Buddhism: a recipe for social action

The suffering of the world today demands action. But often enough, far too often, our action increases suffering because we lack understanding.

The story that always comes to mind for me is of the Peace Corps project to bring reliable water to a small village in Africa. By all western measures the project was a success: a well had been dug, a hand pump installed, a filtration system implemented. But for the villagers, especially the women, it was a disaster. Before this, you see, the women would walk together every morning to get water from a river a ways off. On this journey they would talk, share stories, solve problems, and comfort one another. After returning home the women worked separately, silently, under the watch of husbands or other men in this extremely patriarchal society. Now, without that journey, the lives of these women were entirely alone. The wisdom they had shared on those walks was lost, and village life deteriorated.

More recently I read of a small group of indigenous people in the jungles of northern Thailand. They have lived for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years in a small area through subsistence farming, which required ‘slash and burn’ clearing of small parts of the jungle every couple of years, and small scale hunting. Now, thanks to the influence of western NGOs, Thailand is making their land “National Forest” and outlawing their ways of life.

So before we act, we need understanding. We need to empty ourselves of notions of how it is supposed to be. From there we can look at the world anew, just soak it up. And from there also we are able to respond without preconditions, without prejudices.

Zen teacher Philip Kapleau notes Eric Fromm’s realization (in The Art of Loving) that in the West we are driven to action, senselessly, without a clear understanding of motivations. We praise ‘achievers’ equally based on their production, we don’t look to who acts selflessly, who acts out of fear or desire or hatred. We just look at the product. And as such we are each reduced to a product in our own way.

Meditate on the question “Who am I?” and you’ll see these social labels, heaped up on you, holding you down, boxing you in. Let the meditation turn to all those things that you rely upon just to exist; begin to feel the connections stretching ‘you’ out across the world and time – breaking free of social labels and expectations. This is the place from which to begin acting, where the barriers between ‘self’ and ‘other’ have fallen away and your hands flow out naturally to help all beings, just as your hand would remove a thorn from your own foot…