CONTENTS
Introduction
The Endeavor of Praxis
Socially Engaged Buddhism and the Project
of Modernity
Buddhist
Praxis and the Dissolving of the Theory/Practice Duality
Justifying
and Grounding Socially Engaged Buddhist Praxis
The Third International Think
Sangha Meeting on
Buddhist Responses to Modern Violence
Planning and Preparation
Day One - Personal Level: Buddhist Praxis
for Responding to Violence
Day Two - Familial Level: Gender and
Domestic Violence
Day Three - Communal and Regional
Level: Cultural, Religious and Ethnic Violence
Day Four - National and Global Violence:
Economic and Political Violence, and Militarism
Introduction
Violence and how to prevent violence is a perennial theme in Buddhism.
The first precept against killing, the Buddhaﾕs discourse in the
Mahanidana Sutta on the dependent origination of communal
violence, the Buddhaﾕs mediation of the communal conflict over
water resources at the Rohini River, all show Buddhismﾕs basic
commitment to non-violence and guidance on how to respond to violence.
In the modern age, however, this commitment is not so evident.
Japanese Buddhism gave significant ideological support to its
governmentﾕs war in the Pacific. The Sri Lankan Buddhist Sangha
has been equally supportive towards its government concerning
the ongoing civil war with the Hindu, Tamil minority. Moreover,
what does one make of Burma, a vibrant Buddhist society that is
ruled by oppressive military dictators? Modern fundamentalism,
nationalist militarism, and economic structural violence typify
the new challenges to traditional Buddhist teachings on violence.
What can Buddhism offer in response to these various forms of
violence in the modern world? Can it offer something beyond erudite
philosophy and simplistic ethics? Can Buddhism itself meet the
challenge of renewing its teachings so that it becomes an integral
part of the solution, and not the cause, of these contemporary
forms of violence? As we face the everyday news of violent events
which are justified by both religious sentiments and utilitarian
rationalizations, these questions are not ones for idle philosophers.
Rather they are urgent ones that we need to answer with vision,
practice and action.
The following paper is a report on a project to confront these questions and issues concerning modern violence initiated by Think Sangha. Think Sangha is a socially engaged Buddhist think tank coordinated by the author and affiliated with the Buddhist Peace Fellowship (BPF) in the United States and the International Network of Engaged Buddhists (INEB). Think Sangha's core activities are networking with other thinker-activists, producing Buddhist critiques of social structures and alternative social models, and providing materials and resource people for trainings, conferences, and research on social issues and grassroots activism. Through its links to INEB and BPF, Think Sangha is inter-connected with a wider circle of socially engaged Buddhists in various countries. Many of these individuals and groups are involved in on-going projects committed to peace and non-violence. For example, in Sri Lanka, the Sarvodaya Shramadana movement has recently led a number of mass interfaith meditations on peace, such as one in March, 2002 in which over a half million people participated. In July 2002 in Indonesia, the third session of a Buddhist-Muslim interfaith dialogue took place led by prominent religious leaders Chandra Muzzafar of Malaysia, Sulak Sivaraksa of Thailand, and former President Abudrahman Wahid of Indonesia, all of them committed to non-violent social change.
In order to further support such important work, Think Sangha decided to hold a five day international meeting from February 5-9, 2003 in Chiang Mai, Thailand. A small group of socially engaged Buddhists active in these issues were assembled to reflect, interact and help each another envision and enact Buddhist responses to the violence they face in their respective regions and fields. The three basic goals of the meeting were:
1) to deepen the understanding of the nature of violence and how to respond to it in non-violent ways, specifically from a Buddhist standpoint,
2) to develop and publish a series of papers, based on our conversations and the reflections of certain key participants as a resource for other socially concerned Buddhist practitioners, and
3) to empower the individual participants to return to their native regions and deepen their work for peace and non-violence.
The following report offers a concise overview of the activities that occurred during the meeting and presents some of the ideas and practices concerning violence that were developed at the meeting. Before reporting on the meeting itself, it is important to examine some issues of theory and practice in socially engaged Buddhism and to reflect on the meaning of Buddhist praxis for the modern world.
The Endeavor of Praxis:
Transforming the Split between Theory and Practice
Socially
Engaged Buddhism and the Project of Modernity
Socially Engaged Buddhist
social theory is said to have first developed about one hundred
years ago in Sri Lanka with the activities of American Theosophist
Henry Steel Olcott and his prot使� Anagarika Dharmapala. Of course,
Buddhists before this time grappled with social issues and attempted
to apply Buddhist principles to social problems. However, the
very idea of an engaged Buddhist "social theory" has
a number of internal assumptions bound up with modern thinking.
As witnessed in the present debate over whether the Buddha had
a systematic approach to confronting social problems, the act
of creating a Buddhist ﾒsocial theoryﾓ appears as a fusion of
pre-modern religious sensibilities and modern approaches to social
engineering. In this way, the socially engaged Buddhism of Olcott
and Anagarika has been labeled "Protestant Buddhismﾓ because
of the rationalism and moralism which informed its social engagement
(Queen & King, 1996, p. 27-28). For the large number of socially
engaged Buddhists from the West and for a number of important
socially engaged Buddhist leaders in Asia seminally influenced
by western thought, such as Ambedkar and Sivaraksa, socially engaged
Buddhism is an undeniably modernist endeavor. This applies both
to the way it is done, often with an implicit division between
theory and practice, and to what it hopes to accomplish in transforming
this division.
In this context, the work of Think Sangha began in 1992 with the formation of the "Buddhism and Social Analysis Group" at the third annual conference of the International Network of Engaged Buddhists (INEB). Think Sangha's central purpose has been to heal the secular/religious and public/private dualisms of modernity by "changing the way people talk about and respond to the world through bringing moral and spiritual perspectives back to the center of economic, political, and social debate" (Think Sangha: Background and vision, n.d.). This agenda is not a fundamentalist one which seeks to erase the advances of modernity by returning to a mythical past. It is also not a typically post-modernist one in declaring all truths to be totally relative. Rather, it can be understood as an attempt to reinvigorate moral and spiritual approaches to the world in order to compliment and ultimately transform the modern rationalist way of conceptualizing the world. On a more practical level, Think Sangha was created because a number of INEB members were concerned that the motley group of INEB activists from all over the world should be fully grounded in the powerfully liberative principles and practices of Buddhism. We saw ourselves as a group which could inform the harried and difficult activist work of our colleagues through more reflective and systematic approaches to Buddhism in the contemporary world.
From the beginning, however, we were aware of the pitfalls of creating a socially engaged Buddhist "intelligentsia" which would lead the activist "masses" in their attempts "to save the world" (Watts, 1999). This is precisely the pitfall commonly encountered in movements which have preached an egalitarian emancipation of people only to build new structures of ﾒtyranny.ﾓ Tyranny in this sense has the specific meaning of "a particular boundary crossing, a particular violation of social meaning" (Walzer, 1983, p. 28). Tyranny exists when an individual or group uses its power or authority held in one social sphere for advantage in another social sphere. Certainly, there are historical examples of institutions and societies manipulating Buddhist ideas in the service of tyranny. However, we have felt in Think Sangha that an authentic Buddhist praxis can offer a unique kind of critique of power. The core teachings of the Buddha reveal a number of subtle perspectives and integrated practices for transforming the sources of tyranny, which has cast a long shadow over the scientific, economic and political advances of modernism.
Buddhist
Praxis and the Dissolving of the Theory/Practice Duality
One of the most essential
of these practices is Buddhism's approach to theory and ideology.
