A Brief Overview of Engaged Buddhism
Engaged Buddhism has been most succinctly expressed by Thich Nhat Hanh, the distinguished Vietnamese monk who originally coined the term:

Meditation is not to escape from society, but to come back to ourselves and see what is going on. Once there is seeing, there must be acting. With mindfulness, we know what to do and what not to do.1

Engaged Buddhism has come to define itself as public engagement in caring and service, in social and environmental protest and analysis, in nonviolence as a creative way of overcoming conflict, and in "right livelihood" and similar initiatives towards a socially just and ecologically sustainable society. It also brings a liberal Buddhist perspective to a variety of contemporary issues, from gender equality to euthanasia. It aims to combine the cultivation of inner peace with active social compassion in a practice and lifestyle which supports and enriches both. Back in the 1980s, it required some special pleading within the Buddhist community. It has now come of age academically in the two definitive volumes of essays edited by Christopher Queen of Harvard University entitled Engaged Buddhism: Buddhist Liberation Movements in Asia and Engaged Buddhism in the West .2

The different kinds of engagement can be arranged along a continuum. At one end Buddhist compassion is expressed in public and organised forms of service and caring - therapy, healing and healthcare (especially with the terminally ill), prison chaplaincy, education, social welfare, and environmental projects. In Buddhist Asia and in Western countries where Buddhism is well established, there is a growing mosaic of projects, organisations and networks in all these fields. Such diverse enterprise amounts to a subtle Buddhist presence in the many fields in which it takes place - notable, for example, in contemporary perspectives and therapies to do with death and dying.

At the other end of the engaged Buddhist spectrum is an activism directed towards radical social change. This is a much more challenging and controversial level of engagement. As a Buddhism of modernity concerned with the social transformation of that modernity, it is at the sharp end of our Buddhism/modernity convergence.

There are also national and international networks embracing the whole spectrum of engaged Buddhism, like the International Network of Engaged Buddhists (INEB), Thich Nhat Hanh's Community of Interbeing, the [American] Buddhist Peace Fellowship (BPF), the Peacemaker Order, the Amida Trust, and the UK and other European engaged Buddhist networks.

Buddhist social activism includes accepting responsibility for the ecological and social implications of one's lifestyle, and changing it accordingly. Secondly, it includes many forms of mass protest, whether demonstrating, lobbying or just bearing witness. In particular, nonviolent protest and the advocacy of nonviolent solutions to social and international conflict have been prominent in both East and West. Indeed, engaged Buddhism in the West had its origins in the movements against nuclear weapons and the war in Vietnam. There has also been a common concern to halt environmental degradation, and to promote gender equality in the face of the patriarchal tradition.

In Engaged Buddhism: Buddhist Liberation Movements in Asia, the editors go so far as to claim that "'Buddhism' in contemporary Asia means energetic engagement with social and political issues and crises at least as much as it means monastic or meditative withdrawal".3 This engagement grew out of national and anti-colonial movements, superpower aggression (China against Tibet, and the USA against Vietnam and its neighbours), and the intrusiveness of free market globalisation and the local elites which it has co-opted. Thus, in Vietnam Thich Nhat Hanh and the Unified Buddhist Church struggled to create a third way of creative nonviolence beyond communism and capitalism. The Dalai Lama, a Nobel prize winner, has become an outstanding exemplar of engaged Buddhism in his advocacy of peaceful reconciliation with China and the restoration of Tibetan autonomy. Another monastic, Maha Ghosananda, and his fellow peace marchers, have played a significant part in bringing peace and stability to Cambodia. In Burma, a Buddhist laywoman, Aung San Suu Kyi, heads a Buddhist-inspired democracy movement against the ruling junta. Thailand has been particularly rich in diverse engaged Buddhist initiatives, which owe much to Sulak Sivaraksa, an outstanding theorist and activist. Also in Thailand Buddhadasa Bhikkhu has been a distinctive philosopher of engaged Buddhism.

