By Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi
On December 6, BGR’s new European partner, Mitgefühl in Aktion, held its first online international gathering. Ven. Bhikkhu Bodhi was invited to be the keynote speaker. What follows is an edited version of his presentation.
When I saw how Mitgefühl in Aktion has gotten off the ground, I began to reminisce about the birth of BGR. Both organizations spring from a shared vision about the role of Buddhism, and of Buddhists, in today’s world. This mission in some ways runs counter to traditional institutional Buddhism, but it aims at recapturing, in contemporary terms, the fundamental spirit of the Dharma. Our approach to promoting “the well-being and happiness of many” cannot be static but must adapt to the conditions and needs of our age.
First a little personal background. I returned to the U.S. in 2002, after 20 years in Asia, mostly in Sri Lanka. On my return, I noticed that American Buddhist circles placed an almost exclusive emphasis on the practice of meditation. People thought that to “practice Buddhism” means to practice meditation—whether Vipassana, Zen, or some type of Tibetan meditation. Of course, meditation is an indispensable part of Buddhist practice, and it is this side of Buddhism that fills a major gap in Western culture. But it seemed to me that people who took up Buddhism were placing too narrow a focus on meditation to the neglect of broader ethical applications of the Dharma, applications that are urgently needed.
After I settled back in the U.S., each day I would check out several websites that provide news and commentary on current events. The reports I read constantly reminded me of the terrible burden of suffering that falls on people all around the world. Suffering is pervasive even in the U.S., which despite its immense wealth has been plagued by serious transgressions of human dignity. I read about natural disasters: cyclones, earthquakes, torrential hurricanes, the South Asian tsunami, escalating climate change. I read about the horrors of the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. I read about appalling violations of basic human rights: hunger and famine, poverty, corporate duplicity, communal violence, police shootings of Black people, violence against women, and other manifestations of greed, hatred, and cruelty.
In 2007 the North American Buddhist magazine Buddhadharma asked me to contribute an editorial essay for their summer issue. In that essay I expressed my thoughts about the direction Buddhism was taking in the U.S. and more broadly in the West. I maintained that if we Buddhists are to fulfill the ethical requirements of the Dharma, we had to take a more active role in the struggle for human rights, for the advancement of social and economic justice. I saw this as a deeply moral challenge, which had to be met for the Dharma to play a decisive role in our collective future. Otherwise there was a real danger Buddhism would turn into the plaything of an affluent elite, who could enjoy its blessings while turning a blind eye to the vast suffering that weighs down on billions of marginalized and dispossessed people who share this planet with us.
It was not enough, I said, to develop such beautiful qualities of the heart as loving-kindness and compassion if they remain purely subjective states of consciousness. We also had to draw upon these qualities as springs for socially transformative action. This, I wrote, was a deeply moral challenge: the challenge of becoming advocates of justice for those victims of violence and injustice who cannot speak for themselves.
When this issue of Buddhadharma magazine was published, several of my friends and students read the essay and we started to discuss how we could respond to the challenge the essay posed. After several rounds of discussion, we decided to form a Buddhist relief organization. At first, as idealists, we thought we could respond to all the miseries facing humankind around the world. But we soon realized that we needed a more specific mission, and in response, I proposed that we focus on the problem of hunger and malnutrition.
This proposal was based on my own experience during my first two years as a monk in Sri Lanka (1972–74). At that time, Sri Lanka was passing through a period of economic experimentation that was taking a heavy toll on the population. The monastery where I lived was located in a poor region and thus the daily diet was extremely sparse. Breakfast consisted of a watery rice porridge and a few crackers; lunch was rice, watery lentils, and light vegetables; and, in accordance with the monastic precepts, there was no food after noon. During this time, I came to learn first-hand what hunger is really like—not the hunger you feel when you miss a couple of meals, but the hunger you experience when, month after month, you aren’t getting enough nutritious food, and even the cells of your body are crying out for the nutrients they lack.
