I've been kvetching a lot lately about the need to build Buddhist communities. Petteri Sulonen and Nathan of Dangerous Harvests have posts up about community and un-community that are worth reading.
I dimly remember being assigned a book to read for a college class about the unraveling of communities in post-World War II America, and that book would have been published no later than the 1960s. Petteri says you can find the same issues in Finland. In the past 60 years we have gradually become strangers to our neighbors. There are many reasons for this, such as suburbs designed for cars and not for people.
Petteri writes,
"I read a bit of news reporting a few months ago where they had interviewed three people, one born in the 1950's, one in the 1970's, and one in the 1990's, in a certain part of Helsinki. They'd asked them to map out the physical territory they roamed as children below the age of 12. The 1950's kid was all over the place, shooting rats at the harbor with a BB gun, climbing the rocky vacant lots in Kallio, getting into scraps with the kids from the neighboring neighborhood, taking long walks to Seurasaari, and so on. The 1970's kid's map covered the general quarter of the town pretty well, but had none of the 1950's kid's expeditions. The 1990's kid went to school, some friends houses nearby, and was driven by his parents to do sports and other hobbies. His map had a few disconnected spots on it."
Growing up in a small midwestern town in the 1950s, I remember spending long summer days with a tribe of other children freely roaming around the neighborhood, accompanied by a couple of dogs. The neighborhood included an empty field and a small river passable by a treacherously unstable wooden bridge that was usually missing a few planks. All day long we were on and off the bridge, in and out of the river, and roaming in and out of the neighborhood yards with few adults in sight.
It didn't help that the river was the place people dumped things they no longer wanted, including mattresses and the occasional large appliance. Hey, it was the Ozarks. I remember when I was still quite small, maybe 6 or so, cutting my feet on broken glass, but after the shards were pulled out of my feet I don't recall being warned not to wade in the river barefoot any more (although I didn't). But the fact that as a 6-year-old I had the freedom to get into that kind of trouble at all seems astonishing.
Did I mention the river also was infested with snapping turtles? Sometimes the boys would shoot at them with BB guns. All the boys had BB guns, and no one seemed to worry that they'd shoot each other's eyes out. (Not that I approve of shooting at turtles, of course, but I doubt the boys ever hurt one. They were big critters with thick shells.)
But the neighborhood was full of eyes; stay-at-home mothers and some retired couples were always close and no doubt keeping an eye on us whenever we came into view. As I remember the stepping on glass episode, the grandfatherly retired man who lived next door, and who usually was outside tending to his lawn or garden, heard me crying and came quickly. He carried me back to my house to my mother.
And I also remember that whenever we did light near one particular house, the mother of that house would be outside to check on us and offer us not-nutritious refreshments. One mother always seemed to have a vat of grape Kool-Aid at hand, for example.
It was community child raising, which has been the norm in human communities since there have been human communities. Of course, this particular model only worked because most of the mothers were at home. This created other kinds of problems, and some of those mothers -- including mine --were actively miserable in the stay-at-home mother role.
But if you go back just three or four more generations, the norm was that most men were either farmers or some kind of artisan -- blacksmith, shoemaker, or such -- whose workplace was in or adjacent to his home. So in the 18th century and before, most fathers were around most of the time, too. The "norm" of a father who was away most of the time and a mother who was at home was created by 19th century industrialization. Back in the 1940s Joseph Campbell wrote quite a bit about how this "norm" had changed cultural ideas about masculinity, btw, but that's another rant.
Anyway, it appears that in the past few generations the norm of community child-raising has eroded away, and now families are more and more isolated from and distrustful of each other. I'm not sure we've come to grips with how that loss might affect us.
Getting back to the subject of Buddhism, I say again that we need to get away from thinking of a dharma center as a place where individuals go to receive teaching and think in terms of building communities of practitioners. This supports individual practice in many ways, including opening our eyes and hearts to the needs of others instead of being locked up in our own issues.
How to do this is another matter. Teachers and senior students need to take the lead on this. Addressing the particular needs of practitioners with jobs and children is a start. Offering a variety of programs aimed at people in different stages of their lives is another. It also might mean sponsoring activities that are not exclusively "Buddhist," like Little League teams.
Any other ideas?
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