History

In the late days of the 1960s — times I remember with embarrassing clarity — some of us imagined that the millennium had come thirty years early and that personal and social transformation were just around the corner. In 1968, Buddhist poet Gary Snyder wrote a challenging piece called “Buddhism and the Coming Revolution.”  An excerpt.

. . . Institutional Buddhism has been conspicuously ready to accept or ignore the inequalities and tyrannies of whatever political system it found itself under. This can be death to Buddhism, because it is death to any meaningful function of compassion. Wisdom without compassion feels no pain.

...The mercy of the West has been social revolution; the mercy of the East has been individual insight into the basic self/void. We need both. They are both contained in the traditional three aspects of the Dharma path: wisdom (prajna), meditation (dhyana), and morality (sila). Wisdom is intuitive knowledge of the mind of love and clarity that lies beneath one's ego-driven anxieties and aggressions. Meditation is going into the mind to see this for yourself — over and over again, until it becomes the mind you live in. Morality is bringing it back out in the way you live, through personal example and responsible action, ultimately toward the true community (sangha) of "all beings."

Snyder's essay begins to answer the question that opens the Visuddhi Magga or Path of Purification, Buddhaghosa's encyclopedic commentary. The question, as posed in a verse from the Samyutta Nikaya, asks:

The inner tangle and the outer tangle —
This generation is entangled in a tangle.
And so I ask of Gotama this question:
Who succeeds in disentangling this tangle?

Snyder's essay, deeply rooted in Zen and Mahayana traditions, offers an answer, one that ten years later, in 1978, took form as the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, the first organizational flower of socially engaged Buddhism here in the West.

BPF was born at the Maui Zendo, co-founded by Nelson Foster, Robert and Anne Aitken and several Zen friends, soon joined by Gary Snyder, Joanna Macy, Jack Kornfield, Al Bloom, and others. Its ecumenical approach to the Dharma was a matter of principle, a real strength in the face of Buddhism's sectarian history. At the start, there was a circle of friends, predominantly Euro-American Zen practitioners, most clustered in Hawaii and the Bay Area, with the rest scattered across the States. After a year there were only about fifty members, but it was a real network nonetheless, linked by friendship, common purpose, and by the dedicated work of Nelson Foster, who regularly published the newsletter and maintained active correspondence with members. That newsletter was to evolve into our vibrant journal, Turning Wheel.

Christianity, Judaism, and Islam have long nurtured forms of spiritually-based activism and social transformation. BPF itself emerged as a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a church-based umbrella for nonviolent change. In those first years the ties between BPF and FOR were close and very encouraging for lonely Buddhist activists. From this branch of the peace movement, with its links to Jesus, Gandhi, Thomas Merton, and Martin Luther King, we began to find ways consonant with and parallel to the Dharma to explore suffering and social change. Early issues of the BPF newsletter featured pieces on Theravada, Tibetan, Zen, and Pure Land traditions, outlining a doctrinal and historical basis for engaged Buddhism, and setting precedents for our own emerging work. These foundations were important at a time when most Westerners turned to Buddhism as an escape from the world and the turmoil of the times.

From the start, BPF was working for human rights in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh, in Vietnam, and in Cambodia, actively engaging with issues of war, disarmament, and nuclear weapons. Today, we are still working on all these issues. Last December we wrote to our current 4,000 members, asking them to send letters in support of recently imprisoned monks Thich Quang Do and Thich Huyen Quang, leaders of Vietnam's Unified Buddhist Church. BPF has campaigned for these monks since 1979. BPF's work has been consistent, but the problems we confront are deep and persistent. Seventeen years later none of them has been completely resolved. We must remind ourselves over and over that the work of compassion is not about attachment to results, but about the process of compassion itself. Within three years, the network had grown to several hundred members, moved its office to Berkeley, hired a part-time coordinator, formed the first chapters, and organized several conferences and meetings that brought members and teachers face-to-face at last. The newsletter, edited by Fred Eppsteiner, then Arnie Kotler, became more professional in appearance. It came to document a growing movement within the Western Sanghas.

…If we want to be in touch, we have to get out of our shell and look clearly and deeply at the wonders of life — the snowflakes, the moonlight, the songs of the birds, the beautiful flowers — and also the suffering — hunger, disease, torture, and oppression. Overflowing with understanding and compassion, we can appreciate the wonders of life, and, at the same time, act with firm resolve to alleviate the suffering. Too many people distinguish between the inner world of our mind and the world outside, but these worlds are not separate. They belong to the same reality.
— Interbeing, Thich Nhat Hanh

We can't consider the history of BPF without bowing deeply to the continuing influence of Thich Nhat Hanh. Our first contacts came through peace activists and friends at the Fellowship of Reconciliation, dating back to Thay's first visits to the United States in the late 60s, his exile from Vietnam, and his role as head of the Buddhist delegation at the Paris peace talks. In 1983, BPF and the San Francisco Zen Center (which now sponsors the Zen Hospice Project) organized Thich Nhat Hanh's first retreat for Western Buddhists at Tassajara. In 1985, '87, and '89 BPF co-sponsored him in longer tours and larger venues. In the late 1980s, Parallax Press and the Community of Mindful Living (Thich Nhat Hanh's lay Sangha here in the West), shared offices in Berkeley. From year to year, we are always learning from Thich Nhat Hanh and try to support his work for religious freedom and healing in Vietnam. We also benefit from his generosity and from the thousands of people who come to engaged Dharma practice through his teaching.