The drive for gender equity among American Buddhists is in many respects a reflection of socially engaged Buddhism, a movement to apply Buddhist principles to issues in contemporary society. Buddhism has had a long history of engagement with social issues in Asia. The Buddha defied the caste system, a rigid social and religious hierarchy, when he formed the original sangha, and in the third century B.C.E., the emperor Ashoka embraced the principles of the dharma in running his empire. Throughout many centuries, the Buddhist emphasis on compassion for all sentient beings has been expressed in charitable activities, education, and caring for the sick and dying. The phrase “socially engaged Buddhism,” however, is usually used to refer to the application of the dharma to social issues in a more comprehensive fashion than religious charity or philanthropy, one that seeks to redirect the personal quest for transcendence to the collective transformation of society.
One principle at work in much of socially engaged Buddhism is the Mahayana concept of nondualism, the conviction that at the most fundamental level of existence male and female, rich and poor, employer and employed, ruler and ruled are merely relative distinctions that fall away before universal Buddha mind or Buddha nature. Attachment to distinctions such as gender, economic class, and race is a hindrance to an individual’s experience of liberation. Social inequities resulting from such ultimately illusory distinctions are to be remedied through compassionate action. Socially engaged Buddhism takes many different forms, from working for peace and reconciliation in regional conflicts in Asia to running hospices in New York City. But it is also expressed in Buddhists’ cultivation of compassion and mindfulness in every aspect of their day-to-day lives.
There is some controversy about how best to understand socially engaged Buddhism at the level of practice and theory. Many Buddhists emphasize renouncing the world and cultivating enlightened awareness through meditation. The temple or dharma hall is the center of their religious life and the world is the arena for the expression of the Buddha’s teachings about compassion, lovingkindness, and generosity. For others, however, a distinction between cultivating awareness and expressing compassion is a form of dualistic thinking, and socially engaged Buddhism requires that the two be thoroughly integrated. In this understanding, the Eightfold Path, with its emphasis on wisdom, ethics, and meditative consciousness, is followed by being present in the war zone, in the emergency room, or on the streets of the city. The world becomes, in effect, the temple or dharma hall. Compassion and lovingkindness are not extended to the world by those who have renounced it, but are actualized within the world by learning through social action the fundamental truth of the interdependence of all beings.
Socially engaged Buddhism in the United States draws upon at least three distinct sources for its inspiration. To a large degree, it is an expression of liberal-left social concerns inherited from the 1960s. Many activists first took up meditation as a complement to political work, and realized only in the 1970s that the dharma could be a powerful vehicle for social change. As a growing number of American Buddhists began to integrate activism with contemplation, they naturally focused on contemporary issues, from civil rights to nuclear weapons, environmentalism, and feminism.
Buddhist social movements in Asia are a second source of inspiration. In one form or another, socially engaged Buddhism has been a force in that part of the world since the middle of the nineteenth century, particularly in south Asia where Buddhists, Hindus, and Muslims alike were forced to respond to western colonialism. Throughout the twentieth century, traditional Buddhism has been recast by a number of Asian leaders in terms of western political liberalism, Marxism, socialism, and social Christianity. The single most important Asian source of inspiration in this country has been Thich Nhat Hanh, who began to develop Thein or Zen-based ideas about social action in southeast Asian during the war in Vietnam, when he coined the phrase “socially engaged Buddhism.”
A third, more general source of inspiration is a reform-minded tradition in American religious history, particularly powerful in Protestantism. At least since the antebellum decades, Protestantism has given American religious culture a strong this-worldly, activist orientation. The impact of this activism on modern culture is sufficiently strong that socially engaged Buddhism, both overseas and in this country, is sometimes seen as a kind of Protestantization.
The main line of development in American socially engaged Buddhism is associated with two major groups, the first a cluster of organizations associated with Thich Nhat Hanh, the second the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. Generalizations about the differences between the two are difficult to make because of their shared history in this country and a substantial overlap between their constituencies. Both groups, moreover, make a point of emphasizing inspiration over doctrine and are nonsectarian and ecumenical in character. Each has a visionary dimension, although Thich Nhat Hanh’s approach has a more thoroughly mystical quality that comes primarily from his Asian background and a strong poetic streak in his personality. The Thich Nhat Hanh group is also more cosmopolitan than the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, a fact that can be attributed in part to the more international scope of his movement.
