One of the campgrounds at Manjushri Kadampa Meditation Center,
before (top) and during (bottom)
Summer Festival 2006.

An empty field behind the main
building, before (top) and
during (bottom) Summer Festival 2006.

Summer Festival: A Kadampa Family Gathering - July 27, 2006

They’re here! Thousands of meditators from around the world have arrived for Summer Festival 2006. The formerly idyllic environs of Manjushri Kadampa Meditation Center have now become a carnival-like atmosphere. Old friends become re-acquainted, and new friendships form on an hourly basis. Children roam free while parents and ordained sangha mingle at the patio café.

On the grounds, a tent city has sprung up, accommodating campers of every description, and seemingly, nationality too. Food is prepared, and served in several large marquis by a juggernaut of volunteers. Shops selling everything from snacks to camping supplies to precious Buddha statues have sprung up inside tents, alcoves and trailers.

Buddha famously said “the end of meeting is parting … the end of collection is dispersion.” Experience here shows that the opposite is also true.

These festivals are a Kadampa family gathering. After having attended many of them, I have become acquainted with spiritual cousins from New Zealand, Germany, Switzerland, France and half a dozen other places that I see and interact with here and nowhere else. They span all ages, walks of life, appearance and background. In addition to the familiar ones who have attended for years, each festival brings an influx of new characters, mixing in like in-laws.

People have various feelings toward family gatherings. In my family, the events are usually happy. I enjoy them maybe in part because they are brief, and in some larger measure because I actually like my family. However, the gatherings are a collection of opposites: young meet old, conservatives come eye-to-eye with liberals, and divorcees re-connect around children. If tension arises, it can be no surprise. When these meetings are successful, it is because love is the glue that holds us together.

Here at the Summer Festival, it is much the same, only on a larger scale. Challenges come from different sources: We wait in line for toilets and showers. Sometimes the food is late, and we wait for lunch or dinner. Outside of meditation sessions, privacy and quiet are scarce. The weather adds its own special trials, be it from excessive heat, cold, rain or mud (this year the record heat wave has everyone talking about global warming.)

Don’t get me started about seating in the temple!

But those tightly packed kidney piercers all face the same direction. When sitting in the temple, we are inevitably inundated with love and blessings that fill us to overflowing. Outside the teachings, I am often amazed as people rise to challenges with kindness and patience, sometimes toward strangers. Occasionally there is friction, to be sure. But on the whole, there is love, and this family works.

In a larger sense, these festivals provide us with a vignette of the life and society that Buddhas would have us build. If love can create a family out of a collection of several thousand world traveling Kadampas, what stops it from creating a global family encompassing everyone without exception?