Ever since we moved into 331 Broadway in 1985, I have related to CIMC as an address, as a building, as an entity of its own. When Christopher Titmuss came to CIMC to teach, he always mentioned his appreciation for teaching “off Broadway.” At times, through the years, I’ve spoken about how the building itself needs rest just as we do—time spent without anything happening in it so that it can rest and regenerate and prepare to welcome us once again.
I was charmed by the history of the building I learned when we were first exploring buying it, which is that it once housed a birthing center. When the doctor in residence died, his nurse took over and began taking in the homeless. I know only this broad brush of its history but hearing this always made me feel that this particular building has a special capacity to hold healing, to foster regeneration, and to comfort those lost and wondering. And in its current incarnation, the building has had the right karma to be a spiritual home for many.
I will never forget returning to CIMC in the middle of the night after practicing in a forest retreat monastery in northeast Thailand. At that time, I lived in the Center, so I was just returning home. While in the monastery, I became close to a few of the monks, who told me just before I left that I might have a hard time keeping up the practice outside the atmosphere of the monastery. I half believed them because I had had such a transformative period of practice there.
I remember walking into the building and opening the door to the meditation hall on the first floor, where the dining room is now. The moment I opened the door, a powerful peace hit me like a strong ocean wave. I thought to myself: “Those wise monks were mistaken. I can practice here just as well as there”.
I could not have imagined the particular situation we are in now, of our being in exile from the building. But of course, here we are. Everything is impermanent, and although we hope to be able to reenter the building before too long, we can’t know when—and, more importantly, our exile reminds us that We Are Not Our Building.
This a long windup to what I really want to say, which is that as much as we may wish to return to our building, we carry the Buddha, the Dharma, and the Sangha within us, just as I carried them from the monastery in Thailand back to CIMC.
The Buddha manifests as our knowing our own and everyone’s intrinsic awakened nature, obscured by the kilesas of greed, hatred, and delusion, but present in all beings nonetheless. The Dharma manifests here and now as the Buddha’s teachings and the practices we are engaging in: the practices of awareness, metta, compassion, and wisdom. And the Sangha manifests as the lineage of awakened practitioners that have gone before us, paving the way, as well as our community which is continuously co-creating itself in the here and now.
Each Dharma center has its unique character, unique community of practitioners, and unique emphasis on different aspects of the teachings. CIMC teachers each share the Dharma in their own ways, but we all share the perspective that your life is your practice and your practice is your life. This means our practice has to involve both depth and breadth. Depth meaning that our aspirations are to know and share the deepest Dharma and awaken to our true nature, and breadth meaning our understanding has to express itself in our lives as they are, and not just when we are on retreat. Our daily life isn’t separate from our beliefs and aspirations.
The Daily Dharma each weekday morning which many of you are participating in is the very essence of what we are all teaching at CIMC. We come together as a community, we sit together as a community, we hear an instruction that we can choose to take up as practice for the day. Eventually we will gather together again in the building. But as ever, the practice itself will always be our true home.