The classical Buddhist community was a group of monks who practiced and taught Buddhism separate from lay practitioners. In many traditions, this group is still held to be the sangha; lay practioners are relegated to listeners so that by means of generosity and moral conduct, they can eventually become monks and achieve liberation. In many traditions, it is a basic assumption that laity cannot achieve sufficient realization to avoid rebirth.

The lay community was organized around temples that provided support (and sometimes great wealth) to monastic communities. They primary function of the laity was essentially to support the monks with gifts. Ceremonial practices were created to appeal and appease the laity as well as ensure its loyal support, though some had the adjunct mission of teaching an uneducated audience. A host of semi-deities in some traditions were created to make the abstract concept of mind concrete. And as typical in human experience, those concrete forms often replaced the essence being taught. Many monks, even today, remain ensnared in the state of belief in the traditional semi-magical efficacy of ceremonial and the semi-deities that host them. None of this is good Buddhism. And most monastics know this. But they indulge the laity's ignorance who wish to invoke semi-magical intervention in their lives by means of prayers and offerings to bring them good fortune, to relieve their misery, and to give them peace about their eventual death. This indulgence is a symbiosis of sorts. The laity provides financial support the temples thrive on; the monks pat the ignorant laity on the head with rituals that make them feel better. None of this is canonical Buddhism -- or even probably good Buddhism.

This model of an ignorant lay Buddhist community who coughs up money in exchange for a ceremonial pat on the head will not ultimately succeed in the modern world which is less primitive and ignorant than the one in which Buddhism took root in the the East.. It won't work in the West, in particular, where the awe of ceremonial magic, and its inductive power to transform, has almost entirely been lost, except for the pockets of ignorance that continue to flourish in any culture. Western ritualistic Christianity based on ceremonial content in its most obvious form in the West is a dying religion; it only continues to grow in uneducated, ignorant cultures. The trend will continue. Ceremonial practice in the West continues to have artistic value, but its symbols no longer have any significant power to transform life or culture. Buddhism which attempts to build a community on this crumbling foundation will quickly follow Catholicism to its death.

The difference in emphasis in Western Buddhism is very stark and clear. That in Buddhism which has found resonance is an honest teaching of the Buddhist doctrine sans ceremonial that cloaks and disguises the message. The laity is interested in meditation. The laity is interested in understanding how the Buddhist precepts confront the decisions about everyday life, and what useful insight they offer. The laity is not interested in funding monastic conclaves for the sake of perpetuating an Eastern culture. Rather they are looking to them to provide assistance and help to them in incorporating Buddhism intelligently and spiritually, not ceremonially, into their lives. And much of the monastic community in the West currently just doesn't  "get it" at this point. Many of them have had little lay experience, and some have very little experience outside the artificial environment of the monastery. Their only concept of a Buddhist community is to build a ceremonial community centered around them; they simply don't know how to (or perhaps even wish to) build a lay community which is far more interested in the Buddhist teaching in practical life than in building a temple to sustain the importance of the particular lineage that the monks are associated with.

What to do ... that's what we want to start exploring in Part 2.