A State of Enlightenment
Think you’re gonna find Buddhism in Steeler Nation? I didn’t. When I moved to Pittsburgh, I didn’t expect to find many meditation centers; certainly not the diversity and convenience that I had enjoyed back in Boston.
I easily found Pittsburgh Shambhala, but Tibetan Buddhism is radically different than the Theravada Buddhism that speaks to me, and I’m uncomfortable with how they venerate their teacher, the late Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, to a fault.
Searching online, I discovered the Pittsburgh Buddhist Center, a small center run by three monks from Sri Lanka: one of the three primary Theravadan countries, together with Thailand and Burma. PBC even stream their Wednesday evening sittings, so I could get an idea what it was like before visiting. So that was the first place I checked out in person.
Their center is 40-minute drive out of town, which makes it inconvenient. The sangha is small, split about evenly between locals and Sri Lankan expats. Because of this, the practice retains a lot more of the Asian cultural context than the Americanized Vipassana centers I’m used to: there’s incense, offerings, extensive chanting in Pali, and their meditation sessions feature a lot of verbal instruction, which I don’t find helpful. Because of the Sri Lankan cultural influence, I haven’t felt especially integrated with that group.
On the other hand, they’re solid Theravadan, which is great to find in this town where refinement amounts to stuffing french fries inside your sandwich. And they’re the genuine article: fully-ordained monastics straight from Asia, rather than watered-down secular American teachers with no monastic experience. Even in Boston, being able to discuss practice and philosophy with a monk was a very rare and precious thing, and I never imagined that ongoing weekly contact would be available to me in Pittsburgh.
So PBC has pluses and minuses, but it seems like a place I’ll visit occasionally.
During my first visit to PBC, I was given a small pamphlet that listed the Buddhist groups in the area. That was a great resource, and one of the entries intrigued me. It was for something called “Vipassana Sitting Group”, which meets (at a Jewish temple, ironically) only a couple blocks from my apartment. Anachronistically, it listed no website and no Facebook page; just the personal email address for Rhonda, the organizer.
It turns out that Rhonda Rosen was of the same circle as people like Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg and Jack Kornfield and Larry Rosenberg: American hippies who practiced in Asia and returned to establish centers like CIMC and the Insight Meditation Society in Barre. Rhonda studied under the late Indian teacher S. N. Goenka, who is widely known for his rigid but effective teaching style. It turns out that she has run this small, unaffiliated meditation group under the radar for decades, generally following Goenka’s model.
Much like CIMC, her group is entirely made up of Americans with very diverse levels of practice experience, and she too has stripped off all the Asian cultural baggage in favor of a familiar secular, earnest, practical focus. She also maintains running verbal instructions during meditation, which runs sequentially through anapanasati, body scan, and metta.
Being so similar to my previous practice at CIMC and IMS-and conveniently located in my neighborhood!-I’ve attended Rhonda’s group more regularly, and have found it a lot easier to integrate with. My biggest frustration is that I can’t attend both her group and PBC because they meet during the same Wednesday evening time slot!
With attendance varying from 8-24 people each week, Rhonda’s group has a new and interesting dynamic for me to explore. It’s sort of halfway between the large-group formality of CIMC and the small-group informality of my little kalyana mitta spiritual friends group.
What do I mean By “formality”? At places like CIMC and IMS, most discussion is Q&A, where students pose questions that are addressed by the teacher, but students are usually discouraged from addressing one another’s questions directly. It’s a more centralized model where the teacher is the sole authoritative voice. In contrast, my KM group had no teacher, was completely egalitarian, and individual practitioners simply kicked ideas back and forth.
I’ve been carefully sussing out whether Rhonda wants her group to be more centralized or more open, and she has consistently encouraged me to offer my own ideas and experiences during group discussions. And with twelve years of study and practice under my belt, I often have useful ideas to contribute and experiences to relate.
With things to offer and encouragement to contribute, this group feels like a safe little laboratory for me to test the waters and find my own voice as a potential future teacher. That’s not a vocation that I intentionally pursued, but as people express appreciation for my comments, I become more aware of the value I can share, and more confident in my ability to articulate it in a way that others can receive. It’s a very new and interesting place to find myself, and so far I’m enjoying it.
This past weekend Rhonda’s group held a one-day retreat at the Zen Center of Pittsburgh, which sounds lofty but it’s really just an old farmhouse twenty miles out of town. I attempted to bike out to the retreat, but broke a spoke and had to abort my ride and drive out.
The retreat itself was nice, with about twenty people attending… And also three cats who live there, which I found delightful. One even came by to meow inquisitively a couple times during one of the sittings! It was nice to share a little more of an experience with Rhonda’s “regulars” beyond our short Wednesday sits.
For myself, I did have one minor insight, although it takes a bit of explaining to convey.
We’re all familiar with the geeks who desperately try to score points by knowing more about everything than everyone else, who turn even casual conversations into opportunities for one-upsmanship, to everyone else’s annoyance.
Behind their lack of social grace, all those people are trying to do is win others’ respect and admiration; they think that people will like them if they can show how much they know.
I’d use the word “mansplainers”, but that is a hatefully sexist term that does an injustice to most men and fails to address the women who exhibit the exact same behavior.
Those of us who realize that people don’t respond well to unwanted corrections have largely given up on offering them. A more fatherly approach that I usually take is to offer information only when it is useful or expressly desired.
Even though I’ve long-since abandoned the impulse toward parading my knowledge and one-upsmanship, I was surprised to realize that I still expect that being knowledgeable and competent will cause people to like me.
But that’s not necessarily true. In Rhonda’s sitting group, I’ve been trying to offer advice, suggestions, and insight to less experienced practitioners… no more than once per day, tho! My contributions have been really well-received, so my image in that group is generally one of knowledge and competence. But does that mean they like me? Not at all.
Maybe they like me, and maybe they don’t. Probably people’s impressions vary from one end of the spectrum to the other, based less upon how I present myself, and more determined by their own character and backgrounds. Demonstrating knowledge and experience isn’t a requirement for being liked, and actually doesn’t correlate well with social favor.
I’ll try to keep that realization in mind as I continue to build relationships with the people in the group and explore my own voice as an experienced practitioner.