Institutions
“The dzogchen guru is not concerned with training scholars who are servants of dharma but with enabling those who wish to understand themselves to do so. The dharma is there to help people, not to enslave them in the service of an institution.”
Institutions is a horrible word, but we can’t really live without them.
Whenever we organise ourselves to do something together, we create institutions. The key, as James Low points out here, is that the institution has to be in service to the individual, to all the individuals that make it up. Not the other way around.
It’s possible for ‘the institution’ to become an end in itself. My teacher, Sangharakshita, talked of the institutions as having the sole purpose of enabling the flow of kalyanamitrata, friendship in the spiritual life. And I love James Low’s definition here of kalyanamitrata; enabling those who wish to understand themselves to do so.
When we lose sight of this and the institution becomes more important than the people in it, things start to go wrong.
When we talk of ‘being in service’, are we in service to living beings? Or to an abstract ideal?
Quote from a post shared by @simplybeingsangha