In the Buddha's core teaching of dependent origination (paticca
samuppada), one of the critical factors leading to the birth
and development of the suffering-prone ego-self (atta)
is attachment (upadana) to views (ditthi) and methods
(sila). When attachment to a sense of personal identity
gets mixed in with concepts and theories about how to improve
situations, they are easily turned into hardened ideologies. As
Think Sangha member David Loy notes:
Ideology is another attempt to objectify ourselves, by understanding ourselves objectively. On this account the need for theory, and the difficulty many have with unanchored critique, is the intellectual's version of the dialectic noticed earlier between security and freedom. The Buddhist alternative ... is not to rid oneself of all thought but to be able to think in a different way, without needing to ground oneself thereby. Such a "non-abiding" wisdom can wander freely among an overlapping plurality of truths without needing to fixate on any of them. (Loy, 2003, p. 26)
In Buddhist praxis, ideology needs to be "emptied" before use, so that it becomes less reified. This does not suggest the total relatively of ideas as post-modernism often does. Rather, Loyﾕs quote points towards an authentic spiritual practice which constantly questions assumptions and conceptions while reaffirming ways of living that are mutually beneficial. In this way, ideas avoid taking on the aura of absolute truth, and differences are seen as fruitful, fraternal, and valuable for deepening understanding.
This type of theoretical openness in Buddhism is based on a moral perspective: remaining unattached to any specific set of views and methods resists the formation of ideology and denial of the full agency of other sentient actors. Modernity appears to have the same intention in its use of reason to develop universal norms by which one group cannot tyrannize another with its own particularistic norms. However, such universalistic norms are often blind to the systemic particularities that exist in any social context. Without attention to the specific conditions of each social context, these universal norms can be used by those already in power not as means to liberate others but as ideologies justifying further domination, for example when aggressive military means are used to "modernize" and "democratize" societies seen as not measuring up to these universal norms.
This point not only discloses the need for a consciously established moral viewpoint when developing theory but also the dangers of establishing universal moral viewpoints. A moral viewpoint enables us to engage in the ethical praxis of negotiating with others how to collectively organize and live in a social context. However, when morality becomes universalized, it can also become uncritical and dogmatic. For example, if the moral precept against stealing calls for punishment of offenders in all cases at all times, then it becomes easy to demonize the thief while turning a blind eye to the systemic factors such as economic exploitation or social discrimination which lead to crime. In this way, the original intention of creating a mutually empowering, ethical praxis can deform into a tyrannical use of power by one group to dominate others. Buddhists are not free of this tendency and sometimes make an inflexible ideology of their moral beliefs. As we will see later in this report, attachment to views on purity, sex, and gender have led to a long tradition of sexism in the tradition.
The Buddha attempted to temper such tendencies in his teaching of morality by emphasizing the quality of intention behind moral action. In the India of his time, the teaching of karma as moral law was being developed in a variety of ways which led to important differences in ethical praxis. In Brahmanistic practice, the idea of karma did not refer to moral action and ethical praxis in a community but rather to making the proper ritual sacrifices and offerings to secure a blissful afterlife. The Vedic notion of an absolute, universal soul energy (atman) whose power emanates throughout the world led to parallel notions of the distribution of power in the human sphere. Karma thereby became a doctrine of "ritual action" by which the performance of one's predetermined class roles replicated the hierarchical harmony of the cosmos. There were also materialistic notions of karma, as in Jainism, which said that no matter one's intention, the nature of one's action would directly result in the quality of one's life. For example, one accumulates negative karma even in the unconscious and unintentional act of killing an insect or worm by stepping on it. This understanding tended to make morality puritanical and uncritical. The focus became more on eradicating bad karma through developing individual purity in acts of self-denial and expiation rather than through moral action which benefits others (Krishan, 1997, p. 41, p. 55). The Buddha spoke eloquently to the problem of both of these approaches:
When one falls back on what was done in the past as being essential (pubbekatavada), monks, there is no desire, no effort [at the thought], 'This should be done. This shouldn't be done.' When one can't pin down as a truth or reality what should and shouldn't be done, one dwells bewildered and unprotected....When one falls back on creation by a supreme being as being essential (issarakaranavada), monks, there is no desire, no effort [at the thought], 'This should be done. This shouldn't be done.' When one can't pin down as a truth or reality what should and shouldn't be done, one dwells bewildered and unprotected. (Thanissaro, 2002, A.iii.64)
In this passage, the Buddha indicates how both approaches disempower intention and any sort of critical morality, thereby leading to the kind of dependence and passivity upon which tyranny thrives.
Luis Gomez has pointed out that the Buddha tempered these tendencies by both rationalizing and ethicizing the teaching of non-violence. He strongly rejected the mythical foundations of the Vedic caste system propounded by the brahmins, and emphasized the functional roles of class as well as the moral basis of true "class distinction" (Walshe, 1995, p. 413-414, D.iii.93; Nanamoli & Bodhi, 1995, p. 806, M.123). However, his strong emphasis on the intentional aspect of moral action shows his awareness of the dangers of totally deflating the mythological universe as seen in certain materialistic and nihilistic doctrines of the time (Walshe, 1995, p. 67-90, D.i.1-46). His response to Brahmanistic corruption was more attuned, balancing moral and rational energies. Gomez sums up the significance of the Buddha's response:
If ethical behavior could be governed by principles that would provide, in all circumstances, an unambiguously moral and rational course of action, then self-cultivation would center on compliance, and we would no longer be able to speak of virtue. (Gomez, 1992, p. 46)
This has crucial import for modern society which increasingly seems focused on law enforcement rather than on the development of civic virtue.
While the Buddha was certainly concerned with the results of action, he was also concerned with the nature of intention (cetana) behind action. I would argue that his emphasis on intention was to reinforce the connections between ethical praxis, morality and inner transformation. As mentioned earlier, ethical praxis involves the fundamental social act of negotiating with others how to organize and live in a social context. Moral perspectives are essential in that they offer reasons and justifications for this negotiation based on what is good and what is not (Brown, 1990, p. 119). In Buddhism, morality refers not only to acting non-harmfully towards others but also to engaging in inner transformation to purify intention and to transform the roots of greed, anger and delusion. In this way, Buddhism does not make the conceptual split between theory and practice or between moral perspective and moral action. Buddhism uses a different conceptual form of praxis in the formula of morality-meditation-wisdom (sila-samadhi-panna).
A popular way of understanding this praxis is from a linear perspective in which the practice of morality supports the physical and mental conditions for meditative concentration that leads to wisdom. This perspective, however, reinforces the stereotypical sense of Buddhism as a solitary practice for individual enlightenment. For example, by developing personal purity through moral conduct (sila), one creates the conditions for attaining deep states of meditative concentration (samadhi) through which one realizes by oneself liberating wisdom (panna) and enlightenment (nibbana). In this way, moral action tends towards the materialistic understanding of karma by emphasizing individual purity (and all its material and behavioral trappings), rather than compassionate intention, as the basis for enlightenment. From a less conceptual and more engaged level, these three factors reveal themselves as deeply interpenetrating. Wisdom is understood as the critical insight of Right View and Right Understanding which form the intentional foundations of moral action in the Buddha's Noble Eightfold Path. Meditative insight is also essential for developing the mindfulness by which greed, anger and delusion are transformed, and moral action becomes compassionate, selfless action. From this integrated perspective emphasizing interdependence (idapaccayata), one sees an important dialectic between personal and interpersonal transformation. Social transformation is highly dependent on the internal, moral quality of individuals. However, individuals cannot transform by themselves within a vacuum. We are largely dependent on ethical interaction with others to develop the conditions necessary for our internal transformation. This is the basis of the bodhisattva vow in Buddhism, in which the personal enlightenment of the bodhisattva is indivisible from her endeavors to support others' enlightenment.