A further manifestation of Buddhist social activism is the creation of Buddhist alternative social models. Outstanding in this respect is the forty year old Sarvodaya Shramadana movement in Sri Lanka. Its founder and leader, A. T. Ariyaratne, has forthrightly declared that:

My dream is to get 16,000 villages in Sri Lanka to build a truly alternative system (without calling it alternative), and then one day declare our freedom. Instead of confronting a government, we confront the whole system. If the spiritual, moral and cultural value systems of the people are destroyed, then everything is lost, and more and more coercive instruments of the State -- the police, the armed forces -- are needed to bring about order.4

Sarvodaya is presently a rural development network of roughly 8,000 comprehensively self-reliant villages, involving some one and a half million people. Traditional Buddhist teachings have been creatively adapted to community needs, and personal awakening is understood as being interdependent with the awakening of one's local community from apathy and powerlessness.
Soka Gakkai originated in Japan, where it has eight million members, but it is also an international movement of 1.26 million people in 120 countries. It has been prominent in sponsoring ambitious international peace initiatives and promoting ecological projects. The ultimate goal is the "fusion of Buddhist beliefs with every phase of human behaviour, the veritable reconstruction of society on a comprehensive base of religious values and norms".5

The Friends of the Western Buddhist Order (FWBO), based in Britain, has 80 centres worldwide, with numerous co-operative "Right Livelihood" businesses. According to one senior member "the FWBO is seeking to bring about a 'quiet revolution' by encouraging more and more people to set up for themselves a real alternative within the existing society"6. In India the FWBO has promoted TBMSG movement, funded by their Karuna Trust, which enables some of India's poorest people to achieve educational and economic self-reliance
Sarvodaya, the Soka Gakkai, and the FWBO are cohesive movements with charismatic leaders, their own versions of mainstream Buddhism, and explicit radical social goals. Sarvodaya, however, approximates more closely to the loose, grassroots, networking model generally favoured by engaged Buddhists and by the broad movement for an alternative post-modernity. But the Soka Gakkai and the FWBO have been widely criticised by other Buddhists as ideologically driven movements with self-righteous and exclusivist tendencies, disturbingly reminiscent of other movements that have promoted their particular version of utopia. A "culture of awakening" that had a whiff of theocracy about it would be totally alien to perennial core Buddhism.

In the West, engaged Buddhism grew out of the endeavour of Buddhist converts to remain true to their culture of active social responsibility and social justice. In Asia it grew out of the Buddhist response to modernity -- much the same marriage, but with the partners reversed. More specifically it was a Buddhist response to the liberal and socialist emancipatory project, to Western rationalism and science, and dynamic methods of organisation and the management of change. The culture of Christian activism has also been influential both in Asia and in the West. As Cynthia Eller has observed: "For Buddhists, the other will be served if the self is transformed; for Christians, the self will be transformed if the other is served. The difference is primarily one of emphasis, of picking up the fabric of individual and social life from different ends".7 Engaged Buddhism has evened up this equation for Buddhists, and in my experience dialogue between Buddhist and Christian activists tends to even it up the other way for Christians, that is, to direct their attention more strongly to introspective cultivation than previously. This is a fertile and felicitous area for Buddhist/Christian engagement.
It is remarkable that there is substantially a single, global engaged Buddhism. For although the movement has developed on the ground in different ways in East and West, engaged Buddhists do appear to share much the same values, goals and perspectives, as is testified by the writings of leading thinkers in the different countries. Here engagement with modernity has been a bridge, which has sometimes not been the case in other encounters between Western and Asian Buddhists.

This relative unanimity has much to do with the common adoption of an alternative political ethos, summarising by Sallie King in Engaged Buddhism: Buddhist Liberation Movements in Asia.. The general standpoint of Asian engaged Buddhist movements and their leaders is "a kind of 'Green' environmentally friendly, people-friendly politics and economics emerges rather consistently among our subjects"8. This is a radical politics which has developed independently of Buddhism but with which it is highly compatible, in its emphasis on mutuality and social justice (interdependence); its opposition to free market greed and consumerism; its foundation of ecological sustainability; its nonviolent orientation; and its post-ideological character. In the West, it developed as a riposte to triumphalist neo-liberalism. In Asia, it has taken the form of a radical conservatism combining the democratic and social justice traditions of modernity with the self reliance and embedded wisdom of indigenous communities and cultures.

