On June 18, Pope Francis issued a papal encyclical pointing to climate change as the overriding moral issue of our time. The encyclical boldly proclaims that humanity’s capacity to alter the climate charges us with the gravest moral responsibility we have ever had to bear. Climate change affects everyone. The disruptions to the biosphere occurring today bind all peoples everywhere into a single human family, our fates inseparably intertwined. No one can escape the impact, no matter how remotely they may live from the bustling centers of industry and commerce. The responsibility for preserving the planet falls on everyone.

The future of human life on earth hangs in a delicate balance, and the window for effective action is rapidly closing. Tipping points and feedback loops threaten us as ominously as nuclear warheads.

What heightens the danger is our proclivity to apathy and denial. For this reason, we must begin tackling the crisis with an act of truth, by acknowledging that climate change is real and stems from human activity. On this, the science is clear, the consensus among climate scientists almost universal. The time for denial, skepticism, and delay is over.

Our carbon-based economies generate not only mountains of commodities but also heat waves and floods, rising seas and creeping deserts. The climate mirrors the state of our minds, reflecting back to us the choices we make at regional, national, and global levels. These choices, both collective and personal, are inescapably ethical. They are strung out between what is convenient and what is right. They determine who will live and who will die, which communities will flourish and which will perish. Ultimately they determine nothing less than whether human civilization itself will survive or collapse.

Since religions command the loyalty of billions, they must lead the way in the endeavor to combat climate change, using their ethical insights to mobilize their followers. As a nontheistic religion, Buddhism sees our moral commitments as stemming not from the decree of a Creator God but from our obligation to promote the true well-being of ourselves and others.

The Buddha traces all immoral conduct to three mental factors, which he calls the three unwholesome roots: greed, hatred, and delusion. Greed propels economies to voraciously consume fossil fuels in order to maximize profits, ravaging the finite resources of the earth and filling its sinks with toxic waste. Hatred underlies not only war and bigotry but also the callous indifference that allows us to consign billions of people to hunger, drought, and devastating floods without batting an eye. Delusion—self-deception and the deliberate deceiving of others—is reinforced by the falsehoods churned out by fossil-fuel interests to block remedial action.

We thus need to curb the influence of greed, hatred, and delusion on the operation of social systems. Policy formation must be motivated not by narrow self-interest but by a magnanimous spirit of generosity, compassion, and wisdom. An economy premised on infinite expansion, geared toward endless production and consumption, has to be replaced by a steady-state economy governed by the principle of sufficiency, which gives priority to contentment, service to others, and inner fulfillment as the measure of the good life.

The moral tide of our age pushes us in two directions. One is to uplift the living standards of the billions mired in poverty, struggling each day to survive. The other is to preserve the integrity and sustaining capacity of the planet. A rapid transition to an economy powered by clean and renewable sources of energy, with transfers of the technology to developing countries, would enable us to accomplish both, to combine social justice with ecological sustainability.

At the very outset, we must start the transition by making highly specific national and global commitments to curb carbon emissions, and we must do so fast. The Conference of the Parties meeting in Paris this December has to show the way. The meeting must culminate in a climate accord that imposes truly rigorous, binding, and enforceable targets for emissions reductions. Pledges and promises alone won’t suffice: enforcement mechanisms are critical. And beyond a strong accord, we’ll need an international endeavor, undertaken with a compelling sense of urgency, to shift the global economy away from fossil fuels to clean sources of energy.

Pope Francis reminds us that climate change poses not only a policy challenge but also a call to the moral conscience. If we continue to burn fossil fuels to empower unbridled economic growth, the biosphere will be destabilized, resulting in unimaginable devastation, the deaths of many millions, failed states, and social chaos. Shifting to clean and renewable energy can reverse this trend, opening pathways to a steady-state economy that uplifts living standards for all. One way leads deeper into a culture of death; the other leads to a new culture of life. As climate change accelerates, the choice before us is becoming starker, and the need to choose wisely grows ever more urgent.

The post Climate Change Is a Moral Issue appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Every year in ancient Israel the high priest brought two goats into the Jerusalem temple on the Day of Atonement. He sacrificed one to expiate the sins of the community and then laid his hands on the other, transferring all the people’s misdeeds onto its head, and sent the sin-laden animal out of the city, literally placing the blame elsewhere. In this way, Moses explained, “the goat will bear all their faults away with it into a desert place.” In his classic study of religion and violence, René Girard argued that the scapegoat ritual defused rivalries among groups within the community. In a similar way, I believe, modern society has made a scapegoat of faith.

In the West the idea that religion is inherently violent is now taken for granted and seems self-evident. As one who speaks on religion, I constantly hear how cruel and aggressive it has been, a view that, eerily, is expressed in the same way almost every time: “Religion has been the cause of all the major wars in history.” I have heard this sentence recited like a mantra by American commentators and psychiatrists, London taxi drivers and Oxford academics. It is an odd remark. Obviously the two world wars were not fought on account of religion. When they discuss the reasons people go to war, military historians acknowledge that many interrelated social, material, and ideological factors are involved, one of the chief being competition for scarce resources. Experts on political violence or terrorism also insist that people commit atrocities for a complex range of reasons. Yet so indelible is the aggressive image of religious faith in our secular consciousness that we routinely load the violent sins of the 20th century onto the back of religion and drive it out into the political wilderness.

Even those who admit that religion has not been responsible for all the violence and warfare of the human race still take its essential belligerence for granted. They cite the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the Wars of Religion of the 16th and 17th centuries. They also point to the recent spate of terrorism committed in the name of religion to prove that Islam is particularly aggressive. If I mention Buddhist nonviolence, they retort that Buddhism is a secular philosophy, not a religion. Here we come to the heart of the problem. Buddhism is certainly not a religion as this word has been understood in the West since the 17th and 18th centuries. But our modern Western conception of religion is idiosyncratic and eccentric. No other cultural tradition has anything like it, and even premodern European Christians would have found it reductive and alien. In fact, it complicates any attempt to pronounce on religion’s propensity to violence.

In the West we see religion as a coherent system of obligatory beliefs, institutions, and rituals, centering on a supernatural God, whose practice is essentially private and hermetically sealed off from all secular activities. But words in other languages that we translate as “religion” almost invariably refer to something larger, vaguer, and more encompassing. The Arabic din signifies an entire way of life. The Sanskrit dharma is also “a ‘total’ concept, untranslatable, which covers law, justice, morals, and social life.” The Oxford Classical Dictionary firmly states: “No word in either Greek or Latin corresponds to the English ‘religion’ or ‘religious.’” The idea of religion as an essentially personal and systematic pursuit was entirely absent from classical Greece, Japan, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Iran, China, and India. Nor does the Hebrew Bible have any abstract concept of religion; and the Talmudic rabbis would have found it impossible to express what they meant by faith in a single word or even in a formula, since the Talmud was expressly designed to bring the whole of human life into the ambit of the sacred.

