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COPYRIGHT 2003 Heldref Publications
Although religion is often associated today with flashes from the mass media of fundamentalist groups' extreme acts of politically driven violence, there have been for the greater part of the modern period significant peace movements initiated and led by religious organizations. When we do associate religion with peace, however, we often think of the simplistic platitudes offered by religious teachers, such as "turn the other cheek" or "peace is the only way." Buddhism frequently is perceived this way, with its ancient commandment to harm not even the smallest insect and the more contemporary face of the Dalai Lama waging a seemingly naive campaign of nonviolence against the Chinese control of Tibet. If we more deeply examine religious teachings, specifically Buddhist ones, concerning peace and nonviolence, is it possible to discover something more muscular, more sophisticated, and more proactive than these surface images?
In February 2003, a small group of socially engaged Buddhists assembled in Chiang Mai, Thailand, to work on this question. The result of our investigations was that Buddhism, at least, has a compelling form of praxis by which to confront the problem of violence in the contemporary world. This praxis does not simply touch on the more politicized work of confronting forms of direct violence with nonviolent direct action. The four-day workshop actually spent more time looking into methods by which to confront the roots of such direct violence through instigating nonviolent direct action at the structural and cultural levels of violence. At these levels, the marginalization of certain groups of people is typically a primary foundation for the legitimization of acts of violence directed against them. In this way, our group discovered that an interpretative process of storytelling and structural analysis was significant in creating the conditions for a community or society to resolve its problems and negotiate its relationships in an ethical manner. The numerous practices of Buddhism become an integral aspect in the development of such an ethical community, which in Buddhist terms can be called sangha.
It is the assertion of socially engaged Buddhism, and other forms of socially engaged spirituality, that the emphasis on inner transformation forms an essential part of developing ethical community, because such personal practice helps to develop morality as a tool of critical insight rather than blind dogma. In this way, the modernistic split between private morality and public dialogue can be healed and the two integrated into a powerful social praxis, which not only can evaluate whether our goals are "good" and "right" but also can provide the means by which to realize these goals in a mutually beneficial and non-harmful way.
Background of the Meeting
The four-day meeting was actually the third in the last six years initiated by Think Sangha, a socially engaged Buddhist "think tank" coordinated by me and affiliated with the Buddhist Peace Fellowship (BPF) in the United States and the International Network of Engaged Buddhists (INEB). Think Sangha's core activities since its inception in 1995 have been networking with other thinker-activists, producing Buddhist critiques of social structures and alternative social models, and providing materials and resource people for trainings, conferences, and research on social issues and grassroots activism.
The Buddha posited community (sangha) as an essential part of the Buddhist practice. Traditionally, the understanding of sangha has often been limited to the monastic order. This has created a kind of ritualistic devotionalism reminiscent of Brahmanism in which lay followers gain spiritual blessing through making ritual offerings to the monastics. We have taken a broader understanding of the Buddhist term for community beyond the male monastic one to mean a community of practitioners or, even more widely, as any community of beings. Sangha represents the method of community as an ethical praxis rooted in interpersonal and social interaction. In this way, the model for Think Sangha has been based in friendship and Buddhist practice as much as in theory and thought. As such, we have felt that the membership of our sangha needs to be equally balanced among teachers, thinkers, and activists. From numerous years of convening INEB conferences, we have learned that participants have important things to learn from each other, no matter what their background. For example, highly educated western Buddhists still have much to learn from their fellow Asian practitioners steeped in generations of tradition. Likewise, monks highly educated in textual matters or highly developed in meditative insight have much to learn about modern perspectives on gender and other issues. Experts are only relative depending on the context and content of a particular issue.
Our third international meeting necessitated a recommitment to these ideals. Although our sangha has been and still is nurtured by close personal relationships maintained across great distance through frequent gatherings, more often than not it has been tenuously held together by a small internet user group. Furthermore, our sangha has become more and more a magnet for western Caucasian males, exemplified by the four male, white Americans who formed the central core of the sangha. Increasingly, it became evident that something important was missing. Although the members of the group had been engaging in inner transformation through spiritual practice, the dominant approach to the work had begun to follow a more typical modernist one o" abstracting Buddhist principles and perspectives and then applying them to various contexts. Our activities were mostly oriented to the intellectual work of producing papers and publications. While Think Sangha itself consciously did not establish itself as an activist group but rather as a group to support activists, it was becoming too disconnected from the essential composting matter of daily suffering, which informs meaningful social analysis. Think Sangha was becoming disconnected from social justice issues from the perspective of the marginalized.
This realization was the basis for the decision to move the next meeting, and the context for the next round of Think Sangha projects, to the south. This decision immediately facilitated a change in leadership in the group. Three out of four of the core, white, male American members, who had nurtured the group from the beginning, decided to step back from this next stage of the work due to new challenges within their own smaller sanghas. Two other core members, a Thai monk and a Thai woman, became the principal leaders for the meeting. The Thai woman, Ouyporn Khuankaew, who had attended the first Think Sangha meeting in Japan, became the host organizer for the meeting, held at her own center on the outskirts of Chiang Mai city in Thailand. She was also empowered to recruit half of the members of the meeting from her international network of women, Buddhist social activists. With the further assistance of the Thai monk, Phra Phaisan Visalo, we assembled a group of sixteen participants: nine were women, ten carne from the South, and only three were Caucasian males.
An equally important consideration was how the meeting would be organized. The overall theme "Buddhist Responses to Modern Violence" came through a consultation meeting in Thailand in February 2002 with Phra Phaisan, Khuankaew, and myself. It was a fairly clear choice due to the domination of present global issues by the religious tenor of the war on terrorism. In The Nonduality Good and Evil, fellow Think Sangha member David Loy shows how the nondual...
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