Approaches of the Socially Engaged Buddhists to Intervention

"A man should hasten towards the good; he should restrain his evil thoughts; if he is slack in doing good his mind incline to delight in evil".^[1]

To follow a spiritual path, however, sometimes seems to demand all of one’s free time and energy. To cultivate love, compassion, courage, and wisdom in a deep lasting way in one’s life, to work through one’s self-centeredness, hatred, fear, and confusion, seems to require an intense focus and dedication, which may preclude getting overly involved with the social world. Furthermore, we sometimes hear from spiritual teachers, as I often have heard, that working for social change places a Band-Aid on human suffering, that it doesn’t address the deep existential roots of the problems, and that it distracts us from the real spiritual work. This mirrors the comments of some people that inner work is at worst a fundamental delusion and at best an escapist luxury-and some other people proclaimed that religion is the “opium of the people.” To really address the roots of suffering, they say, we need to change economic, social, and political structures and ideologies.

The premise of this chapter is to explain that we don’t have to make an impossible choice between these two paths. Instead, we can bring them together. We can even link deep inner work with action in the world, in which our spiritual values infuse our response to the needs of the world, whether we are community organizers, teachers, activists, lawyers, or parents. The two paths deeply need each other: and our times desperately call for both spiritual and social commitments. Without spiritual development, well-meaning attempts to change the world will probably unconsciously replicate the very problems that we believe we are solving. Unfortunately, we can see this all too clearly in the history of revolutions, where so often after an oppressor was toppled, the purported liberator was soon revealed as a new oppressor. Violent “solutions” all too frequently only beget further violence.

Without transforming ourselves and coming to know ourselves deeply through sustained spiritual inquiry and practice, we may only make things worse. We also run the risk of not having the kind of resources of wisdom, compassion, equanimity, and perseverance necessary to respond to the great needs of the times without being quickly burned out by anger and frustration. Outer transformation thus entails inner transformation. But if the path of spiritual transformation is not socially informed, it too is at risk. There is irony of attempting to overcome selfcenteredness through spiritual practice while ignoring the cries of the world, of living in a protected spiritual home while the rest of the world is burning. And there is the danger of not seeing how the world is not just “out there” but also “in us” internalized through our self–images; and in our behaviors as consumers, parents, partners, and co-workers. Without transforming the world that is in us, we maintain, usually unconsciously, its patterns in ourselves and our spiritual communities. And when we do attend to the world “in us”, we join in the act of social transformation. In that sense, inner transformation entails outer transformation.^[2]

Footnotes and references:

[1]:

S. Radhakrishnan, The Dhammapada, Pilgrims Publishing, 2007, Verses 116.

[2]:

Sherwood Patricia, (Ed), The Buddha is in the Street, Cowan University Bunbury, Malaysia, 2003.