The only faith tradition that does fit the modern Western notion of religion as something codified and private is Protestant Christianity, which, like religion in this sense of the word, is also a product of the early modern period. At this time Europeans and Americans had begun to separate religion and politics, because they assumed, not altogether accurately, that the theological squabbles of the Reformation had been entirely responsible for the Thirty Years’ War. The conviction that religion must be rigorously excluded from political life has been called the charter myth of the sovereign nation-state. The philosophers and statesmen who pioneered this dogma believed that they were returning to a more satisfactory state of affairs that had existed before ambitious Catholic clerics had confused two utterly distinct realms. But in fact their secular ideology was as radical an innovation as the modern market economy that the West was concurrently devising. To non-Westerners, who had not been through this particular modernizing process, both these innovations would seem unnatural and even incomprehensible. The habit of separating religion and politics is now so routine in the West that it is difficult for us to appreciate how thoroughly the two co-inhered in the past. It was never simply a question of the state “using” religion; the two were indivisible. Dissociating them would have seemed like trying to extract the gin from a cocktail.

In the premodern world, religion permeated all aspects of life. A host of activities now considered mundane were experienced as deeply sacred: forest cleaning, hunting, football matches, dice games, astronomy, farming, state building, tugs-of-war, town planning, commerce, imbibing strong drink, and, most particularly, warfare. Ancient peoples would have found it impossible to see where “religion” ended and “politics” began. This was not because they were too stupid to understand the distinction but because they wanted to invest everything they did with ultimate value. We are meaning-seeking creatures and, unlike other animals, fall very easily into despair if we fail to make sense of our lives. We find the prospect of our inevitable extinction hard to bear. We are troubled by natural disasters and human cruelty and are acutely aware of our physical and psychological frailty. We find it astonishing that we are here at all and want to know why. We also have a great capacity for wonder. Ancient philosophies were entranced by the order of the cosmos; they marveled at the mysterious power that kept the heavenly bodies in their orbits and the seas within bounds and that ensured that the earth regularly came to life again after the dearth of winter, and they longed to participate in this richer and more permanent existence.

They expressed this yearning in terms of what is known as the perennial philosophy, so called because it was present, in some form, in most premodern cultures. Premodern folk felt themselves to be caught up in larger dimensions of being. Feeling ourselves connected in this way satisfies an essential craving. It touches us within, lifts us momentarily beyond ourselves, so that we seem to inhabit our humanity more fully than usual and feel in touch with the deeper currents of life. If we no longer find this experience in a church or temple, we seek it in art, a musical concert, sex, drugs—or warfare.

Our relationship to warfare is complex, possibly because it is a relatively recent human development. Hunter-gatherers could not afford the organized violence that we call war, because warfare requires large armies, sustained leadership, and economic resources that were far beyond their reach. But human life changed forever in about 9000 BCE, when pioneering farmers in the Levant learned to grow and store wild grain. They produced harvests that were able to support larger populations than ever before and eventually they grew more food than they needed.

As a result, the human population increased so dramatically that in some regions a return to hunter-gatherer life became impossible. Between about 8500 BCE and the first century of the Common Era—a remarkably short period given the four million years of our history—all around the world, quite independently, the great majority of humans made the transition to agrarian life. And with agriculture came civilization; and with civilization, organized warfare.

In our industrialized societies, we often look back to the agrarian age with nostalgia, imagining that people lived more wholesomely then, close to the land and in harmony with nature. Initially, however, agriculture was experienced as traumatic. These early settlements were vulnerable to wild swings in productivity that could wipe out the entire population, and their mythology describes the first farmers fighting a desperate battle against sterility, drought, and famine. For the first time, backbreaking drudgery became a fact of human life. These violent myths reflected the political realities of agrarian life.

By the beginning of the 9th millennium BCE, the settlement in the oasis of Jericho in the Jordan valley had a population of three thousand people, which would have been impossible before the advent of agriculture. Jericho was a fortified stronghold protected by a massive wall that must have consumed tens of thousands of hours of manpower to construct. In

this arid region, Jericho’s ample food stores would have been a magnet for hungry nomads. Intensified agriculture, therefore, created conditions that that could endanger everyone in this wealthy colony and transform its arable land into fields of blood. Jericho was unusual, however—a portent of the future. Warfare would not become endemic in the region for another five thousand years, but it was already a possibility, and from the first, it seems, large-scale organized violence was linked not with religion but with organized theft.

Agriculture also introduced another type of aggression: an institutional or structural violence in which a society compels people to live in such wretchedness and subjection that they are unable to better their lot. Paleolithic communities had probably been egalitarian because hunter-gatherers could not support a privileged class that did not share the hardship and danger of the hunt. Because these small communities lived at near-subsistence level and produced no economic surplus, inequity of wealth was impossible. The tribe could survive only if everybody shared what food they had. Government by coercion was not feasible because all able-bodied males had exactly the same weapons and fighting skills. Anthropologists have noted that modern hunter-gatherer societies are classless, that their economy is “a sort of communism,” and that people are honored for skills and qualities, such as generosity, kindness, and even-temperedness, that benefit the community as a whole. But in societies that produce more than they need, it is possible for a small group to exploit this surplus for its own enrichment, gain a monopoly on violence, and dominate the rest of the population.

This systemic violence would prevail in all agrarian civilizations. In the empires of the Middle East, China, India, and Europe, which were economically dependent on agriculture, a small elite, comprising not more than two percent of the population, with the help of a small band of retainers, systematically robbed the masses of the produce they had grown in order to support their aristocratic lifestyle. Yet, social historians argue, without this iniquitous arrangement, human beings would probably never have advanced beyond subsistence level, because it created a nobility with the leisure to develop the civilized arts and sciences that made progress possible. All premodern civilizations adopted this oppressive system; there seemed to be no alternative. This inevitably had implications for religion, which permeated all human activities, including state building and government. Indeed, premodern politics was inseparable from religion. And if a ruling elite adopted an ethical tradition, such as Buddhism, Christianity, or Islam, the aristocratic clergy usually adapted their ideology so that it could support the structural violence of the state.

Established by force and maintained by military aggression, warfare was essential to the agrarian state. When land and the peasants who farmed it were the chief sources of wealth, territorial conquest was the only way such a kingdom could increase its revenues. Warfare was, therefore, indispensable to any premodern economy. The ruling class had to maintain its control of the peasant villages, defend its arable land against aggressors, conquer more land, and ruthlessly suppress any hint of insubordination. And once states grew and warfare had become a fact of human life, an even greater force—the military might of empire—often seemed the only way to keep the peace.

