By Steve LeFevre

You are seen. You are heard. You are welcome here. You are not alone. You are enough.

Every Sunday we sit together and recite these words. I’ve said them dozens of times. Maybe hundreds.

But every once in a while, a single sentence jumps off the page and refuses to let go.

This was mine:

“…liberating from the superiority complex, the inferiority complex, and the equality complex.”

I understood the first two.

The third one stopped me in my tracks.

Equality complex?

Isn’t equality a good thing?

I sat with that question all week. I didn’t have an answer. I still don’t have a complete one. But I want to walk through what I found — because I think it changes how we hear these words we’ve said so many times we almost stop hearing them at all.

I. Sangha

Before we get to the complexes, we need to remember what they’re complexes *within*.

Sangha is not a club.

Not an organization.

Not a collection of Buddhists who happen to show up on Sunday mornings.

Sangha is a living body.

Different people. One breath.

Different voices. One chant.

Different ears. One listening.

We’ll come back to this. Hold it lightly for now.

II. The Disease of Measurement

Here’s a question. Not rhetorical. Actually ask yourself.

Who have you compared yourself to this week?

Have you looked down at someone?

Have you looked up at someone?

Have you looked sideways — at the person right next to you, doing the same thing you’re doing?

The ego doesn’t care which direction it’s looking. Up, down, sideways — it’s all the same motion. It only wants one thing: to know where it stands.

The Buddha actually named this disease. He called it the eight worldly winds — gain and loss, praise and blame, fame and disrepute, pleasure and pain. Four pairs. Every one of them is a scale. Every one of them invites us to ask “where do I stand?”

Today I want to follow just one of those pairs — praise and blame — because I think it opens the door to everything else.

There’s a teaching about what happens to a person who stops climbing onto that particular scale. It’s in the Dhammapada, verse 81:

“As a solid rock is not shaken by the storm, even so the wise are not affected by praise or blame.”

Not — notice — because the wise stop hearing the praise or the blame. They hear it fine. They just stop letting it move them. The rock doesn’t refuse the wind. It simply doesn’t need the wind to tell it what it is.

That’s the whole answer to superiority and inferiority in one image. Praise pulls us toward “I’m better.” Blame pulls us toward “I’m behind.” The rock doesn’t move for either one.

This is the disease underneath all three complexes. Not one of them is separate from the others. They’re the same measuring mind, just facing different directions.

Superiority is measuring and coming out ahead.

Inferiority is measuring and coming out behind.

And equality — we’ll get there. But notice: equality is still measuring. It just tells you the measurement came out even.

That should already feel strange. Because if the whole problem is the measuring — why would measuring evenly be a problem too?

Stay with that. It’s the heart of the talk.

 III. The Three Complexes

Let’s take them one at a time.

**Superiority** sounds like:

“I’m better.”

“I know more.”

“My practice is deeper than theirs.”

We recognize this one. It’s loud. It announces itself.

**Inferiority** sounds like:

“I’m behind.”

“I’ll never understand this.”

“Everyone else here has it figured out. I’m the only one who doesn’t.”

We recognize this one too. It’s quieter, but it’s just as loud in the mind that’s carrying it.

Equality,is the one that fools us. Because it doesn’t sound like measuring at all. It sounds like *compassion*.

It sounds like:

“If I could do it, why can’t they?”

If I got sober —

If I climbed out of the depression —

If I forgave the person who hurt me —

why can’t they?

Doesn’t that sound reasonable? Doesn’t it even sound generous — like you’re holding them to the same standard you hold yourself?

But underneath it, the arithmetic is still running. It assumes you and the person you’re comparing yourself to started from the same place. The same causes. The same conditions. Same wounds, same support, same nervous system, same history.

The Buddha never taught that. Dependent origination says exactly the opposite: every single life is a different web of conditions, arising differently, unrepeatable. No two people ever begin from the same place — which means no two people can be fairly measured against each other at all.

I want to be careful here, because I don’t want to overreach. The night the Buddha awakened, the texts say he spent the first watch of the night recollecting his own past lives — hundreds of thousands of them, each with its own name, its own family, its own particular measure of pleasure and pain. That story isn’t *about* comparing people to each other; it’s the Buddha verifying, in his own awakening, the truth of karma and rebirth.