Americans have been exposed to Thich Nhat Hanh’s ideas about engaged Buddhism through his voluminous writings and the organizations with which he is involved, such as Plum Village in France, Parallax Press, and the Community of Mindful Living. But a particularly important expression of his approach is the Tiep Hien Order or Order of Interbeing. It was founded during the Vietnam War, but was not presented to Buddhists in the United States until Nhat Hanh’s 1985 tour of this country. The order is a work in progress, as its charter, procedures, and guidelines are continually refined by the community, but its spirit is clearly expressed in Being Peace, a collection of talks made in the course of the 1985 tour, and in Interbeing: Fourteen Guidelines for Engaged Buddhism, which was first published in 1987 and revised in 1993.
Thich Nhat Hanh’s ideas are grounded in the teachings of the Buddha, the bodhisattva ideal, and the expansive Mahayana worldview. His general approach can be sensed in his treatment of the First Noble Truth, that life is characterized by dukkha or suffering. It is typical of his upbeat outlook that he emphasizes “suffering is not enough” and that social peace begins with the cultivation of inner peace by individuals. Meditation, chanting the gathas, and other simple ritual practices are all means for the cultivation of love, harmony, and mindfulness, not in order to retreat from the world, but as preparation for a deep and thorough engagement with it. With the disarming simplicity that characterizes much of his writing, Thich Nhat Hanh insists that “Smiling is very important. If we are not able to smile, then the world will not have peace. It is not by going out for a demonstration against nuclear missiles that we can bring about peace. It is with our capacity of smiling, breathing, and being peace that we can make peace.”1
The bodhisattva ideal and ideas about the interdependence of all beings are encapsulated in the two Vietnamese words tiep and hien. Tiep means “to be in touch,” with oneself, all the buddhas and bodhisattvas, and the wisdom and compassion of universal Buddha nature. It also means “to continue,” understood in the sense of continuing the movement of awakening first set in motion by the Buddha. Hien means “the present time,” “to make real,” and “to manifest.” Practice is not undertaken for the future or for a future rebirth, but to embody wisdom, compassion, peace, and joy in the present. In the absence of adequate terms to translate tiep hien, Nhat Hanh coined the term interbeing. “Interbeing is a new word in English, and I hope it will be accepted,” he wrote in Being Peace. “I am, therefore you are. You are, therefore I am. That is the meaning of the word ‘interbeing.’ We are interbeing.”2
Nhat Hanh further grounds his vision of engaged Buddhism in the precepts, fourteen for those who are ordained in the Tiep Hien Order and five for lay practitioners, who are a vital part of the extended community. In keeping with the overall tenor of his thought, he recasts the precepts, which have traditionally been articulated as proscriptions, in a positive fashion, emphasizing what good can be done, not what actions should be avoided. For instance, one of the five precepts has often been translated as “I vow to abstain from taking things not given” or “I vow to refrain from stealing.” In the Tiep Hien Order, however, many of its implications are drawn out to underscore the interconnectedness of social and natural life and applied to modern issues and daily living.
