lotusinthemud

Update to the Third of the Five Mindfulness Trainings: Plum Village Tradition

 

"As many of you know, the third of the five mindfulness trainings has been undergoing revision to support our inclusiveness and support our communities. We should be using the new version in our recitations, and it will appear on future transmission certificates. Here, then, is the updated training with main modifications in bold.

 

Aware of the suffering caused by sexual misconduct, I am committed to cultivating responsibility and learning ways to protect the safety and integrity of individuals, couples, families, and society. Knowing that sexual desire is not love, and that sexual activity motivated by craving always harms myself as well as others, I am determined not to engage in sexual relations without mutual consent, true love, and a deep, long-term commitment. I resolve to find spiritual support for the integrity of my relationship from family members, friends, and sangha with whom there is support and trust. I will do everything in my power to protect children from sexual abuse and to prevent couples and families from being broken by sexual misconduct. Seeing that body and mind are interrelated, I am committed to learning appropriate ways to take care of my sexual energy and to cultivating the four basic elements of true love – loving kindness, compassion, joy, and inclusiveness – for the greater happiness of myself and others. Recognizing the diversity of human experience, I am committed not to discriminate against any form of gender identity or sexual orientation. Practicing true love, we know that we will continue beautifully into the future."

Transforming Suffering Into Compassion

 

Suffering and its unwholesome causes are not to be escaped but to be confronted — and eventually transformed into wisdom and compassion.

~ Reverend Patti Nakai, “Someone Is Jealous of You”

Bhikkhu Bodhi addresses the Climate Crisis at the UN (Video)

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Watch below as Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi addresses the UN on the climate crisis. According to scientists, we have only a matter of years to prevent widespread ecological collapse, and every day new reports suggest that the window of opportunity might be even smaller than anticipated. As Bhikkhu Bodhi points out, much of this gets little attention by mainstream media, “A symptom of how we can seal from ourselves, the real perils that lie just before us.”

Indeed, delusion, often self-delusion, is at the root of, well, most everything in Buddhism. And as such it is incumbent upon Buddhists to seek out the roots of that delusion and see the reality of the climate crisis as it is.

Four years ago, Bhikkhu Bodhi was a signature on the “Call to Action for U.S. and World Leaders to Proactively Address the Adverse Psychological and Social Impacts of Climate Disruption” (see link below), and he has continued his steadfast work to raise awareness about this pressing concern. As he says in the address:

The discourses of the Buddha speak of the causal origins of suffering primarily in the framework of the individual quest for liberation. They show how the mental afflictions damage our personal lives and how was individuals. We can free ourselves from them today. However, as the world has been integrated into a single interdependent global order, we have to examine how this process of causation operates at a collective level and then based on this investigation we must determine the kind of changes we must make in our societies, political institutions, and global policies to avoid the adversities we face as an international community. We can call this a global application of sati sampajañña, of mindfulness and clear comprehension of all the dangers we face together today, the most formidable, the most all-embracing, and the most threatening is the one usually called climate change, but which perhaps might be more accurately called climate destabilization or climate disorientation.

As William Edelglass astutely argued recently:

“Buddhism offers a vast tradition of philosophical and moral reflection. But traditions endure only to the degree to which they address the experience and concerns of each new generation. Our contemporary concerns include justice and inequality, navigating difference in multicultural societies, climate change, and the pervasiveness of information technology. Discerning how to speak, act, and think skillfully in our contemporary context requires us to engage with these concerns. As Buddhists, we should not be afraid of drawing on Western thought when it can help with this engagement.”

Indeed, as Bhikkhu Bodhi says:

Above all, we have to turn away from a social system driven by greed, by the quest for limitless profits, by competition, exploitation, and violence against other people and the natural world, social systems that allow a few to flourish while millions, even billions, live on the edge of survival. Instead, we need to envision new collective systems of global integration that give priority to cooperation and collaboration, to living in harmony with each other and with nature, systems that will enable all people to flourish economically, socially, and spiritually.

Can we do this before it is too late?