Root Problems of Engaged Buddhism
At first sight a socially engaged Buddhism may appear so unproblematic as to make the very term redundant, as even Thich Nhat Hanh thought, "in a sense", it was: "Buddhism means to be awake - mindful of what is happening in one's body, feelings, mind and in the world. If you are awake you cannot do otherwise than act compassionately to help relieve suffering you see around you. So Buddhism must be engaged in the world. If it is not engaged it is not Buddhism".9 The potential for the exercise of compassion by improving physical and social conditions increased immeasurably with the coming of modernity. Thus a meeting of 22 Western Buddhist teachers with the Dalai Lama in March 1993 issued a widely published joint declaration whose opening paragraph proclaimed:

Our first responsibility as Buddhists is to work towards creating a better world for all forms of life. The promotion of Buddhism is a secondary concern. Kindness and compassion, the furthering of peace and harmony, as well as tolerance and respect for other religions, should be the three guiding principles of our actions.

The above quotations imply that Buddhism in modernity must inevitably be engaged Buddhism. There are disturbing questions here to which we must now turn.

For the monastics of early Buddhism the all-encompassing goal was nirvana - or the end of the rounds of rebirth, in that there was no longer a clinging self to return in yet another life-form. The laity, who were less spiritually privileged, could at least hope for rebirth in a higher social station through the accumulation of merit. Spiritual practice for both monastics and laity did enjoin many kinds of selfless behaviour. Generosity (dana) is the first of the Buddhist virtues, and especially generosity in supporting the monastic sangha. And the Buddha urged his monks to "go forth on your journey, for the benefit of the many, out of compassion for the world, for the welfare, for the benefit and joy of mankind" (Vinaya 1.21). In Mahyana Buddhism, compassion was even more strongly emphasised. Its great heroes, the bodhisattvas, were enlightened beings who postponed entry into nirvana in order to serve sentient beings, and in sutras like the Avatamsaka they are shown doing so in many different ways.

However, the first of the great bodhisattva vows is "to save all beings", that is, to lead them to enlightenment. Similarly, to imply that the above injunction of the Buddha to his sangha is a manifesto for social revolution, or even some kind of welfare agenda, is to wrench it from its soteriological context and secularise it. Ultimately, good works have been incidental to the enlightenment project, and a "skillful means" to that great end. Remember that we are speaking of social cultures in which there could be virtually no expectation of change in the harsh conditions of life (even for the rich). To help people to release themselves into an absolutely different way of experiencing those conditions was - and still is - a truly revolutionary gift.

Modernity totally reverses these assumptions. For the young American radicals of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s who became interested in Buddhism, emancipatory modernity was simply the absolute taken-for-granted truth, to which Dharma had to be accommodated. Thus one of the first concerns of the American Buddhist Peace Fellowship (BPF) was to secure some historical validation by assiduously seeking out "exemplars of engaged Buddhism" from the past, ranging from the bodhisattva who offered himself as a meal to a starving tigress to the Emperor Ashoka's Buddhist welfare state.10

Eventually it began to dawn in some quarters that such readings were decontextualised exceptions to the cultural norms of pre-modern Buddhism, where inner transformation was necessarily the all-encompassing goal. Nelson Foster says in his confessional essay "How Shall We Save the World? (included in this issue):

Naivete ... played a part in BPF's creation, I now see, at least on my part, navet about Buddhism itself and the bodhisattva way of saving beings. While innocence may have served BPF well in other respects, I think in this respect it did not. As I reflect on the developments of the past twenty years, it seems to me that BPF and other Buddhist projects of a similar nature have suffered from a failure to resolve crucial differences between the world view implicit in Buddhism and the world view that we absorb unintentionally as children of this culture.

To live in modernity and yet appreciate received Buddhism for what it authentically is (in any one of its ancient cultural packages), it is, therefore, necessary to try to enter a little into the pre-modern mentality. This requires some distancing from the emancipatory attractions of modernity, which is difficult if one is strongly identifying with them. I believe engaged Buddhism has yet fully to come to terms with that authenticity, just as unengaged Buddhism has fully to come to terms with modernity's vastly expanded potential for active and effective compassion, which arguably makes a difference to the bodhisattva's traditional priorities.

