Sacramento Dharma Center

To enjoy more photos click on the title of this news post! Take a ride by. Open House coming soon.

The February 11th Business Journal has a wonderful article about SDC board member Helen Hobart’s work as a staff chaplain at the The Sutter Center for Psychiatry. In the article she also talks about the Dharma Center and our vision.

We are so fortunate to have Helen on our Board – here is a bit of what she said about us:

“Outside the workplace, Hobart does have an agenda, however: building the Sacramento Dharma Center, a sanctuary that would represent three Buddhist meditation groups to accommodate the growth of the religion in the greater Sacramento area. ‘The region has a long Buddhist history,’ she says. ‘But there’s a growing interest in meditation – an outgrowth of people wanting their lives to be less stressful.’ ”

“Hobart says that the people involved with the Dharma Center project have raised $430,000 so far toward its construction. ‘We want to raise a million dollars,’ she says, ‘and we’re going to do it – this year, I hope. Maybe it won’t be a perfect building but our goal is to be open every day and be in a convenient location. We’re going to open the doors when it’s completed and say, ‘Y’all come!’ ”

Read the entire article here.

Throughout the fall, you’ve been hearing about investigations to obtain a building for our Founding Sanghas to call home and it’s high time we updated you on where we are looking, what we are looking for, and the preferences that guide our search. Based on a five-year-old survey of Sangha members’ preferences we have been searching for a space in the central Sacramento area.

While we are still searching in the central city, we’ve come to realize that focusing on this area may not meet our need for adequate parking, outdoor space, and affordability – so we are considering the pros and cons of expanding our search area.

So — who’s behind the Dharma Center? Who are these people that want to actually acquire a physical home, for practicing this dharma path of kindness and wisdom?  My friends? Here’s a great collection of photos where you can see some of the generous friends who have chosen to build the SDC Sustaining Circle.  You’ll see members of Valley Streams Zen Sangha, Sacramento Buddhist Meditation Group, and Sacramento Insight Meditation who are making the vision come real for 2016 ~ come join us!

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The Sacramento real estate market is hopping, and the Sacramento Dharma Center Board has been hopping, too, actively investigating the opportunities as they arise. In the last two months we have made several non-binding offers, one at full price, on promising buildings in downtown, midtown, and the Broadway corridor, and Board members checked out three additional locations over the Thanksgiving holiday. So far, each building has had significant obstacles, primarily involving costs that would stretch current resources.

The number of available properties is good news, but real estate prices continue to rise. We have had some successful alternative fundraisers in 2015, but the need for donor contributions is more urgent now than ever to keep up with the changing market. We are continuing our Sustaining Circle campaign to increase the pool of monthly donors, and will also re-open the Capital Campaign.

The month of December will bring re-invigorated outreach by email, phone, and one-on-one contact with members of the three Founding Sanghas. Look for exhibits at your Sangha meetings on how SDC will meet Sustaining Sanghas’ needs, as well as the new “I’m In” campaign, where current donors show their support. All sustaining members who want one will receive the newly-minted SDC bumper sticker or window decal.

We only need 29 more!

In the past two weeks, eight new Sustaining Circle members have signed on! We now have 91 members donating, or pledged to donate monthly. The goal is to have 120 members by the new year. Although any amount is welcome, the average monthly contribution for sustaining members is $35.

Our Building Committee Rocks

Meanwhile, the Building Committee is collecting names of architects we could ask to bid on developing as-is and conceptual drawings. Contact Julia at juliam@surewest.net or Joette at joettess@sbcglobal.net with recommendations or send a message via our contact page.

The committee is also developing a list of tasks, costs, and time frames for both immediate improvements and those that can be phased in.

People Power

In other news, Bruce Baccei from Valley Streams Zen Sangha was elected for a three-year term on the Board as an at-large member. Margaret Buss, a SIM member, is a new volunteer for the Communication Committee, and Maggie Geddes and Gil Schroeder from SBMG have also stepped forward to help with special projects.

