We urgently need visions and maps. Some of us are on the front lines of social change, working with refugees, prisoners, the homeless, and AIDS victims. Some are campaigning for the abolition of nuclear weapons, land mines, and handguns, issues that differ in payload but stem from the same source of fear and hatred. Some are protecting our fragile environment, standing up for the trees, the waters, for the wide circle of all beings. [p. 9]

Far from being “on the front lines of social change,” most of these activities have nothing to do with social change. Those listed at the beginning are forms of social service. The rest are defensive reactions against a few of the more glaring symptoms of the social system. This does not necessarily mean that such activities are not worthwhile. It’s simply a matter of being clear about what you are doing and what you are not doing.

These are all social, structural issues that we must meet in an organized social way. Individual heroics will not address the problems. Leave that to the cowboy movies. So we create communities on every scale, lay and monastic, from Dawn Kiam at Suan Mokkh in Siam and Plum Village in France to Sarvodaya, Sri Lanka’s vast network of self-empowerment communities. [pp. 9-10].

The fact that social issues ultimately need to be dealt with collectively does not imply that the first step is to “create communities.” As a matter of blunt historical fact, most would-be alternative communities over the last two centuries (utopian colonies, communes, coops, affinity groups, etc.) have either failed or, if “successful,” have ended up being coopted and reinforcing the system they wished to transcend. One of the articles in the book in fact admits the failures of Sarvodaya (pp. 256-260), pointing out how such organizations function primarily as temporary stopgaps among sectors neglected by capitalist development and are generally abandoned the moment such development becomes accessible to them.

When people are sick, hungry, or filled with bitterness and hatred, it is not enough to suggest that they let go of attachment to self or to show them how to meditate. . . . Our difficult task is first to understand our complex relationship to their suffering, then help us together to grasp the underlying conditions for collective identity and liberation. And maybe then it is time to teach meditation. [p. 10]

That is well put, except that I would question the priority given to “our complex relationship to their suffering.” In practice such existential, “we-are-all-partly-to-blame” moralizing usually serves as a means to evade real possibilities. Like many other people, engaged Buddhists waste a lot of time guiltily berating themselves for their vague “complicity” in social-systemic evils they can do little about while paying no attention to specific faults that, with a little initiative, they could overcome (such as their passive reliance on leaders or their ignorance of radical history).

Without a social analysis, a Buddhist social analysis, we may not know where our attention and energy should be directed. Without an open, flexible social vision, we have no idea where we are heading. [p. 11]

A social analysis is indeed needed, but the editors are prejudging matters by assuming that it must be a “Buddhist” one. A truly open and flexible analysis, investigating all the factors without attachment to preconceived views, might lead to conclusions that contradict some aspects of Buddhism. Although engaged Buddhists deserve credit for calling attention to discreditable episodes of Buddhist history (an excellent recent example is Brian Victoria’s book Zen at War), they still tend to take it for granted that “Buddhism” itself is inherently good — as if the only problem were that for some strange reason it has sometimes been corrupted or misinterpreted. Like Christians with the Bible, they go into elaborate contortions to fit their political and ethical biases into a Buddhist framework, hunting up some out-of-context scriptural quotation that with a little stretching can be interpreted to accord with their views and ignoring anything that contradicts them. The implication is that authentic Buddhism (if we can just determine what that may be) already has all the answers.

Earlier in the Introduction, for example, the editors flatly declare that “our violent self-centeredness and, by extension, society’s self-centered ills are the root problem” (p. 8). While it is true that a narrow, “unenlightened” self-centeredness can create or exacerbate many problems, the editors’ unmindful Buddhist dogmatism leads them here to overlook the fact that people have also remained oppressed because they have been conditioned into accepting hierarchical conditions without being “self-centered” enough to insist on getting a fair shake. The notion that we must “lower our expectations” and be more self-sacrificing and altruistic is just buying into the system’s con, transferring the blame from an absurd exploitive system onto the victims of that exploitation, as if the problem were that the victims were too greedy.