In this way, the Buddha posited community (sangha) as an essential part of the Buddhist practice. Traditionally, the understanding of sangha has often been limited to the monastic order. This has created a kind of ritualistic devotionalism reminiscent of Brahmanism in which lay followers gain spiritual blessing through making ritual offerings to the monastics. Understood more widely as the community of practitioners, and even more widely as any community of beings, sangha represents the essential interpersonal and social aspect of an ethical praxis. In this way, the model for Think Sangha has been based in friendship and Buddhist practice as much as in theory and thought. As such, we have felt that the membership of our sangha needs to be equally balanced between practitioners who are teachers and thinkers and ones who are activists. What we have learned from numerous years of convening INEB conferences is that participants have important things to learn from each other no matter their background. For example, highly educated western Buddhists still have much to learn from their fellow Asian practitioners steeped in generations of tradition. Further, monks highly educated in textual matters or highly developed in meditative insight have much to learn about modern perspectives on gender and other issues. In this way, there are only relative experts depending on the context and content of a particular issue.
At the second international Think Sangha meeting in Hawaii in 2001, we were able to articulate a specific socially engaged Buddhist praxis along these lines (Think Sangha, 2001). Analogous to the interpenetrating praxis of sila-samadhi-panna, we developed a model of socially engaged Buddhist praxis as social activism-spiritual practice-intellectual inquiry. Intellectual inquiry involves developing the basic principles of socially engaged Buddhism by investigating the connections between personal and social liberation, and between Buddhist teachings and various forms of contemporary thought. This process provides a Buddhist foundation for engaging in social activism. However, the second component of social activism is not derivative but equally important for developing praxis. Buddhist social activism principally involves empowering the renunciation of self-centered ways of living and developing forms of compassionate action. Spiritual practice is the third essential component which prevents theory and practice from disconnecting. Practice involves both the solitary work of reorienting the mind/heart through meditation and the social work of compassionate action. In the theory/practice split of modern thought, only experts are deemed knowledgeable enough to plot courses of action whilst the majority of people are disempowered from taking action for their own betterment. The Buddhist emphasis on the moral intention behind each thought, word and action guides one, according to one's own abilities, to engage in creative endeavors to bring about ethical praxis in community.
In this way, Think Sangha has attempted to offer an alternative approach to the classically dualistic one of a think tank in which overarching conceptual theories are developed to explain diverse phenomena and to implement cookie-cutter solutions to various contexts. The "think" aspect of Think Sangha relates to the endeavor to engage in a critical and moral analysis of contemporary society which the secular/religious split in modernity denies of "irrational" religion. The "sangha" aspect highlights the need to ground modern society in an ethical praxis informed by moral perspectives derived from the struggle of inner transformation. In our particular modern context, socially engaged spirituality has emphasized transformation from the inside out. This emphasis is an attempt to counter balance the prevalent modernistic approach of systemic and material change seen to guarantee the conditions for personal happiness. To emphasize again, endeavoring in some form of inner transformation by which a critical morality is developed is essential for guarding against tyranny and for creating the conditions for ethical, just and truly democratic societies.
Justifying
and Grounding Socially Engaged Buddhist Praxis
Still questions remain
about how such praxis can truly guard against the self-centered
impulses that encourage tyranny. For example, if Buddhism believes
in theoretical and practical pluralism while rejecting universalistic
claims to truth, what prevents it from being haphazard? Although
it speaks of the practice of inner transformation which
informs self-less compassionate action, how can socially engaged
Buddhism properly ground itself to avoid the violent pitfalls
of fundamentalism? Diana Winston, another Think Sangha participant,
has examined the ways in which socially engaged Buddhists can
critically evaluate this praxis. She distinguishes four ways for
grounding and justifying the praxis of socially engaged Buddhism:
1) drawing on Buddhist textual resources, 2) "socializing"
or applying Buddhist principles and themes, 3) inner transformation
as outer transformation, and 4) the radical creativity of moving
beyond concepts (Winston, n.d.). [see
complete paper]
The first two involve an approach that takes general principles and applies them to specific, new contexts. Drawing on Buddhist textual resources is a common approach by which one justifies action based on what the great masters of the past have done. This approach by itself, however, has its own pitfalls in that it tends to forget that a significant portion of the Buddhist tradition is non-textual, such as the handing down of oral and intuitive knowledge in the monastic lineage. Further, from the post-modernist perspective, there is always the problem of the authenticity of texts and the various biases encoded in them by their compilers (Winston, n.d.). These dilemmas point to the highly rational, modernist nature of this approach. For example, in modern, fundamentalist readings of texts, instrumental reason tends to misread largely mythological and allegorical pre-modern texts for literal information on how to act in the world (Armstrong, 2000).
The second approach of "socializing" Buddhist principles and themes tries to avoid this problem by deriving key principles, not literal information, which can then be re-applied to modern contexts. This attempt to undress and then redress core practices to new contexts has created a body of highly creative socially engaged Buddhist theory, such as Thich Nhat Hanh's fourteen social precepts and A.T. Ariyaratne's application of Buddhist moral development methods to social development (Queen & King, 1996). By itself, however, this approach can also be vulnerable to the straight-jacket of ideology and tyranny when principles take primacy over the lived experience of individual contexts, that is when principles become absolute rules and universal norms rather than heuristic guides.
This pitfall leads directly into Winston's third and fourth approaches which correspond to a more inductive approach that develops principles from grounded experience. The third approach of inner transformation as outer transformation refers to the aforementioned praxis of inner transformation through spiritual practice which empowers a critical morality and supports ethical praxis in community. This is perhaps the most significant of the approaches to socially engaged Buddhist praxis, because it highlights the problems of mainstream modernist thinking. By focusing on personal transformation in a community (sangha) context, there is a shift away from the acquisition of knowledge which gives us "answers" to the problems of suffering and towards the acts of learning and communicating with others to collectively develop our own ways to resolve suffering. As such, knowledge transforms from absolute facts about the world into heuristic approaches by which to explore suffering in the world. This approach reminds us of important trends in post-modernism which emphasize the inter-subjective construction of realities (Midgley, 2000, p. 193). This third approach also leads to important trends in the critique of power and the role of power in such inter-subjective communication (Midgley, 2000, p. 203). As Winston notes:
This ["turning inward"] gives us a starting point for critique, because by referencing personal experience we can break the seemingly enormous social problems into more easily understandable, personal, bite-sized explanations of how structural violence works. More significantly, when we look at our Buddhist practice and see personal responses to suffering and how we antidote or work with our defilements (kilesa) on a personal level, we might be able to abstract these same "personal antidotes" or practices out to the social level. Further, this approach illustrates how the authority of an oppressive structure rests not on something objective, but on the collective and often unconscious agreement of individuals. This agreement can be made conscious and people can choose to act differently. (Winston, n.d., ｦ25)
Winston indicates here what I believe is the unique and significant contribution of socially engaged Buddhism by connecting the practice of inner, personal transformation to a critical morality which analyses power structures in order to create ethical social change.
Winston's fourth approach of radical creativity is an extension of this practice. It takes the Buddha's emphasis on intention (cetana) and the imperative of compassionate action (karuna) as the foundation for doing all that can be done to relieve the suffering of others. When intention is purified and compassion made deep through spiritual practice then the source of the methods, be they Buddhist, spiritual, secular, or material, become irrelevant. This approach argues for a pluralism which transcends the confines of any specific tradition. It sees all concepts as heuristic and something ultimately to be abandoned, and as such, forms the polar opposite to the first two approaches. This approach reflects the creative power behind the Buddhist emphasis on the moral intention which empowers non-experts to go ahead and engage in meaningful social action without perfect theoretical knowledge.
In this way, this approach becomes the basis for confronting the tyrannical use of power. It is highly significant for the modern world, because it takes us beyond the mere rationalistic justice of modern society. The imbalance of modern law towards contractual concerns over moral and historical ones, like an uncritical universal morality, has affected the quality of modern society so that its citizens act mostly out of obligation and the limited scope of mutual tolerance. This tends to undercut the deeper interpersonal bonds of fraternity and solidarity and to support the tyrannical use of law by vested interests. Buddhism, like other spiritual traditions, espouses the kind of compassionate action which goes beyond the confines of tolerance and contractual obligation. Such action promotes a justice which deeply identifies with the suffering of individuals and uses the power of love and compassion to find the appropriate means to end that suffering.