Are you In? One click here
to set up your monthly pledge.

Welcome to the launch of conversations exploring how Sacramento Dharma Center is taking shape, under the title “Thus Have I Heard.” Your responses are invited, as well as your own thoughtful writing.

Our first writer suggests that SDC empowers our sense of being a collective Sangha, a community whose members support each others’ deepening practice, as well as enhancing the resources of individual Sanghas, similar to the model of AA.
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First person I heard say it was Ram Dass: “I’ll pretend you’re who you think you are if you’ll pretend I’m who I think I am.”

The issue of identity is central to every pilgrim’s spiritual undertaking. Who am I? More to the point, Who am I when I begin to suspect I’m not who I think I am? Or who they told me I was? Or am supposed to be? Because at some point just about every pilgrim comes to the realization he/she isn’t the being described/prescribed by the instructions and programming he/she perceived while growing up.

Just about every spiritual smorgasbord has identity as some sort of main dish, but they don’t all provide a hard and fast answer to the identity conundrum. Buddhism, for example, says . . . well what does Buddhism say, anyway? Me, I’m way too new at the Buddhist quest to even begin to offer an explanation of what Buddhism says I am. Or you are.

What I like about Buddhism is the way it provides all these wonderful umbrellas to feel safe and comfortable under while I’m conducting the search for identity. The four truths. The eightfold path. The mettas. The three refuges.

As a seeker come to Buddhism from the world of the twelve steps, I’m especially fond of the three refuges. “I take refuge in the Buddha. I take refuge in the Dharma. I take refuge in the Sangha.” Probably I like them because of the way they so readily translate into the language of addiction: “I take refuge in the higher power. I take refuge in the literature of alcoholism. I take refuge in the community.”

Of those three, I feel it’s the third that provides me with some of the very most nourishing food for thought/meditation. Sangha. Community. A collective of fellow seekers, fellow explorers, fellow travelers.

Of course it’s always possible to define the group one is part of, or wants to feel part of, by using a very narrow set of parameters or boundaries. One of the things that has attracted me to Buddhism is a sense that the lines between the different schools aren’t nearly so exclusionary as the lines, say, between the Sunni or Shi’ite or Wahhabi schools of Islam. I think that’s part of what Everyday Zen Center priest Norman Fischer was referring to in a recent retreat here in Sacramento when he made reference to the “genius” of AA. There are more than 500 weekly AA meetings in the Sacramento area, but nobody in those meetings talks about their own particular meeting as being “better” than anybody else’s meeting.

Once a year people from the different AA meetings get together for a Spring Fling, and it can only be described as a joyous three-day love fest.

The Sacramento Dharma Center has been created to provide both a literal and a metaphorical umbrella for the Buddhist communities in the Sacramento area. One of the ongoing challenges for these communities has been finding physical facilities for their meetings and activities. Addressing this problem collectively is a primary purpose of SDC.

In the beginning this will probably mean that the component Buddhist communities may need to pool their fiscal and other resources to obtain and/or develop the building, or building and grounds, for the group to share. But in the long run the sense of Sangha that is bound to result from such a collective effort will almost certainly compensate for whatever short-term challenges the individual Buddhist communities might experience through their involvement. One need only look at the growth and development of Spirit Rock in Marin County to appreciate what can be done by working together for a set of shared goals.

There is already a shared sense of Sangha among the Sacramento Buddhist communities: a shared sense of working for a common set of purposes as set forth in the words of the Buddha. In the AA world an individual member refers to him/her self, identifies him/herself, as a friend of Bill, after Bill Wilson, the founding spirit of AA. When a friend of Bill strengthens his/her sense of involvement in the AA community (primarily through service), there is no sense of diminution in his/her own sense of independence or autonomy. Rather, there is a growing sense of strength by being part of the group. So it is with Buddhists, or Buddhist groups, that work for the strength and solidarity of the Sangha.

~Sam, member of SDC Sustaining Circle~