path lay outside the institution, they don’t survive historically. Every now and then you may come across something.
So this leaves a very interesting dilemma. That if your path lies outside of established institutions, you really do have to reinvent the wheel in every generation. Occasionally you’ll come across a person outside of that whom you can learn from. But it’s something that comes up again and again.
So, a lot of my own questioning has come out of that experience. And when you’re not in the institutional structure—and I’m using institution in a very broad sense here—you’re able to ask questions. And pursue ways of thinking, pursue ways of practice, that you might not otherwise.
This passage and Ken's earlier reflection from 2005 raise a burning question for me: does being outside institutions necessarily mean practicing alone?
I'm keenly interested in Ken's description of sangha as “a community of shared intention.” People whose paths lie outside institutions still need teachers, peers, conversations, and ways of learning from one another. Perhaps sangha is particularly important when there is no established path to follow. Yet my experience of Dharma communities has been much as Ken describes. Even without buildings, organizational structures and hierarchies, or formal membership they seem to “lose that sense of shared intention and become something else.”
How do people whose paths lie outside institutions find and support one another without creating another institution? Ken leaves that question open. I don't have an answer, but am actively searching for possibilities. Please email me at ann@akalpana.org if you'd like to explore this.