Military force was essential to the rise of states and ultimately empires, so much so that   historians regard militarism as a mark of civilization. Without disciplined, obedient, and law-abiding armies, human society, it is claimed, would probably have remained at a primitive level or have degenerated into ceaselessly warring hordes. Like our individual inner conflict between violent and compassionate impulses, the incoherence between socially peaceful ends and violent means would remain unresolved. This is the dilemma of civilization itself. And into this tug-of-war religion would enter too. Since all premodern state ideology was inseparable from religion, warfare inevitably acquired a sacral element. Indeed, every major faith tradition has tracked that political entity in which it arose; none has become a “world religion” without the patronage of a militarily powerful empire, and, therefore, each would have to develop an imperial ideology. But to what degree did religion contribute to the violence of the states with which it was inextricably linked? How much blame for the history of human violence can we ascribe to religion itself?

The answer is not as simple as much of our popular discourse would suggest.

Until the modern period, every state ideology was religious. The kings of Europe who struggled to liberate themselves from papal control were not “secularists” but were revered as semidivine. Every successful empire has claimed that it had a divine mission; that its enemies were evil, misguided, or tyrannical; and that it would benefit humanity. And because these states and empires were all created and maintained by force, religion has been implicated in their violence. It was not until the 17th and 18th centuries that religion was ejected from political life in the West. When, therefore, people claim that religion has been responsible for more war, oppression, and suffering than any other human institution, one has to ask, “More than what?” Until the American and French Revolutions, there were no secular societies. So ingrained is our impulse to sanctify our political activities that no sooner had the French revolutionaries successfully marginalized the Catholic Church than they created a new national religion. In the United States, the first secular republic, the state has always had a religious aura, a manifest destiny, and a divinely sanctioned mission.

John Locke believed that the separation of church and state was the key to peace, but the nation-state has been far from war-averse. The problem lies not in the multifaceted activity that we call “religion” but in the violence embedded in our human nature and the nature of the state. As even the great Buddhist emperor Ashoka discovered, even if a ruler shrank from state aggression, it was impossible to disband the army.

When we fight, we need to distance ourselves from the adversary, and because religion was so central to the state, its rites and myths depicted its enemies as monsters of evil that threatened cosmic and political order. Yet casting off the mantle of religion did not bring an end to prejudice. A “scientific racism” developed in the modern period that drew on the old religious patterns of hatred and inspired the Armenian genocide and Hitler’s death camps. Secular nationalism, imposed so unceremoniously by the colonialists, failed to apply the concept of human rights to the indigenous peoples of the Americas or to African slaves. Secular nationalism would as well regularly merge with local religious traditions, where people had not yet abstracted “religion” from politics; as a result, these religious traditions were often distorted and developed an aggressive strain of religious nationalism.

Our world is dangerously polarized at a time when humanity is more closely interconnected—politically, economically, and electronically—than ever before. If we are to meet the challenge of our time and create a global society where all people can live together in peace and mutual respect, we need to assess our situation accurately. We cannot afford oversimplified assumptions about the nature of religion or its role in the world. What the American scholar William T. Cavanaugh calls “the myth of religious violence” served Western people well at an early stage of their modernization, but in our global village we need a more nuanced view in order to understand our predicament fully.

To paraphrase a British commercial: “The weather does lots of different things—and so does religion.” In religious history, the struggle for peace has been just as important as the holy war. Religious people have found all kinds of ingenious methods of curbing violence, and building respectful, life-enhancing communities. Because of the inherent violence of the states in which we live, the best that prophets and sages have been able to do is provide an alternative. The Buddhist sangha had no political power, but it became a vibrant presence in ancient India and even influenced emperors. Ashoka published the ideals of ahimsa [nonharming], tolerance, kindness, and respect in the extraordinary inscriptions he published throughout the empire. Confucians kept the ideal of humanity (ren) alive in the government of imperial China until the revolution. For centuries, the egalitarian code of the Shariah was a countercultural challenge to the Abbasid aristocracy; the caliphs acknowledged that it was God’s law, even though they could not rule by it.

Other sages and mystics developed spiritual practices to help people control their aggression and develop a reverence for all human beings. They sought an equanimity that would make it impossible for one to see oneself as superior to anybody else, taught that every single person has sacred potential, and asserted that people should even love their enemies. Prophets and psalmists insisted that a city could not be holy if the ruling class did not care for the poor and dispossessed. Priests urged their compatriots to draw on the memory of their own past suffering to assuage the pain of others, instead of using it to justify harassment and persecution. They all insisted in one way or another that if people did not treat all others as they would wish to be treated themselves and develop concern for all, society was doomed. But as with Ashoka, who came up against the systemic militancy of the state, they could not radically change their societies; the most they could do was propose a different path to demonstrate kinder and more empathetic ways for people to live together.

In the West secularism is now a part of our identity. It has been beneficial—not least because an intimate association with government can badly compromise a faith tradition. But it has had its own violence. This is because secularism did not so much displace religion as create new religious enthusiasms. So ingrained is our desire for ultimate meaning that our secular institutions, most especially the nation-state, almost immediately acquired a religious aura, though they have been less adept than the ancient mythologies at helping people face up to the grimmer realities of human existence for which there are no easy answers. Yet secularism has by no means been the end of the story. In some societies attempting to find their way to modernity, it has succeeded only in damaging religion and wounding psyches of people unprepared to be wrenched from ways of living and understanding that had always supported them. Licking its wounds in the desert, the scapegoat, with its festering resentment, has rebounded on the city that drove it out.

Excerpted from Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence, by Karen Armstrong. Copyright © 2014 by Karen Armstrong. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.

The post The Myth of Religious Violence appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

The incomparable loftiness of the monk figure—placid and disinterested, having renounced desire—leads many to think of Buddhism as a religion detached from all worldly concerns, especially those of economy. But Buddhism has always addressed a continuum of human flourishing and good, creating what has been referred to as an “economy of salvation.” Metaphors of economy—even of debt—abound in Buddhist texts, and in many ways Buddhism came to be fundamentally shaped by economic conditions and considerations of the era in which it originated.

Depending on material support from moneylenders, the Buddhist establishment from its outset did not seek to hamper the business that made it possible. Devout merchants (setthi) and householders (gahapatis)—controllers of property, moneylenders, often even usurers—were the primary supporters of the early monastic community. Giving material support (amisa dana) to the monkhood thus ranks in Buddhist doctrine as the most effective way for laypeople to generate positive karma, even above following the five moral precepts that define the Buddhist way of life. Out of a concern for its own survival, Buddhism could not condemn the acquisition of wealth, but it could provide principles for its dispensation—namely, giving and generosity (dana). To these ends, the Buddha celebrated wealth creation alongside a call for its redistribution.

The New Market Economy

In order to understand the subtleties of Buddhism’s approach to wealth accumulation, poverty, and debt, we must first have some understanding of the market economy from which it arose. The introduction of the widespread use of coinage to India just a few decades prior to the Buddha’s birth around 500 BCE disrupted existing social orders and also inspired a philosophical renaissance driven by spiritual dropouts like the Buddha, who sought to respond to the new economy.