Buddhist leaders: sign to raise awareness of the psychological, spiritual, and moral effects of climate change

 

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How to Choose a Teacher ~ Dharmavidya

Dharmavidya writes:

I am often asked how one can select a good teacher. How is one to know if somebody is genuine or not? This seems to be a big worry for some people. They are wary of being tricked. For Western people to give up even a smidgen of their independence is such a big thing they may want cast iron guarantees in advance. Unfortunately there are none.  Of course, some wariness is wise, as not all who present themselves as spiritual guides are up to the job and not everything wrapped in a fancy robe is the genuine article.

Some teachers are erudite, some are illiterate. Some teachers have many disciples, some have only one or two. Some are monks or nuns and some are not. None of these features tell you whether the person has got the Dharma or not. We can think of historical examples. Hui Neng, one of the greatest Ch’an teachers in history was illiterate. Honen and Dogen were both extremely erudite. Bodhidharma, of great fame, is said to have only had four disciples and Jesus Christ only had twelves - and one of those no good.

Some things can give you some clues. If the teacher only really regurgitates the teachings of others, then one might wonder. There is much to be said for loyalty to one’s own teacher, and it may well be that one’s teacher often says, “Well my teacher would have said…” and there is nothing wrong with that, but it is important that the person you choose as a teacher does actually inhabit the teaching, not merely deliver it. The same applies in the case of people who deliver the teaching in a highly intellectual or philosophical way - doing so is not wrong in itself and might be brilliant, but one needs to be able to see how the teacher could answer the question, “And how does this apply to you?” There are plenty of people around who can speak endlessly about rarefied spiritual states that they actually have no first hand experience of and such a person does not make a good teacher in the spiritual sense of the term. A Spiritual guide is not like a school teacher or university lecturer.

 

Being Natural is Rather Unusual ~ Dharmavidya

When we read about Chinese or Japanese Buddhism we come across passages that say such things as that the master “eats when hungry, drinks when thirsty, sleeps when tired.” and the like. We might then think, “what is so different about that?” or we might think that something very profound is being conveyed in a rather mysterious way.

However, it is also worth reflecting that not many people do live in such a way. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that the world has always been divided into two groups, one of which is always hungry and the other never so. It is the same today. In some parts of the world, there is rarely enough to eat and hunger is an everyday experience never fully satisfied, but in the so-called developed world people hardly ever actually experience hunger. They eat long before arriving at that point, following social convention, and, usually, eating far more than they actually need.

The description of the Buddhist master, therefore, is not just an ideal for the individual, it is also a model for harmony in world society. A former president of the USA used quite often to assert that Americans had a “right” to their way of life. In fact, the idea of “rights” is a legal concept that does not really have relevance to this type of pronouncement, but, in any case, we know that if everybody on the planet adopted the American way of life as it currently is we would need four planets the size of the Earth to provide the necessary provisions. The “ecological footprint” of many other rich countries is not so very different.

On the other hand, it does not appear that the Master is necessarily a passionate social activist either. Really he is just living in a natural way. He might sometimes support a worthy social cause - many sages have done so - but his main modus is simply to live an authentic life. There is here a faith that anybody who lives in a more simple and natural way automatically makes an important contribution to the spiritual wellbeing of us all, without making a special point of it. Buddhism minimises self-consciousness.

A lot of “spiritual training” consists substantially in getting people to live in rather overly constrained ways. The trainee tries to get his mind under control in the way one might tame a wild horse. This has some benefits. However, it is worth noticing that while the trainee is trying ferociously to stop his mind going this way and that way, the master has a mind that goes and comes as it likes. How can this be?

When there is sunshine, he enjoys it. When there is rain, too. When the earth is green and when it is brown, crossing the sea or crossing the dessert, everything is full of light. Emotions come and go too, like clouds in the sky. He is not trying to put on a special appearance. To the casual observer, he is nothing special, occasionally a little odd, perhaps, and yet… there is something rare there, a precious jewel that has no name and is not consciously displayed.

When hungry eat. When tired, sleep. And while you sleep so, the Buddhas will sew that jewel secretly into the hem of your robe.

