Beyond the Temple: Feral Buddhism

I subscribe to the occasional newsletter from Beyond the Temple blog by Tahlia Newland, and have for a few years. I’ve been watching Tahlia’s transformation, from a traditional, guru-led Vajrayana practitioner, to her choice to leave Sogyal Rinpoche’s group after the truth of student abuse was revealed, to now her life post-traditional Buddhism as an independent practitioner. It’s been a wonderful journey to witness. Her most recent post, When Vajrayana Practice Calls, is about her re-imagining Vajrayana practice without a guru, and without a traditional Tibetan deity. She is recreating her own Vajrayana practice by summoning a deity of her own imagination, and devising her own trove of meanings derived from her practice. I see this as a courageous move Beyond the Temple to a post-institutional Buddhism. This is akin to Stephen Batchelor’s move out of traditional temple-based Tibetan practice to what he now calls Secular Buddhism; although, for Tahlia it is not secular in the sense of a lack of faith in the supernatural, but secular in the sense that it does not rely on institutional Buddhism to be a living practice for her.

One might call it feral buddhism, a practice that is released from the captivity of institutional Buddhism to live once again in the wild.

https://beyondthetemple.com/when-vajrayana-meditation-practice-ca

I recently saw a video by Shozan Jack Haubner of Zen Confidential: the Path is not TO the Monastery, but THROUGH the Monastery, in which he says something very similar. He says that the traditional course of a Zen practitioner might be to spend some amount of time in a Zen monastery, even many years, but eventually, the student is expected to leave the monastery and return to the world.

“These days I’m living the lay life just like you. A Zen monastery is not a place where you get to hang your hat forever. Sooner or later you must return to the “human world,” just as the historical Buddha figure did when he decided to try to teach others what he’d learned under the Bodhi tree.”