Aware of the suffering caused by exploitation, social injustice, stealing, and oppression, I vow to cultivate lovingkindness and learn ways to work for the well-being of people, animals, plants, and minerals. I vow to practice generosity by sharing my time, energy, and material resources with those who are in need. I am determined not to steal and not to possess anything that should belong to others. I will respect the property of others, but I will prevent others from profiting from human suffering or the suffering of other species on Earth.3
Another precept that prohibits the use of alcohol has been expanded to encompass a comprehensive dietary program for mindful living. “Aware of the suffering caused by unmindful consumption, I vow to cultivate good health, both physical and mental, for myself, my family, and my society.… I am determined not to use alcohol or any other intoxicants or to ingest foods or other items that contain toxins, such as certain TV programs, magazines, books, films, and conversations.… I understand that a proper diet is crucial for self-transformation and for the transformation of society.”4
Thich Nhat Hanh, shown here with American students in Malibu, California in 1993, coined the phrase “engaged Buddhism” as a peace activist during the Vietnam War. His Mindful Living communities, together with the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, became major vehicles for Buddhist social activism in America in the 1990s. DON FARBER
Nhat Hanh’s program for engaged Buddhism is a seamless garment, to borrow a phrase from Roman Catholic ethical discourse, for personal and social responsibility. It provides guidelines for an individual’s moral and spiritual life as well as a framework for the critical evaluation of social structures and vested interests that contribute to injustice and inequity. Consistent with Thich Nhat Hanh’s views on compassionate action, his students emphasize acts of charity such as aiding education, assisting prisoners, and comforting the sick and dying. They see themselves as having a mission, not only to the politically and economically distressed but also to the emotionally and psychically wounded. The mystical quality of his approach to social engagement rests upon an unflinching conviction of the veracity of the law of cause and effect and the interconnectedness of all things. “Every action, every thought has an effect. Even if I clap my hands, the effect is everywhere, even in far away galaxies. Every sitting, every walking, every smile will have an effect on your own daily life, and the life of other people also, and practice must be based on that.”5
The Buddhist Peace Fellowship (BPF) is more American in both origin and spirit, but has come to stand at the confluence of the three different sources that inspire engaged Buddhism in this country. It was founded in 1978 when a small group of Buddhists, among them Robert Aitken, Gary Snyder, and Joanna Macy, began to see the need to integrate their dual commitments to Buddhist meditation and 1960s-style social activism. “There was the peace movement and there was the sangha—and those were two distinct things,” recalls Aitken, reflecting on his role in the founding of BPF. “I thought it was time to move out from under the bodhi tree, that our habitat and our life were in danger from nuclear weapons. The Buddhists were keeping silent and even cooperating.”6
The tenor of BPF is suggested by Snyder’s “Buddhism and the Coming Revolution,” an essay first written in the early ’60s in which he envisioned the West’s emphasis on social revolution revitalized by the East’s emphasis on morality, meditation, and personal wisdom. “Meditation is going into the mind to see this [wisdom] for yourself—over and over again, until it becomes the mind you live in. Morality is bringing it back out in the way you live, through personal example and responsible action, ultimately toward the true community (sangha) of ‘all beings.’”7 Another source of inspiration was the appeal to social conscience, which has played an important role in activist Christianity. In the early years, BPF allied itself with the Fellowship for Reconciliation, an old-line Protestant peace group founded at the onset of World War I that subsequently grew into an ecumenical social action movement.
Since its founding, BPF has also gone on to establish many contacts with engaged Buddhists in Asia. While still a fledgling organization, it launched its first social action campaigns in Bangladesh, Vietnam, and Cambodia. Through peace activists, BPF leaders met Thich Nhat Hanh, whose ideas about social engagement influenced the development of their ideas. BPF and the San Francisco Zen Center organized Nhat Hanh’s first American retreat for western Buddhists and co-sponsored a series of his subsequent tours in the 1980s. For a time in the late ’80s, BPF shared offices in Berkeley with two organizations closely associated with Thich Nhat Hanh, Parallax Press and the Community of Mindful Living. BPF also became affiliated with the International Network of Engaged Buddhists, an organization founded in 1989 under the direction of Sulak Sivarakasa, a prominent Thai leader of socially engaged Buddhism.
In the past twenty years, the Buddhist Peace Fellowship has grown into an organization with more than 4,000 members, some 15 local chapters nationwide, and a large number of national and international affiliates. It has undertaken medical missions on the Thai/Burma border, established meal programs and a revolving loan program for Tibetan refugees in Nepal and India, and worked with others to promote peace and reconciliation in Yugoslavia. In this country, BPF tends to focus on issues related to the promotion of nonviolence and weapons control, whether nuclear arms, land mines, or handguns. Turning Wheel, its nonsectarian quarterly, addresses a wide range of social and theoretical issues of concern to Buddhists and other activist communities.