The exclusive practice of these
latter two approaches, however, has its own pitfalls. In particular,
one must be concerned about the quality of the grounding of supralegal
and supramoral action based on spiritual insight. When the affective
and emotional aspects of the mind/heart become disconnected from
the critical tools of reason, the hysteria of cult easily arises.
Modern fundamentalism is characterized by extralegal acts of dubious
moral and ethical quality. Socially engaged Buddhist praxis needs
to address not only the problems of instrumental reason, but also
its shadow in the proliferation of uncritical and ungrounded religious
fundamentalisms. In this way, the essential point of the project
of socially engaged Buddhism is not so much revaluing or reasserting
the religious and spiritual in the public sphere but healing the
destructive separation between mind and heart in modern society.
The integrated Buddhist approach to learning, expressed as sila-samadhi-panna,
is offered as one way to bridge this separation. The changes in
the way humans understand and live in the world since the time
of the Buddha require Buddhists to re-articulate this integrated
praxis within a modern context, and socially engaged Buddhism
is one sustained attempt in this direction.
Planning
and Preparation
While the second Think
Sangha meeting in Hawaii gave birth to some important new understandings
as noted above, it also signaled a crisis within the group. Ten
years after beginning this work, the group had in some ways begun
to embody the fundamental dualities of modernity rather than being
a forum for transforming them. Although our sangha has
been and still is nurtured by close personal relationships maintained
across great distance through frequent gatherings, more often
than not it has been tenuously held together by a small internet
user group. Furthermore, our sangha has become more and
more a magnet for western Caucasian males, exemplified by the
four male, white Americans who formed the central core of the
sangha. Increasingly, it became evident that something
important was missing in the way the group was going about things.
Although the members of the group have been employing the essential
approach of inner transformation through spiritual practice, the
dominant approach to the work had begun to follow the more modern
approach of abstracting Buddhist principles and perspectives and
then applying them to various contexts. Our activities were mostly
oriented to the intellectual work of producing papers and publications.
While Think Sangha itself consciously did not establish itself
as an activist group but rather as a group to support activists,
it was becoming too disconnected from the essential composting
matter of daily suffering which informs meaningful social analysis.
Specifically, this meant that Think Sangha was becoming disconnected
from social justice issues from the perspective of the marginalized.
This realization was the basis for a decision to move the next meeting, and the context for the next round of Think Sangha projects, to the ﾒsouthﾓ. This decision immediately facilitated a change in leadership in the group. Three out of four of the core, white, male American members, who had nurtured the group from the beginning, decided to step back from this next stage of the work due to new challenges within their own smaller sanghas. Two other core members, a Thai monk and a Thai woman, became the principal leaders preparing for the meeting. The Thai woman, Ouyporn Khuankaew, who had attended the first Think Sangha meeting in Japan, became the host organizer for the meeting, held at her own center on the outskirts of Chiang Mai city in Thailand. She was also empowered to recruit half of the members of the meeting from her international network of women, Buddhist social activists. With the further assistance of the Thai monk, Phra Phaisan Visalo, we assembled a group of sixteen participants: nine were women, ten came from the South, and only three were Caucasian males.
An equally important consideration was how the meeting would be organized. The overall theme "Buddhist Responses to Modern Violence" came through a consultation meeting in Thailand in February of 2002 with Phra Phaisan, Khuankaew, and the author. It was a fairly clear choice due to the domination of present global issues by the religious tenor of the present war on terrorism. In The Nonduality of Good and Evil, David Loy shows how the non-dual perspective inherent in Buddhism offers a new perspective for viewing the commonality of Bush and Bin Ladenﾕs "holy war" and the violent ramifications of such a view (Loy, 2003). In addition, increasingly subtle analyses of economic globalization, which expose the problems of structural violence on multifarious levels, show the relevance of the theme beyond the war on terrorism. Finally, Buddhism's complicity with violence in places like Sri Lanka and Burma made the topic directly relevant for all Buddhists to confront.
The author and Phra Phaisan spent three months together in Japan in the spring of 2002 developing a basic framework for the meeting. In collaboration with Loy who also lives in Japan, we decided that Buddhismﾕs unique contribution to responding to violence rests on its non-dual perspective. From the basis of emptiness (sunnata) and not-self (anatta), one is able to see through the delusion of self and other. This delusion too often leads to demonizing the other as evil. Such labeling discontinues our endeavor to understand the other and inclines us to respond with violence. Phra Phaisan is a highly educated and intellectually creative monk, so the three of us naturally gravitated towards the more typical, modern approach of applying principles to specific contexts. In this way, we decided to begin the meeting by discussing the basic non-dual perspective of Buddhism as it applies to violence. This approach actually dovetails with the common Buddhist one of working from the inside out. In the end, we came up with the following framework for the meeting:
Day One - Personal Level: Buddhist
praxis for responding to violence,
Day Two - Familial Level: gender and domestic violence
Day Three - Communal and Regional Level: cultural, religious and
ethnic violence
Day Four - National and Global Level: economic and political violence,
and militarism
We expected that the actual content of these sessions would use a mix of the approaches outlined in the previous section.
At a typical academic meeting, participants often read their papers aloud while a second participant gives a prepared response and a short discussion follows. In Think Sangha, however, we have always emphasized the centrality of group dialogue in our meetings over the presentation of papers. In this way, although some participants were asked to write papers for the meeting with the eventual goal of publishing them, the papers were actually used more as a method of preparation for the participants to develop a certain level of depth in their ideas before the meeting began. This initial outline became the basis for the more creative work of organizing the four sessions.
Being a university professor and having a deep interest in "Buddhist pedagogy," I felt it extremely important to empower each participant by giving him/her the responsibility to organize a part of the meeting. Accordingly, I asked the participants beforehand to voluntarily form groups of four people focusing on the type of violence which most interested them. Then I asked them to work with the others in their issue group to organize the sessions of that day along the following guidelines. A basic format for the whole day could be: in the morning, exploring the key aspects of the issue, especially those aspects to which Buddhism can contribute the most; and in the afternoon, exploring specific Buddhist responses to those key aspects. Although group discussion is important, intense discussion over five whole days can lead to fatigue and burn out. Thus, I encouraged the groups to experiment freely with different kinds of group processes they may have developed elsewhere in their work as activists, such as role-playing, breaking up into smaller more intimate groups, meditation, and periods of non-intellectual processing such as drawing and mapping.
In reflecting on this overall mixed approach, I began to become concerned that it might yield a confused and unproductive gathering.
* Without the specific tension provided by formal paper presentations would the participants actually prepare something meaningful?
* By delegating total authority to each group to organize the individual sessions would the meeting become disjointed and unfocused?
* Would the participants be able to bond together quickly enough to bring a collective unity to the meeting?
From the perspective of modern instrumental reason, such an approach seems irresponsible and unscientific because it is not controllable. From a spiritual praxis standpoint, one learns to have faith that events will work themselves out as they should. From an ethical praxis standpoint, even if the group were unable to coalesce and create a fully meaningful event, it would at least be more authentic than the pre-determined and mechanistic outcomes of highly structured meetings based on the decisions of a small group of organizers. As the meeting was about to begin and I looked over the papers which had been written, I got my first hint that this approach was appropriate. In reading the papers, I could see that almost none of them were offering some significant conceptual approach to enlarge the body of socially engaged Buddhist thought. When I let go of this way of thinking, however, I realized that each paper reflected an important experience of practicing socially engaged Buddhism. They all had good stories to tell, and so the meeting began.