One of the Buddha’s most poignant accounts of worldly life speaks to the social alienation inherent to economic competition and the accumulation of private property. It remains pertinent to this day:

Seeing people floundering
     like fish in small puddles,
     competing with one another —
               as I saw this,
               fear came into me.
     The world was entirely
               without substance.
     All the directions
                                    were knocked out of line.
     Wanting a haven for myself,
     I saw nothing that wasn’t laid claim to.
     Seeing nothing in the end
     but competition,
     I felt discontent.
              —Sutta Nipata 4.15, trans. Thanissaro Bhikkhu

Widespread use of currency led to a flattening of reality that rendered all goods and services commensurable, nourishing a tendency toward abstraction for which we owe much of our philosophical inheritance today—from Pythagoras in Greece, to Confucius in China, to the Buddha in India. The reformulation of economic relations brought about by monetization triggered previously unheard of levels of social mobility, and mobility’s attendant individualism.

The Buddha skillfully encouraged some of the new social values that emerged from these economic changes. For example, he encouraged the individualism that subverted family structures (monks were “home-leavers”). But he also sought to undermine other emerging values associated with psychological states that fuel the acquisition of capital: desire and greed. The Buddha condemned acquisitiveness at the same time he supported capital accumulation, specifically for its potential to create and multiply merit through generosity. In this way, Buddhism advocated a “Middle Way,” the simultaneous negation of the extremes of asceticism and indulgence. Spiritual health and material well-being were, in the words of economist E. F. Schumacher, natural allies.

The Buddha diverged from other religious thinkers in his embrace of the new market economy. Confucians in China and Brahmans in India strongly resisted this economy, denouncing the economic activities of businessmen and merchants as threats to the moral order of society.

Perhaps the Buddha embraced the new market economy in part because it supported his rejection of the Brahmans’ mythical justifications for the stratification of caste. Rather than speaking about caste, the Buddha spoke instead of economic class, the new social order, which was divided into six categories: very wealthy, wealthy, faring well, faring poorly, poor, and destitute. Such disparities are inevitable in a society organized by the market economy. The establishment of the monkhood, which presented a new, radical kind of freedom, enabled its constituents to stand outside caste and, in theory, outside the market economy altogether.

Can Buddhist Teachings Move Us Toward Jubilee?

The accumulation of wealth among urban merchants and moneylenders, scorned by the then dominant Brahmans, was a boon to the sangha, the Buddhist monastic community, which relied on the generosity of the laity for material support as well as the spread of Buddhist ideas along trade routes. This upwardly mobile class found in Buddhism a justification for its economic activities and new lifestyle. By giving to the monks, the laity performed acts of dana, or generosity, a fundamental tenet of Buddhism. Serving as “fields of merit,” the monks provided an opportunity for laypeople to practice generosity, the first “perfection,” and the basis of all other perfections, leading to enlightenment. Importantly, the amount of merit generated by such transactions was determined by the recipient’s level of virtue and not the benefactor’s, forming a holy alliance between the monkhood and the laity that, at least within the performance of dana, condoned the benefactor’s methods of accumulation. This alliance was furthered by the Buddha’s injunction forbidding those with debt from joining the monastic order, by which the indebted would effectively default.

So instead of challenging the accumulation of wealth, Buddhism critiques the social structures that perpetuate poverty and the unwholesome states of mind that contribute to the suffering of self and others. This is admirable enough, but still leaves quite a bit for Buddhist socialists and Buddhists committed to Jubilee to wrestle with.

Buddhism has historically taken a permissive approach to economic relations. It might be the only world religion that does not formally condemn usury. And being wealthy in and of itself has been taken as a sign of good karma. Yet there remains much in the Buddhist canon that can enrich our thoughts on debt and wealth distribution.

The Ina ­Sutta, the Buddha’s “Discourse on Debt,” praises ananasukha, the pleasure of being debtless. Conversely, it also links indebtedness directly to bondage and, ultimately, suffering, the first noble truth of Buddhism:

Poverty is suffering in the world. . . Getting into debt is suffering in the world. . . Interest payment is suffering in the world. . . Being served notice is suffering in the world. . . Being hounded is suffering in the world. . . Bondage is suffering in the world. . . . When a poor, destitute, penniless person, being hounded, does not pay, he is put into bondage. For one who partakes of sensuality [a layperson], bondage is suffering in the world.

Buddhist texts make ample use of metaphors of debt and exchange to confer spiritual advice, both a sign of the times and a winning bet made by the Buddha on the future hegemony of the monetary economy. At the end of the Ina Sutta, the Buddha goes as far as to use freedom from debt as a metaphor for nirvana (liberation from samsara, the indefinitely repeated cycles of birth, misery, and death caused by karma):

[Knowledge in the total ending of the fetters of becoming] is the highest knowledge
that, the happiness unexcelled.
     Sorrowless,
     dustless,
     at rest,
that
          is release from debt.

For Jubilee, perhaps the most instructive concept in Buddhist thought is that of karmic debt, for which financial debt is often used as a metaphor, as it is in these final lines. Born as humans, we all have karmic debt, the first one being to our parents, who brought us into this world, raised us, fed us, and guided us. This debt extends to all our benefactors—teachers, friends, and anyone else who has acted with our well-being in mind. But this is not a debt that can be easily repaid. For such an infinite debt, no material compensation is sufficient. In fact, the only way to repay such a debt is to become enlightened ourselves and endow others with the conditions for enlightenment. Thus, according to the Kataññu Sutta, we become debtless:

But, O monks, one who . . . encourages his ignorant parents, settles and establishes them in wisdom—such a one, O monks, does enough for his parents: he repays them and more than repays them for what they have done.

In other words, recognizing our true debts establishes the basis for the discernment of contrived debts, and thus any kind of resistance against them. This old Buddhist idea is freshly relevant in the context of contemporary efforts to build a debt resistance movement. In fact, it sounds surprisingly similar to the Debt Resistors’ Operations Manual. “To the financial establishment of the world,” the manual reads, “we have only one thing to say: We owe you nothing.” It continues:

To our friends, our families, our communities, to humanity and to the natural world that makes our lives possible, we owe you everything. Every dollar we take from a subprime mortgage speculator, every dollar we withhold from the collection agency is a tiny piece of our own lives and freedom that we can give back to our communities, to those we love and we respect.

Repaying Our Karmic Debts

In the Buddhist approach to debt, wealth can be accumulated, but only so that it can in turn be given away to those to whom we are truly, karmically indebted. Production and multiplication of merit-creating wealth is thus a noble determination. One who acquires lavish wealth, the Buddha said, should provide for the pleasure and satisfaction of himself, his loved ones, and his associates, and also for priests and contemplatives.

Buddhist monasteries for a long time accomplished a kind of redistribution of wealth, supporting mendicants who owned nothing. They also invested in local economies, providing an alternative to local moneylenders. In later years, however, some monasteries (such as in Medieval China) started making high-interest loans and meddling with debtors’ contracts. A Burmese proverb characterizes Buddhist economic excess succinctly: “The pagoda is finished and the country is ruined.”

