Buddhist Sangha -- Road to Enlightenment

Religion is just a web of terms concealing nothing. In Buddhism bodhicitta is the “altruistic mind that aspires enlightenment to help others find happiness”. A bodhisattva is someone who has generated bodhicitta, and is already on the path to enlightenment.

How is enlightenment attained?
By knowing and understanding the Three Jewels of Buddha, Dharma, and Sangha. Buddha is the enlightened being, which is explaining what medicine is by saying it’s medicine, so this doesn’t help. Dharma is Buddha’s teachings, or enlightenment teaching, so this is saying enlightenment is attained from teachings of enlightenment, which, again, doesn’t help. Finally, Sangha means our spiritual friends -- the monks and nuns of a spiritual community. If we could identify our Sangha, we really would be getting somewhere, at least, outside redundant, recursive answers because attaining enlightenment with a spiritual community is doable. The first two Jewels said to attain enlightenment by knowing enlightenment and teachings of enlightenment, which is at the least unhelpful, but more equivocating if anything.
Those three Jewels (or 1 Jewel Diamond and 2 redundant Jewels, or pieces of coal) are supposedly all you need to know and take refuge in to reach enlightenment. So, according to these Three Jewels – keystones of Buddhism --we only need to know and take refuge in our spiritual community.

However, another implicit method of attaining enlightenment could be knowing the Ultimate Truth, which is “the way things really are…empty of being...interdependent upon their constituent parts and environment”. Sunyata means emptiness or voidness, how everything is empty of existence, cannot exist alone, and truly is dependent upon each other, so Sunyata is basically the Ultimate Truth because all the Ultimate truth describes is Sunyata. So by knowing the meaning of the synonyms Sunyata and Ultimate Truth we can get closer to enlightenment. But what does Sunyata/Ultimate Truth imply? Outside of all the different mediums of delivering words – Mo (divination prayers), stupas (religious monuments), sutra scriptures, sadhana religious texts, and the like (all which are different ways of delivering a message of enlightenment) -- it implies that, again, this enlightenment is acquired from the spiritual community. We must go to our spiritual community upon which we interdependently need for existence because we do not exist alone. Again, the message is in the Sangha. We are void and existence-less, so we must connect with our Sangha. Clearly, from the Ultimate Truth perspective or the Three Jewel perspective the equation for enlightenment points to Sangha.

Tantra, meaning “continuity”, encourages the practice of developing body, speech, and mind into that of a Buddha. So Tantra encourages achieving enlightened through something similar to Buddha mimicry. But we have no role model to base this mimicry on, so the task is aimed at becoming like Buddha, or becoming enlightenment. Again, the only tangible thing that leads to this area is our Sangha.

Clearly, our Sangha – from the Tantric view, the Three Jewels view, or the Ultimate Truth/Sunyata view – is vital, if not the only method, to achieving enlightenment. Obviously, important questions arise about the nature of this Sangha.

How do we identify our Sangha?
Is it our family? Is it our hometown? The city in which we work? People who randomly share a cab? How big is it? How small? How sentient? Does it last only a few hours and then shift? If we are at a concert with 25,000 other people are we all in the same Sangha? Or are people in the same row in the Sangha? Does it rely on political boundaries for definition? Are Americans in the same Sangha? Or is it that North Americans are in one Sangha and South Americans in another? Or is it hemispheres? Maybe our spiritual friends are in the western hemisphere and another Sangha exists in the eastern hemisphere? Why couldn’t our Sangha be the entire globe or total universe? Clearly, because all those answers seem somewhat ridiculous, or all completely okay, one’s Sangha is not geographically or spatially defined.

If it is not geographically defined, how is our Sangha defined?
Could Sangha be defined by emotions? Sangha could most likely defined with emotional reaction. Emotions are what cannot betray us, but frequently differ from what is going on, but our emotions are signals to action; cries for help, exclamations of joy – they keep us alive. The people we emotionally connect with, are drawn to, are repelled from, are magnetized towards, or that make us feel genuine, ultimately create and shape our spiritual community. But we can be attracted and drawn to negative people, negative temptations, that would certainly not be a spiritual community. And sometimes people that are spiritually not good for us repulse us. So relying on emotional reaction doesn’t seem to work any better than geographical definition.

Sangha is a spiritual community so wouldn’t it have to be defined by how we spiritually connect with people? Wouldn’t Sangha be defined by what our personal spiritual intuition defines as our spiritual community? This makes sense, but, now, of course the question arises, how do we access our spiritual intuition that can select or recognize people in our spiritual community. It seems like the best answer to this is practice. The more practice we get interacting with members of the earth – the grand Sangha – we become more and more aware of how to treat certain people with varying degrees of openness, protection, aggression, generosity, miserliness, and the like. So again, our Sangha is the key to enlightenment and we define and craft our Sangha through practice of interacting with our people, with the grand Sangha, the human community. In short, if you want enlightenment, learn how to live joyously with people.
How can you live joyously with people? First off, you mustn’t act joyous when you are not. Everyone operates in different ways, finds joys through different methods and places, and connects with different locations different. I find joy surfing; others could find joy driving in cars. Driving in cars would not create joy for me, just like surfing may not create joy for another person. So living joyously with people is the key to enlightenment and happiness and living joyously is all about developing your personal relationship with your own tendencies, behaviors, personal likes and dislikes, and things that give your life a boost.
Why is it being attained?
The goal of enlightenment is compassion to free al beings from their suffering.




“Refrain from reading attacks upon yourself so you won’t be provoked” (Philips 75). Knowing this gives us the power to get provoked or to not be provoked. Getting provoked is good if we want to come alive and stir things up and speak our mind, but if we are in a more docile mood and don’t want to go crazy, we simply choose read all attacks as problems the person has with themselves (some inadequacy they are compensating for). This gives us total control if we are being berated to have insults repel off us innocuously and to be provoked by them if we choose.
Philips, Donald. T. Lincoln on Leadership. New York: Warner Books, 1993.


In the Buddhist scriptures it is said, “Because there is this, that ensues. Because this came into being, that came into being. Because there is fundamental ignorance, volitional acts come into being.” (Lama 65). This is referring to the causal nature of karma. I figure this to mean that if some event occurs, it can generate future events to occur if that has potentiality to it. The “Condition of Potentiality” states, “it is not the case that everything can produce everything or anything” (Lama 69). Instead, there has to be some kind of “natural correlation between a cause and its effect” (Lama 69). Dr. Phil writes, you cannot change what you cannot acknowledge, meaning that acknowledge is the key to change and continuing to make correlations between past events creates future acknowledgements, which integrates the past with the present, to be aware of the future, so you can live with the greatest amount of happiness.


Lama, Dalai. A Simple Path. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997.