From Tibet's great yogin Milarepa to editorials in the London Buddhist Society's Middle Way, there have been warnings about the folly, in Milarepa's words, of "setting out to serve others before one has oneself realised Truth in its fullness; to be so would be like the blind leading the blind".11 Contrasting with this ancient soteriological model, there is at the other extreme the social emancipation model, whereby Buddhism reduces to mindful social service and mindful radicalism - a spiritual lubricant for justice, freedom and welfare.

What is necessary is to maintain a sense of balance between and beyond the two extremes? There is a middle way to be found in personal practice, whether contemplative or active. And there is also a middle way to be discerned in the appropriateness of our response to a range of different personal and social predicaments. Let us consider this further.

The Middle Way between Contemplation and Activism
In the first place, in many of the Buddhist traditions, from the satipatthana of the Theravada to the dzogchen of the Tantrayana, there are practices which make positive use of the demands and discomfitures of everyday life for the development of insight. Such mindfulness or "bare awareness" lies at the heart of engaged Buddhism and, I believe, would qualify as the basic, across-the-board inner work of a broad psycho-spiritual culture of awakening. In contrast to the many manuals on sitting meditation, the practice of inner awareness is less well known than it should be, and merits a digression.12

It does require considerable practice to be able to open in total visceral awareness to the emotions which arise when the self is discomfited by not getting what it wants or else getting what it does not want. The last thing the self wants to do is simply to remain in awareness of how it feels, and many people at first have difficulty in neither intellectualising about their feelings nor returning to gnaw at the objective cause of their discomfiture. A wide range of other more subtle evasions may be identified as part of a general and quite disconcerting picture of how our mental and emotional household works. With practice we can just stay with the feeling longer and more intensely, until an acceptance grows of "just how it is". The situation is then experienced in a softer and more manageable way - rather like physical pain that has been made an object of meditation. This new awareness has a given quality about it, as if it had been there all along, and is accompanied by a sense of well-being. The objective cause of our affliction can now be observed with greater clarity, being no longer shadowed by anxiety. We are better able to do something positive about it, if that is possible, and particularly to open more generously to others' needs. To be well sustained such inner awareness practice still requires a background of regular meditation practice and periodical meditation retreat. These provide laboratory conditions for what is essentially the same process of exploration and transformation.

Relevant here is Master Dogen observation that "he who regards worldly affairs as an obstacle to his training only knows there is no Way in worldly affairs, not knowing that there is nothing such as worldly affairs to be distinguished from the Way".13 Dogen refers to the bodhisattva ideal of spiritual maturity, which transcends the dualistic pull of militancy versus mysticism in a seamless response. Of course, decisions still have to be made about whether to go on retreat next week or join an anti-nuclear action. But a calmed mind, freed of subjective pulls this way and that, is likely to make a wiser decision. In fact, an engaged Buddhist lifestyle may require a balance not only between spiritual practice and active social responsibility, but also between earning a living, sustaining close relationships and friendships, bringing up children, maintaining physical health and fitness, aesthetic cultivation, and so on... Here is a major personal issue in engaged Buddhism, where demands of choice and complexity may translate into stress and confusion14.

Again, how much meditative cultivation is required to sustain mindful and effective activism? Are not some kinds of activism just too ideologically freighted, too emotionally hot, or just too painful, for some people at some phase of their growth? In terms of sustaining inner awareness there may be turbulent situations in which some activists are swept out of their depth. It is important to be aware of this danger, and the associated one of over-commitment. Thomas Merton warned that "to allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of the activist neutralises work for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of work, because its kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful."
What applies to the individual may apply no less to socially engaged Buddhist movements. In a movement with a mission the traditional virtue of ksanti (spiritually creative humility, tolerance and patience) easily gets lost, and that of virya (energy, forcefulness) takes on an ideological and self-righteous cast.
Finally, the contemporary sangha of Buddhist practitioners also needs to find a balance and a complementarity between those who emphasise contemplative practice and teaching and those for whom activism is itself part of their spiritual practice. There is a mutuality of support here exemplified by monastics like Bhikkhu Buddhadsa in Thailand and Father Thomas Merton in the United States.
The foregoing is about various domains in which balance needs to be found to sustain a social activism and service which is awake and grounded. No less important is it to discern the appropriateness of both spiritually informed objective change and spirituality as enabling personal and public affliction to be lived as creative and enriching experience (spirituality as therapy-gone-beyond). If insight can heal irremedial personal afflictions like disability and bereavement, then why not chronic poverty which cannot be abolished tomorrow? Or endemic political anarchy and oppression for which innumerable quick fixes have failed? But is not this the pie-in-the-sky of the militant mocking the mystic - Marx's opium of the people? Where is the dividing line between social humiliation and existential humility? Between social resignation and spiritual acceptance as illusion-free clarity? In other words, is this not the soteriological skeleton in the engaged Buddhist cupboard? Not necessarily so.