As greed—the motor of capital accumulation and, in Buddhism, one of the three “poisons” that binds beings to the wheel of samsara—became institutionalized in the new social order, the Buddha edged out a place in society where greed’s opposite, generosity, could flourish.

While the production and multiplication of wealth creates conditions for merit in the form of virtuous giving, greed annihilates merit. The Buddha said that even if one could transform one single mountain into two mountains of solid gold, it would still not provide complete and lasting satisfaction of a single person’s wants. Such is the unlimited nature of desire. From the Buddhist view, then, capital accumulation does not find its end in capital accumulation, but in its transmutation into merit through generosity. “To have much wealth and ample gold and food, but to enjoy one’s luxuries alone is a cause of one’s downfall,” the Buddha says in the Parabhava Sutta. Wealth is not the enemy of spiritual development; it has an enormous potential to create merit—but not principally from lending, but giving.

For this reason, even to live modestly while retaining great wealth is sinful. In the Aputtaka Sutta, the Buddha speaks of a moneylender who “ate broken rice and pickle brine” and wore only “hempen cloth,” riding around in a “dilapidated little cart.” Many lives ago, the moneylender had given alms to a contemplative, leading the moneylender to be reborn seven times with great fortune. But in his subsequent lives the moneylender failed to create virtue with his fortunes, passing up many opportunities to generate merit through generosity. For this reason, after the merit generated for seven lifetimes ran out, the moneylender found himself in one of the hell realms.

The Evil of Endless Accumulation

Today’s ultra-wealthy commit this same evil of endless accumulation without redistribution. Moneylending through the financial establishment, effectively indebting others in order to create profits, does not create merit but destroys it. Such a system of debt has helped concentrate 40 percent of the nation’s wealth in the hands of 1 percent of its population, while the bottom 60 percent owns just 2.3 percent of the nation’s wealth. Debt today encourages the upward distribution of wealth, whereas the Buddha seems to have advocated its downward distribution.

In the Cakkavatti Sihanada Sutta, the Buddha makes clear that charity, and philanthropy especially, is never enough. Giving advice to a king, he says, “Whosoever in your kingdom is poor, to him let wealth be given.” When a king comes to power and neglects this duty, he is faced with social deterioration that can be reversed neither through recourse to charity nor through justice (i.e., brutal punishments): “Thus from goods not being bestowed on the destitute, poverty, stealing, violence, murder, lying, evil-speaking, and immorality grew rife.”

Considering that Buddhist texts tend to concentrate unrelentingly on defilements of the mind as the roots of suffering, this passage is remarkable in that it focuses instead on social and economic injustice as a foundational cause. Here, the ignorance, desire, and hatred of the people—the three poisons—are traced directly back to the failure of the state rather than to their own individual moral failings. When the king attempts to correct social strife by dispensing charity, this produces only more negative results, clearly demonstrating that charity cannot stand in for economic justice. Perhaps most importantly, the Buddha places the responsibility for the material well-being of the poor on the government. There exists no other power capable of enacting any progressive economic policy, including debt forgiveness.

This gets to the problem at the heart of the massive proliferation of personal debt in the United States: the country’s long-term disinvestment in public goods such as higher education, health care, and housing. If wealth, of which there is no shortage, is not shared with the poor in such forms, inequality becomes exacerbated in the form of debt, which increases the burden of poverty in the form of interest.

Vital to Buddhist doctrine is the conviction that all people, regardless of social position, are capable of becoming enlightened, of becoming buddhas. Poverty and the stress it entails, however, can be real barriers to spiritual development. The Buddha recognized that becoming free of worries about our material welfare enables us to develop our potentials. If release from karmic debt is the goal of Buddhist thought and practice, then release from economic debt is its precondition.

“Buddhism and Debt” in Tikkun, Volume 30, no. 1, p. 35. © 2015, Tikkun Magazine. All rights reserved. Republished by permission of the copyrightholder, and the present publisher, Duke University Press.

The post The Economy of Salvation appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Today marks Burma’s Martyrs’ Day, a holiday commemorating the anniversary of the assassination of anti-imperialist revolutionary Aung San, father of the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and newest member of Burmese parliament Aung San Suu Kyi. Recognized as the architect of Burma’s independence from Britain, the young leader was gunned down in a government building on July 19, 1947 along with six of his cabinet ministers, just six months before his country would achieve independence. In Burma, today is a day of mourning, both of the leader and the principles that would have likely become manifest in Burmese society if his life had not been cut short.

In the pages of Tricycle early this year, Burmese activist and scholar Maung Zarni demonstrated how Aung San’s ideals stood in opposition to the recent wave of Buddhist-led violence that we continue to cover closely:

Marxist-inspired revolutionary nationalists led by the martyred Aung San (Aung San Suu Kyi’s father) set out to forge a new multiculturalist, secular, and civic nationalism. In 1948, after Aung San was assassinated by a rival Burmese politician… Burma plunged into a long series of armed revolts against the central state. Aung San’s successors gradually abandoned any attempts to secularize Burmese nationalism along the lines of civic nationalism, which would have moved the Burmese away from the premodern provincialist blood- and faith-based view of national identity.

The victims in the assassination of Aung San and his cabinet represent a wide range of Burmese (not just Burmese Buddhists), and include a Shan, a Karen, and a Muslim, U Razak, then Minister of Education and Planning. In addition to being Chairman of the Burma Muslim Congress, U Razak was also a chairman of the Anti-Fascist People’s Freedom Party—a political party amalgam of the Communist Party of Burma, the Socialist Party, and Aung San’s National Army. Their policy rejected the partitioning of the nation along community or religious lines. Aung San and the principles he and his government advocated thus remain relevant to the most pressing issues the country faces today.

As Burma opens up to the forces of the global market at an accelerating rate, we are reminded of Aung San’s anti-imperialist views that strongly opposed economic exploitation. Before his assassination, he spoke openly against the British and accused them of destabilizing the region in order to protect their interests, a position that many suspect got him killed. The assassination of Aung San led to what Burma’s (or “Myanmar’s”) current president Thein Sein has called “the longest-running set of armed conflicts anywhere in the world.” Many foreign companies, such as China’s state-owned firms, have benefited immensely from the country’s perpetual unrest, and so have the handful of Burmese in and associated with the country’s former military regime. Now that Burma is opening to foreign investment, any multinational that can afford to bid stands to benefit. The problem is that that benefit, at least in the past, has not trickled down.

For example, despite Rakhine (Arakan) State’s plentiful natural resources, the region remains the second poorest in Burma, which is one of the poorest nations in Asia. The government has given the Chinese permission to begin surveying sites for mineral deposits, a move met by resistance from local villagers, whose protests have been suppressed and participators arrested as recently as April. A China-backed petroleum pipeline, slated to begin transporting gas in September, has also elicited grassroots protests.

A combination of the region’s overwhelming poverty, ethnic diversity (the highest concentration of Rohingya in the country, at one point as high as 40%), marginalized Buddhists (Rakhine Buddhists are distinct from the “Burmese Buddhist” majority that rules the nation, and have historically been in conflict with them), as well as adjacency to Bangladesh and the Bay of Bengal came together to create a natural “ground zero” for an outbreak of anti-Muslim violence.