 

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Meditation is an Auxiliary Practice ~ Dharmavidya

The attempt to fit Buddhism into the secular, technical, reductionist mindset of modernity often has the effect of turning the matter on its head. Thus, we now find Western schools of practice – I hesitate to call them schools of Buddhism – in which meditation is the central matter and all other practices are ancillary to it and dispensable. Bowing, making offerings, chanting and so on are presented as cultural accretions somehow stuck onto and burdening the real matter which is the practice of pure meditation. This is like typifying Christianity as prayer technique to which odd ideas about love of God have got erroneously attached.

Buddhism is a religion. It is not primarily a health cure, nor a means to success in the rat race. It begins and ends with taking refuge in Buddha, Dharma and Sangha. This act of faith can then be expressed in a variety of ways such as bowing, making offerings, chanting the holy name or reciting revered texts and so on, and these practices can all be understood more deeply through contemplation and meditation. However, the act of faith is primary and is the pivot around which everything else revolves. Without a sacred focus, meditation is pointless, or wrongly pointed.

Meditation in Buddhism is broadly classified into two forms, calm and insight. Insight refers to experientially understanding dependent origination in one way or another so that one has some appreciation of the frailty of the being who has faith. Calm refers to the experience of receiving the grace, or transference of merit, bestowed by the Buddhas when one abandons self-power and turns to them for refuge. These contemplations can thus deepen one's appreciation of what taking refuge means. Detached from such faith they become mere mental keep fit exercises or, worse, elements in a self-perfection project that can only lead to trouble later.

Mechanical meditation and so-called mindfulness practices do serve the purpose, in a purely practical way, of bringing large numbers of people into some tangential relationship with Buddhism, but they also misrepresent it and can easily immunise people against the real thing. Buddhism is mindfulness based, not in the modern sense of here-and-now-ism, but in the original sense of keeping refuge in mind throughout all one's life. As such, mindfulness is a protection against getting lost in the here and now - in the merely imminent.

Original mindfulness was to saturate oneself in ancient wisdom, wisdom in which reverence for transcendent truth – the Unborn – was primary. In a religious orientation, the mundane is an expression of the holy, the imminent an expression of the transcendent, not the other way about. When it is up-ended in the modern secular manner the transcendent is soon lost sight of and all one has left is reductionism. The Dharma is not a reduction, it is an expansion into eternal life and limitless light. When one takes such a refuge the light is everywhere and meditation is to let one's heart and mind dwell upon it, revere it and be filled with it. Meditate on that, but do not put the cart before the horse. Refuge is the alpha and omega and in the Pureland school our foremost means of expressing this is nembutsu. Try it and see.

 

 

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Learning from Karmic Obstacles ~ Dharmavidya

TEXT: By our daily difficulty in the preceptual life, we awaken to the presence of the myriad karmic obstacles

The preceptual life refers to the attempt to live according to the moral precepts and karmic obstacles refers to the complications and mess of life whereby even the best and fullest attempt to live a perfectly moral life is inevitably frustrated.

The precepts ask us not to kill, not to take what is not freely offered, not to tell lies, not to add energy to quarrels, not to gossip or slander, not to get involved in sexual misconduct, not to lose control of ourselves through intoxication, addiction or compulsive habits and so on. These are all inherently good things. We cannot praise them enough. How wonderful to live such a life. Any yet, when we come to the real business of living, we are soon implicated in all manner of conflicting urges and situations in which it is impossible to keep all precepts at the same time. What is good? Even if one were to do one's best one would still be caught in such dilemmas and a heightened moral sensitivity might even increase the number of problems as one tries to avoid situations of harm, weaving around them and embarrassing others in the process.

The import of the whole verse is that it is through the preceptual life - through the actual sincere attempt to live as moral a life as possible - that one comes to an enhanced or even full awareness of the tangled nature of the existential situation in which a human person has their being and performs life. The suggestion is that this coming to knowledge is a vital part of spiritual maturity - it is necessary. It is something that one has reason to be grateful for.

We can perhaps appreciate that in some degree this is part of the natural process of growing up. Young people come to adulthood, generally speaking, carrying ideas about how best to live. In particular, they may be seeking to live in a more ideal manner than their parents managed or better than seems to be current fashion in the society around them. As they get older and accumulate experiences they come to realise that ‘it is not as simple as all that’. They, hopefully, come to appreciate the fact that there are reasons, reasons why people act in ways that bring unfortunate consequences, reasons why people become enmeshed in situations that then oppress them, and so on. This is often portrayed as a loss of innocence, which it is, and this loss is lamented. However, while there is a charm particular to the innocent child, a charm that is delightful in its way, life asks more of one.