It is insight and revelatory "acceptance" that frees us of all illusions, all evasions, whether of activism or of quietism, and which enables authentic and appropriate response to what the situation may require. There is considerable biographical testimony. In Easterhouse, a huge squalid housing estate on the outskirts of Glasgow, Cathy McCormack, spoke of her despair after seven years of unemployment and crushing adversity: "I was so broken by it that I felt there was no point in living. I wanted to go to sleep and never wake up again. Then one day something happened. It was a kind of awakening; almost a spiritual experience ... I understood that my life is here in this place, and no fantasy of escape would help. This is where the wains must grow up and make their lives; here we must survive or perish together".15 Cathy McCormack was enabled to empower her fellow tenants. and to initiate regeneration projects to reverse the cycle of despair and deprivation.

Moreover there will be economic and political situations where this kind of clarity provides the fortitude and resolution for a long-haul strategy, instead of a knee-jerk activism which may only create further problems -- like the armed uprising which creates an even more intractable situation, or the war that is "won" at the cost of an enduring peace.

When situations are emptied of self-need they can be seen as the unfolding transient, insubstantial flux of phenomena. The human experiment may, for example, prove to be ecologically unsustainable, but we don't need to take it personally -- that's just how it is. This can clear our minds for appropriate response when we come back into the imperatives of the this-or-that? mode. We can, for example, treat our adversaries with the respect and humanity due to fellow human beings, instead of needing to demonise them and perpetuate the problem we have with them. So, dwelling in Emptiness can clarify Form, but for the activist trapped in the two-dimensional struggle between this and that the dialectics of mysticism may be difficult to comprehend.

For example, I recall a contentious and wide-ranging correspondence in an American Buddhist magazine provoked by John McClellan, of Boulder, Colorado. Critics felt that McClellan was deficient in positive commitment to our planetary future. His response was the rarely heard voice of engaged Buddhism sub specie aeternitatis. He saw "no reason for a simplistic 'either/or' attitude in this area. Yes, everything is perfect, and yes, there is still much to do. [Yes], the dishes need to be washed up, and 'deep contemplatives' are expected to do their share":

We care passionately about the world, almost too much at times; this is understandable, as our very lives are at stake. But a deep and constantly refreshed detachment must lie at the core of any really passionate relationship. When this is forgotten, lost in the heat of caring, the relationship becomes greedy, possessive and materialistic; it becomes deluded, self-centered, and blind, and ultimately unhelpful.16

The introduction of both of Buddhism's "Two Truths" - of Emptiness and of Form - into engaged Buddhist dialogue can be a source of confusion and conflict, which is perhaps why it rarely happens. Yet modernity's gravitational pull to social liberation does need to be balanced by profound insight into existential liberation. As McClellan remonstrates: "We win and lose and live and die ... but there is a deeper way of doing this. How can this delicate matter be discussed properly?" Indeed, Ch'an Master Seng-ts'an concluded his poem On Trust in the Heart:

What can words tell
of that which has
no yesterday, tomorrow or today?