Day
One - Personal Level: Buddhist Praxis for Responding to Violence
One of the benefits of
the inside-outside approach of Buddhism was that it helped us
to immediately confront the issue of creating a strong collective
unity within the actual conference program. On the evening
before Day 1 and during the morning of Day 1, we focused on a
purely experiential, non-analytical process of reflecting on and
sharing our identities with smaller groups of four and eventually
with the whole group. In the evening session, the participants
spent time by themselves drawing their own personal solar systems
as reflections of their identities. In smaller groups, they shared
their commonalties, their unique points, and their hopes and goals
for the conference. The next morning, the participants engaged
in a similar drawing and small group process focusing this time
on their specific Buddhist identity. Sharing stories about their
teachers, teachings, practices, and communities, the participants
were asked to also talk about how their Buddhist identity has
influenced, either as a support or as a hindrance, their social
activism. At the conclusion of both sessions, all the drawings
were put on walls and the whole group walked around briefly sharing
what each group has discussed.
This type of activity turned out to be powerful. Firstly, it created strong interpersonal bonds in a short time, thereby establishing the conditions of mutual trust which is essential for ethical praxis (Brown, 1990). This approach is also far more efficient than formal presentations in generating a large amount of issue material in a short period of time. Instead of the monological approach that communicates information by presenting one paper after another, this latter approach creates a small contextualized universe from which the participants can draw experiences and engage in ethical dialogue over the course of the meeting. The limits of this report and of this type of written communication do not provide an adequate recounting of this material. However, throughout this report, we will encounter parts of it through the stories which were elaborated over the following days.
On the afternoon of Day 1, participants engaged in a third session of small group experiential sharing. The principal designer for the afternoon session was the other male, American Caucasian in the group, Yeshua Moser, who is married to a Thai woman and has lived abroad for over a decade. He is the Director of the Southeast Asia office of Non-Violence International and served as the resident non-violence expert in the group. As mentioned in the introduction, although I was wary of creating an overly analytical approach, this was the one place in the meeting where he and the other principal organizers like Phra Phaisan and myself felt that some analytical theory might be helpful in serving as a simple framework for understanding our experiences. Therefore, in a very concise and clear presentation, Moser introduced the seminal concepts of Johan Galtung concerning direct, structural and cultural violence (Galtung, 1996). In short, Galtung posits three different faces of violence: 1) direct violence which is the act of actual harming; 2) structural violence which is the systems, institutions and structures that may lead to direct violence yet also embody a whole process of violence; and 3) cultural violence which is the symbols, images and customs that legitimize structural and direct violence. Moser drew the following diagram to illustrate the dynamics of these three faces of violence.
With direct violence as the apex of the iceberg poking out of the water, structural and cultural violence form its bases, usually hidden from sight beneath the water. To confront the roots of direct violence in their structural and cultural forms also means to confront one's own unconscious patterns of belief, thought and action in daily life.
Moser skillfully organized this session by avoiding a large group session discussing the aspects of Galtung's ideas which would have created a rupture with the previous two sessions of experiential sharing. Rather, he altered the experiential stream only slightly by introducing an analytical context to all the personal sharing that had gone on. Thus, in small groups, participants were again asked to share a personal experience, this time of a violent event directly witnessed or which had an indirect impact on the participant. Then participants shared how their understanding and practice of Buddhism helped them to respond or cope with the situation. Finally, for reporting back to the large group, the smaller groups were asked to consider the Galtung framework of direct, structural, and cultural violence in the events they discussed and to record the principles revealed by these stories. In this way, the inside-out approach worked to draw out the principles and key concepts from a rich dialogical interchange of personal experiences, in place of the relatively disembedded, individual, and monological work of individuals creating their own analytical conference papers.
This approach actually brought out on the very first day the key issues which remained in the forefront of our discussions for the rest of the meeting. Based on the experiences of extreme suffering and victimization, especially from the conflict areas of Sri Lanka and Burma, questions of forgiveness, acceptance and justice were raised. In the Buddha's discourses, specifically the Dhammapada, violence and victimization are not to be met with anger but with compassion for those driven to engage in violence (Buddharakkhita, 1985). On a practical level, this raised serious questions about how to end such violence. Can violent perpetrators be brought to justice without using anger and retributive punishment? A typical Buddhist explanation would be that the law of karma exacts a form of perfect justice in the suffering that violent people bring upon themselves. This opened up a whole range of issues that were further developed throughout the meeting regarding the interpretation of karma, retributive karmic justice, and passivity in the face of oppression. In conclusion, we felt that we had already accomplished much by the end of this first day. A rich context for ethical dialogue had been created out of sharing personal experiences, the last discussion on experiences of violence being particularly powerful. Furthermore, we had already begun to identify key issues surrounding violence and key Buddhist concepts for discussion and analysis.
Day
Two - Familial Level: Gender and Domestic Violence
This day's sessions were
organized by Ouyporn Khuankaew and some colleagues in her Buddhist
women's activist network, the International
Women's Partnership (IWP). The whole morning and part of the
afternoon were devoted entirely to four women telling their personal
stories in depth to the group, largely in monological form. When
I realized this approach at the beginning, my analytical (and
patriarchal?) mind immediately panicked. I wanted to go back to
the interesting principles and issues that the previous day had
uncovered. I was concerned that this monological approach make
the other participants passive. However, I also knew I could trust
Khuankaew and her colleagues, who had a vast base of experience
in running workshops across Southeast and South Asia on women's
leadership, empowerment and non-violence.
In her conference paper Khuankaew wrote that the first step to solving the problems of patriarchy and gender violence is to break the silence concerning this violence by creating meetings and workshops where women are given the opportunity to share their stories (Khuankaew, 2003, p. 4). Perhaps the greatest injustice that marginalized groups like women experience is the fact that their histories go unrecorded and their voices unheard. Breaking the silence is therefore a basic step to overcoming the mentality of inferiority and passivity imposed by cultural and structural forms of gender violence. Therefore, it was quite consistent with her analysis to devote a major portion of the program to this endeavor. This approach taken by Khuankaew and her group established a pattern for the rest of the meeting. As the majority of the participants represented marginalized communities, it became important to begin each session by hearing their stories and understanding more deeply their histories. This process had begun on the first day, but it needed repetition and elaboration in such different contexts as familial, communal, and national. Khuankaew reaffirmed this point at the beginning of the session by noting that examining gender violence within a Buddhist perspective provides the potential for developing a deep analysis on that level. However, she felt that Buddhism does not exist alone as the problem or solution. Therefore, looking at structural systems, for example using Galtung's framework, can enhance a more holistic perspective on the problem.
In this way, Khuankaew foresaw the importance of Galtung's framework and the issue of karma and its interpretation for the meeting. In her conference paper, she used the term "structural karma" to refer to the way the teaching of karma in Buddhism has come to devalue women and create a structure (or more appropriately a culture) of patriarchy into which both women and men are inculcated (Khuankaew, 2003, p. 3). As noted in my introduction, Buddhists have confused the Buddha's emphasis on karma as moral, intentional action with other interpretations of karma, specifically the highly materialistic and deterministic one which equates present suffering directly with previous immoral action. In this way, the inferior status of women in Buddhist societies has been legitimized as the just result of immoral actions in previous lifetimes. Khuankaew noted in her paper that gender violence is further accepted by the way that abused women are often counseled by monks to develop the Buddhist virtue of equanimity (upekkha) and to "be patient and kind to her husband so that one day the karmic force will cease and everything will be fine" (Khuankaew, 2003, p. 3).
In the discussions that followed the stories by these four women, this issue was prominent. Ven. Dhammananda, a Thai nun, argued eloquently that there is an important difference between upekkha and indifference to suffering. She said that everyone has a right not to suffer; and if we don't help someone in a situation when we could have, then we transgress our own commitment to the Buddhist precept of non-harming. She felt that it is really only appropriate to employ upekkha in a situation when a person refuses to help her/himself. Yeshua Moser noted that complicity issues become apparent when looking at structural and cultural violence. Ven. Dhammananda further commented that when one realizes one's complicity and interconnection, it doesn't mean ending activism but opening another front within oneself as a kind of internal activism. In this way, the group enlarged the perspective on karma from the popular interpretation - "what you did" - to include the issue of complicity and passivity - "what you didn't do" - and finally to one also imbued with intention - "what you can do."
