Dharmapala College

Dharmapala College plays an active part in the emerging Buddhist culture in the West. Initiated by members of the Western Buddhist Order, it invites the participation of everyone inspired by the ideals of collaborative enquiry into reality and open-handed sharing of understanding and experience.The year 2007 was a period of transition for Dharmapala College—internally no less than externally. With the two-year Dharmaduta Training Course approaching its final term, we have been shifting our main emphases to:

• developing a ‘Community of Enquiry’ as the core practice inspiring our teaching activities;
• merging study and meditative contemplation in our programme of seminar-retreats;
• offering teacher support through workshops and training events at local centres.

Exploring the Dharma through Questioning and Reflecting

The vision of Dharmapala College is to foster a deeper engagement with the Dharma through the development of communities of enquiry. By “enquiry” we mean dharma-vicaya, understood as practice (bhavana) comprising both critical investigation and contemplative reflection, and culminating in an ever deeper experience of insight. Our notion of enquiry thus rests on a mutually reinforcing combination of study, meditation, and devotional practice. Most simply put, the “enquiry” aspect of our vision seeks to cultivate the four iddhipadas or bases of spiritual success: concentration of intention, of energy, of mind, and of investigation.

By its very nature Dharma enquiry is an individual pursuit, individual both initially and ultimately. Why then the second component to our vision, indicated by the notion of a “community of enquiry”? Effective spiritual growth arises best, we feel, from a dialectical process that combines individual and collaborative enquiry. We each begin our enquiry individually—by clarifying what we seek to know and why. We then bring that preliminary understanding to the context of collaborative enquiry where we have the opportunity, through positive critical engagement with our fellow practitioners, to break through the limitation of our own personal biases and unconscious views. The third step in the dialectical process will ideally be an instance of what Sangharakshita has called “the third order of consciousness: Individual understanding is refined and deepened in the crucible of collaborative effort, so that a higher of order understanding can emerge, one that would have remained inaccessible to any single individual effort. The process thus moves from individual, to collective, and then back to the individual, but now at a higher, more fully integrated level of awareness.

All of these elements are already present to varying degrees in many different activities of our Order and movement. The mission of Dharmapala College is thus not so much to innovate as to focus and foster the Order’s existing “best practice”. In particular we hope through our seminars and our special sessions of enquiry to provide a laboratory for sharing and sharpening this comprehensive approach to Dharma practice.

To find out more about our special sessions of enquiry, please click here.