Some people may, indeed, pass much of their life acting the part of the charming innocent, but generally, though this may enable them 'to get away with murder', they leave behind a trail of less than ideal outcomes. Sometimes the superficially 'virtuous' person is less mature than the seemingly more worldly one. Hard knocks teach worldly wisdom and faith teaches transcendental wisdom and the bodhisattva needs both.

This is very similar to the theme of my book Love and Its Disappointment. One always loves, taking love in the broadest possible sense of meaning, but those loves lead one into complications and setbacks, disappointment and doubt. The question of life then becomes not, can one love, but can one love again? Can one go beyond the obstacle and live in the reality? ‘With the ideal comes the actual’ and it is the actual that enlightens, not the ideal. The ideal is a kind of fine delusion, and it is fine, but it is delusion, and the spiritual path must take one beyond it. That does not mean not having ideals, nor not attempting them, but it does mean learning from the experience of attempting to do so.

It is for this reason that in Amida Shu we attempt to keep the precepts while accepting the bombu paradigm. One extreme is to say that because one is bombu it is pointless even attempting to keep the precepts. The other extreme is to make accomplishment of preceptual perfection the criterion of a spiritual life. The latter makes it impossible and the former means that one does not learn and grow. Both equally are sabotage. 

Life is full of irony and invidiousness. When two of one’s friends fall out, what should one do? There are a number of options all of which involve mess and some harm or cruelty. One might side with one against the other. One might hold back in a position of neutrality and be fairly useless to either. One might try to mediate and frustrate both parties. There is no simple solution. Or, the cat brings in a half dead creature that is evidently not going to recover. Does one take it from the cat or not? Does one care for it or ‘put it out of its misery’?  One might have opinions (ideals) about what is the ‘right’ thing to do in such situation, but one has to face the karmic obstacle - the fact that whatever one does there is a downside.

There is a famous Buddhist story of two monks arriving at a stream and a geisha is standing wondering how to get across. One of the monks sweeps her up into his arms and carries her across. The two monks go on their way. Some time later, the second monk says, “How could you do that, given that, as monks, we are not allowed to touch women?” The first monk replies, “Oh, are ou still carrying her - I put her down at the stream.” This is a good story with a useful moral. However, if one penetrates a little more deeply, one can consider, for instance, the position of the second monk and his dilemma. Suppose he had arrived at the stream on his own. Should he break his precept and carry the woman across? What if he got half way across, fell, and she was drowned? How will he live with himself afterwards? Or the first monk, has he really put her down? Actions leave traces. The principle seems simple, but the human reality may be more messy. One may live a more or less renuncient life, but, while hat will reduce the number of occasions for such encounters, it will not eliminate them. The gaisha will still be standing at the stream waiting for one.

Becoming more fully aware of karmic obstacle changes the tone of one’s spiritual life. It brings the ‘great grief’ and the sense of bitter-sweetness, yet it is liberation. It is not tragic that life is tragic. True maturity is, like the lotus, rooted in the mud. The spiritual life is not just about being nice all the time and keeping oneself out of trouble. However, when we look at our own lives, we may well see that a great deal of our style of living and relating is essentially based upon such a motive.

Awareness of karma is a foundation of compassion in several ways. It yields a sense of compassion for the ‘villain’ as well as the victim. It gives one understanding of the sometimes seemingly bizarre behaviour of others and a meta-level appreciation that even when one cannot understand it, nonetheless, there will be reasons that one is blind to. When one sees in this way one falls into blame and condemnation much less readily. Similarly, one is not taken in by over simplistic solutions either in personal life or to the problems of the world. The sense of fellow-feeling is enhanced. We are all in this mess that is samsara and it is here that we have to live the noble life. When we go to the Pure Land we may have less obstacles and might get the hang of it more quickly, but even such know-how will need then to be tested by a return to the material world. 

The meaning, therefore, is an invitation to us to feel some gratitude for the problems, complexities and difficulties that we encounter that are as those of all sentient beings. In this way we grow. We try to keep the precepts and, in the process we acquire wisdom. These are phases in the development of faith. Karmic obstacle is like thick cloud, but even the thickest cloud does not obscure the sun completely.