In this way, the participants were led into an afternoon and evening process similar to the afternoon session of the previous day. Using the Galtung framework of the three types of violence, all the men in one group and all the women in another shared experiences of how they had resisted gender violence on personal, community, and societal levels. Such discussions of gender violence within structural and cultural frameworks are an essential aspect of IWP's workshops. Khuankaew notes:
Particularly for women, a structural analysis helps to explain that the suffering women face is not a product of individual karma, action, or misfortune. Recognizing suffering as a result of societal structures empowers women to see the possibility to end it because it is not their fault. They are able to move beyond blaming themselves to identifying violence, understanding root causes, looking for solutions, then working for change. (IWP, 2003)
As we can see here, structural analysis can be a powerful emancipatory tool when it takes in the particularities of historical and social context. On the other hand, we can see the problems that arise when moral values become too general and abstract, as in the way equanimity (upekkha) and karma have often been taught in Buddhism. When morality loses its social and historical context, it can be used in the service of oppressive power rather than as a reminder to respect others regardless of background. Such social and historical amnesia prevents a systematic social analysis of power, wealth, and influence while falling back on personalistic and individualistic explanations of poverty and other forms of marginalization (West, 1999, p. 358). In this way, it is paramount that structural analysis be first grounded and contextualized.
Once such structural and cultural analysis has been performed, the next challenge is generating the type of ethical praxis outlined in my introduction. The emphasis on story telling as a first step creates a social and historical context for ethical dialogue as well as structural analysis. It also serves as a form of inner practice in that the story tellers may experience a type of healing and the listeners may awaken to a new sense of compassion in this act. Khuankaew further commented that in order to empower not only women but also men in this process, it is important to find male allies willing to take part in such meetings. In this way, the issue does not remain a "woman's problem" but is seen in larger terms as also a man's problem and more fundamentally a human problem (Khuankaew, 2003, p. 4). In the evening discussions, a certain amount of tension arose within the group as some of the men expressed anxiety engaging in gender issue discussions. Out of their own insecurity regarding this issue and the increasing assertiveness by women, men experience their own sense of disempowerment in confronting ingrained gender values which also taint their experience of the world. IWP has attempted to confront the combative nature of gender dialogue by engaging in these issues "nonviolently with assertiveness" (IWP, 2003). They see their work as not antagonistic in the sense that women must take the power of men. Rather, they seek to define a unique style of feminine leadership which involves "power sharing, seeing community power as collective. This involves trust building, and collective leadership and decision making" (IWP, 2003). As noted in my introduction, these are also characteristics of a morally critical and empowered ethical praxis.
In these three sessions on gender, we could briefly experience a powerful approach to confronting coercive power. First, story telling helps redefine contexts and expose where social boundaries are drawn. Secondly, structural analysis more deeply examines the issues which arise and acts to critique social boundaries. Thirdly, these first two acts set the stage for the establishment of a new kind of critically empowered ethical praxis within a dialogical community. From a Buddhist standpoint, these sessions showed us more about ways of confronting coercive power situations using non-violent means. Non-violence has often been understood too simplistically as responding to acts of physical, direct violence through political campaigning and civil disobedience. However, non-violence must also work at the roots of coercive power structures by reorganizing power into a non-violent structure which is critically moral and ethically empowered.
Day
Three - Communal and Regional Level: Cultural, Religious and Ethnic
Violence
As mentioned in the previous
section, we continued the process of story telling as the first
act of our ethical praxis, because 1) it helped to reveal the
key issues and key Buddhist principles within a social-historical
context in which a meaningful structural analysis and engaged
response can be made, and 2) it became an important means for
empowering all the participants and creating conditions of collective
trust.
The stories from Indonesia, reasserted the need to move from story telling into structural analysis and the problems of not developing an adequate structural analysis. Through the thirty year rule of Suharto and continuing into today, those in power in Indonesia, including religious elites, have used the smoke screen of cultural violence - ethnic-religious conflict between Christians and Muslims and between Chinese and indigenous Indonesians - to hide the more fundamental structural violence committed by those seeking and defending their economic and political power. For example, violent Christian-Muslim conflict on the peripheries of the archipelago is created by rival political cliques at the center who are competing for the power to control Indonesian society. Buddhists in Indonesia are largely of Chinese descent. Although they have significant economic power, they are political and culturally marginalized from the kind of social activism in which Muslims regularly engage. While this hinders the development amongst Buddhists of the kind of divisive political activism which is rife in Indonesia, it also hinders the kind of structural analysis and awareness and creates its own problems. Indonesian Buddhists engage in the typical type of social welfare activities seen amongst Buddhists in many countries. Although an important service to those in need, these activities can almost be regarded as acts of complicity with tyrannical power, because they clean up the results of direct violent created by structural violence and injustice while never confronting the root structural causes. As in the case of overcoming gender violence, we can see that the Buddhist principles of non-violence and compassionate action need to go much deeper than the surface level of peace and welfare activities.
In his conference paper, Yeshua Moser investigates the problems of complicity and how a structural analysis can lead to a much more engaged form of Buddhist practice and non-violent action. Moser notes that:
Nonviolence is an active term, and it means meeting threats to peace and security, at the personal, communal or ﾔnationalﾕ level, with methods which are not violent, but directly engage the threat at either the direct, structural or cultural level. Buddhism is also an active term, not just a system of belief but a path in which the goal, and the method for reaching that goal, are indivisible. (Yaso, 2003, p. 1)
This understanding is congruent with the notion of karma as intentional, moral action and not passively accepting the results of past acts. Such action empowered by a critical structural analysis leads to a more robust engagement which examines all personal connections with systems of killing and takes measures to remove complicity with them. The examples he cites include adopting a vegetarian diet, since there is a connection with killing for a living on all levels; refusing to pay taxes, much of which go towards military expenditure; and, more controversially, property destruction which disrupts the functioning or production of weapons (Yaso, 2003, p. 1).
One example of this last approach is the Ploughshares movement in the United States, where a small group of individuals have broken into military installations and destroyed weapons in ways that brought no physical harm to others, such as covering the hi-tech components in sand. This example walks a delicate line around the concept of intentional, moral action. As property is inanimate, there is no killing or direct harm involved in its destruction. However, is the act of destruction itself tinged with hateful or angry feeling and intention? There is obviously an important distinction between more systematic destruction of property in which no one is harmed and more anarchic destruction of property where others are put in danger and livelihoods threatened. On this point, universal statements on the nature of what is and what is not violent are not only elusive but also do a disservice to the fundamental principle of the Buddha's teaching as a path of intentional action. On this path, present reality and moral norms create a tension that challenges committed practitioners to avoid the easy way and to continue to challenge themselves to reach higher levels of awakened being.
This challenge was no better embodied than in the stories of suffering which came from the Shan participants of upper Burma. The Shan people share a common Buddhist heritage with the majority Burmans who dominate the military government. Most monks in the region are Burmese with links to the military. Not unlike the aforementioned monastic preaching given to women, these monks tend to emphasize patience or equanimity (upekkha) towards the trouble in this region, and also teach karma as the reason for present sufferings. Some Shan monks have supported the resistance to the military government. However, there is a prevalent view among the Shan people that to recruit soldiers for resisting the Burmese military is evil, because it means taking part in killing and the creation of more bad karma in the future. In turn, they have developed a sense of fatalism that their suffering is due to bad karma from a past life. The idea of past karma has been used to make the people submissive and unable to liberate themselves, so they are waiting for a savior (Jaiyen, 2003). This distorted understanding of karma is the very opposite of Moser's conclusions on non-violence. It has been interpreted here as passivity, so instead of fighting for their rights, the Shan people are fleeing into Thailand.