But there is hope. Today in Rangoon (Yangon), Burma’s largest city and commercial capital, hundreds took to the streets to mourn the assassination and celebrate the memory of the leader that led the country to independence. Such demonstration was prohibited until the current government (what The Irrawaddy calls the “quasi-civilian government”) came into power in 2011. Martyrs’ Day was declared a holiday following the official independence of the country, and was publicly celebrated until the popular uprising of 1988, at which point the military junta, fearing unrest, barred public gatherings. Now the holiday, and the political spirit that accompanies it, is making a comeback.

On the holiday, in an interview aired earlier, President Thein Sein shocked supporters when he announced that he was not preparing himself to contest the 2015 presidential election, and that he had “no objections” to opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi, General Secretary of the National League for Democracy, running for office. The former prisoner of conscience will still require a constitutional amendment in order to run for office, as the current law forbids anyone married to a foreigner or who has foreign children from being eligible for office. (Suu Kyi was married to the late British academic Miachael Aris, with whom she had two children, both British.) The challenge of convincing a military-dominant parliament to amend the constitution remains, but if accomplished, Suu Kyi will be the leading candidate for the presidency. On this Martyrs’ Day many are hoping, in the “Golden Land” of Buddhism and beyond, that Aung San Suu Kyi will have the opportunity to continue her father’s legacy.

—Alex Caring-Lobel

The post On Martyrs’ Day, Burma’s Past Meets its Future appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Just hours ago, Burmese President Thein Sein declared a state of emergency in central Burma due to killing, destruction of property, and general rioting in the streets of the town of Meikhtila. Violence erupted following a dispute between a Muslim gold shop owner and Buddhist customers. After four nearby gold shops were burnt to the ground, a 1,000-strong mob of Buddhists ran riot through the Muslim neighborhood. The death toll is currently being reported at at least 20, but this number will likely rise. TIME reports:

Journalists attempting to report in the area have been threatened. A photographer for the Associated Press reportedly had a foot-long dagger placed against his neck by a monk who had his face covered. The confrontation was defused when the photographer handed over his camera’s memory card. Late on Friday, the Burmese government said that nine reporters trapped amid the unrest had been rescued by local police and evacuated from the area.

On social media, residents reported seeing bodies scattered by the side of the road and women and children lying helpless, their homes destroyed. U Aung, a Muslim lawyer living in Meikhtila, told TIME that the violence was already spreading to nearby townships. “They are burning mosques and houses and stealing Muslim property,” said Aung.

Tricycle readers will be familiar with the Buddhist-led violence against the Rohingya Muslim minority in western Burma from the article “Buddhist Nationalism in Burma” in the current issue. In the article, Burmese dissident and democracy activist Maung Zarni makes a convincing argument for the characterization of recent anti-Rohingya violence as genocide. Zarni highlights the harnessing of the same sangha-led forces that occasioned the “Saffron Revolution” (2007) to accomplish these ends.

Recent unrest in Meikhtila suggests two important things. First, anti-Muslim violence and rioting has spread beyond the western Burmese Rakhine state and into the heart of Burma. Second, since the violence appears to be directed at Muslims of Indian origin—not Rohingya Muslims—this would seem to corroborate Zarni’s assertion of the anti-Muslim, religious sentiment of these riots, repeatedly dismissed as “sectarian violence” by many mainstream media outlets at the time of the outbreak of violence last year. (TIME quotes Chris Lew, founder of The Arakan Project: “the perception of last year’s unrest as sectarian rather than religious was inaccurate.”)  Zarni makes this contention in his article for Tricycle and reiterated the point when I interviewed him over Skype from Indonesia the day before the last. We also spoke about his objection to the term “communal violence,” which TIME has used in the article quoted above, and the reasons why the conflict hasn’t been called a genocide. The anti-Muslim racism we’re currently witnessing can be tracked back to Burma’s colonial past, which Zarni adumbrates in the article and further elaborates in our interview. Zarni’s article for Tricycle can be found here and our interview will run on the Tricycle blog on Wednesday.

In other news, Ariana Huffington, chair, president, and editor-in-chief of the Huffington Post, has authored an article on corporate mindfulness on her site. Titled “Mindfulness, Meditation, Wellness and Their Connection to Corporate America’s Bottom Line,” the article peddles the benefits of corporate values and its platitudes regarding “performance and productivity”: “I do want to talk about maximizing profits and beating expectations—by emphasizing the notion that what’s good for us as individuals is also good for corporate America’s bottom line.” Most of the piece focuses on cutting healthcare costs to corporations by promoting mindfulness meditation.

Ironically, the research touted here was conducted through a partnership between healthcare behemoth Aetna and Duke University, in which yoga and other mind-body therapies were made available to all Aetna employees nationwide. Apparently, Aetna is not only too cheap to pay their patrons’ medical costs, they’re also too cheap to pay those of their own employees.

The one company that Ariana Huffington reports “gets it,” is Google, whose in-house mindfulness consultant Chade-Meng Tan ensures the happiness of its employees through the stresses and invasiveness of 80-hour workweeks. In such a context, mindfulness reveals itself as the most recent incarnation of industrial psychology, a field of knowledge that has proven effective in pacifying workers and improving their “performance and productivity,” regardless of any inhumane workplace conditions and expectations, or the deleterious effects of their work on the world-at-large (such mindfulness practice has most famously been taught to Monsanto workers).

Huffington ends the article, out of the blue, by quoting Institute for Mindful Leadership founder Janice Marturano: “We have one life. What’s most important is that you be awake for it.” More honest and in keeping with the rest of the article might be, “We have one life. What’s most important is the bottom line.”

The post Buddha Buzz: Dagger-Wielding Monks and Mindfulness in Service of the Bottom Line appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Over at the Buddhist Peace Fellowship website, frequent Tricycle contributor David Loy has published a letter, “Can Mindfulness Change a Corporation?” to William George, a Goldman Sachs and Exxon Mobil board member who has been meditating since 1974 and frequently advocates for the introduction of mindfulness techniques into the American corporate world. Loy’s insights into the social implications of Buddhism’s transmission to the West have been a highlight of Tricycle for years (check out his piece “Why Buddhism Needs the West” and his review of David McMahan’s book The Making of Buddhist Modernism), and this letter is another thought-provoking read from the professor and Zen teacher. Loy writes to George:

The debate within American Buddhism focuses on how much is lost if mindfulness as a technique is separated from other important aspects of the Buddhist path, such as precepts, community practice, awakening, and living compassionately. Traditional Buddhism understands all these as essential parts of a spiritual path that leads to personal transformation. More recently, there is also concern about the social implications of Buddhist teachings, especially given our collective ecological and economic situation. …

What I’m concerned about is the “compartmentalization” of one’s meditation practice, so that mindfulness enables us to be more effective and productive in our work, and provides some peace of mind in our hectic lives, but does not encourage us to address the larger social problems that both companies [Goldman Sachs and Exxon Mobil] (for example) are contributing to.