The Buddhist Alliance for Social Engagement (BASE) is one of the most innovative BPF programs. BASE is meant to provide for lay American Buddhists the kind of institutional support for the cultivation of socially engaged Buddhism available to Asian monks and nuns who are a part of a monastic sangha. But it is also inspired by the BASE community movement in Latin America, which was founded in the 1970s as a vehicle for Catholic liberation theology. BPF ran its first pilot program in 1995. Volunteers were committed to combining socially relevant work with Buddhist practice, training, and reflection for six months. They had to work in San Francisco Bay area service organizations, attend twice-weekly practice sessions, and participate in retreats held monthly and at the opening and closing of the program. Training included the investigation of socially engaged Buddhist movements in Asia, the study of the dharma, and guided reflection on how Buddhist practice can be most effectively related to social action. By the end of the 1990s, BPF was beginning to expand its BASE programs to other parts of the country.
Like the Tiep Hien Order, BASE emphasizes social engagement as a path of Buddhist practice, not simply as a mode of Buddhist social service. Diana Winston, a BASE coordinator during the pilot program in 1995, recalls how her work at a San Francisco clinic for the homeless was a means of reflecting upon suffering and mindfulness in everyday life. “Why am I doing this?” she asked herself. “If it is just to be ‘helpful’ then I am missing the point. I need to remember the context. I am doing this in order not to let suffering out of my sight.… The more I can see suffering, in myself, in others, the more I can open to the possibility of freedom from suffering.” As she neared the clinic each morning, she repeated her daily intention: “May this day of work be the cause and condition for the liberation of myself and all beings. May I be present. May my ego be removed from what I am doing.”8
BASE also emphasizes group work to foster awareness of how the dharma can be realized in the personal and social dimensions of everyday living. Donald Rothberg, a long-time vipassana meditator and BPF board member, wrote of this experience in BASE, “We opened up to each other in ways that brought together, for example, my fears about intimacy and anger; your despair over continuing ecological devastation; her difficulties with working day in and day out with people with cancer; his joy about teaching composting to inner city youth; and their interpersonal friction in the group.” BASE allows participants “to make connections between personal psychology, group dynamics, and social systems. Increasingly, we came to approach difficulties of any kind in the spirit of engaged Buddhism.”9
In many respects, the BPF carries forward the best of the spirit of the 1960s—passionate dedication to social change, a commitment to personal spiritual growth, and high standards of self-criticism. Its rhetoric tends toward the visionary, as in Aitken’s endorsement posted on its Internet homepage. “Buddhism is undergoing a profound change to a ‘new Mahayana’ whose delineations we don’t yet see clearly. The monastery walls are down, which means that the Buddha’s teaching of infinite compassion truly has no limits.”10 BPF politics remain grounded in the race, class, gender, ecology, antiwar, and pro-peace issues at the heart of the political consciousness of the ’60s, but the organization is self-critical about its difficulties in expanding beyond its European American constituency. “What difficulties exist in opening to ethnic Buddhists and to people of color who take up Buddhism is an on-going discussion,” wrote Alan Senauke, National Coordinator of BPF. “For me the critical matter is to recognize the priceless gift we have been given by Asian traditions and teachers, and to set aside any arrogance.” Evoking the image of a weaver knitting together threads of international and interethnic friendship, Senauke notes: “Respectfully we extend ourselves and make connections with the different Asian sanghas. The full effect of our friendship and our work—completely apart from particular successes and failures—cannot be calculated. So we just keep on weaving.”11
The Zen Peacemaker Order (ZPO), founded by Bernard Glassman and his wife, Sandra Jishu Holmes, is a more recently established group, but has the potential to rival Thich Nhat Hanh’s groups and the Buddhist Peace Fellowship as a force in American activism. Glassman’s work in the Greyston Mandala in Yonkers, New York, discussed in chapter 7, was at the cutting edge of Buddhist social activism in this country through much of the 1990s. But Glassman and Holmes’s vision for the Zen Peacemaker Order is both more spiritual in tone and more ambitious.