Here we touch on what is grave and constant in perennial Buddhism, and of which engaged Buddhism has particular need. In this context it is a danger to characterize engaged Buddhism as "The Fourth Yana", that is, a new and distinct Buddhist tradition. Indeed, I would rather not distinguish an engaged Buddhism at all, but refer simply to socially engaged Buddhists. It needs to be freed of the secularizing weight of modernity so that it can become truly the Buddhism of modernity. Ken Kraft, one of its most astute observers, concludes:

At this stage it may be difficult to identify the signs of realization in the actions or the ethics of engaged Western Buddhists. Yet one should not conclude hastily that such a dimension is entirely missing. It remains to be seen whether Buddhism's indigenization in the West will yield an ersatz (essentially Western) Buddhist ethics, an attenuated Buddhist ethics (lacking enlightened awareness), or a robust Buddhist ethics that brings the essentials of the tradition to bear upon contemporary conditions".17

It may be added that, at the other extreme, there are very unengaged Buddhists stuck in a mystical notion of Emptiness, like a certain Kelsang Rabtan, writing in the correspondence column of Full Moon, the magazine of the New Kadampa Trust (Winter, 1996). Dismissing concern for the environment he declares that "the environment and the mind are like the body and its shadow. Likewise to the same degree that I purify my mind, my environment will be purified."

Secular Inversion or Spiritual Engagement?
Secular inversion happens when a predominantly secular culture translates religious values into secular terms. Such an inversion, dubbed "Buddhist modernism", did occur over several decades in Southeast Asia, and was particularly strong in Sri Lanka and Burma in the anti-colonialism following the Second World War [in Thailand see the article by Ven. Phaisan Visalo in this issue]. Buddhist intellectuals and termagant monks presented the Dharma as no less rational and scientific than Marxism or modern technology. The Buddha became, plausibly enough, a radical humanist, the monastic sangha a proto-democracy, and the dharma a scientific philosophy and revolutionary theory.18 Buddhist modernism also gained some currency in the West in the 1960s and 1970s, as in the influential writing of Trevor Ling. For Ling Buddhism was as much a revolutionary social theory as a "psycho-social philosophy", with the Buddha's enlightenment as "a process of analytical human reasoning", albeit "almost superhuman".19

The engaged Buddhism which developed in Asia and the West in the 1980s was largely free of this gross kind of inversion, and contemporary readings of Buddhism have taken more subtle forms. British alternative economist Simon Zadek, reporting a discussion on Buddhism and economics, quotes the concern of one participant "to counteract a tendency we all have to invent a 'Buddhist economics' on the hoof. (We must counter the proposition) 'I am a Buddhist; I have this idea about economics; therefore this idea is Buddhist economics'. Buddhists should not fall into this ego-baited trap".20 Some years ago, when Zadek and I tried to put together an international symposium of papers towards a Buddhist economics, I was struck by the ease and conviction with which many contributors simply gave a selective dharmic spin to their own pet economic theory, ranging from free market capitalism to state socialism.

An authentic engagement with modernity must start with Buddhism's root diagnosis and remedy for the human condition and read that into modernity, adapting whatever contemporary theory provides a compatible and explicatory extension to the original existential handle. This can be exemplified by the development of a contemporary Buddhist ethic. Three stages may be distinguished.

First there is the traditional Buddhist personal morality, as typified by the five ancient precepts -- not to kill, not to steal, not to engage in harmful sex, not to lie, and not to intoxicate the mind.

Secondly, for pre-modern Buddhism society was simply the aggregate of individuals comprising it. However, for reasons discussed elsewhere, the social import of the precepts was rarely spelt out (even though there were notable exceptions to this). Engaged Buddhists now do spell out these social implications, but many still confine themselves to personal social responsibility. This is exemplified by the precepts of Thich Nhat Hanh's Community of Interbeing. The Sixth Precept, for example, states: "Do not accumulate wealth while millions go hungry. Do not take as the aim of your life fame, profit, wealth or sensual pleasure. Live simply and share time, energy and material resources with those who are in need".21

Thirdly, we are now able to understand society in cultural, structural and institutional terms as a phenomenon greater than the individuals who comprise it and in some sense possessed of a power and momentum of its own. It is legitimate, for example, to speak of "structural violence" as the violence inflicted by coercive and exploitative structures and institutions. Thus, when international financial institutions have obliged poor countries to cut back their welfare policies under threat of economic penalties, this has correlated directly with increases in infant mortality and child malnutrition. Accordingly it is necessary to extend this precept to a societal responsibility (which also includes the previous two formulations of the precept).