But I don’t think it’s a stretch to notice what’s sitting right inside that story anyway: even the same being, across countless lives, never arrives twice under the same conditions. If that’s true within *one* stream of becoming, across all those lifetimes, how much more true is it between any two of us, sitting in this room, who’ve never shared a single one of those conditions at all.

So “if I could do it, why can’t they” isn’t compassion wearing plain clothes.

It’s judgment wearing compassion’s clothes.

And that’s exactly why these words save it for last. Superiority and inferiority are easy to catch — they announce themselves. Equality is the one that gets past security. It’s the version of measuring that feels like kindness while you’re doing it.

So the practice isn’t to ask “why can’t they?”

The practice is to ask:

“What has this person been carrying that I have never had to carry?”

That’s not a rhetorical softening. It’s a completely different question. One measures. The other wonders.

 IV. Breathing as One Body

But I want to pause on something before we go further. The rock, in that verse, is alone.

Nobody is breathing with the rock. Nobody needs to. It doesn’t fall over in the wind because it doesn’t need anything outside itself. That’s exactly what makes it free of praise and blame — and it’s exactly what makes it, by itself, not yet Sangha.

Because freedom from comparison isn’t the finish line. A person could become perfectly unmoved by praise and blame and still be entirely alone. Unshaken, and untouched. That’s not what we’re practicing toward.

So come back, for a moment, to the very first line of what we recite together.

“The Sangha is invited to come back to our breathing…”

Not *your* breathing.

*Our* breathing.

Sit with how strange that actually is. Breathing is supposed to be the most private thing there is. No one can breathe for you. No one can breathe for me. And yet — every week — we say *our* breath, together, out loud.

Not because we share one set of lungs. But because life itself, moment to moment, is being received together. These words are quietly moving us from *my* breath to *our* breath — from *my* awakening to *our* awakening — before we’ve even gotten to the part about complexes at all.

Maybe that’s not an accident of translation. Maybe it’s the whole teaching, hidden in plain sight, in the very first sentence.

Notice the order these words give us:

Breathe.

Chant.

Listen.

*Then* — only then — transcend comparison.

Not the other way around. We don’t out-argue the measuring mind. We don’t outthink it into stopping. It softens because the relationship around it deepens first. Comparison doesn’t get defeated. It just quietly runs out of reasons to keep going, because there’s no longer a separate “me” standing far enough away from “them” to measure the distance.

The rock answers superiority and inferiority. The breath answers something the rock never could — it answers loneliness. One teaches us not to be moved. The other teaches us not to be apart.

This is what we meant, at the very start, when we said Sangha is a living body. Different people. One breath. Not because we agree on everything. Not because we’ve all measured out even. Because the breath was never separate to begin with.

V. Namu Amida Butsu

So we close, as we always do, with these four syllables.

We don’t become one body because we try hard enough. We don’t earn our way into it by finally getting the practice right.

We awaken to the fact that we were never actually separate to begin with.

When we say *Namu Amida Butsu*, we are not reporting an achievement. We’re not saying “I did it.”

We’re entrusting ourselves — as we are, mid-comparison, mid-measuring, mid-mess — to the compassion that has been holding all of us, together, the whole time.

Not one of us ahead.

Not one of us behind.

Not even one of us “equal” — because equal still means measured.

We have a phrase we say to each other here, almost every week: come as you are. I don’t think we always notice how radical that actually is. It isn’t “come once you’ve measured up.” It isn’t “come once you’ve caught up to the person next to you.” Amida’s Vow doesn’t ask what you’ve accomplished, or where you rank, or whether you’ve finally leveled with anyone else in this room. It simply says: come.

That’s the whole shape of the Primal Vow. No entrance exam. No minimum score. Just — come as you are.

So maybe that’s what we heard at the very start of this service, before we even knew we were listening for it.

You are seen. You are heard. You are welcome here. You are not alone. You are enough.

Just: held.

Namu Amida Butsu.