In October, my wife and I visited a couple who are old friends and have for many years led a Zen meditation community in a small university town. They are now retired, but they are still involved with the community. Over the twenty years they've been teaching, they built the community up from a few folks sitting once a week in their living room to a community of around a hundred with a weekly program at their center. The center includes a meditation hall, sangha building, and they have plans for building a residence where a couple priests and some lay practitioners will live. Their dedication to the Dharma is really inspiring, and I always enjoy visiting with them.
Over dinner, we discussed practice. I mentioned that I've started practicing with a Mahamundra teacher in San Francisco. I do a once a week session with him over Skype because the traffic is so bad it would take an hour and a half to get there and an hour and a half to drive home, and that he sends me an mp3 of his weekly practice group session which I listen to. Also, that I participate in the DharmaOverground (aka DhO) web site discussion group. And that, in addition to daily meditation, was my practice now.
Sarah* was concerned that, more and more, Dharma practice was becoming disembodied. For over two millennia, Dharma practitioners lived near where their teachers lived and practiced with them in person. If the practitioners were monks, they lived in a monastery (vihara) and practiced meditation together with their teacher. If the practitioners were lay people, they came up to the temple periodically and listened to dharma talks in person, or gave food to monks and heard a talk in the village. Direct contact, person to person, or, as Sarah and Victor*, her husband, put it: warm hand to warm hand, was how the Dharma was practiced. She felt that disembodied Dharma, as she called it, risked losing something, some essential connection that had sustained practice over the years, or perhaps risked turning it into a conceptual exercise. I think there is some truth to Sarah's concern. But on a larger scale, the problems involved in Internet Dharma are really the problems with the Internet in general.
I work over the Internet all the time without being in the same building or even on the same continent as the people I'm working with. I work back to Europe, a 9 hour time gap away. So when I wake up in the morning, my colleagues in Europe are at the end of their day, and we have maybe 3 hours to meet on line before they leave work. If they are up for it, we can also meet later in my morning after they've gone home, eaten dinner, and put the kids to bed. That rarely happens though, since they typically don't want to work for another hour after already working a full day, and I don't really mind waking up at 5 AM in time for a 6 AM meeting, especially when I can take the meeting at home, since in principle I'm a morning person . But after about 11 AM Pacific Time, they're no longer available. Still, using Skype, email, and other online collaboration tool, it is possible to work productively and accomplish our jobs, though the actual experience of working feels nothing like the 1980's and 1990's, when nobody worked remotely and you and your team were in the same building.
What's lost, I think, is the sense of being on a team and accomplishing the same goals, then celebrating them by going out to lunch or having a celebratory dinner. Working closely together with people, you get to know their particular work habits: when they come in, when they like to get together over the coffee machine for a chat, what kind of coffee or tea they like, when they are having trouble at home, etc. These are all the aspects of the human condition that I suppose one could read in a Facebook feed (I'm not a member of Facebook so I don't know) but talking with the person and experiencing their physical presence makes the experience more real. If your colleagues are a 9 hour time gap away and you only see them in person every six months, you are not a part of their lives in any real fashion, and they are not part of yours. You share tasks and accomplish them, but that's it. I think the same could be true of an "Internet sangha".
For Internet Dharma practitioners, because you are disconnected from the source of what you are viewing, you have a hard time judging the authenticity of what is offered for viewing. We can see this in the recent concern about "fake news", or, what in the past would have been called lies dressed up as legitimate news stories. The source is often obscure. In the past, when people lived in the same village all their lives, they knew the back stories on the lives of others in the village, and could judge the authenticity of a story by weighing the source. But when you see someone posting to a Dharma discussion group that they've studied with "Wazu Tulku", achieved the 14th bhumi, and are now qualified to judge where others are on the path, you really can't tell whether they are qualified to teach or not. Of course, the same problem can happen if you practice in person with someone, but it's easier to see whether a person has the kind of qualities you would expect of a teacher, in other words, whether they are a person who has undergone long years of meditative training and therefore understands well how their mind works.
The other problem with Internet dharma has to do with Dharma superstars. The Internet has a tendency to force any area that utilizes it as a medium into a "winner take all" situation. So Amazon is practically the only retail store on the Internet, Google is the practically the only search engine, etc. There are of course others but the top player always gets more hits than anyone else. With Dharma, what that means is that the superstar teachers get all the attention. An online retreat with a major Dharma teacher, one who has published several books or has a huge Youtube presence, is more likely to get attention than the blog of a minor Dharma practitioner who has only one ebook to his name 😊. Despite the fact that the Internet lowers the cost of reaching billions of people to almost nothing, the number of voices that actually get heard keeps shrinking since people only have so much attention and prefer to focus it on stuff that others are focused on.
The Internet isn't going away, though, and we as a society need to evolve the institutions and practices for countering the excesses. And Dharma isn't the only area where these excesses are beginning to manifest (and it isn't even, in my opinion, the area which is most critically in need of developing those practices).
Image source: http://realitysandwich.com/1256/sixthlevel_digital_dharma_seeing_deeper_seeing_wider/
*Names changed here