Most prominent engaged Buddhists, like Sulak Sivaraksa and Robert Aitken, are robust in spelling out the global political and economic implications of the ancient moral precepts. And the American Santikaro Bhikkhu, a senior monk and disciple of Bhikkhu Buddhadasa, has offered intriguing contemporary interpretations of each of the eight kilesa (mental pollutants).22

A similar but much more ambitious societal extension of dharma is the elaboration of Buddhist social theory. So far there has been remarkably little development in this direction, as compared with that in the comparable field of psychotherapy. Donald Rothberg has argued that

Despite the great interest in integrating personal and social transformation, inner and outer, there is still often far more attention given to the (very important) personal and inner responses to the social and the outer, and less given to systematic analysis, strategy and collective action. To give a spiritually informed reading of our times, and to develop a mature socially engaged spirituality, it is necessary to connect such inner responses with systematic analysis, with the analyses of various social, political and ecological contexts and problems.23

The second dimension of an engaged Buddhism is activism itself. That means to build broad strategies for radical social change. Earlier preoccupations with peace and environmental issues - and, in Asia, with the development of self-reliant, dharmically inspired local projects - are now opening up into a more general critique and campaigning against free market globalisation. The following forthright remarks of the Dalai Lama - the Number One engaged Buddhist - are typical:

... A tremendous effort will be required to bring compassion into the realm of international business. Economic inequality, especially that between developed and developing nations, remains the greatest source of suffering on this planet. Even though they will lose money in the short term, large multinational corporations must curtain their exploitation of poor nations. Tapping the few precious resources simply to fuel consumerism in the developed world is disastrous; if it continues unchecked eventually we shall all suffer".24

Earlier, I emphasised the centrality of inner awareness to the personal practice of engaged Buddhism. Engaged Buddhists have developed an impressive range of awareness (mindfulness) practices and perspectives. These have been central to Thich Nhat Hanh's teaching over many years25, and Joanna Macy has evolved distinctive "despair and empowerment" workshops, spreading the benefits more widely through successive manuals.26 More recently Zen master Bernard Glassman has founded a Peacemaker Order whose three basic tenets are the essence of mindfulness practice: "The first is not knowing - letting go of fixed ideas. The second is bearing witness - totally immersing oneself in the situations that one is involved in. And the third is healing oneself and others, out of the ingredients that come up from bearing witness".27

Ideological sensitivity is the societal extension of mindfulness, wherein we become aware of the ideological pulls and leanings in ourselves and in the organisations and beliefs we support - as well as those which we don't. The importance of such ideological audit is clear, but it seems rare even among engaged Buddhists. The first three of the Precepts of Thich Nhat Hanh's Community of Interbeing include warnings like "Do not be idolatrous or bound to any doctrine, theory or ideology, even Buddhist ones. Buddhist systems of thought are guiding means; they are not absolute truth ...Do not think the knowledge you presently possess is changeless, absolute truth. Avoid being narrow minded and bound to present views. Learn and practice non-attachment from views in order to be open to receive others' viewpoints".28 Just as a true friend gives both unconditional support but also honest criticism, so should be the attitude of engaged Buddhists towards certain New Age and "new paradigm" beliefs.29

For Sallie King, concluding the study of Buddhist Liberation Movements in Asia, Asian engaged Buddhism is "a major influence on the social and political, as well as the religious world ... Buddhist liberation movements constitute a major turning point in the development of Buddhism and will continue to play a role of substantial importance in the evolution of Buddhism into the foreseeable future".30 In the West, it is less influential but here also the convergence of Buddhism and modernity is already being successfully negotiated, and for a few pioneers outer and inner liberation is becoming an integral life-project.

Excerpted from Liberation is Indivisible: the Convergence of Buddhism and Modernity (soon to be published)

