Being Benevolence: The Social Ethics of Engaged Buddhism

2 Building from Tradition

2 Building from Tradition Engaged Buddhism is a modern, reformist movement found throughout the Buddhist world. As a reformist movement, it by no means breaks from or is discontinuous with the preceding tradition. On the contrary, Engaged Buddhism draws extensively from tradition, key texts, and well-established concepts, values, and practices of the tradition, interpreting them and applying them in accordance with the challenges and demands of modernity and with its own ethos of response to the immediate needs of sentient beings. Although Engaged Buddhism differs from country to country, certain key ideas and practices drawn from tradition turn up again and again in the speeches of its leaders and theorizers. Reference to these ideas and practices both legitimizes Engaged Buddhism, by placing it within the continuum of orthodoxy and tradition, and establishes the foundational concepts and approaches upon which Engaged Buddhists build. The fact that these ideas and practices turn up again and again throughout the distinct Engaged Buddhist movements also has the consequence of establishing a degree of unity in both discourse and practice among Engaged Buddhists. It will be useful, therefore, to introduce these foundational ideas and practices at this early stage of our inquiry. In this chapter, we will briefly examine how Engaged Buddhists think about key concepts, teachings, and practices drawn from tradition. These themes will be further developed throughout the book. INTERDEPENDENCE AND CAUSALITY/CONDITIONALITY Buddhist teaching on interdependence and causality is at the root of many Engaged Buddhists’ way of thinking. A. T. Ariyaratne writes, One of the unique teachings of the Buddha is the theory of dependent arising. Everything is related to every other thing. If there is no peace in a society, there should be a variety of interdependent and interrelated causes that bring about such a situation. All these causes have to be attacked simultaneously and removed to make a reversal of the processes that have Building from Tradition • 13 brought about a loss of peace in our society so that we can rebuild a culture of peace. The Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement of Sri Lanka has evolved during the last 41 years an integrated self-development approach to counteract the causes that bring about conflicts, crimes, and war.1 Here we see a typical application of both interdependence and causality to a concrete problem by an Engaged Buddhist. In fact, Ariyaratne was one of the pioneers of seeing and putting to use such applications. If ‘‘everything is related to every other thing,’’ as the Buddha taught, and if everything comes into being through causes and conditions outside itself, as the Buddha also taught, then in a given society there will indeed be a multiplicity of ‘‘interdependent and interrelated causes’’ that make that society what it is. Again, as the Buddha taught, if there is something that is unpleasant and is a source of suffering, and if one wants to be free of it, one should identify its causes and eliminate them. Thus, if a society, like Sri Lanka, is experiencing ‘‘conflicts, crimes and war,’’ one should identify the ‘‘interdependent and interrelated causes’’ of those things and eliminate them. Every step of this thinking is directly based upon the teachings of the Buddha . The only thing that one might consider to be new is the application of those teachings to the problems of society—but even that is not entirely new, as Ariyaratne and others correctly point out. There is advice to laymen and to rulers in the Buddhist canon, though certainly the development of this applied thinking among the Engaged Buddhists has gone far beyond what Shakyamuni ever said and did. Thus, in its roots the thinking is not new, and even the application of this thinking to society’s problems is not new; it is the extent of the application that is new. One of the key points that Engaged Buddhists return to again and again in their thinking is the fact that human beings are social beings—that is, each one of us lives in a condition of interdependence within society. The Dalai Lama says that that interdependence is so profound that ‘‘our every action, our every deed, word and thought’’ has implications for others. He points out that our interests are inextricably linked because we all depend on both the social web and the web of the natural environment in order to survive. Moreover, we all want to be happy, and we all have an equal right to be happy. Our happiness...