As ZPO took shape in 1997, it began to resemble an alliance among people who were already Buddhists and a consortium of distinct groups, some of which already existed. The core of ZPO was seen as the Order itself, whose members included co-founders Glassman and Holmes, other teachers, and mentors, apprentices, and novices. Newly established organizations included an Interfaith Peacemaker Assembly, which is the administrative hub for a number of “villages” (socially engaged Buddhist affiliates around the country and overseas), and the House of One People, which Glassman and Holmes envisioned as an interfaith center. A fourth organization, the Upaya Peace Institute, was founded in 1990 by Joan Halifax, a well-known Buddhist teacher whose work was discussed in the previous chapter. All these were understood to be different but related ways to bear witness to suffering and joy and to heal both individuals and society, goals similar to those of Thich Nhat Hanh’s Tien Hiep Order and Community of Mindful Living. For a time, ZPO was headquartered in Sante Fe, New Mexico, in a house that, after Holmes’s death in 1998, was named Casa Jishu. At this writing, Glassman has taken a year-long sabbatical, is in Palo Alto, California, and plans to travel to Israel, while the work of the ZPO is continued by his assistants.
Socially engaged Buddhists address many concerns, but some observers have noted that environmentalism and ecology form the basis of a distinctly American form of Buddhism-based social action, sometimes referred to as the “eco-centric sangha” or the “green dharma.” A number of Buddhist groups run environmental programs. For instance, at Zen Mountain Monastery, Dogen’s Mountains and Rivers Sutra is used as a touchstone for reflection on ecological issues. Others approach environmental concerns through research and public education. The Boston Research Center for the Twenty-first Century, an affiliate of SGI-USA, works to build grassroots support for the United Nations Earth Charter and has sponsored conferences on religion and ecology. Groups such as Metta Forest Monastery approach the wilderness in a more classically Buddhist way, as a place particularly well suited to practice in retreat from the distraction and attachments of urban society.
Building on years of experience with social activism in the Greyston community in New York, Bernard Tetsugen Glassman founded the Zen Peacemaker Order in 1997. Shown here during a retreat on the Mall in Washington, D.C., members of the ZPO are dedicated to bearing witness to the joy and suffering in the world and to fostering personal and social healing. PETER CUNNINGHAM
There is also a unique kind of Buddhist environmentalism that is more visionary and specifically American in tone. It is inspired partly by naturalists such as Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and Aldo Leopold, and partly by Buddhist philosophy, in particular its ideas about the interdependence of all life. Gary Snyder was among the Americans to pioneer this synthesis of Buddhism and ecology. In 1975, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Turtle Island, a collection of poetry that reflects Buddhist, ecological, and Native American themes and sensibilities. But since that time, Buddhist environmentalism has taken on many forms, especially on the West Coast, where experimentation with the dharma is pursued most avidly.
In 1990, in a collection of essays devoted to Buddhism and ecology, Alan Hunt Badiner referred to this emergent, Buddhist-inspired movement as “Dharma Gaia.” Gaia, the Greek goddess of Earth, was first used in a modern, ecological sense in the 1970s by scientist James Lovelock, whose “Gaia Hypothesis” described Earth as a self-sustaining organism that adapts itself to environmental change without conscious guidance. While some scientists dismissed the argument, environmentalists concerned with the destruction of Earth’s biodiversity quickly popularized it. The concept of Gaia soon fired the imaginations of others who associated it with a range of ideas from microbiological evolution to Earth as living mother, a popular notion in the New Age movement, and some forms of feminist spirituality. “Dharma,” Badiner wrote, “comes from the Sanskrit root dhr, which means ‘that which has been established in the mind,’ ‘the object of consciousness.’ Dharma Gaia might therefore mean Earth Consciousness.”12
In his introduction to the collection, Badiner drew out what he and others have seen as parallels between the Gaia Hypothesis and the interdependence of all beings. The Buddhist emphasis on awareness and mindful living “opens our perception to the interdependence and fragility of all life, and our indebtedness to countless beings, living and dead, past and future, near and far.”