During this session, the Shan Buddhist scholar, Khuensai Jaiyen of the Shan Herald Agency for News, attempted to explore the full import of the meaning of karma as intentional, moral action in terms of empowering his pacified people to resist the Burmese military. He drew on a version of one of the mythical stories of the Buddha's previous lives, the Mahosatta Jataka, which appears to have been previously altered towards a more militaristic bent. In this story, the Buddha-to-be as King Mahosatta of Videha engages in a defensive counter-attack and conquers King Culani of Kapila. Mahosatta does not punish Culani. Instead he makes friends with him and is able to liberate the entire region by forming a federation of states. Khuensai asked the question, "If the Buddha-to-be as Mahosatta could engage in violent warfare and kill people, how could he have not created bad karma and become the Buddha in a future incarnation?" For Khuensai, the answer lies in intention (cetana). Mahosatta did not engage in warfare with selfish or evil intent but simply to protect the people under his care (Jaiyen, 2003). In this interpretation, karma as inseparable from intention is stretched to its furthest limits. One obviously has to ask what the difference is between a righteous warlord and one who holds a deluded vision of sacred war. Ven. Dhammananda pointed out that one can intentionally engage in a violent, defensive reaction to safeguard others under one's care with a knowledge that negative karma is being created. In the spirit of a bodhisattva who sacrifices his/her good for the benefit of others, one may voluntarily take on the bad karma of killing someone to avoid the death of many.
Finally, Phra Phaisan not only challenged Khuensai's version of the Mahosatta Jataka but more deeply challenged his approach for arriving at his conclusions. Reflecting on Diana Winston's four-part approach to justifying socially engaged Buddhist praxis, we can see that Khuensai focused his legitimization on the two deductive forms, drawing on textual resources (the Mahosatta Jataka) and reapplying core Buddhist concepts (karma as cetana). Phra Phaisan found this inadequate and incomplete, stating, "You may choose to fight and kill, but you cannot justify it by calling your action a Buddhist teaching" (Visalo, 2003). Phaisan further commented that out of respect for the Buddha, we must not twist the teachings to fit our agenda but rather use them to constantly challenge ourselves to grow and develop new perspectives and practices. In this way, he drew on Winston's fourth approach of radical creativity and the authority of a deeply informed experiential practice. The meaning of the teaching of not-self (anatta) is to push beyond fear and the need for quick answers and to constantly expand perspective to make resources out of all perceived threats (to identity).
This renunciation of such a restrictive identity was further reaffirmed from outside the Buddhist tradition by the German Christian participant, Gerhard Koberlin. Koberlin shared his story of an interfaith group working for peace in Bosnia called Abraham. Their powerful and progressive work is rooted in the vision which their name embodies. Abraham refers to the common heritage which unites all the monotheistic faiths in Bosnia. The story of Abraham himself was one of a journey into a new territory in which his old identity had to be given up. Such a journey required openness to the new in a way that transformed fear into trust and faith.
In a story from Australia, Jill Jameson, a local leader of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, spoke of just this kind of endeavor to transform fear and despair into empowerment and moral action. Drawing on the work of Joanna Macy, her group has used vipassana meditation techniques with labor unions to discover where the trigger points are within individuals that lead them in negative directions. A number of Think Sangha participants have used various Buddhist methods to do conflict resolution work. Their approach has been to recreate the fundamental conditions for ethical dialogue by creating new moral orientations. Engendering experiences of key Buddhist teachings of not-self, interrelatedness and compassion through meditative exercises, the moral orientation which sees the other as different, fearful, and even evil is transformed into an orientation of connection and trust. For Jameson, expressing fears at the beginning of a workshop serves as a form of emotional disarmament. Admitting fear is a total act of courage and becomes a point of strength. She related that Tibetan master Chogyam Trungpa said that fearlessness is not the absence of fear but the willingness to face it.
Day
Four - National and Global Violence: Economic and Political Violence,
and Militarism
The third day had been
another one of moving stories leading to an investigation of key
issues. Thanks to Gerhard Koberlin, we were actually able to name
the kind of process that we not only saw as effective amongst
various groups in transforming the roots of violence, but that
also was empowering us as a group to investigate these issues.
From his own work in the monotheistic tradition, he shared with
us the concept of "ecumenical learning" which he defined
as "the power of personal interaction and communication for
group and social transformation" (Koberlin, 2003). As the
meeting entered its final day, Koberlin's ideas and the work that
had been revealed through story telling affirmed the approach
of critical, ethical praxis which I have outlined in this report.
On this final day, it was now time to turn this praxis back inward onto ourselves as our own practice of ecumenical learning. As active participants in these issues, rather than as scholars analyzing them from the outside, we needed to do our own work of transforming fear into trust and deepening our interconnectedness with the world. The last two sessions drew on Joanna Macy's powerful Buddhist-based practices for transforming fear into empowerment (Macy & Brown, 1998). The final set of stories were of the "popular" marginalization that individuals living in the highly modernized North experience. We heard stories from Japan and the United States where instrumental reason has so deeply alienated society that most individuals have become deeply distrustful of their own emotions, abilities and power to create meaningful lives for themselves. As noticed above in Jill Jameson's work in Australia, Buddhist practice directly confronts these feelings, and through meditation and other techniques which Macy has developed, it can transform them into their polar opposites. This type of moral reorientation transforms alienation into a sense of interconnection that creates a form of natural compassion to act out of concern for others.
Phra Phaisan commented on the previous day that the renunciation of self creates a commitment to investigating all that has been perceived as different. From a systemic standpoint, this means perceiving everything that we encounter as a resource for ethical praxis. The concept of not-self (anatta) conforms to a thoroughly pluralistic standpoint where no person or group is marginalized as unworthy, dangerous or evil. Arjuna Krishnaratne of Sarvodaya in Sri Lanka gave us a practical illustration of this approach. In Sarvodaya's work to overcome factionalization and distrust amidst Sri Lanka's ethnic war, they have learned the need to look at the resource potentials of every single actor in their sphere of action. If antagonists cannot be transformed in some way into resources, they at least need to be transformed into neutral forces. In Sarvodaya's case, Krishnaratne noted that providing services that the government did not or could not helped them when the government opposed them. Through such endeavors, they have gained the respect of the government who can no longer ignore them. In this way, Sarvodaya has been able to integrate local police and government officials in their development activities. At present, they even run a meditation program with the police (Krishnaratne, 2003). The Sarvodaya movement stands out as the most successful, mass endeavors to use Buddhist praxis to confront coercive power, principally through its community self-reliance schemes (Macy, 1985; Queen & King, 1996).
From this basis, we returned to the more intimate and creative approach of the first day of the meeting. Participants were asked to make a drawing of their own work as a web of interconnection between their activities and their partners', and then further outward towards other like-minded groups. This exercise was to develop a deep sense of interconnection and solidarity among the participants, many of whom often feel isolated in their own work to overcome the marginalization of their communities. To spin these webs and to link them with other participants' webs gave us all a strong sense of an alternative globalization of peoples working for transformative awareness and social justice. At the same time, participants were instructed to split the circle of each node in the web and to fill in the other half with the groups who oppose the work of each of the participant's partner groups. Finally, the participants were asked to choose two or three of these "antagonists" and explore ways in which they could be transformed into allies, for example, the case of Sarvodaya's integration of the police into their work. The power of Sarvodaya's experience was immediately translated into the group-sharing process of this activity. Krishnaratne ended up working closely with two of the Indonesian participants, Bhikkhuni Santini and Acaw, on an empowered program of lay education regarding women's status in Buddhism, specifically the growing movement for the full ordination of nuns (bhikkhuni) in the southern, Theravada Buddhist tradition. In general, this approach to confronting "enemies" as resources reflects back on our original Buddhist foundation for the meeting in the non-dual perspective of emptiness (sunnata) and not-self (anatta).
