Over three years ago I helped found an online sangha with a few friends. Today we are an international sangha of men and women, both monastic and laity, who come together to practice, study the suttas, and support each other as “Students of the Path”.
Our premier event is a sutta reading and study that happens every Sunday at 6:30pm Eastern, called “Sutta Smunday”. Smunday because for some of our members who attend the event, it’s actually Monday for them, but Sunday for us still in the states. Over three years ago we started out with Majjhima Nikaya #1, and 5 people, Tomorrow tonight we are about to finish the Majjhima with #152, with 30+ people. We’ve come a long way.
The Channel tag line/summary is as follows :
“Students of the Path is a Buddhist discord server centering around the practical study and application of the Early Buddhist Texts (EBTs) as contained in the Pali Nikayas and Chinese Agamas. We host a number of events and conversations across all living Buddhist traditions so that we may better understand and practice the Buddhist Path together.”
We have live events throughout the week, as well as a variety of chat and dhamma resource channels, and an active community of practitioners to learn from and practice with. We do events over voice and text, including Uposatha talks and more.
In the early days we actually had 3-4 monastics online for these sessions, including Bhikkhuni friends from Australia, but alas as these things tend to go, people had to move on. If you are a monastic who studies and lives by the Early Buddhist Texts and would be interested in becoming active in this community, send me a message. The monastics on this channel do not simply give talks, but engage in dialogue and discussion about the suttas with the laity, Any monastic that joins would also need to understand they will be coming into an already established community with norms and rules that may not match what they are use to.
This channel was NEVER meant to be “my” channel, as these things tend to happen with monastics, I, and the lay community, would love for there to be numerous monastics, both Bhikkhus and Bhikkhunis, on the channel with us to share in the dhamma.
If you are interested in checking us out, watch this short video, which, while old, covers the basics still pretty well, and join the link in the description of the video, or here : https://discord.gg/YBAzGcV