If we have any real identity at all in Buddhism, it is the ecology itself—a massive, interdependent, self-causing dynamic energy-event against a background of ceaseless change. From Indra’s Net of the Hua-yen school, to the Japanese teaching of esho-funi (life and environment are one), to the interbeing taught by Thich Nhat Hanh, Buddhist philosophy and practice constitute what scholar Francis Cook called a “cosmic ecology.”13
Badiner also began to explore some of the social and political implications of this essentially religious worldview.
Buddhist practice can inspire the building of partnership societies with need-based, sustainable economies rather than greed-based, growth economies.… The arms industry among developed nations creates vast amounts of pollution, drains the planet’s resources, and threatens the Earth’s survival as a life-sustaining body. But Buddhism helps us realize that it is futile to blame others as solely responsible. We are encouraged to take a closer look at the unwholesome tendencies in our own behavior. Are we recycling? Are we consuming conscientiously? Right livelihood becomes the fruit of our awakening and the salvation of our form of life.14
This line of thinking has been further developed by Joanna Macy, an early leader of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship and a professor at Graduate Theological Union. Macy wrote on engaged Buddhism in Asia and American social activism before publishing Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory: The Dharma of Natural Systems in 1991. In this book, she created a dialogue between systems theory, a western philosophical and scientific view of reality as process, and early Buddhist ideas about the contingent nature of the self, interdependence, and the law of causality. With this as her foundation, she later wrote World as Lover, World as Self, a more popular presentation of her ideas. In World as Lover, Macy describes the emergence of what she calls “the eco-self” out of a confluence of three forces in late modernity. One is the ongoing erosion of the conventional ego-self by the psychological and spiritual suffering from threats of mass nuclear and environmental destruction. A second force is systems theory, with its view that life is best understood not in terms of discrete individualities but as patterns of relationship. A third force at work is a resurgence of nondualistic forms of spirituality, among which she counts the Creation Spirituality of Matthew Fox, a former Roman Catholic monastic, and westerners’ new interest in Buddhist philosophy and practice. “These developments are impinging on the self in ways that are undermining it, or helping it to break out of its own boundaries and old definitions. Instead of ego-self, we witness the emergence of an eco-self!”15
Macy’s presentation of world as lover and self is representative of a kind of American Buddhist literature whose substance and tone may owe as much to a long tradition of American romantic piety and scientism as to Buddhist philosophy. Some observers charge Macy with having moved beyond Buddhism into New Age religion, while others see in her the kind of creativity to be expected and applauded as the dharma comes west. Whatever the case, the energy of her vision of the “greening of the self” is evident in the following passage, where she retells the story of the entire evolutionary sweep of cosmic history and relates it to contemporary human living.
We can reinhabit time and own our story as a species. We were present back there in the fireball and the rains that streamed down on this still molten planet, and in the primordial seas. We remember that in our mother’s womb, where we wear vestigial gills and tail and fins for hands. We remember that. That information is in us and there is a deep, deep kinship in us, beneath the outer layer of our neocortex or what we learned in school. There is a deep wisdom, a bondedness with our creation, and an ingenuity far beyond what we think we have. And when we expand our notions of what we are to include in this story, we will have a wonderful time and we will survive.16
Another, quite different form of American socially engaged Buddhism is practiced by Jon Kabat-Zinn. For more than twenty years, Kabat-Zinn has been applying an eclectic mix of Zen and Theravada forms of meditation to medical concerns, under the heading of stress reduction and preventive medicine. Like many in his generation, he pursued higher education while beginning to explore Buddhist philosophy. He was first exposed to Zen Buddhism by reading Philip Kapleau’s The Three Pillars of Zen and soon began to practice meditation. Within the next few years, he explored various forms of hatha yoga, a Hindu-based form of physical discipline, and Theravada meditation. During this time he was also working on a Ph.D. in molecular biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then a postdoctoral fellowship in anatomy at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center.
