Bonds of Transformation: Friendship | Dharmacharini Seminar

14 – 21 February | Led by SaddhanaNdi + Vidyamala

You have to exercise some care in understanding friendship correctly, understanding the true nature of friendship. If you understand the true nature of friendship, well, the rest will follow. You’ll choose to be friends with people with whom it is possible for the ideal of friendship to be fulfilled.

– Sangharakshita

Friendship, it’s such a koan for many of us. Our lives pass through different phases and so it is with our friendships and our commitment to them. And yet, the Buddha tells us that friendship is the whole of the spiritual life, and Sangharakshita has created our community based on that teaching. When describing spiritual progress he says ‘The knowledge we need is self-knowledge. And the real significance of the deep individual-to-individual contact that Going for Refuge to the Sangha involves lies in the simple psychological fact: we get to know ourselves best in relation to others… Through meeting the challenge of real communication, one comes to know oneself better.’  So, it seems that if we are serious about ‘awakening’ then we need to be serious about friendship.

On this seminar we will use Sangharakshita’s exploration of Johnson’s poem ‘Ode to Friendship’, following that discussion through themes such as trust and self-disclosure, as well as the wholeness, beauty and deep nourishment that can be experienced when we’re in real communication with a friend. 

The Enlightenment experience is not self-contained in a one-sided way. The Enlightenment experience contains an element of ‘communication’, and contains, therefore, an element of spiritual friendship, even ‘transcendental friendship’, or friendship of the highest conceivable level.

– Sangharakshita

Photo: Dharmachanda