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To Die in a Cave like Milarepa ~ Dharmavidya

I have recently read an interview with the Buddhist nun Tenzin Palmo who is well known in Buddhist circles for having spent more than twenty years in retreat in the Himalayas practising tantra, living in a cave house in a valley that is cut off for nine months of the year by heavy snow. She now lives near to Assisi in Italy and has founded a nunnery for women who wish to leave ordinary life and continue the tradition of the same kind of tantric practices. Is this not wonderful?

One of the most telling points in the interview is where she talks about the time when her food supplies did not arrive and were delayed many months without her knowing whether they would arrive at all. When asked how she responded to this, her first remark as, "Well, I got very thin!" It is a real spiritual lesson that she took the matter in this practical way which puts it on a par with anything else that might happen in existence. In Buddhism, we 'undergo' life and death. They happen. Freedom is to be in the state in which whatever happens is just whatever happens. We are physically dependent - the monk wanders with his bowl and maybe it gets filled, maybe it doesn't. It is important to recognise this kind of dependency. At the same time there is liberation beyond all conditions.

When pressed a  bit more she said that she could see her rations getting smaller and smaller and so she prayed to die in the cave just as she knew that the great teacher Milarepa had prayed to die in a cave. She said that this prayer gave her great joy. Here, therefore, is a second wonderful spiritual lesson.

There is a lot of talk about meditation and mindfulness these days, framing them as cures for worldly conditions or aids to worldly effectiveness, but the essence of Buddhist samadhi is complete willingness to die. In samadhi, even if one is in a hall with a hundred people, one is as alone, just as at the point of death, and one is completely willing. That is samadhi. If it were to make one more effective in worldly life, that would be completely incidental. Whatever our role or function in the world, we are all going to die.

When one has this kind of relationship with death - has, in a sense, already died many times in samadhi - then one is liberated, because although the physical dependency of the body continues one is not actually dependent upon it so it does not fundamentally matter to oneself what happens. This gives one complete freedom to decide what is best without any element of 'taking it personally'. This is what is meant by being a bodhisattva.

Of course, reflecting upon this, one might realise that one does not have such equanimity. One recognises one's deficiency. One can pray to be helped to become like Tenzin Palmo, or like Milarepa, or like one's guru, all the while recognising that one has not arrived at such a liberation. This recognition of the gap is itself enormously important. It is in that gap that spiritual practice takes place. This, in Pureland, is called recognising one's bombu nature and praying for assistance from the Buddhas.

In the history of Buddhism we have many spiritual heroes. They are all odd characters. They did not do the ordinary conventional things. They broke the mould. They were able to do so because they were, in varying degrees, liberated and they were, in varying degrees liberated because they did so. It is a cycle. There is the cycle of samsara in which we become more and more trapped and there is the wheel of the Dharma that the Buddhas set turning.

Find your own cave in the snow, whatever it may be, and when the worldly world stops supporting you, pray to die there. Miracles may then happen. And if you cannot, then recognise the gap and practice there. If you do so in faith and with sincerity, then your cave will appear naturally.

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The Means of Training are Thousandfold ~ Dharmavidya

What is Buddhist ‘training’? I have written on the dangers of misunderstanding this term before. Here I would like to try to say a little more, since this is an important issue for all of us and especially for those who have made a full time commitment to the Dharma life.

Essentially ‘training’ refers to the transformation that goes on in one through the medium of the relationship that one has with a Dharma teacher. It is the relationship that provides the motive and power. The term ‘training’ seems to imply a series of exercises designed to cultivate a specific talent. Some of that certainly goes on - the teacher wants to see the disciple progress - but technique is not the core of the matter. 

Sometimes people choose a sangha in the way that one might (in the West) choose a college or university. In the East one might choose a college because one wanted to study with a particular teacher and it used to be like that here in the West too long ago. Nowadays, however, we think that what matters is the ‘system’ or the ‘method’, and even the facilities, but to act this way in the matter of spiritual training is a mistake. It is rather like the person who wants to go into therapy who wants to know whether Gestalt or person centred or psychodynamic or cognitive is best. If one wants to do anything of any depth, it really matters very little which system you choose, but it matters a lot whether you get a good therapist or not. 