In this way, the processes of the fourth day became an integral part of the last session in which we created various commitments to work with one another. A brief overview of these commitments includes:
1. Mutual visits - Visitors will offer emotional support and encouragement though their visits as well as their expertise through workshops and other activities. In some cases, visitors will be learning new skills and methods for taking back and applying to their own work.
2. Writing and Publishing - Two major writings projects emerged from this meeting. The first is to record the stories of many of the participants as a contribution to the further development of socially engaged Buddhism. In this meeting, we discovered that stories are an important approach to deriving socially engaged Buddhist praxis. From a more analytical perspective, there will also be a small project concerning the interpretation of karma and its meaning for social justice.
3. Activism - Participants will support each other's activist campaigns in a variety of ways, for example, popularizing the campaign against the building of a large shopping mall on the complex of the great Indonesian Buddhist ruin, Borobudor.
4. Conferences and Workshops - Some participants are planning to participate in each other's workshops over the next year. Some participants will also attempt to further the work and agendas of this meeting at other meetings they attend together in the coming year.
Conclusions
on Buddhist Responses to Modern Violence
In my introductory section, I spoke of the absence of a split
in theory and practice in traditional Buddhist praxis. I also
spoke of how socially engaged Buddhist praxis attempts to bridge
the modern split between theory and practice. In examining the
processes of this Third International Think Sangha meeting, I
sense a great continuity between the way we worked together
over the days and the ideas we developed concerning confronting
violence. Over these days, we developed an experiential process
which began with story telling and the sharing of personal experiences,
and then moved into deeper structural analyses of the issues which
emerged from these stories. Along the way, we found ourselves
deeply engaged in "ethical praxis," that is, working
as a dialogical community to explore and negotiate acts of personal-social
transformation. As we, the participants, have been directly involved
in communities confronting violence, we became indistinguishable
from the subject matter we were examining. In this way, the process
of coming together to build a (short-term) community to respond
to violence did not differ from the creation of a Buddhist model
for confronting violence. We were for this period a social transformation
community, and our experiences served as a real life experiment
in attempting to respond to violence.
In this way, I believe our group process presents one model, however incomplete, of a Buddhist response to modern violence. Thus, the first act in confronting violence is the one of story telling. As I have discussed, story telling is an essential first act, because it exposes the topology of power through articulation of historical and social contexts. When every participant is given time to express her- and his-story, we can begin to become aware of where margins are drawn in a community or society and where different actors reside in the expression of power in the community or society. Such an exposure of power dynamics immediately sensitizes us to issue of justice and injustice. It also creates a foundation in the reality of lived experience where espoused values and principles are transformed or deformed into customs and traditions. For example, during the meeting, we learned directly from numerous women about the topology of power within Buddhist institutions and within Buddhist society, and further about how such principles as upekkha and karma are deformed under this system of power into aspects of cultural violence as passivity and fatalism respectively.
This act of story telling, however, provides not only an instrumental purpose of exposing such injustices, but also acts therapeutically. For the speaker, it serves as an act of bearing witness and of gaining recognition after a long period of existing in silence and marginalization. For the listener, it can wake up feelings of remorse and compassion in being witness to the real pain of others. In this way, the act of story telling serves as a first step in this overall ethical praxis, because when every participant is given equal time to share his/her experience and feelings, a bond of trust and collectively can be created by which the difficult work of critical dialogical communication can begin.
Structural analysis as a second act is precisely that difficult form of dialogical communication which is the essential step after story telling. Structural analysis provides a deeper examination and critique of the topology and dynamics of power, which have been presented in the first stage of story telling. It is here that analytical tools can be of great service. To begin with structural analysis before a meaningful social and historical context has been set in story telling risks the danger of becoming merely a discussion of ideas. Further, it may marginalize individuals not adept at analytical thinking from the beginning by denying them the power of their voice and perspective which is provided through story telling. In addition, structural analysis without a socio-historical context can become not a further examination of the topology and dynamics of power but rather the cloaking of such topology and dynamics through abstract and analytical rationalizing. If the conditions for trust and collectively are not established in the first act of story telling, then structural analysis will not be embedded in an ethical praxis of dialogical communication.
However, when structural analysis is embedded in such an ethical praxis it sharpens the critical nature of the dialogue. As we saw in the sessions on gender at the meeting, story telling served as a therapeutic device in breaking the silence on suffering and injustice. However, as we also saw, structural analysis goes one step further as a curative device in enabling victims of such injustice to attain liberative insight into the structural causes of their suffering, thereby freeing them from the types of personalistic explanations of their suffering which have been used to keep them imprisoned in self-loathing, fear and passivity. The power of this liberative insight helps to embolden all participants to engage in action to end complicity with the structures of coercive power. As we saw in Yeshua Moser's ideas concerning complicity, the movement to a structural analysis also helps to transform Buddhist teachings into more dynamic and action oriented practices.
Within this second act of structural analysis, a critical morality, in this case Buddhist, acts as an essential guide to the examination of power, violence and injustice. Cultural violence as representative of values of violence operative in a society relates to the moral quality of a society. The problem in modern society is that the overemphasis on instrumental rationality takes us away from an examination of moral issues and cultural values while concentrating on structural ones like the performative efficiency of institutions. In this way, the whole issue of cultural violence is obscured and often overlooked. For the most part, moral issues have already been put to rest through the universal norms embedded in contractual law and the system of justice. This has deep significance for structural violence, because sensitivity to specific social and historical contexts is often ignored for the comprehensive, rational truth of these norms. In this way, the development of modern justice through the championing of universal equality has often devolved into the tyranny of modernistic homogenization which denies the social and historical particularities of persons and place. For example, in the United States, it has usually been seen that the political advances Afro-Americans have made in gaining full civil rights in the last forty years are sufficient for gaining an equal stake in American society. However, as Martin Luther King became acutely aware of in his final few years, the universalism of this political agenda was incomplete, and at times even naive, without a deep analysis of the economic inequalities that continued and still continue to hinder the development of Afro-American communities (Cone, 1991). In this way, the use of self-critical, moral examination during structural analysis leads one away from universalistic, cookie-cutter solutions to problems, such as in the case of the Shan where non-violence is interpreted absolutely and serves to perpetuate injustice through passivity. Instead, self-critical moral examination pushes one towards examining one's connections to systems of tyrannical power and to applying the teachings in a way which acts non-violently by ending complicity and breaking down the culture and structure of tyrannical, violent power.
In this way, a critically moral, structural analysis feeds into the construction of dialogical communities engaged in ethical praxis. When individuals who have engaged in the first two acts of story telling and critically moral structural analysis go on to form organizations and communities, they have the basis for constructing transformative communities of ethical praxis. In this way, ethical praxis is a form of dialogical negotiation of non-harmful and just social contexts underpinned by critical morality and the practice of personal spiritual transformation. For example, Khuankaew's feminine leadership model confronts structural violence by focusing not on the domination of men but on power sharing, trust building, and collective leadership and decision making. In Buddhist terms, ethical praxis means reflecting on how Buddhist practice works to deconstruct cultural and structural violence and using this practice as a basis for critical moral reflection to build new structures and cultures of non-violence. From a socially engaged Buddhist standpoint, this would be the true meaning of sangha, and it would be essentially rooted in an integrated model of learning, such as the "three trainings" sila-samadhi-panna.
In this way, I believe a Buddhist
model of ethical praxis goes beyond the theorizing about dialogical
community by some western thinkers such as Habermas. First of
all, it integrates the non-argumentative but completely essential
act of story telling, which has always been a key feature of indigenous
peoples' approaches to ethical praxis. Secondly, it integrates
the act of inner transformation as an essential foundation to
ethical praxis. The integrated nature of Buddhist practice not
only goes beyond the limits of argumentative, rational dialogue
but also helps to transform the fundamental problem of the split
between theory and practice which haunts most modernist approaches
to ethical praxis.
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Note on Pali Canon References
A. = Anguttara Nikaya
D. = Digha Nikaya
M. = Majjhima Nikaya