Buddhist Women and Social Justice: Ideals, Challenges, and Achievements

4. Transforming Conflict, Transforming Ourselves: Buddhism and Social Liberation

Chapter 4 Transforming Conflict, Transforming Ourselves: Buddhism and Social Liberation PAULA GREEN The world community has become increasingly interdependent. War in one region destabilizes not only neighbors, but the global commons as well. Problems of weapons proliferation, human trafficking, poverty, and disease know no boundaries. At the same time, concepts and practices of democracy, human rights, compassion, nonviolence, reconciliation, and sustainable peace also cross borders. Karuna Center for Peacebuilding is part of a worldwide movement educating for creative peace initiatives, tolerant intercommunal relations, cooperative responses to conflict, and engagement in the peacebuilding process. This kind of change, much less visible than that which destroys, requires visionary leadership, sustained commitment, and conscious community participation. I founded Karuna Center for Peacebuilding in 1993 in response to the growing global need to develop innovative, sustainable strategies to address ethnic, religious, and sectarian conflict. Our core mission is to pioneer efforts to promote dialogue, reconciliation, cooperative problem solving, and nonviolent solutions to conflict in troubled and wartorn regions. Karuna Center works by invitation and in partnership with in-country nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), academics, community groups, educational and religious institutions, local governments , and community peacebuilders. Through these partnerships, 73 Karuna Center facilitates peacebuilding trainings and intercommunal dialogue workshops designed to foster trust and communication between conflicting parties, so that together these groups can effect positive social change. The core threads that I attempt to weave together in my work include psychological training, Buddhist meditation practice, and a long-standing passion for equality, social justice, and nonviolent solutions to conflict and competing interests. My journey as a peacebuilder began in the United States in the 1960s, before I knew myself well or had been introduced to the Dharma, and long before the word “peacebuilder” had become part of my vocabulary and identity. In recent decades, Dharma teaching, humanistic psychology , the women’s movement, international relations, and inner awareness, combined with the original impulses that drew me to the civil rights and antiwar movements, led me to the Buddhist Peace Fellowship, the International Network of Engaged Buddhists, and the formation of Karuna Center for Peacebuilding. Through Karuna Center and my work as a professor at the School for International Training, I am able to act on my concern for the world, my solidarity with oppressed and war-ravaged peoples, and my values of interdependence and mutuality. Although I no longer work solely in societies that are specifically Buddhist, as I did when Karuna Center first developed, the Dharma continues to inform my work. The teachings of the Buddha provide guidance in many situations that arise as I teach in communities recovering from war and I use these understandings as I train practitioners of conflict transformation. Of special usefulness in my work is the concept of balancing wisdom with compassion, the deep recognition of interdependence , and the insight that conflict arises from greed, anger, and delusion . It is my experience that the teachings of Buddhism, introduced in secular language, can be applied in whatever religious or national tradition is struggling to transform conflict and rebuild community. In this chapter I will explore Buddhist teachings that particularly illuminate social action, and share examples of Buddhist perceptions applied to my work in conflict transformation and reconciliation. COMPASSION, NONVIOLENCE, AND INTERDEPENDENCE A disciple once asked the Buddha, “Would it be true to say that a part of our training is for the development of love and compassion?” The 74 PAULA GREEN Buddha replied, “No, it would not be true to say this. It would be true to say that the whole of our training is for the development of love and compassion.”1 Each year I facilitate an international training program called CONTACT, or Conflict Transformation Across Cultures, at the School for International Training in Vermont. Participants come from all over the world, many carrying the wounds of war and the scars of hatred and separation. At the deepest level, the intention of our month together is experiential training in compassion and love. Along with the transmission of concepts, skills, and activities, we attempt to weave a global community, to rebuild understanding where ethnic and religious groups have violated each other, and to promote understanding where the human connection has failed. This program is compassion training in action, and it works. Interreligious and intercultural differences diminish, replaced by actual experiences with others that defy inherited stereotypes. I remember an Armenian man previously taught to hate Muslims finding that his...