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Photo: Credit is Diego Rivara's Detroit Industry Murals
This Monday, Annie will facilitate. After meditation, we will recite the Five Mindfulness Trainings together and then focus on the First Mindfulness Training, Reverence for Life:
Reverence For Life
Aware of the suffering caused by the destruction of life, I am committed to cultivating the insight of interbeing and compassion and learning ways to protect the lives of people, animals, plants, and minerals. I am determined not to kill, not to let others kill, and not to support any act of killing in the world, in my thinking, or in my way of life. Seeing that harmful actions arise from anger, fear, greed, and intolerance, which in turn come from dualistic and discriminative thinking, I will cultivate openness, non-discrimination, and non-attachment to views in order to transform violence, fanaticism, and dogmatism in myself and in the world.
When I was about 10 years old, we took a family trip to New Orleans. After dinner at a restaurant, our parents decided to take us all (Mom, Dad, Grandma, and four kids) down the very racy Bourbon Street. It was dark and when we came around the corner, we encountered a fight starting at the bus stop.
We all wanted to keep walking -- except my mom. She believed that one of the men, both very drunk, was getting bullied, and she had to step in. She told the other man, several times, to stop it. I can't tell you what happened next because Dad, Grandma and we four kids took off across the street to safety. Mom followed minutes later. My mom's brief action showed me that courageous immediate direct action is one way to protect life.
My mom may have prevented someone from being seriously hurt or killed and another person from becoming a perpetrator that night. Our actions to protect individual lives matter and are a part of what this training is pointing to. AND, I think that we can look even more deeply at this training to discover how to protect life by recognizing and shifting the causes and conditions that lead to the suffering of so many people.
How did those two human beings end up on the street that night, drunk and possibly unhoused? Both appeared to be male and Black, so we can already easily imagine some of the systemic racial and economic challenges they and their ancestors may have faced. How might we intervene into these causes and conditions?
When we have reverence for life, we want every person to have all that they need to live a safe and meaningful life. And yet there are so many people, by virtue of our way of life, who don't have what they need. These two men likely suffered from chronic poverty, addiction, anger and despair. Reverence for life means we also aspire to change the underlying conditions.
We may not always be able to do anything about the suffering of individuals that we encounter. When we can't, we can open our hearts and practice compassion and prayer, and we can also consider the many things we can do at a systemic level to change the causes and conditions leading to this kind of suffering. This work takes vulnerability and a willingness to look deeply at the conditions that lead to the killing of human beings' hearts, minds, and bodies.
In my reading of this training, I hear the call for us to protect life on an individual level and also to work for systemic change so that many more lives can be protected by changing the systems that perpetuate poverty, glorify greed, and incarcerate and destroy the lives of our young people, and of the Earth.
We don't have to do this alone. There are many organizations doing this kind of systemic work and we can share our time, energy, and material resources with those organizations. We can push back against the growing gap between the ultra rich and the rest of humanity.
There are infinite different ways to practice this training. Having reverence for life in a world where life is often difficult and is an act of courage. On Monday, after our meditation period, we can share about the ways we have practiced this training on individual and systemic levels, and we can share the ways we hope to practice in the future.
Below are many quotes on this subject for you to peruse. :-)
with love,
annie.
In 2010, Thay was interviewed for an article in The Guardian:
Thay talks about capitalism as a disease that has now spread throughout the world, carried on the winds of globalisation: "We have constructed a system we cannot control. It imposes itself on us, and we become its slaves and victims."
He sees those countries that are home to Buddhism, such as India, China, Thailand and Vietnam, seeking to go even beyond the consumerism of the West: "There is an attractiveness around science and technology so they have abandoned their values that have been the foundation of their spiritual life in the past," he says.
"Because they follow western countries, they have already begun to suffer the same kind of suffering. The whole world crisis increases and globalisation is the seed of everything. They too have lost their non-dualistic view. There are Buddhists who think that Buddha is outside of them and available to them only after they die.
"In the past there were people who were not rich but contented with their living style, laughing and happy all day. But when the new rich people appear, people look at them and ask why don't I have a life like that too, a beautiful house, car and garden and they abandon their values."
The Thai teacher, Buddhadasa Bhikkhu, said (quoted in Dhammic Socialism)
Look at the birds: we will see that they eat only as much food as their stomachs can hold. They cannot take more than that; they don’t have granaries. Look down at the ants and insects: that is all they can do. Look at the trees: trees imbibe only as much nourishment and water as the trunk can hold, and cannot take in any more than that. Therefore a system in which people cannot encroach on each other’s rights or plunder their possessions is in accordance with nature and occurs naturally, and that is how it has become a society continued to be one, until trees became abundant, animals became abundant, and eventually human beings became abundant in the world. The freedom to hoard was tightly controlled by nature in the form of natural socialism.
Writer and activist Clementine Morrigan on having compassion for all:
I support the falsely accused, I support people who have been abusive, and I support survivors. There is no contradiction there. People say “Clementine Morrigan supports abusers” as a way to defame me and warn people about how bad I am. But yes, I literally do support abusers. I support abusers to transform their lives and take responsibility in ways that are compassionate, and respect their human dignity and autonomy. I also support people who are called abusers who are not and who are in fact being victimized by slander campaigns. And I support survivors with all my fucking heart, in real tangible ways. There is no contradiction there. Real life is complicated but compassion is not.
His Holiness the Dalai Lama on Marxism:
Q: You have often stated that you would like to achieve a synthesis between Buddhism and Marxism. What is the appeal of Marxism for you?
A: Of all the modern economic theories, the economic system of Marxism is founded on moral principles, while capitalism is concerned only with gain and profitability. Marxism is concerned with the distribution of wealth on an equal basis and the equitable utilization of the means of production. It is also concerned with the fate of the working classes--that is, the majority--as well as with the fate of those who are underprivileged and in need, and Marxism cares about the victims of minority-imposed exploitation
In her book on Buddhist economics, UC Berkeley Economics Professor Clair Brown writes:
In Buddhist economics, people are interdependent with one another and with Nature, so each person’s well-being is measured by how well everyone and the environment are functioning with the goal of minimizing suffering for people and the planet. Everyone is assumed to have the right to a comfortable life with access to basic nutrition, health care, education, and the assurance of safety and human rights. A country’s well-being is measured by the aggregation of the well-being of all residents and the health of the ecosystem.
In simplest terms, the free market model measures prosperity by focusing on growth in average income per person and in national output, while the Buddhist model measures prosperity by focusing on the quality of life of all people and Nature.
Dr. Gabor Mate, trauma an addiction specialist, in an interview with Briarpatch on how capitalism makes us sick, says:
...even the people who are not on the wrong end of economic inequality or systemic racism are still made ill just by how we live our lives. The stress that we live under, the competition, the aggressiveness, the uncertainty, the loss of control that we experience in our lives. The gender inequalities, these are not just social phenomena, they have an actual impact on community health. The isolation people are experiencing.