Tricycle‘s Richard Eskow brought up these same themes in his Fall 2012 article “Buying Wisdom,” which took a look at the 2012 Wisdom 2.0 conference; a conference, as Eskow wrote, on “mindfulness for the Silicon Valley crowd.” With the 2013 Wisdom 2.0 conference beginning today, there’s no better time to revisit Eskow’s thoughts on the true potential of mindfulness:

If “mindfulness” is to create genuine change in our society, it must involve being mindful of more than just our own need for comfort, good health, or serenity. It must entail being mindful of the social and economic forces that allow some to prosper while others struggle, forces that promote and perpetuate certain behaviors and thought patterns while discouraging or suppressing others. Without that awareness, “mindfulness” will quickly descend into another luxury item that permits the few to ignore the impact of their behavior on others.

The post Can mindfulness change a corporation? appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

This guest blog post comes our way from Joshua Eaton, an editor, writer and translator. Eaton holds an M Div in Buddhist Studies from Harvard University. His most recent piece for tricycle.com is “Making Buddhism accessible to working-class people.”

Occupy Sravasti: How Buddhism Inspires Me to Occupy

By Joshua Eaton

Such a senseless manifestation
Who is monstrously greedy
And amasses riches insatiably
Is called the poorest of all.

Your Majesty, you levy harsh taxes
And punish the innocent for no reason.
Infatuated with your sovereignty,
You never heed
The future effects of your actions.

While you enjoy power in this world,
You do not protect your subjects,
And have no pity
For the poor and suffering.

When I first read these words I was blown away. It was the fall of 2009 and I was in the middle of  researching my master’s thesis on Buddhism and social justice. I found them in a little-known text called the Scripture Requested by Surata, where they form part of a long address by the saint Surata to the unjust and greedy king of Sravasti. They spoke to my deep desire for a stridently engaged Buddhism in a way nothing had ever done before. Surata was my new patron saint.

His story begins one morning when he stumbles on the most unlikely of objects: a golden bell made at the beginning of the eon, a bell worth more than all the world. A crowd gathers quickly. Being a saint, Surata declares that he will give his bell to the poorest person in Sravasti. The oldest man in the city—who is also its poorest citizen, as is often the case today—steps forward to claim his prize. However, Surata turns the man away. Surata proceeds to barge straight into the royal treasury—crowd in tow—and offer the bell to the fabulously wealthy King Prasenajit instead. Everyone is, of course, baffled. Surata explains his bizarre behavior by issuing the scathing indictment of royal greed and corruption that so inspired me when I first read it in 2009.

What I couldn’t have known then is how timely Surata would become. On 17 September 2011, Occupy Wall Street set up a permanent encampment in Zuccotti Park (aka, Liberty Plaza), right next to Wall Street. This singular act set off a movement that spread like wildfire across financial districts from Oakland to Oslo. Now, after a brutal nationwide crackdown that erased most of the encampments and a long winter lull, the Occupy movement is starting to show green shoots. We recently saw scores of protesters arrested as they attempted to re-occupy Zuccotti Park, which made the front page of the New York Times’ online version. Meanwhile other occupations across the country are laying plans for new encampments, Occupy Boston is leading the charge for a nationwide day of action against public transit cuts on April 4, and everyone is gearing up for International Workers’ Day on May 1. The time is ripe for an American Spring.

Occupy’s initial, meteoric rise came with a flurry of criticism from all quarters. Some of this criticism—over its lack of organization, its break with established community organizations, its demographic makeup, its lack of clearly defined goals—is healthy and constructive. However, much of the criticism has focused on Occupy’s tone and tactics rather than on these more substantive issues. This is understandable to a certain extent. After all, Occupy has taken over public parks where people ordinarily go for lunch or take their children on the weekends. It has gnarled traffic by taking over bridges and marching in the streets during rush hour. It has brought out legions of young protesters in Guy Fawkes masks to chant “We are the 99%,” refusing to give in to those who call this slogan divisive. Despite its remarkable nonviolence, the movement is uncompromising, audacious, and often downright rude. 

If I’m honest, I’ll admit there are times when I’m put off by all this. It goes against my working-class southern upbringing, which taught me to be scrupulously polite and to keep my head down. Sometimes I worry that it also goes against something much more precious. Buddhism values calmness, non-attachment, and compassion. This is a far cry from “We are the 99%” or “Banks got bailed out; we got sold out.” There is always a nagging fear in the back of my mind that aggressively confronting greedy corporations, corrupt governments, and repressive security agencies might keep me from cultivating love, kindness, and compassion for the flesh-and-blood people who staff these systems of violence. I worry that in fighting a dragon I may become one. I worry that I cannot be a good occupier while also being a good Buddhist.

But what then of Surata? After all, a treasury is more than just a warehouse for gold; it’s also a center of political and economic power. The greedy king would have felt secure there—surrounded by his wealth, fawned over by his advisers, hidden by thick walls, guarded by men with weapons and the constant threat of lethal force. Those following Surata would have been precisely the kinds of people the king wanted to avoid (and precisely the kinds of people our own society either warehouses or ignores): destitute, foul, emaciated, diseased, schizophrenic, elderly. By entering the treasury Surata violated the king’s physical and emotional security. Not only that, but Surata also violated the authority and integrity of the State. It wasn’t just a threat to the king’s person, but to the very institutions of society, to law and order and national security. When Surata barged into the treasury it was unbelievably kind, but there was hardly anything polite about it.

Neither were many of the social movements I idolize nearly as genteel as I’d like to imagine. The marches, boycotts, and sit-ins that marked the Civil Rights Movement may have been nonviolent, but they were also meant to disrupt the ordinary patterns of day-to-day life. People couldn’t go out to lunch with friends because the lunch counter was blocked by a sit-in; or their hours were cut because none of the black people in town were riding the bus they drove for a living; or they were inconvenienced in a thousand other ways big and small. In fact, Martin Luther King Jr. often referred to nonviolence as “creative maladjustment,” with the idea that those who practiced it must be maladjusted to society’s injustices. And we know that maladjustment always creates friction.

Just as King shows me that nonviolence can still be razor-sharp, Surata shows me that Buddhism can be precious without being precious. This doesn’t mean that I’ve abandoned my ideals of love and compassion, or that I don’t ever question my actions to make sure they remain nonviolent. But King and Surata reassure me whenever I’m tempted to abandon forceful action altogether for an approach with more sweetness and light. They show me how being kind and being polite are different, and often opposite. It’s a lesson I’ll need to carry with me as the Occupy movement reemerges for the spring; we have appointments to keep at more than one treasury.

The post Occupy Sravasti appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Week 2 of Sylvia Boorstein’s Tricycle Retreat begins today! The talk for this week is titled Ethics: The Bliss of Blamelessness.