The other founding members agreed with my proposal, and thus we had a specific mission: to provide relief to people and communities afflicted with chronic hunger and malnutrition. Once we got started, we received a few generous donations, enough to launch three small pilot projects—in Sri Lanka, Vietnam, and Myanmar. We publicized these on our website and started a newsletter, and before long, we received an increasing number of donations and more volunteer support, enabling us to expand the number and range of our projects. Over the past few years we have had a working budget of about $600,000 annually and currently support 45 projects around the world, including the U.S.
I describe the spirit that animates BGR with the expression “conscientious compassion.” This expression brings together two qualities. The first is compassion, the feeling that arises when our hearts deeply resonate with the suffering of others. But compassion needs a partner to propel it into action. This more dynamic quality is indicated by the word “conscientious,” which suggests a compelling sense of conscience, an inner drive to act in accordance with our perception of what is right and necessary in response to the ethical transgressions and suffering we witness.
Conscientious compassion has its roots in fundamental qualities emphasized by the Buddhadharma, such as loving-kindness, compassion, and generosity, but it also involves a deep commitment to social and economic justice. While this emphasis on justice is distinctive of modern Western thought, it is not entirely foreign to Buddhism. The word dharma itself, in certain contexts, can mean something similar to justice. The ideal Buddhist king, the “wheel-turning monarch,” is said to be dharmika, righteous and just. He governs his realm in accordance with the Dharma and seeks to promote the welfare and happiness of all in his realm, even the birds and animals. His regime aims to give everyone the chance to thrive. Today we don’t have a wheel-turning king to administer our countries, so we ourselves have to step into this role: that is, we have to see that Dharma, as justice, prevails in our communities and societies. We have to ensure that everyone can thrive.
As people inspired by conscientious compassion, we face many obstacles to our ideals, many violations of basic justice and human dignity. It is a violation of justice that there should be vast differences in wealth between a small, powerful elite and the masses of people living at the edge of survival. It is a violation of justice that close to two billion people go hungry or live on substandard diets. It is a violation of justice that billions of people around the world don’t receive basic health care; that children are compelled to work at demanding jobs and even fight in wars; that people with dark skins are hastily shot by the police or consigned to long prison sentences. It is a violation of justice and an expression of cruelty that our country devotes hundreds of billions of dollars to its military adventures, while it cuts basic social services to a pittance.
While BGR projects are, from one angle, acts of charity, they also aim at promoting justice. We can’t change political institutions, but we can pursue other ways to correct imbalances in the system. Our main approach is providing people with the skills and training they need to take care of themselves. Direct food relief is only one aspect of BGR’s mission, and not the most important one. What’s most essential is to get people to recognize their own inherent dignity and act on the basis of this recognition.
This requires enabling people to provide for themselves. We don’t want to lock people into a state of perpetual dependence, but to help them become self-sufficient, help them learn to help themselves. The key to helping people become self-sufficient, we have found, is education and vocational training. When kids are well educated, on reaching adulthood they will be able to better provide for themselves and their families. When girls are educated, they will be better respected in their families and communities, have fewer children, and contribute more effectively to supporting their families. The same principle holds when women earn more at their places of employment or start their own livelihood projects. This is why BGR sets a premium on education for girls and vocational training for women. These projects provide the tools that help people escape the trap of poverty, take responsibility for their own lives, and provide for their own well-being.
As I see it, our task today, as Buddhists, is to bring together inner cultivation with transformative action. The lifeblood of Buddhism is the cultivation, purification, and liberation of the mind. This is indispensable to our own progress on the path and to the vitality of the Dharma. But at the same time we cannot turn away from the terrible suffering that rages in the world without reneging on the demands of conscience. What we need to do is to bring inner development and social action together into a relationship of mutually reinforcing harmony. We must use the surges of spiritual strength acquired through the cultivation of wisdom, kindness, and compassion to sustain us in our efforts to create a different kind of world, a world that measures up to our highest hopes and aspirations forged and shaped by compassion. This would be a world in which no one suffers needlessly, a world that gives everyone the chance to flourish and live with dignity.
It should be this kind of vision that inspires the partnership between Buddhist Global Relief and Mitgefühl in Aktion. While the challenge is immense, I hope through our partnership that we can take a few small steps toward its achievement. That in itself would be a cause for celebration.
