Voices Across Boundaries Vol.1 No.3 Editorial
Community-To-Go
Shifting attachments in a high-speed world
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Ironically, it is for the very same reasons that this experience can be profoundly enriching. By bringing into question these very norms that we tend to take for granted, often with the belief that they are somehow universal, we come to know ourselves better. The mirror of the "other" helps reflect both the beautiful and the beastly parts of ourselves, our identities, our culture and our society.
In my personal case, one of the most striking things that I experienced when I first came to live in the West, first in the United Kingdom and now in Canada, was the realization of how deeply embedded my own identity was in that of a community. This is not to endorse the well-worn cliché of the social psychologists that Asians have collective identities while people of Western European descent have individual ones. My life was not really the norm: I had been a monk in the Tibetan Buddhist order for more than twenty years.
As a monk, I was a member of a community of individuals who chose to lead their lives in a particular way, to be guided by certain goals, and to organize their lives according to specific sets of precepts. Mine was a scholastic monastery called Ganden Shartse, established in the fifteenth century. With its own sense of history, preferred scholastic texts, unique rituals, ceremonies and music, Shartse is a monastery steeped in history and tradition.
This was my community and all the monks of Shartse were comrades in the true sense of the word. My life was inextricably linked with the lives of all the other monks, who when I was there numbered around three hundred. Depending on our age and seniority in the monastery, we had set daily routines and responsibilities. Our lives revolved around private meditation, communal chanting, philosophical disputations in open courtyards, and hours of reading and in-class discussions. Since Ganden was part of a Tibetan refugee agricultural settlement, our routine also entailed some work in the rice and corn fields during the planting and harvesting seasons. Through such shared communal life everyone felt an instinctive sense of belonging and a natural sense of loyalty to the monastery and to our fellow monks. To outsiders, I was a member of the monastic order and of Ganden Shartse monastery. There was a certain clarity about my identity, both from my own perspective and from the perspective of others.
All of this was thrown into question when I left the monastic life and came to live in the West.
Looking back, I recognize how this sense of belonging to a community had served as a powerful anchor in my emotional and spiritual life. Clearly, the English word community, with its Latin roots, must have a close association with the Christian theological notion of communion with God, thus giving the term an unmistakable religious connotation. As Colleen Loomis explains in this issue, social scientists have struggled to define the concept clearly to give us a better sense of what we are talking about when we speak of community. However, other than the broad notion that community must have some reference to people, there does not appear to be a single definition that could capture the essence of what the concept entails.
This should not come as a surprise, as many aspects of human life defy neat conceptual definition. In Tibetan the closest equivalent of this term is düde, which literally has the connotation of a specially formed congregation. Thus the monastic community is referred to as the "supreme community," for it is composed of a group of spiritual practitioners, all aspiring to a life of virtuousness. In Buddhism, community is seen as such an essential part of a spiritual practitioner’s life that it is listed as one of the three objects of refuge, along with the Buddha and the Dharma (his teachings). Thus, when an individual commits himself or herself to the path of the Buddha, he or she seeks refuge in the Buddha as the Teacher, to the Teachings as the actual path, and to the spiritual community as constituted by companions on the journey to enlightenment.
Invariably, the concept of community appears to entail some form of boundary, a division between insider and outsider, which helps define the identity of members of the group and, at the same time, exclude others from the grouping. In this way, boundaries provide a sense of identity and reality to specific communities. In some cases, as in monastic communities based on a set of ethical codes, the boundaries may be extremely clear, while in others, they may be less clear-cut and have more to do with mental attitudes.
Generally, a sense of community is stronger in minority groups, as with my own sense of belonging to the Tibetan community in Montreal. By their very nature, communities tend to define themselves in relation to the other -- often the majority. Those in the majority too can have a strong sense of community, especially when there is a perceived threat to their identity and survival. So, at the heart of this sense of community appears to be the following duality: it relates to a certain commonality, whether ethnic, religious or social, among a group of people; yet, at the same time, it distinguishes its members from others living in the same physical environment.
As Ronald Beiner notes, much of the scholarly discussion on community dwells on the perceived contradiction between liberalism and communitarianism. This debate centres on two conflicting visions of human society. On one side is the powerful vision of liberalism where the concept of individual liberty and its underlying belief in the inalienable rights of the individual form the foundation of a good human society. On the other side is the vision of a more communitarian society, where the basic concept of human nature is that of a social being. On this view, the notion of the inalienable "natural rights" of the individual is a misnomer for it presupposes the possibility of conceiving human beings in isolation from others. According to communitarians, our identity, existence and well-being cannot be conceived outside the context of fellow human beings. Needless to say, these two visions are expressed in various shades.
Is a sense of community crucial for human happiness? If so, how can such a sense be developed in a liberal democracy where the overarching principles are premised on individualism? Given the pace of our technological culture, with its urbanized lifestyle, mobile work force, market-dependent economy and almost nonexistent parish life, what kind of community can be developed, if any? Can the very fluidity of this fast-paced culture bring its own conditions for development of new forms of communities?
In my personal experience there seem to be genuinely quantifiable benefits to community, insofar as the psychological, emotional and spiritual well-being of the individual is concerned. Statistically speaking, many of the characteristic psychological ailments that plague individuals in today’s fast-paced urban societies, such as loneliness, alienation and a loss of purpose, appear to be less evident in traditional societies where community ties remain strong. On the down side, one cannot deny that there are certain coercive tendencies in community life. For example, when individual aspirations and views conflict with the expectations and ethos of the community, given that communities tend to be conservative in their instincts, there may be a natural tendency for the community to suppress the dissenting voice altogether. This, in turn, is ultimately detrimental to the health of the community itself.
In this issue, we explore these questions and take a more personal look at a wide variety of communities -- religious and secular, geographical and virtual, large and small.
Thupten Jinpa, Associate Editor