Thanks to those of you are sharing thoughts and questions on our discussion board following the retreat, it really helps bring these talks to life.

For those of you just tuning in, the retreat is called, “The Whole of Life as Practice,” guiding us through the Metta Sutta as a focal point for exploring the Buddha’s teachings on morality, mental disciple, and wisdom. Sylvia’s short article in our Spring 2012 issue highlighted the retreat, which can be read here.

If you haven’t signed up as a Sustaining or Supporting Member, please do so here to watch Sylvia’s retreat—along with our other 28 previous retreat teachings!

The post Week 2 of Sylvia Boorstein’s Retreat Begins Today! appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Does anyone remember when Hungary withdrew official recognition for all religious organizations in the country except 14? Well, good news. They’ve added 18 more, 5 Buddhist groups among them. Of course, that still leaves over two hundred religious sects that aren’t recognized, but at least Hungary is acknowledging that Buddhism (and Islam, and Jehovah’s witnesses, apparently) exists within its borders.

I was surprised to see the same amount of media attention given to two different Tibetan causes this week—that is, barely any attention. The first cause was a protest against a Minnesota beer ad that featured the Dalai Lama in a blond wig, next to a beer bottle and the words “Doing Good. Now available in Blonde.” Suffice it to say that the Tibetan population in Minnesota was none too happy about this. The Minneapolis Star Tribune covered the reaction:

‘It appalled a lot of people,’ said Jigme Ugen, a local Tibetan activist who said he was offended by the image of his spiritual leader used to promote alcohol. He compared it to using Gandhi’s picture to sell guns or the pope’s image to promote condoms.

Equally disturbing, he said, was the fact that the ad used what appeared to be an altered photo of the Dalai Lama, replacing his shaven head, as is customary for monks, with blond hair.

Ugen, who says he used to work in advertising and can appreciate an edgy ad campaign, said this one crossed a line, calling it a ‘cheap publicity stunt.’

The beer company, Finnegans, pulled the ad and replaced the Dalai Lama with “St. Ashlee, the Patron Saint of Blondes.” Personally, I think Finnegans needs to hire a new advertising team.

The second cause is the indefinite fast that three Tibetans are holding in front of U.N. headquarters in New York. Today is Day 10. I went up there yesterday evening to see if they are still there, because there have been some reports of the NYPD harassing them. They are still there, and the NYPD are harassing them. Tenzin, a young man who is part of the Tibetan Youth Congress, told me that they have been forced to remove the tents that were protecting the hunger-strikers from the below freezing weather we have had this week as well as the mattresses that they were lying on, citing concerns due to Occupy Wall Street. Now, they are lying on air mattresses beneath piles of blankets. Luckily, they have set up beneath a construction overhang, which protects them from the worst of the elements. This short video, taken 6 days ago, constitutes most of the press attention that the hunger-strikers have received so far:

Speaking of Occupy Wall Street, do you remember this man? His picture was featured on the Tricycle blog a few months ago.

His name is Pancho Ramos Stierle, and he was arrested in November while meditating at Occupy Oakland. Although there were concerns that he was going to get deported, as he is a Mexican citizen who is in the U.S. illegally, it seems that he has prevailed and is still here. There was a great interview published with him last week in Yes! magazine. From the interview:

Sarah van Gelder: So what happened during the actual arrest?

Pancho Ramos-Stierle: On Mondays we practice silence, and the police officer who arrested us thought that we were deaf because we were not speaking. So he got a notebook and a pen. It was very considerate of him, and I could feel his energy shift a little, and so when he gave me the notebook I wrote, “On Mondays, I practice silence, but I would like you to hear that I love you.”

When he read that, he had this big smile and looked me in the eye and he said, “Thank you. But, well, if you don’t move, you’re going to be arrested. Are you moving or not?”

So I wrote back, “I am meditating.” He said, “OK, arrest them one by one.”

That was one of my favorite moments from the whole ordeal.

Sarah van Gelder: Who else was sitting with you?

Pancho Ramos-Stierle: My housemate Adelaja. We are also now on a mission to bring together people with different skin colors. He’s a six foot five beautiful brother with black skin, and I have brown skin, and we have another brother here with white skin, so we’re trying to be together. 

Sarah van Gelder: Tell me about your experience in prison. Were you able to keep your nonviolent witness going while you were behind bars?

Pancho Ramos-Stierle: Before being in jail, it was hard for me to understand what Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi meant when they said that prisons are the temples of freedom. It’s clear that they can do many things to your body and try to oppress you and use psychological violence. But there’s something so strong inside each of us, the human spirit, that they can not reach. They can put you in shackles and cold cement cells, and feed you horrible food, and put you in solitary confinement, but there’s no way that they can reach the human spirit.

That was powerful—to find once again that that part is sacred. I think that was the only thing that kept me sane and healthy in that very dehumanizing environment.

That’s what I would like to share with people—that it is time for the spiritual people to get active and the activist people to get spiritual so that we can have total revolution of the human spirit. Because we have the idea that the self-indulgent people are just meditating—they are going to caves and meditation centers while all this madness is happening, or you have people at these meditation center that are asking how can you bring peace and calm and harmony to the world if you do not have that in your heart?

I think that we need both now, and that we need to combine this inner revolution with the outer revolution to have the total revolution of the spirit.

Although this post is getting too long to include another interview, the Los Angeles Times had a very interesting one with author Mark Salzman about, among other things, why he stopped meditating. Check it out!

The post Buddha Buzz: A Blond Dalai Lama? appeared first on Tricycle: The Buddhist Review.

Rick Heller, editor of the online magazine The New Humanism, self-identified secular Buddhist, and Occupy Boston activist, recently released the eBook, Occupy the Moment: A Mindful Path to a New Economy. It combines Buddhist teachings with neuroscience to frame a discussion of mindful activism and the Occupy movement. Heller specifically focuses on the three poisons—greed, hatred, and delusion—and how an understanding of all of them, and in particular, greed, can shape how we go about changing society for the better.

From Occupy the Moment‘s introduction:

We in the 99% can serve as role models for those in the 1% who seek liberation from greed. To do this, we must be mindful of our own desires and ask whether we truly need certain things, or if we ought to share them with other who have even less than we do. In this way, compassion may “trickle up” to the 1% and liberate us all from greed.

In many ways, mindfulness is an individual pursuit. It may not be easy to see how it relates to economics. But in fact, our current economic system suffers from a lack of mindfulness. What spurs the economy is how we feel about money, and mindfulness can transform that.

The ebook’s 100 pages are divided into 7 chapters and 8 accompanying meditations. It also includes appendices—for instance, “Breath Control When Threatened with Arrest”—and a resources section.

Occupy the Moment is 99¢ to buy and can be downloaded onto a Kindle or an Apple product (computer, iPhone, etc.) with the Kindle app. Following his own words about being liberated from greed, Heller is donating the first $5,000 in royalties to the Occupy movement.

You can buy the eBook here.

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