The Buddhist path was always intended to be relational. This course is an exploration of spiritual friendship and companionship and the joy and wisdom they bring.

Throughout this course, you'll find the text of each video beneath the talk. You don't need to read these, but they may pull out key ideas and exercises for reference. These materials will be collected for download in the unit's workbook.

Welcome to The Path of Dharma Friendship

Welcome

Hi, my name is Gregory Kramer, and I'd like to invite you to this course on dharma friendship as an essential part of your dharma path, just like meditation and morality. I'm a vipassana teacher. I've been developing the Insight Dialogue approach for the last thirty years. And this is my friend Janet Surrey.

Overlooked teachings

Thanks, Greg. I'm very happy to welcome you all along with Greg to this course, and to say a little about what we plan to offer. According to the teachings of the Buddha, beautiful friendship (kalyana-mitta) is an essential aspect of the path of awakening, just as central as morality and meditation. The Buddha was direct and quite emphatic that friendship is woven into the whole life of a practitioner. Friendships are central at every stage of the path. In the Upaddha Sutta (SN 45.2), the Buddha said:

Beautiful friendship is the whole of the holy life.

It's a life of shared dedication to awakening, to refuge in the three jewels, to a life grounded in wisdom and compassion. The Buddha often described friendship as the first light of dawn, portending as a condition for the arising of the brilliant light of midday, of full awakening and enlightenment. So beautiful friendship is a condition for the fullness and completion of the Buddhist path: good and necessary in the beginning, in the middle, and in the end. Friendship is a dimension of sangha (spiritual community), a refuge. It is a pathway itself, and it is a practice we can cultivate in our lives and in meditation. 

These teachings on friendship have often been overlooked and underdeveloped in many of our dharma circles, particularly in the West. 

While these teachings are right there in plain sight, they have not been emphasized as central to our practice and to our whole lives. As such, they have not received the focused attention, illumination, and care they should so that the power and practice of friendship can be developed and cultivated as an integral part of our dharma lives. There is still a pervasive image of a solitary Buddha in deep tranquillity, alone, rather than as the teacher and beautiful friend to many monastic and laypeople, family, and friends. 

As we read and reread these texts, we begin to see ever more clearly how friendship was a beautiful and powerful element of the Buddha's life and in his teachings. We will be grounding our teaching in this course in core texts, ancient suttas in the voice of the Buddha. Greg and I have both been deeply inspired and guided by these texts. They're a never-ending source of wisdom and insight, and we hope they can come alive for you too, as they have for us, inspiring you to appreciate and cultivate such friendships in your lives.

Friendship gives meaning to the path

Perhaps the reason that dharma friendship is so important and that you see it woven throughout the discourses is that, as human beings, we're intrinsically relational as much as we are individual. So there's a power that arises when two or more people come together. We know that sangha was—as part of the triple gem—as honored, as valued, as Buddha and as dhamma, the teachings. But how do we enact this? How do we live this on our path? And dharma friendship, our actual relationships with other specific human beings and in community is an answer to that. 

It's where the power of two people coming together blossoms into something that can really activate, energize, and make beautiful our dharma path. And we hope that in this course, you'll feel invited, you'll feel inspired to the joys and fruits of friendship, to value your dharma friends and be motivated to create or expand your circles of friendship. 

We look at how this very dynamic is happening throughout the root texts. And we'll combine our examination of the text with stories from this very life. We're speaking from our hearts. Janet and I both deeply value not only our friendship but the friendships that we have and that have developed through our Insight Dialogue community and so on. 

We'll also be offering guidance right from the discourses: What is a beautiful friend? What does it look like? How do you be a beautiful friend? What's the nature of mutuality in human contact in the dharma, in meditation, in the totality of our eightfold path?

These friendships not only lead to harmony, to the sweet things of this life, it's also friendship in support of meditative qualities, and it's friendship in support of wisdom and the relinquishment, the freeing of the heart. 

We'll be providing reflections that you can work with in your daily life, practices, and perhaps you'll also feel inspired to move into the texts yourself. 

So we hope you enjoy this course and look forward to seeing you. Thanks.