In those days, I thought of myself as a One-Refuge Buddhist, for it made sense to me to go for Refuge to the Dharma. It made somewhat less sense to go for the Refuge to the Buddha, since he was to me nothing more than the historical figure who had taught the Dharma. Besides, I thought, Gotama had been dead for so long that he could not serve as much of an effective refuge any longer. As for the Sangha, there were no other Buddhists living in the remote areas I was inhabiting in those days, so there was no Community that could serve for me as an effective Refuge. Let one live alone like a rhinoceros horn.
Attachment arises from companionship, dissatisfaction from attachment.
Observing the perils resulting from attachment, let one live alone like a rhinoceros horn. Addicted to the life of solitude and self-sufficiency described in this text, and equally addicted to the rugged individualism that permeated the Southwestern American culture in which I grew up, if I ever thought of Sangha at all, it was only to wonder why on earth the Buddha had felt it necessary to found one. I even wrote an essay once in which I stated the hope that North American Buddhism would never develop into a Sangha, since religious communities seemed in general capable only of smothering the fragile sparks of light provided to them by their founders. This essentially maverick and misanthropic interpretation of Buddhism was reinforced by many of my early contacts with Buddhist communities in North America, for it just so happened that I encountered very few groups of people that inspired any great confidence in the potential of a community to be an effective Refuge for a serious Dharma practitioner. Despite that pessimistic attitude, I did manage to get some insights into why the Buddha had decided to found a community, rather than just teaching the Dharma to individuals and hoping they would somehow manage to improve their lives morally and eventually attain nirvana on their own efforts.