NOTES:
1. Quoted in Arnold Kotler, ed. Engaged Buddhist Reader (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 1996), Editor's Introduction.
2. Christopher S. Queen and Sallie B. King, eds. Engaged Buddhism: Buddhist Liberation Movements in Asia (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996); and: Christopher S. Queen, ed. Engaged Buddhism in the West (in press).
3. Queen and King, eds. Engaged Buddhism, p.ix.
4. Arnold Kotler, ed. Engaged Buddhist Reader (Berkeley, CA: Parallax Press, 1996), p. 96.
5. James W. White The Soka Gakkai and Mass Society (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1970), p. 36.
6. Subhuti (Alex Kennedy) Right Livelihood Co-operatives (FWBO Inter Co-op Secretariat, 1981), p. 14.
7. Cynthia Eller "The Impact of Christianity on Buddhist Non-violence in the West" in Kenneth Kraft, ed. Inner Peace, World Peace: Essays on Buddhism and Nonviolence (Albany: State University of New York Press [SUNY], 1992), pp. 91-100, 97.
8. Queen and King, eds. Engaged Buddhism, p.413.
9. Turning Wheel : Journal of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, Summer, 1983.
10. See, for example, Fred Eppsteiner, ed. The Path of Compassion: Writings on Socially Engaged Buddhism (Berkeley, Ca.: Parallax Press, 1988), "Exemplars of Engaged Buddhism", pp. 97-149.
11. W.Y. Evans-Wentz, ed. Mi-La-Ras-Pa :Tibet's Great Yogi Milarepa, 2nd ed. (London: Oxford University Press, 1951), p.271.
12. See, for example, Jon Kabat Zinn Wherever You Go, There You Are (New York: Hyperion, 1994).
13. Dogen Kigen, Shobo-genzo Quoted in Yuho Yokoi, Zen Master Dgen (New York: Weatherhill, 1976), p.37.
14. For further discussion, see Kenneth Kraft, "Practicing Peace: Social Engagement in Western Buddhism" Journal of Buddhist Ethics vol.6, June 1999, http://jbe.la.psu.edu/2/kraft.html
15. Jeremy Seabrook The Myth of the Market (Hartland, Devon: Green Books, 1990), pp.102-103.
16. John McClellan, [correspondence], Tricycle, 3(3), Spring 1994, pp. 10-13.
17. Kraft, "Practicing Peace: Social Engagement in Western Buddhism", "Conclusions".
18. See Ken Jones, The Social Face of Buddhism (London: Wisdom, 1989), pp. 234-239, 271-276.
19. Trevor Long, The Buddha (London: Temple Smith, 1973), pp. 39, 106, 261.
20. Simon Zadek, "Towards a Progressive Buddhist Economics" in Jonathan Watts and others, eds. Entering the Realm of Reality: Towards Dhammic Societies (Bangkok: International Network of Engaged Buddhists, 1997), pp. 241-277, 243.
21. Fred Eppsteiner, "In the Crucible: the Precepts of the Order of Interbeing" in Fred Eppsteiner, ed. The Path of Compassion: Writings on Socially Engaged Buddhism (Berkeley, Ca.: Parallax Press, 1988), pp.150-154.
22. Santikaro Bhikkhu "The Four Noble Truths of Dhammic Socialism" in Jonathan Watts and others, eds. Entering the Realm of Reality: Towards Dhammic Societies (Bangkok: International Network of Engaged Buddhists, 1997), pp.89-161.
23. Donald Rothberg, "Buddhist Responses to Violence and War: Resources for a Socially Engaged Spirituality" in Journal of Humanistic Psychology 32(4) Fall, 1992, pp. 41-75, 71.
24. Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama, The Global Community and the Need for Universal Responsibility (Boston: Wisdom Publication, 1992), p.7.
25. Thich Nhat Hanh The Miracle of Mindfulness: a Manual on Meditation (Boston, Beacon Press, 1975/81).
26. Most recently: Joanna Macy with Molly Young Brown Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect our Lives, Our World (Gabriola Island BC, Canada: New Society Publishers, 1998).
27. Roshi Bernard Glassman "Taking the Plunge" Shambhala Sun November 1997, pp. 25-27. Zen Peacemaker Order e-mail: Peacemaker@zpo.org
28. Eppsteiner, "In the Crucible: the Precepts of the Order of Interbeing", pp.150-154.
29. For ideological aspects of the New Age, Deep Ecology and Creation Theology, see Ken Jones Beyond Optimism: a Buddhist Political Ecology (Oxford, Jon Carpenter, 1993), pp. 90-103.
30. Queen and King, Engaged Buddhism , p. 435.

Ken Jones
UK Network of Engaged Buddhists
kennora@onetel.net.uk