The relationship that one has with a teacher is a link with the Buddha. You choose somebody who has long experience and some depth of understanding, somebody who has ‘been through the mill’ and learnt about the Dharma, both the hard way and the easy way. The easy way is by listening to good teachers. The hard way is through life experience.

Training might involve getting up early in the morning, or it might not. It might involve many hours of meditation, or it might not. It might involve living a long time in one place or it might be a matter of travelling great distances. It might mean chanting in Pali or Chinese or English or whatever. Whatever it involves it will extend one. One will grow and mature, become more sane and less pretentious. The ‘sekha’ (person in training) is somebody who takes on whatever is needed and does their best with it in a good spirit. Sometimes what is needed is monotonous - the same day after day. Sometimes it is challenging, requiring one to do things one has never done before.

What is the teacher’s role in all this? The teacher, they say, should have ‘grandmotherly mind’. That is to say, a kindly regard for the needs of each person, a delight in seeing them do well. and sympathy for their struggles. Grandmother also has the benefit of long life experience and she does not make great demands because her days are numbered and her needs are few. The teacher is not generally a sergeant major. 

Different teachers have different styles because they are different people, but all real teachers care deeply for their disciples and love to see them blossom. The way that each disciple does so will, however, be special to that person. It is not a matter of processing people in order to make them fit into a mould. In a similar way, the good disciple will come to love the teacher, but each will do so in a different way. 

Sometimes we gather together and hold a retreat or a training period. At such a time we have a schedule and a range of activities that facilitate our life and practice together. Of course, we generally choose activities that are drawn from our own religious tradition. This, however, is not fundamentally necessary. We might get up early, do some meditation and then have a service in which we chant Buddhist texts, but we should not think that by doing this we are working some special magic upon ourselves that is somehow inherent in these activities. We could sleep all day and spend the night doing African dancing and still arrive at the same spirit of faith, love and Dharma.

Some historical teachers have strongly advocated particular practices. Dogen advocated zazen. Honen advocated nembutsu. Nichiren advocated chanting the name of the Lotus Sutra. However, Saigyo wrote poetry and practised asceticism. Ippen gave out fuda. Hui Neng pounded rice. In a sense, all of these people were doing zazen, but not necessarily by sitting still in a certain posture. All of them said nembutsu, but not necessarily using particular words. All of them revered the Lotus Sutra, even those who had never read it. The essence of Dharma transcends particular activities.

All of this can be confusing to the beginner who wants to be told something specific to do and wants to believe that there can be some kind of contract such as that if one does a sufficient number of hours of a specified practice then enlightenment will be bestowed upon one. Many people implicitly think in this way. It is called ‘spiritual materialism’ which is not really spiritual at all; it is just a way of faking it.

There are many specific things one can do: the means of training are thousandfold. However, one must go deeper and that going deeper happens in the relationship and in activities that naturally spring from it. Probably more people have been enlightened while moving rocks than while meditating.

Of course, some people will read of the means of training being thousandfold and think that this means that anything goes and they can just please themselves. Those people err on the side of self-indulgence. Some people will read it and bristle because they are strongly attached to one practice and really want to force it upon everybody. Those people err on the sado-masochistic side. Buddha often talked about these two types of error - one too soft and the other too hard. He had tried them himself extensively and found both wanting. That is why he called his approach the middle way.

The arch sado-masochist was Devadatta, the Buddha’s cousin, who criticised Shakyamuni for being too soft. Devadatta proposed that Buddha hand over the leadership of the order to himself so that he could lick people into shape. The Buddha refused, saying that if he were going to hand it over to anybody it would be to Shariputra because he was wise, but in fact he was not abdicating. Devadatta was competitive. Some people are like that. Whatever the teacher does, they will find fault with it and think that they could do better.

Devadatta got angry and subsequently tried to have the Buddha assassinated. In the texts Devadatta is comprehensively unsuccessful, but in real life he must have actually had quite a following. When the Chinese pilgrim went to India a thousand years later he found quite a number of monasteries still following Devadatta’s approach. However, it must have died out during the subsequent Moslem invasions.

