Donate

Well, not just yet: not enough content here.

When there is, here’s the rules: donations first to cover the cost of the site, which isn’t much, afterwhich contributions are split between

• Cloud Floating Free Sangha
• Southern Dharma Retreat Center
• Vallecitos Mountain Retreat Center

The first is my current sangha; the second two are “one dharma” retreat centers supporting a variety of teachers and approaches, and hence dependent on a diffuse sangha rather than a fixed community.

Also of note: I use a lot of links to books on Amazon so that you can get details on the books, but these links are neither monetized nor do I really want you to use Amazon as a book source at all: your local independent bookstore is likely to be happy to order for you (and might even find a new book on Buddhism to stock!) or you could try bookshop.org, which returns profits to a local store of your choice.

Look, another controversy!

But while we are on the topic, the topic of contributions for teachings of the dharma—what I’m trying to do here—are quite varied and quietly heated, if that is a thing. The traditional norm is that one should not charge and instead depend on the voluntary generosity, dana [see note 1], of the community. Before retreats become popular, to say nothing of effectively commercialized in some sectors, this extended even to retreats, despite their costly infrastructure of food, lodging, and life-maintenance of the teachers. As long as the interested community remained sufficiently small that a sense of shared responsibility could be maintained, this worked, and far longer than one might expect.

But in the 21st century, this has mostly broken down, and an assortment of arguments—I will provide links as I encounter them—have been made that a Buddhism embedded in modern capitalist cultures cannot maintain the same norms towards money and finance as those of the decentralized kshatriya republics of the age of the Buddha, nor the military/bureaucratic states of Mahayana northeast Asia and Vajrayana Tibet. While I have little question that some of this support was truly voluntary, or at least consistent with strongly-held cultural expectation, much as some of the small change from my paper route would end up in a little envelope dropped into the offering plate of the Protestant church I attended as a teenager, other parts were, unquestionably, developed on the coerced labor of the peasantry and, notably, the generousity of some of the Buddhas patrons, famously the wealthy merchant Athanapindika, had to have come from a very substantial extraction of social surplus, as Marxists would say, somewhere.

I digress. In the proper time, there will be a donate button: WordPress, bless its little silicon heart, is even suggesting that I add it now!

Notes

1. In one of my earlier volunteer roles as treasurer of a sangha—I must have an honest affect (or, more likely, can figure out Quickbooks), having at various times been treasurer of a Quaker meeting, a Buddhist sangha, and a large professional organization—I would periodically need to process generous “qualified charitable distribution” checks that were specified as “dana,” invariably leading to an awkward telephone conversation with some accountant—presumably there are now bots that do this—calling to explain that QCDs could not be made to individuals, and my explaining that “dana” was a Pali word for “generosity” and not an individual. So pro tip: help your doubtlessly beleaguered volunteer treasurer and leave the word “dana” off any tax-deductible contributions.