Brown Jacket Duty

When one is ordained into Tiep Hien, they receive a Vietnamese brown jacket. Along with this jacket, comes a responsibility and duty. Brown Jacket Duty is service, responsibility, and embodied leadership within the community. It includes assisting teachers and instructors, helping lead practice sessions, and supporting others in their individual practice, while also emphasizing selfless service such as cleaning the center and helping organize, manage, and sustain sangha events. Those who wear the brown jacket are expected to demonstrate maturity, humility, and discipline, representing the tradition through their conduct rather than status. At the same time, Brown Jacket Duty reflects a commitment to lifelong learning, continually refining one’s practice with a beginner’s mind and an open curiosity toward life. Above all, it expresses devotion to community fellowship, showing up for the wider sangha, especially new members, and serving others not just for personal development, but for the health and continuity of the whole community.

Key Responsibilities of Brown Jacket Duty:

• Instruction & Mentoring: Assisting teachers and instructors, leading practice sessions, and helping people with their practice.

• Sangha Support: A focus on selfless service such as cleaning the center, and helping organize, manage, and support sangha events.

• Character Development: Demonstrating maturity, humility, and discipline to represent the tradition.

• Lifelong Learning: Continuing to refine their practice, often viewed as cultivating a beginner's mind with a curiosity for life.

• Community Fellowship: Serving and representing the wider community, and showing up to be a supportive sangha member for new members. Showing up for others, not just for oneself.

Ordination Requirements

• Be 18 years of age or older.

• Has received the Five Precepts and the Three Jewels.

• Practices with a local Sangha in this tradition.

• Is committed to observing at least sixty days on retreat a year.

• Has been mentored by ordained members for at least a year.

• Is ready to begin the work of an Ordained Member: Sangha building and support, explaining the Dharma from personal experience, and nourishing the bodhicitta (the mind of love) in others while maintaining a regular meditation practice in harmony and peace with one’s family.

• Is a stable practitioner who has learned to transform suffering and embodies the practice of mindfulness in his or her own life.

• Practices with a spirit of generosity, attentive to the needs of others.

• Is committed to continue deepening his or her practice of the Fourteen Precepts.

• Is able to teach the basic practices to others.

• Participates (and will continue to participate) regularly and harmoniously in his or her local practice community and in the ordained community.

• Has the intention and capacity to be an active Sangha builder.

• Invite the Bell

• Lead the basic chanting service used at retreats

• Facilitate deep sharing/deep listening and other small groups.

• Give Dharma talks and have ability to explain the Dharma from personal experience.

• Lead guided meditations.

• To model mindful communications and to be able to facilitate mindful meetings.

• To be able to help organize and lead sangha practice activities such as Days of Mindfulness.

• To be able to help organize and lead either: sangha community (e.g. social events or sangha gatherings), educational (e.g. workshops or trainings), or administrative activities (e.g. new member coordination)

• To be able to mentor others in the practice.

• To be able and willing to help organize running of the Center in someway (e.g. housekeeping, gardening, IT, kitchen/cooking, etc.)

Qualities of Brown Jacket Duty

The following includes a summary of some key qualities of mindfulness and the Dharma that we embody and that also support our skillful service in the community.

Mindfulness

•    The ordained has a stable mind and is thus able to abide more consistently in mindfulness and experience life directly instead of through her thoughts. She brings mindfulness to most of the activities of her daily life.

•    She recognizes and works skillfully with wholesome and unwholesome mind states.

•    She generally listens deeply to others and endeavors to speak “nobly” from her heart, with honesty, kindness, appropriateness, and an aspiration to benefit others with her speech.

•    The ordained offers a clear demonstration of mindfulness that is observable from her behavior and verbal and non-verbal communication.  The expression of embodiment can be sensed through her body, e.g. her posture, physical groundedness and steadiness, physical sense of ease, calm and alertness, rhythm and pitch of voice tone, etc.

•    The ordained is in touch with her own personal experience during teaching.

•    The ordained models deep listening and “noble” speech.

Emotional Stability

•    There is a fairly consistent degree of emotional clarity and stability in the ordained’s life, i.e. he doesn’t often get lost in or swept away by his thoughts and stories or afflictive emotions. When afflictive emotions do arise, he recognizes them and engage in practices to heal and transform them.

•    He understand his own schemas and has applied the Dharma meaningfully for personal healing.

•    He is able to apply his practice to bring greater harmony and awareness to his interpersonal relationships, e.g. family, work, etc.

•    The ordained is able to be present in a non-reactive, non-judgmental, present-centered awareness even in the sometimes charged and intense environment of the class. He is open to the fullness and uncertainty of the moment, with a willingness to not know the answer.

Patience,  Equanimity, Compassion, and Loving-Kindness

•    She understands the principle of cause and effect and brings that understanding into her relationships with others.

•    She practices loving-kindness and compassion meditations for himself and others.

•    The ordained brings a non-judging and understanding mind to interactions with participants, helping them in turn to cultivate those qualities in themselves.

•    She conveys an attitude of non-striving, not trying to “fix” members or force the process towards a particular outcome, but to support a flowering of the student’s understanding and realization of what is being taught.

•    The ordained embodies a willingness to see things as they actually are in the present moment, and models accepting self, others and experience with an attitude of friendliness.

Meditation

•    He has a consistent and stable daily meditation practice, with intention, structure and direction. He knows how to and practice calm abiding meditation, involving mindfulness and concentration.

•    The ordained is knowledgeable and confident in sharing meditation practices and working with member challenges due to the depth of the ordained’s own practice.

Wisdom

•    She has a good understanding of the Four Noble Truths and the Eight Fold Path.

•    She is cultivating “right view” through the practice of the Four Thoughts (preciousness of human life, impermanence, cause and effect, and the dissatisfactoriness of worldly life).

•    She is cultivating a mind of openness, watching thoughts, emotions and feelings as they arise, persist, and dissolve in her mind.

•    She understands “selflessness” and endeavors to practice living life without continual self-reference and ego-centric thought and action.

•    The ordained brings a steady and calm mind, suffused with understanding and clarity, to skillfully interact and support participants, wherever they may be .

•    Her solid understanding of Buddhist psychology provides a strong base for seeing causes and conditions in members and for helping them from a place of wisdom, without becoming entangled in the content of thoughts and emotions.

•    Personal experience of successful transformation is used as appropriate as a model to instruct and inspire participants

•    The ordained’s developing selfless view supports a focus on sharing in a way that is most supportive of the members rather than a demonstration of the ordained’s knowledge.