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21 Engaged Buddhism Agnosticism, Interdependence, Globalization Christopher S. Queen introduction Over the past half-century, political activism and social service have emerged as salient features of the globalization of the Buddhist tradition. Along with the democratization implicit in the new roles that laymen and laywomen are playing in Buddhist institutions, and the pragmatism of a tradition that increasingly stresses actions—meditation, chanting, morality , and “the art of happiness”—more than words, doctrines, and philosophies , the social engagement of Buddhism may be said to parallel the activism , if not the militancy, of other world religions, notably Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and Hinduism.1 In prisons, hospices, refugee camps, and a wide range of social ministries and chaplaincies, engaged Buddhists are often as visible as the Hare Krishnas were a generation ago. But engaged Buddhists are not robed or shaven-headed dropouts, and they do not dance and distribute leaflets at airports and on street corners. In the West, they are more likely to be laymen and laywomen of all ages, often highly educated professionals, committed not to achieving bliss or to levitating themselves or the Pentagon, but to applying the Buddha’s teachings to social challenges of the day— human rights, economic justice, ethnic tolerance, racial healing, and environmental protection. In Asia, engaged Buddhists are more likely to be ordained or lay volunteers of the village development movement in Sri Lanka, the Dhamma Yietra peace walk movement in Cambodia, and the Tzu Chi Foundation, offering natural-disaster relief in Taiwan and around the world.2 Activists and scholars do not agree on the origins of engaged Buddhism. Did it spring directly from Gautama Buddha’s teachings of compassion, interdependence , and morality, or his acceptance of society’s marginalized members—particularly untouchables and women—to the Sangha, his 324 religious order? Or did it emerge later, during the reign of Aśoka Maurya in the third century B.C.E., or during a thousand years of cultural assimilation in China, Korea, and Japan, as Buddhist personal ethics encountered the institutional formalities of Confucian civil society? Did it come into being in the nineteenth century, when Buddhist reformers, Western colonialists , and Christian missionaries began to debate the merits of their respective cultures, to compete for the hearts and minds of citizens, and to maneuver for strategic control of Buddhist Asia? Or did engaged Buddhism appear full-blown only in recent times, as the world began to restructure economically, politically, and culturally at the global level—since the middle of the twentieth century?3 To be sure, the impact of Buddhist ideas and institutions on Asian societies is an established fact. Yet we must not be too hasty to make the Buddha and his successors into social revolutionaries and utopian reformers of the kind that gave us the modern world. In surveying the range of engaged Buddhism today, we see that its practitioners often think and act differently from their predecessors in Buddhist history and literature. We often encounter attitudes toward suffering—its definition, causes, and remedies—that are fundamentally new in the context of traditional Buddhist discourse and action. Buddhists generally agree, for example, that their path entails an inner transformation in which the painful affects of the three mental poisons—hatred, greed, and delusion—are reduced in the life of the practitioner. And they agree that this change will have beneficial ripple effects in society. But engaged Buddhists, while affirming these teachings, are likely to press on, to seek the harmful social, institutional , and collective expressions of these mental states in the policies and programs of corporations and governments, and to address them at the social , institutional, and collective levels.4 Thus the mass conversion of India’s untouchables to Buddhism in 1956 grew out of their struggle to overcome the violence and humiliation of the caste system; the mobilization of Buddhist monks in Vietnam in the 1960s aimed to stop the war and to repair its ravages; in rural Sri Lanka, tens of thousands of students, monks, and laypeople have volunteered to build roads, wells, clinics, and schools in the poorest areas; and the “ecology monks” of northern Thailand and their lay supporters have fought to stop clear-cut logging in the rainforests of their country. In the United States, such organizations as the Buddhist Peace Fellowship in Berkeley, California ; the Upaya Foundation in Santa Fe, New Mexico; the Greyston Mandala in Yonkers, New York; and the Peace Pagoda in Leverett, Massachusetts —social service agencies inspired by Buddhist...

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