During a retreat, Kabat-Zinn began to contemplate the clinical and medical potential of meditation for treating pain and stress-related disorders. Back at the medical center, he shared his ideas with an orthopedic surgeon as they made rounds examining patients with a variety of pain-related ailments. He also began to develop a vocabulary—concepts such as wellness, mindfulness, relaxation, and stress reduction—to convey to wary patients and to a cautious medical establishment how Buddhist meditation could be used to mobilize people’s inner resources in rehabilitation therapy.
In 1979, Kabat-Zinn and his colleagues established the Stress Reduction Clinic at the university, within the Medical Center’s Division of Preventive and Behavioral Medicine. Since then, more than 7,000 people with a wide range of chronic medical problems, diseases, and pain conditions have participated in the clinic’s eight-week training program in mindfulness meditation, which is a model for others across the country. Kabat-Zinn has also worked with groups of judges, educators, and Catholic priests and has utilized mindfulness techniques in the training of Olympic athletes. He and his colleagues later established a mindfulness-based stress-reduction program with low-income minorities in the inner city. In the mid-1990s, they founded the Center for Mindfulness in Medicine, Health Care, and Society, also under the auspices of the University of Massachusetts, to disseminate ideas about how mindfulness practice can be applied in prisons, schools, corporations, factories, and other settings. Kabat-Zinn has written a number of widely read and well-regarded books, including Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness; Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life; and Everyday Blessings: The Inner Work of Mindful Parenting, which he wrote with his wife, Myla.
Kabat-Zinn’s work represents the way in which the dharma in this country is being transformed in some quarters from a traditional religious philosophy and practice into a set of ideas and techniques for living, streamlined for a secular clientele but attempting to retain an essential core of spirituality. As a keynote speaker at the Buddhism in America Conference in Boston in 1997, Kabat-Zinn recalled, “There was a time that I considered myself to be a Buddhist, but I actually don’t consider myself a Buddhist [now]. Although I teach Buddhist meditation, it’s not with the aim of people becoming Buddhists, but with the aim of them realizing that they’re Buddhas. And there’s a huge distinction.” In the course of his address, Kabat-Zinn likened Buddha mind to the western concept of genius. Impediments to the experience of Buddha mind are largely self-imposed, he said. To understand that is a “part of our work of liberation.… By practicing non-doing, just non-harming, non-interfering, that genius can emerge.” Like many others who discovered the dharma in the 1960s, Kabat-Zinn sees Henry David Thoreau as a paragon for American Buddhists, praising his Walden as a “rhapsody of mindfulness.”17
In a variety of forms, socially engaged Buddhism is an important strand of American Buddhism. But Buddhists in this country are also bringing the dharma to bear on social issues and human suffering in other, often more unassuming, ways. Tibet support groups, where Buddhists join non-Buddhists to educate the public about the plight of the Tibetan people, are forms of Buddhist social action, as are the medical charities of the Tzu Chi Foundation discussed in chapter 10. Theravada monks are at work in the inner cities serving constituencies from youth gangs to aging and disabled refugees. Some of the larger dharma centers, temples, and monasteries sponsor hospice care and prison ministries, and the Naropa Institute has developed a degree program in which students combine a contemplative lifestyle with care for the aging. Nipponzan Myohoji, a group of Nichiren Buddhists unrelated to either Nichiren Shoshu Temple or SGI-USA, combines traditional Buddhist piety with social action by building Peace Pagodas worldwide (there are two in the United States, one near Albany, New York and another in western Massachusetts) and by leading international walks for peace to sites known for their inhumanity, such as Auschwitz, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki.
Moreover, many individual Buddhists undoubtedly express their convictions by engaging in small and large acts of kindness with no philosophical justification or rhetoric of world transformation. Given the secular, this-worldliness of American society, however, it is very likely that the more visionary forms of socially engaged Buddhism will continue to appeal to many Buddhists. Socially engaged Buddhism, particularly in its “eco-centric sangha” phase, may well emerge as a distinctly American expression of the dharma in the twenty-first century.