There is some sense in the idea that religious training should be rigourous, but one is really looking for a deep faith, not just a superficial pose or conformity, and certainly not a kind of passive aggression. When religion decays it can become cruel, or merely mechanical. The genuine teacher cultivates tenderness and benevolence rather than rigid rectitude and that kindness is one of the most precious treasures that the disciple can acquire.

 

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Dharmaternative: The problem of real peace ~ Dharmavidya

One way of understanding Buddhism is as an attempt to create an alternative society. Groups of Buddhists are cells in what is intended in the long run to be a quiet revolution, gradually transforming society partly from within and partly from without.

What sort of alternative are we talking about. Evidently one based upon a rather different scale of values from those of materialism and nationalism that prevail at present. The really difficult problem is, 'How are people to live in peace together?' This is a much more difficult problem than most people realise. The common idea is that war is some kind of aberration and for world peace to occur it is just necessary for countries to stop fighting each other, and, in particular, for the other people to stop opposing 'us'. This is naive. There has rarely if ever been a time in history when there was peace all over the planet and the periods when the largest countries have not been engaged in war somewhere or other have been short. We have to conclude that war serves a function or a number of functions and until we can either do without those functions or find means other than warfare of getting them done we shall go on having wars. The problem, therefore, is not really that of how to end war. The problem is how to manage peace. Buddhism is an attempt.

What function does war perform. The first obvious one is coercion. It is fairly well established by social psychology that as soon as a large number of people are involved in anything most of the individuals concerned lose their sense of responsibility for it. This means that even moderately sized communities have to rely upon various forms of coercion and war is simply the ultimate case. Society is disciplined by the fear of war. Can it be done any other way? In our Buddhist communities we are experimenting with alternative ways. We are not always successful, but our attempt is our practice. We are always trying to understand what we are doing more deeply.

One of the problems in understanding what a Dharmic society could be lies in the fact that those in the West who think that they reject materialism and nationalism tend to do so by adopting a range of supposedly ‘progressive’ values that, although superficially more attractive, are not really Dharmic either. Buddhism is not an aggressive crusade for ‘freedom, justice and democracy’. Nor is it aligned with socialism. If it has any parallel in Western political thinking at all, then it is somewhat closer to the ideas of the more positive anarchists, such as Kropotkin, then to most, but in fact all Western political thought comes out of a different mould from that which spawned Buddhism.

In practice, the most Buddhist communities have been rather in the nature of villages or small towns centred on a monastic establishment of some kind. This is not totally unlike Plato’s idea of philosopher kings, except that the ‘kings’ actually have little real power or authority, more a moral influence. Yet even in these small societies there has to be authority of some kind or the crops do not get grown and harvested. The fact is that if people are left to their own devices, they only rarely co-operate in an economically effective way, certainly not sufficiently to get the population fed, let alone provide all the commodities that modern people seek. One element can be a simpler life that needs less commodities, but even this does not solve the authority problem entirely.

Can a society be built entirely on goodwill? A Buddhist group is a selected one. Only people who fit in are recruited and those who don't yet still come are a burden. Up to a point it is a burden that the other members may carry happily, but beyond a certain tipping point it can break the back of the community. In every Buddhist community that I have had experience of there were some people seeking a refuge from life and others providing it. So long as there is a fair majority of the latter it can work, but that is not a random selection of the population at large. It is, in effect, a special group.

Of course, the Buddha's mission can be seen as having been basically to recruit and train such people who could then act as a leaven in society and make the possibility of genuinely peaceful communities more widespread. This, however, is a very long term strategy.

In fact, building Buddhist community is a bit like building sandcastles on the beach. They hold together pretty well until the tide comes in. When strong forces of materialism or militarism arrive in the form of a greed or ideology based invasion, the Buddhists are not of a mind to take up arms and fight back, so the pernicious wave rolls over them like a tsunami and when the extent of the damage is apparent they then either move elsewhere or start again where they are. We believe in karma. We believe that the good done is not lost, despite the disasters. We believe that in time there will be fruit from the seeds planted. One way or another it works out. To operate in this way takes faith. This means that Buddhism has great staying power in the long term but we are talking about the very long term.

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