Evading the
Transformation of Reality

— Engaged Buddhism at an Impasse —

“A very popular error: having the courage of your convictions. The point is to have the courage for an attack on your convictions!”

—Nietzsche　　

In 1993 I wrote Strong Lessons for Engaged Buddhists, a leaflet welcoming the emergence of socially engaged Buddhism as a healthy development but also pointing out a number of its shortcomings. Several thousand copies were handed out at Thich Nhat Hanh appearances in Berkeley and San Francisco or mailed to engaged Buddhist groups around the world, and over the next few years my friends and I continued to distribute it at local appearances of Gary Snyder, Robert Aitken, the Dalai Lama, etc. It has been reprinted several times, including in Turning Wheel: Journal of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship (Summer 1994), and can now be found online at this website.

Despite the predictable negative reactions (“How dare you criticize Thich Nhat Hanh!”) and even a few unsuccessful attempts to prevent the circulation of the text, the great majority of the responses were positive (“It’s about time someone raised these issues!”). Unfortunately, most of these positive responses do not seem to have had much practical follow-through. While many people, including several BPF authors and board members, privately informed me that they agreed with much of what I said, their subsequent public writings have contained no mention of the leaflet and scarcely any discussion of the issues it posed. I hope that the following remarks will provoke a more public debate.

The Buddhist Peace Fellowship’s stated purpose is “to bring a Buddhist perspective to contemporary peace, environmental, and social action movements” and “to raise peace, environmental, feminist, and social justice concerns among Western Buddhists.” In the most narrow sense, I suppose the BPF has indeed been “raising” such “concerns” over the last two decades. But I doubt if either its founders or most of its subsequent participants intended to limit themselves to such a meager goal as merely making Buddhists passively “aware” that people are socially oppressed in various ways — something that practically everyone in the world is already only too well aware of, even if they have little idea of what to do about it. I think it is fair to say that the spirit of the BPF’s aim could be summed up as:

(1)  Buddhism has some contributions to make to radical social movements.

(2)  Buddhists also have some things to learn from such movements.

I agree with (1) (if I didn’t, I wouldn’t even bother to make these critiques), but the point I wish to make here is that engaged Buddhists have largely evaded (2). While they constantly imply that social activists would do well to adopt meditation, mindfulness, compassion, nonviolence and other Buddhist qualities, they rarely acknowledge that they themselves might have anything to learn from non-Buddhists — except for predictable nods to kindred spiritual figures like Gandhi or Martin Luther King who merely confirm their own preconceptions. If they occasionally venture into the secular realm, it is only to echo a few left-liberal platitudes from trendy commentators like Ralph Nader, Jerry Brown, Jeremy Rifkin or E.F. Schumacher, none of whom represent any radical challenge to the dominant social order, however cogently they may denounce a few of its more glaring absurdities.

The two aspects are interrelated. The fact that engaged Buddhists have not bothered to investigate truly radical movements is the main reason that such movements have remained equally indifferent to any advice from engaged Buddhism (assuming they are even aware of its existence, which in most cases they are not).

In 1992 a number of Buddhists in various countries, apparently dissatisfied with the level of discussion on these issues in the BPF and INEB (International Network of Engaged Buddhists), organized a Buddhist Social Analysis Group. More recently some of the same people have formed an online “think tank” called the Think Sangha.(1) The first notable public expression of this seemingly promising development is a book entitled Entering the Realm of Reality: Towards Dhammic Societies (ed. Jonathan Watts, Alan Senauke & Santikaro Bhikkhu; INEB, Bangkok, 1997).

In the Introduction the editors call for new visions, then slip into a myopic pretension: