Engaged Buddhism

Namaste Friends,

I consider myself a peace activist and I believe that my interpretation of Zen Buddhism indicates that I should be engaged as a Buddhist. Thay was the first person to coin the phrase "Engaged Buddhism." In many ways the term seems to be a contradiction. Buddhists generally have avoided suffering by leaning how to get control of their desires and training themselves to look past the obvious material world, which is really a world of illusion.

Thay, beginning with his engagement against the war in Vietnam started the "ball to rolling." So today, many Buddhist in all traditions have re-examined the precepts of their path and have found a solid basis for social action. Many are confrontion war, exploitation, racism, sexism, homophobia, commercialism, imperialism, nationalism and destruction of the environment.

In his book entitled "Peace Is Every Step" Thay has a chapter entitled, "Mindfulness Must Be Engaged. He wrote, "When I was born in Vietnam, so many of our villages were being bombed. Along with my monastic brothers and sisters, I had to decide what to do. Should we continue to practice in our monasteries or should we leave the meditation halls in order to help the people who are suffering under the bombs? After careful reflection, we decided to do both - to go out and help people and do so in mindfulness. We called it engaged Buddhism. Mindfulness must be engaged. Once there is seeing, there must be acting. Otherwise what is the sense of seeing?"

Engaged Buddhists of the United Kingdom writes on their web site that:

"Engaged Buddhism is engagement in caring and service, in social and environmental protest and analysis, in nonviolence as a creative way of overcoming conflicts, and in "right livelihood" and other initiatives which prefigure a society of the future. It also engages with a variety of contemporary and often controversial concerns of relevance to an evolving Buddhism. Engaged Buddhism combines the cultivation of inner peace with active social compassion in a mutually supportive and enriching practice."

I think we also forget that working for peace does not mean that we protest and work against war. Poverty is violence. Sexism and racism are violence. Homophobia and xenophobia are violence. There is a violence that permeates our mindset, and this violence is sometimes worse than physical violence. Most of it as because of the ideologies that we set up as our political beliefs. Unfortunately, religion many times plays a big part in prejudice and violence of mind. Some religions teach that their path is the only one that is right and anyone who does not accept their savior or their particular doctrine are going to suffer some kind of eternal punishment or some other horrible violent action against themselves.

It isn't just what is happening around us, in our community. The situation in Burma, the Chinese occupation of of Tibet, the political repression of dictators throughout the world, the imperialist and nationalistic war machine of the United States and other nations. Even President Eisenhower, in his farewell address said that we should be weary of the Military Industrial Complex. Corporations are financing wars, especially for the west, that are destroying the lives and the environments of innocent people. Engaged Buddhists would stand with the oppressed people who are working everyday to make ends meet but because of the greedy systems of this world, they cannot get ahead. Violence also is cruelty toward animals and toward all sentinent beings.

But, it all goes back to the way we think and our willingness to take a very close look at our thought processes. Are we willing to bring them under control and to not let the five senses dictate our actions? We allow this as individuals and as a nation. Mindfulness is a way to begin the process of changing how we see things and how we respond to what we think. We cannot change what we think or how we think, but we can change how we react to our senses and our thoughts,.